When asked whether he was concerned about global warming, a young colleague of my wife, with an earned doctorate [but not in the sciences], replied that there wasn’t any evidence of global warming. He dismissed the numerous scientific studies suggesting that global warming is indeed a real problem with the statement that, “I don’t pay any attention to the scientists. They’ve all got political agendas.”

His statements were stupid — and not just about global warming. While the probable causes of global warming are clearly multiple and still highly debated, the actual evidence of such warming is close to incontrovertible. More bothersome to me was his statement about agendas. Every single human being has agendas. Does that mean nothing any of us has to say can be trusted? Einstein definitely wanted recognition as a scientist, and that was so much of an agenda that he agreed to give the money from the Nobel Prize he had not yet won to his first wife. Did that personal agenda invalidate his Theory of Relativity? Clyde Tombaugh wanted to discover Pluto. Did that agenda invalidate this discovery [regardless of whether that body is now “officially” classified as a planet or not]?

My wife’s young colleague was in effect denying that science has a factual basis, one which stands independent of opinion or agenda. I’m not saying that scientists are infallible or that they don’t have opinions. As is true for all of us, their opinions and even their theories are sometimes incomplete or wrong, but the basis of science is found in repeated observations, replication where possible, and scrutiny and challenge. A scientist may well be wrong, but good science and the process behind it stand independent of opinions and beliefs.

An issue such as global warming highlights the difficulty of maintaining scientific impartiality in the light of political and economic agendas, because the worst impacts of global warming are in the future and the costs of addressing it are in the present, and most people really don’t want to pay for acts from which they do not benefit personally and directly. Nor do most corporations, because the top executives’ pay and bonuses are based on present-day performance and profits, and spending significant funding to address future problems — or even to provide future profitable products — reduces current performance… and executive compensation. Now, if one wants to talk about agendas… I’d suggest that any agendas of climate scientists pale besides those of the corporate world.

The greatest environmental impacts are in the Arctic and the Antarctic, where only a few people are there to observe, and where there has been no continued human settlement to live with and comprehend the changes. The costs of addressing — or of not addressing — global warming will have to be born, in greater or lesser degree, by every human being. The politician who denies the severity of the problem because he does not wish to spend public funds now may well require his successors a generation hence to bear the costs of dealing with massive coastal flooding as the sea levels rise. Does that politician’s agenda affect the factual basis of the science? Not in the slightest, but his agenda may well affect the public support of science and increase the costs of dealing with the impacts of global warming by several orders of magnitude.

The same is true of the near-earth asteroid search program. It is not a matter of opinion whether large bodies will pummel the earth. They have at irregular intervals for billions of years, and small bodies pummel the planet every day. It is only a question of time before a large body finds itself on a collision course with our home planet. That fact will not be affected by the agendas of those in support of or in opposition to the near-earth asteroid search program.

Wherever science reveals an impact on society, everyone has an interest that will be threatened or benefited, and that means that everyone from scientists to clerks in Wal-Mart has an agenda. I spent all too many years as a relatively senior staffer in politics, and one of the most effective rhetorical tricks, and one that dates back as far as human politics, is the attribution of an agenda. Equally long-standing is the habit of politicians of denying any agenda. Hmmm… you want power, but you have no agenda? Yet, somehow, most people believe that if a politician has an agenda, that invalidates his or her concerns. Now, we’re seeing the attribution of agendas to scientists as well as to politicians. But exactly what do such attributions have to do with facts and evidence?

What I fear is that, with the hurry-up, high-speed, and high-pressure society that has developed, particularly in the USA and parts of Asia, very few people are taking the time to analyze and assess the facts and fundamentals of the practical and scientific issues facing our world. Instead, decisions are being made on non-factual bases, such as agenda attribution, selective fact choice, personal bias, or wishful thinking. Just because communications and technology are almost near-instant doesn’t mean that decisions should be.

And it certainly shouldn’t mean that decisions should be based on whether a scientist or a politician has an agenda — but on how economically, politically, and scientifically well-based such an agenda may be, not on whether there is an agenda.

Whenever someone asserts that something is not a problem because someone else “has an agenda,” I’d worry far more about the unspoken agendas of the critic. Yet, historically, comparatively few people do. It’s far easier to agree that anyone who has an agenda can’t be trusted — as did my wife’s colleague.

Some weeks ago, a comparatively new SF author’s blog listed his income from writing, and there was quite a flurry of comments. Much of it centered on how “secretive” the field is, and how veteran authors and editors “hide” the financial facts from new authors and how grateful some of the commenters were to the author for revealing the awful truths. I don’t know who all these people are in the field who are hiding matters. Certainly, over the years, I’ve also received a number of questions and comments about how much writers make, and often pointed inquiries about how much I earn from writing. I’ve declined to comment, except in general terms, partly because I value my privacy and partly because the issue of income diverts attention from the work at hand, that is, the writing itself.

The issue, however, remains. Is there a conspiracy to keep financial truths from aspiring writers? From what I’ve seen over the years, no such conspiracy exists, except perhaps one. That one? It’s simple. The number of writers who can tell a publishable story or novel is extremely small, and the number of those who can do so with technical skill is even smaller, and the number who can do both of the former and sell in high enough numbers for their works to be profitable is even smaller. There is a widely accepted myth in the English-speaking world, and for all I know elsewhere, that anyone who is basically literate can write a story or a book. In very basic terms, that is true, in that with a computer anyone can string together words and sentences at story or novel length. Doing so, of course, does not really make the product either a story or a book. As many editors and publishers have attempted to point out for years, given that most first and second novels lose money, editors are more than willing to publish a book that is: (1) entertaining, (2) popular; and (3) well-written. They’ll even settle for a book that only meets the first two criteria. But this should be no secret to anyone.

As for the financial “secrets” of the publishing world, in general, the information is out there. Reputable publishers do have standard contracts, with fairly standard rates and break points, and while the sales numbers of most books are not officially published, and those that are generally apply to a handful of atypical writers, just by listening and asking questions, even when I was younger and new in the field, it wasn’t that hard to figure out the ranges and the probable earnings involved, which at that time were even more modest than now. In the end, a writer’s income is largely a function of the three factors I listed above. Because royalties in a standard contract are based on a percentage of sales, even if a writer doesn’t get the largest possible advance, since the advance is taken out of total royalties, in the end the writer still gets the same amount of money. Now, some writers claim that publishing houses will commit to pushing harder to sell a book for which they have given a larger advance. This is certainly true… in some cases, but at least one well-known publisher is of the opinion that advertising does very little for book sales.

After years of experience in the military, politics and government, business, and writing, I’ve discovered that there are always those who believe in secrets and conspiracies. I’ve even had to investigate a few, and I’ve discovered one interesting aspect of it all. While there are a handful of conspiracies, most don’t last long because human beings can’t keep secrets very well. The rest of what people think of as conspiracies are just the interaction of human greed, ambition, economics, short-sightedness, and stupidity.

Over the years, more than a few would-be authors have approached me asking how they can get published, and more than a few have voiced concerns that the reason why they hadn’t been accepted for publication was that there was a conspiracy against their kind of writing. I’m sorry. There’s no such conspiracy. There is a shared concern by all publishers. It’s called profitability. Publishers have to make money. Publishing books that will not appeal to enough readers, no matter how well written technically, to cover costs is a certain way to ruin.

By the same token, with all the waves of POD, internet publishing, and the like, big-name print publishing is here to stay because reputable publishing houses provide one very valuable service that tends to get overlooked — quality control. No, they’re not perfect, and turkeys do slip through, but unless you’ve ever read through a slush pile, you cannot imagine how little literary wheat there is for all the chaff. Most readers don’t want to sort through that. They don’t have the time. They rely on publishers to do the sorting, and the better a publisher is at sorting, the more likely that publisher is to be profitable. That quality control and sorting process, combined with the lack of anything remotely comparable on the internet, is also why I doubt that internet publishing on an individual basis will ever provide a significant number of widely-read titles.

So much for all those awful publishing secrets.

As one writer [and I can’t remember whom or I’d credit him or her] once said to me, “Everyone wants to have written a book that sells, but few of them want to actually write it.” Computers and spell-checkers have changed this a great deal, and now piles and piles of material appear on the internet and upon the doorsteps and post-office boxes of editors and agents and authors cornered at conventions. And almost all of it by volume, at least, not only according to me, but to the renowned Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, is, shall we say, less than acceptable.

But what is good writing? Is it measured by awards or sales? Or both? If so, in what proportion?

An editor once told me that there are two kinds of awards, those that a writer gets nominated for by one relatively small self-selected [and often self-important] group or another and those measured by the author’s royalty statements. Now, over the years, what I’ve observed is that the excellence of a book is not measured exclusively by either group. In fact, personally, I’ve discovered that I tend not to find the majority of either the “critically acclaimed” F&SF novels or the runaway F&SF best-sellers as those books that I would personally judge as the best in the field. But then, both critically acclaimed and best-sellers tend to be, although not exclusively so, at various extremes in the field, and I tend to err on the side of flaming moderation.

I’m so moderate, in fact, that if someone corners me and starts to rave about a book, and I mean rave, as opposed to discuss, my initial reaction is that I probably have no interest at all in the book. This may not seem fair, but to me, it’s a workable system, and one that complements those certain reviewers whose recommendations are a sure sign that I don’t want to read that particular book. There are other reviewers, none of whom to my knowledge rave about books, whose recommendations I take as seriously as any, but the bottom line is relatively simple. I just open the book and try to read it.

I’m more interested in how well a writer writes than the personal or financial details of his or her life. I don’t buy or read books based on the appearance and lifestyle of a writer… but it’s clear that a growing number of writers and particularly so-called recording artists are selling their works on the basis of their appearance and media-charisma, or their internet blogs, rather than upon the excellence [or lack thereof] of their work.

Yet for all my interest in moderation, I’ve found something rather unusual that suggests moderation is decreasing. In reviewing the “reader reviews” of The Magic of Recluce on the internet sites of both Barnes & Noble and Amazon, I’ve discovered a very interesting pattern. I was obviously pleased to note that 60% of the readers rated the book with either four or five stars, but also, more than half the reviews (51%) were either one star or five stars. Less than fifteen percent were three stars, and although the book has been in print for almost sixteen years, almost 90% of the one-star negative reviews were made in the last six years, as were nearly 65% of the negative two star reviews, while the rave five star reviews, the mostly favorable four star reviews and the “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hand” three star reviews, all showed a consistency across the entire rating period. Put another way, although roughly 14% of the total reviews were one-star negatives, almost all of them were posted in the last several years.

I’m obviously not going to do this kind of analysis for other authors, but I wonder if this occurs with other books that have been in print for years. It also suggests to me that there’s a growing close-mindedness and intolerance for books that don’t meet the expectations of what seems to me to be a growing body of readers… and that seems rather sad to me, because I’ve always thought of reading as a way of opening horizons, rather than reinforcing closed preconceptions.

Recent images from the Cassini spacecraft have again revealed a hexagonal weather pattern some 15,000 miles across centered on Saturn’s north pole, confirming that the pattern is in fact a long-standing feature of Saturn’s upper atmosphere, since Voyager images revealed the same pattern some 25 years ago. Just think about this — six regular lines of clouds, each some 7,000 miles long in a pattern that has lasted at least 25 years. That truly boggles the mind.

In other news, investigations have disclosed that ITT, a top U.S. defense contractor, revealed details of secret U.S. night-vision equipment used by U.S. troops by outsourcing part of the production to firms in China and Singapore over a period of more than ten years. The company agreed to a $100 million fine, of which $50 million was deferred because ITT’s new CEO had been “cooperative” in the investigation.

What do these stories have in common? Nothing… except that they’re mind-boggling in two different ways.

Defense products historically comprise more than a third of ITT’s total revenues (43% in 2005) of more than $7.0 billion annually, and the annual profits from the company’s defense sector exceed $200 billion. If I understand the situation correctly, for breaking the law about not revealing defense secrets, and doing so repeatedly for over ten years, ITT will be fined in cash terms less than a quarter of its annual profits from defense contracts alone, which contracts it will not lose. The amount of the fine is only about 5% of the company’s annual profit. This is truly less than a slap on the wrist for a long-running illegality in company operations.

The Cassini mission is also a long-running operation, expected to continue through 2008, with launch occurring in 1997, and years of development before that. Over the course of the Cassini mission, ITT’s defense profits amounted to more than the annualized cost of Cassini. From Cassini, we’ve gained a far greater understanding of our own solar system, and particularly that of Saturn and its satellites. From ITT, we’ve gained… what?

The understanding that: (1) the pursuit of profit is greater than patriotism and more powerful than the requirement to obey the law; (2) that these disclosures could lead, if they have not already, to an increased number of deaths of U.S. servicemen and women; and (3) these illegal and unconscionable actions can be papered over with what amounts to a token fine?

That’s almost as incomprehensible as a naturally occurring hexagon that could swallow something like four complete planets the size of Earth.

Do any of you know that, some thirty years ago, I carved a set of miniature wooden animals for my children? Or that those animals were perhaps among the most amateuristic efforts ever to disgrace the non-artistic world? More important, does anyone besides the children really care? Should anyone care?

What is it about our world that so many people in the so-called civilized western world need to know the trivia about everyone who is anyone? Yet we often know so little about those around us. Recent news stories revealed that illegal commercial pot growers have now invaded the suburbs of large cities, turning dwellings in those suburbs into high-tech marijuana “grow houses.” Why? Because in many middle class or even affluent suburbs no one knows more than a few neighbors, and everyone’s schedule is so regimented and isolated from their neighbors’ schedules that no one even notices who’s reclusive and who’s not.

I confess I’m not immune. I have some neighbors I haven’t seen in years, and some whose names I don’t even know. I console myself that I don’t know anything about Paris Hilton except her name, or about Anna Nicole Smith… except what was in the headlines that were hard to avoid.

Still… I find it somehow sad that millions know the intimate details of the lives of people who will be forgotten in a few years and not the names of the neighbors only three houses away, near whom they may have lived for years, or for that matter, the name of the current president or any past president.

By the same token, I find it disconcerting that the best popular songs of my parents’ and grandparents’ times are still around, and many are quite distinctive, and they’re often sung, seldom as well as by the original artist. Yet very few of today’s listeners will be able to remember a single one of last year’s “current” hits by next year, let alone hum a melody [assuming the song even had one] or sing the lyrics, assuming they were intelligible in the first place… except for those “songs” that repeat the same phrase time after time.

Now… there are more and more magazines and publications about “entertainment,” but what I find amazing is that very little of the “content” — the few columns squeezed in between the ads — deals with the entertainment itself. Rather than deal with the creations, feeble as they may be, of such media-manufactured artists, the magazines and newspapers and other mass media devote endless pages, video, and the like to occurrences involving celebrities and pseudo-celebrities and the minutiae of their lives. In William Gibson’s book Idoru, published over ten years ago, a character goes so far as to suggest marrying Rei Toei, an “idoru” (idol) who exists only in virtual reality. What’s intriguing about this is not that it’s far-reaching, but that such a future is almost at our fingertips — and an ever-growing number of people prefer it to the lives they live. And what does that say about the lives we do live?

I’m about to attempt to draw a line, albeit a wide and fuzzy one to split fiction — or at least speculative fiction — into two differing sub-genres, those that I will call “real” fiction and “fictive” fiction.

But isn’t all fiction fictive, by definition? In a technical sense, that’s absolutely correct.

Why am I bothering with what sounds like a technical exercise? Because, first, in point of fact, I believe it to be anything but technical, and, second, I see too many readers and reviewers belaboring and bashing perfectly good books because said readers and reviewers don’t seem to understand the distinction. Nor do many of them seem to care.

So, in the interest of reader and reviewer education, as if many will heed the effort, I am attempting to suggest that the differences between these two types of fiction not only exist, but that at the extremes they are very different. In the middle, of course, where much fiction is written, the distinctions can be blurred into indistinguishability, but because it is often indistinguished there, that lack of distinction doesn’t seem to matter in such cases.

In “real” fiction, human beings, or other intelligent beings, behave in ways consistent with their culture, genetics, heritage, education [or lack thereof], and their job description. This means that if a character is depicted as a business owner, an inordinate amount of his or her time should be devoted to that business. Soldiers should be preparing for war and handling military collateral duties, of which any army in history has had a plethora. Teachers should be teaching, plumbers plumbing, smiths smithing, engineers engineering, and so forth. They should all have concerns about income, because all humans have always had such a concern, and those who have not generally ended up dead or redundant, neither of which should involve a protagonist. They also have to juggle their economic requirements against their emotional needs and requirements, as well as against everyone else’s economic and emotional requirements, not to mention the requirements imposed by the culture, geography, and climate. Needless to say, there are authors who do not wish to bother with these troublesome details, and those who cannot be bothered because such details merely get in the way of the story. There are also those for whom the details threaten to bury the story, something of which I’ve occasionally been accused.

But, for better or worse, “real” fiction at its best tends to illuminate aspects of life and culture as we know it, but at enough of a distance that such illumination is not blinding. It generally does not provide nearly the escapism of “fictive” fiction, but it can be enjoyable to those who appreciate a dose of realism with their escapism.

On the other hand, in “fictive” fiction, accurate depiction of culture, character, background, and economics all take a back seat to adventure and escapism. In fictive fantasy, the peasant boy or girl can become the great hero, despite never having even held a sword or piloted a spacecraft. No one looks too closely at where the resources come from to wage war or go on a lengthy quest. Cities can appear or be built in deserts. Creatures whose biology is patently suspect can appear and wreak havoc or bestow bounty. Great and glorious love can spontaneously arise and enchant two people who do not have the same background or culture, nor speak the same language, and who may not even have the same biology.

In fictive science fiction, new inventions can be created overnight and produced in quantity in days or weeks. Information can be obtained with a quick supercomputer [or the equivalent] search. Private investigators can afford to work on a single case for little or no retainer or expenses for weeks on end. Scientists can create black holes with little equipment in portable laboratories, and global climate change can overwhelm an entire planet in days, if not in hours.

I’m not saying that such fictive fiction stories aren’t entertaining, nor am I saying that many are not well written stylistically. What I am saying is that they’re about cultures or people that haven’t the remotest chance of ever being close to any recognizable reality, and that’s all right. Some readers, and sometimes I’m even one of them, need that kind of escape.

The problem comes when the devotees of one kind of fiction read the other kind, thinking that it might be “their” kind… and come away disappointed and angry enough to complain that writer “x” is not “radically awesome” enough or that writer “y” has so little understanding of technology and economics that he [or she] could not even build a sand castle, let alone a real one.

In short, be careful of damning a book because the writer didn’t write it to your specifications; it may well meet someone else’s. That applies to style as well. Just because a book is written from the first person viewpoint or in the present tense, or both, doesn’t mean it’s either bad or good. It’s a differing approach. Different is different. Poorly written is poorly written. But “different” based on personal expectations, as opposed to technical quality of writing, doesn’t automatically equate to poorly written and bad, and these days I’m seeing that equation far too often, and it doesn’t do either other readers or the writers much good.