I recently read an article in The New York Times with a title something like “DNA Sequencing, Two Billion Bits of Me, Me, Me!” That suggested more than just research into what makes a human being.

We live on a small planet holding over six billion human beings, and that planet is located in a universe that, so far as we can determine, holds something like fifty billion galaxies, each with between fifty and a hundred billion stars and their solar systems. Yet each of us wants to believe that we are not only unique, but special, and we want to affirm in some way that we are not so insignificant as the numbers above might indicate. For that reason, we as humans have continually sought ways to prove our worth, both to ourselves and to the world at large.

Religion has certainly been one of those ways, as has a striving for some form of world-changing accomplishment. But when one comes right down to it, there’s only room for a handful of world-changers such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon, or geniuses such as Einstein, Newton, Mozart, Edison, and Fermi, or even fortune-building entrepreneurs such as J.P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, or Bill Gates. But heretofore anyone could theoretically believe in a god and a faith that promised some form of immortality. Except now… even religion is under attack.

I have no doubts that religion will remain as a bulwark against personal universal insignificance for billions of humans, but for those for whom the billions upon billions of stars in the sky suggest that religion will not provide any security against personal oblivion and meaninglessness, I suggest that genetic engineering is the new faith. Just think, there’s the possibility of endless clones of one’s self, or more modestly, the possibility of ensuring that one’s best traits are passed on to offspring — not only one’s own, but to others desirous of having children with special traits and brilliance, for do we not all have such brilliance?

Even now, services are offering clones of favorite pets and, in the process, giving their owners a sense of power over a cruel universe. How long will it be before we can pass “ourselves” on to an identical clone and thus not have to rely on an uncertain deity for continued existence?

But then, isn’t that just another kind of faith? And faith is religion in another guise, isn’t it?

Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to CONduit, the science fiction and fantasy convention held in Salt Lake City, and the convention that qualifies as my “local” convention, because it’s the closest — if anything some 260 miles away is ever exactly local. One of the panels I was on dealt with the topic of “foreshadowing” in fiction, the idea that an author needs to set up events occurring farther along in a book so that the reader doesn’t get to that later event and throw the book across the room — or worse — vow never to read another of the author’s books.

Another panel was on political commentary in science fiction and fantasy, and one of the points brought up was that authors should generally refrain from pontification and empty rhetoric and that we should use the events and actions in the story to demonstrate and illustrate how political acts influence society and people and what those effects will be. As an author, I very much agree with that point, and although I must confess to an occasional lapse, generally perpetrated by my alter-ego Exton Land, I do make a deliberate and conscious effort to show my readers what will happen as a result of political decisions and acts.

But…as I was driving home, I began to think about the confluence of those panels — and there is more than enough time to think on a 260 mile drive through the sparsely populated mid-section of Utah. It struck me that those of us who are authors are being held to a far higher standard by our readers and the public than our politicians are. Politicians can mislead their constituents day after day, year after year, by promising a happy ending through higher federal benefits, greater environmental protection, lower taxes, or laws that conform to the religious beliefs of their constituents… if not all of the above. What’s more, over ninety percent of them get re-elected.

If I, or any other author, tried to foist that kind of a happy ending on my readers, especially if I did so following 300 pages of the kind of obfuscation and misdirection practiced by the vast majority of politicians, after one book I would have almost no readers left. And again, I must confess to past errors, because for all too many years I was one of those political staffers who created speeches, letters, policy papers, and speeches all designed to suggest a political happy ending through blind faith in a given politician.

As an author, I don’t have that luxury. I have to produce an honest ending, and if I don’t, I won’t be able to make a living from writing fiction because my readers expect that degree of professionalism from me. Neither will most of the other authors I know. Yet we’re authors, just people who try to sell stories for entertainment.

We haven’t been elected to make or change laws that have national and world-wide consequences. People pay far less for our books and stories than they do in the taxes that support government and their elected politicians. But as authors,we’re still held accountable for what we produce and do.

So why don’t people expect and demand the same degree of professionalism from their elected representatives?

The quick and obvious answer to the question is. “Yes. How could it be anything else?” After all, the books have good and evil wizards and magic and flying broomsticks and giant chess games where the pieces move themselves.

But for all that, most of the settings focus around what amounts to a co-ed English boarding school for magicians. Magic doesn’t seem to play much of a part in the world at large away from Hogwarts, yet there would seem to be a role for such magic

in the world of the muggles.

The idea of the English boarding school was, variously, to educate young people away from their parents, to instill some sort of background, to prepare them for life, etc., but boarding schools have always been, in many senses, unreal places. So the fact that Hogwarts is unreal isn’t that much of a stretch. Nor is the fact that Harry and his friends have to solve problems that seem, and may be, life-threatening. Likewise, studying magic is about as useful as certain aspects of boarding school curricula must have seemed to more than a few students over the years. And in time, the boarding school becomes a far more real place than a “home” where less and less time is spent. In a perverse way, the time Harry spends away from Hogwarts is more of a nightmare than the time he spends at Hogwarts.

For all the trappings of education at Hogwarts, there’s precious little on the structure of magic, or even on the structural differences between good and evil. And…if we’re talking about fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien, where an author creates an entire world from scratch, with cultures, languages, different economies and technologies, “Harry Potter” tends to come up as enjoyable “fantasy lite.”

Now, obviously, fantasy can be anything an author and that author’s publisher declare it to be, so long as it’s popular and profitable, and the Harry Potter books are certainly both. Also, as a fantasy author, at least part of the time, I’m more than pleased to see young people reading anything, particularly anything that might lead them into reading more, especially more challenging works.

But I still have to ask,”Is Harry Potter really fantasy?” But then, does it really matter?

As I’ve noted before, I”m neither a Luddite nor a technophile. I just like usable technology that does what I want and makes my personal and professional life easier. Even so, I tend to find myself continually amazed by people’s fascination with what they think is “new” and vital in technology. Several months ago, my cell phone bit the dust, and I had to get a new one. I purchased the simplest version I could find. If I’ve counted correctly, which is difficult to do because this device has so many different screens and sub-screens, depending on how many times and in what order you press what, it has something like twenty different functions, and what seems like that many options, with each option having that many sub-options.

My first thought was: “For what?” My second was: “No wonder the number of automobile accidents caused by cell phones is going up.” My third thought was: “Who has time for all this foolishness?”

A great number of people, apparently, given the turnover in cell phone sales with each new version with even more techno-enhancements. But the proliferation of itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie tech gadgets seems to me more of a reflection of a society of navel-gazers than a society supposedly entering a new era, and on the verge of the “spike” or the “singularity.” College students spend endless hours hooked to their cell phones, talking, texting, and seldom looking at their classmates, or reading real novels, or taking a walk and looking at the scenery. More and more people on the streets of any major city — or in their cars — are less than half-aware of what lies around and before them.

Several weeks ago, I posted a blog on the amazing hexagon at Saturn’s north pole, each side something like seven thousand miles long. There was one short article on AOL and two equally short articles in two different science publications, at least from what I could tell. I got no comments, and I never saw much reaction to this amazing phenomenon.

In the night sky are thousands of stars, and they’re just an infinitesimal fraction of the fifty billion galaxies, or more, in the universe, each with an average of fifty billion stars… and we have trouble finding the willpower and funds to even explore and venture out into our own solar system, with wonders like Saturn and its hexagon and rings so comparatively close.

Yet there are hundreds of articles on cell phones, the new X-box, playstation, or Wii, and the fascination with them seems endless. Over 40 years ago, in The Joy Makers, James Gunn postulated a future where the doctors of the future [hedonists] plugged everyone on earth into synthetic electronic personal futures. He clearly anticipated the virtual world that seems to be the vision of the future for so many today. In fact, we already have real commerce in the virtual world, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.

But there’s a large small problem with all this. Who’s going to fix and maintain the real world while everyone is navel-gazing into their itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie high-tech virtual worlds? For that matter, who’s going to maintain the virtual worlds?

And what ever happened to that sense of wonder about the real world? Or the real world of a future that may never be because no one can look up long enough to find it?

A month ago Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel opened here in Cedar City, produced by the Southern Utah University Opera Theatre and sung by university students. In the article/review that appeared in the University Journal, a math student was quoted as complaining that she’d forgotten that opera was all sung, and that the opening of the production was slow — until the witch appeared. There was no mention of the vocal technique, the live symphonic accompaniment, or the actual singing, much of it by students who had previously won state and regional awards.

The reason why I mention this is that it is an example of the impact of the growing pressure to technologize, speed up action, and quantify both the arts and education dealing with the arts, technophilia, if you will, applied to the arts. Motion pictures and television programs are filled with movement and increasingly quick cuts from viewpoint to viewpoint. Songs tend to be shorter and more repetitive. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein often wrote songs with melodies running 20 bars or more. Today, it’s a rare popular song whose melody line exceeds six bars, even with all the technological aids to composition.

More and more, university professors in the arts are judged on how many compositions, performances, and publications they have completed, and how many student credit hours they have produced — not how good said compositions, performances, or publications might be and not what their students have done after graduation, which is in fact a better indication of the quality of teaching than student “satisfaction” evaluations — but student evaluations can be computerized and analyzed quickly. Students taking music appreciation find it almost impossible to listen to classical music without watching a video.

Close to twenty years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the observation that the arts were one area where technology could not be effectively applied to reduce costs and shorten the time involved. As he noted then, a Mozart string quartet that took twenty minutes to play in 1790 still takes twenty minutes to play, and the musicians still need years of training to play it properly. Moreover, as any number of musicians and music aficionados have noted publicly in recent years, electronic reproduction or amplification of the music, no matter how good, degrades the listening experience, because electronic systems, regardless of what the techo-geeks claim, does not reproduce the full range of harmonics and overtones.

Great art cannot be painted any faster than in the time of Manet and Monet. Admittedly, technology has resulted in a wider range of generally better pigments, but the actual creation process isn’t any faster. Great sculpture still takes time. Great wines still need to be aged, even if technology has resulted in overall cheaper and better common wines. Great cheeses require technique and aging.

So why do we as a society keep buying into the idea that faster and more technologized is better, especially where art is concerned?

Thirty-three people died at the hands of a young madman at Virginia Tech, an unstable twenty-three year old who could not escape the combination of cruel childhood teasing and his own madness, a madness whose incipient danger was all too evident to those around him, including various authorities… who did nothing, all citing after the fact how their hands were tied.

On average, more than 70 people die in the United States every day from gun-related homicides and suicides, most of them killed by handguns, which have no purpose besides target shooting… and killing people. And… effectively, for all the talk, and all the debate on whether guns kill or people do, no one does very much… and hasn’t for years.

On average, more than 120 people die in the United States every day from automobile accidents, and an ever-growing proportion is caused by people doing things they know they should not — driving after drinking too much, driving while too tired, driving too fast, driving while eating, driving while using a cell-phone. We kill more people on the highway every year than we have in warfare in any single year in the last century and a half, with the exception of something like six years — and no one ever seems to make the comparison.

Over the last century, the world has seen genocide after genocide, the Armenians by the Turks; the Russian kulaks by Stalin, preceded and followed by various other purges; the willful exterminations of the Holocaust by Hitler’s Third Reich; the rape of Nanking by the Japanese and the atrocities which followed throughout WWII; the Russian retaliation against the Germans; the ethnic turmoil following the partition of India and Pakistan that cost close to a million lives, if not more; the triumph of Ho Chi Mihn in North Vietnam that resulted in at least hundreds of thousands of deaths, the death of millions in Cambodia at the hands of Pol Pot; the ethic cleansings in the Balkans, the massive killings in Ruanda; the massacres of the generally Christian population in Darfur; and now the daily sectarian carnage in Iraq.

In the past 107 years, we’ve also seen war after war — the Second Boer War; the Boxer Rebellion; the Philippine Insurrection; the Chinese overthrow of the emperor; WWI; the Irish struggle for independence; the Russian Revolution; the Spanish Civil War; the Fino-Russian War; the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia: WWII; the 1948 Arab-Israeli War [and the subsequent wars in 1956, 1967, 1973-74, and 1982]; the fall of “Nationalist” China; the Korean War; Vietnam; the Chinese invasion of Tibet; the Iran-Iraq War; the Russian invasions of Afghanistan and Chechnya; the Serbian/Bosnian Police Action; Desert Storm; the Iraq War.

One of the explanations for all the war and violence is that they’re all about resources, but why do we have famines when food is actually available in the area or the region where people starve? Why do we engage in conflicts, domestic and international, that actually reduce available resources? Why are some resource-rich nations impoverished, and some with no natural resources to speak of wealthy?

Others claim that it’s about beliefs, yet most major religions claim that they espouse peace.

In almost all the cases, general and individual, the blame always falls on the “other person.” “They” drove drunk or talking on the cell phone; “they” started the war; “they” abused human rights. “We” didn’t do anything wrong.

The only problem with this is that you’re my “they,” and I’m your “they.”

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, while we as individuals don’t want violence used against us, as societies and/or smaller groups we don’t mind using it against others, and we really don’t want to get involved in preventing its use against others — unless we “have to” because something of ours is threatened or because we want something someone else has. Or could it be that our nature is to ask, and if we don’t get, to take what we want or do as we please?

Or maybe, for all our protests to the contrary, we really do like violence and fighting and other assorted carnage, live and on video. Why else do we refuse to admit the almost unitary link between the amount of violence depicted in the media and the growing incivility and violence in society?

Or it is that most of us don’t dislike violence enough to give up much of anything to stop it?

Can you think of another explanation? One that doesn’t involve blaming someone else?

First Dilbert and now college presidents… and it’s long past time. What am I talking about? As technology and instant calculation capabilities permeate U.S. society, Americans’ long-standing love of statistics and numbers has become an obsession, to the point that quantification crowds out qualification or anything that can’t be quantified, and we exalt these sacred numbers, from the Dow Jones to baseball batting averages to point spreads to SAT scores to cost-effectiveness in business and higher education to ranking colleges numerically… and thousands of other numbers. As a culture, we seem to be under the misapprehension that once we know the right numbers, we’ll somehow understand things better, be able to make the right decisions, set the right regulatory guidelines, pick the right college, determine whether there is or is not global warming…

Now, a number of college presidents are attacking the U.S. News and World Report collegiate ranking system. These aren’t the heads of fly-by-night diploma mills, but the presidents of rather prestigious institutions, some of which, heaven forbid, have already decided that SAT scores aren’t even a partial measure of a student’s abilities. With all the effort to quantify high school students to see who gets admitted where, is it any wonder that students respond with their own forms of quantification — adding community service projects, science projects, tutoring underprivileged students, athletics, internships, whatever they can find to boost that magic score that will get them accepted. And the treadmill continues in college as students and their parents press for higher grades, more prestigious summer jobs and internships, cram prep courses for the LSAT, MEDCAT, or GRE.

There is a place for numbers in society, and there are places where precision in such numbers is vital. I definitely want the components of my vehicle’s brakes machined precisely. I want medical measuring systems to be accurate and precise. I want architectural specifications, and the buildings constructed from them to match.

But there are more than a few places in society where numbers only provide a misleading and inaccurate assessment of quality. Nonetheless, numbers are being used there, despite the fact that the accuracy of the inputs is subject to such variance that the outputs, no matter what the mathematical models say, are less than statistically meaningless. There seems to be little understanding of the old GIGO model because of the continuing fascination with computer modeling and statistical analysis methodologies.

I’ve mentioned some examples before, such as rating the quality of the teaching of university professors on the basis of how many students they teach, or even worse, on anonymous student evaluations to which near-arbitrary numerical coefficients are attached. In certain disciplines, such as music, particularly on the undergraduate level, the competence and teaching expertise of the individual studio teacher is usually the most important single factor for the success of the individual student. In other disciplines, the laboratory facilities may be the most important, or the collective strength of a department faculty. Most of these factors are not accurately quantifiable, no matter what U.S. News and World Report claims.

Then, another set of examples comes from sports such as gymnastics and figure skating competitions, where the subjective analyses of judges are quantified in numerical terms, then calculated to hundredths or thousandths of a point. And how many times have audiences and seasoned professionals figuratively, if not literally, shaken their heads at the results.

In business, the emphasis on quantification has led to a short-term, profit-oriented mentality whose shortcomings are illustrated practically daily by the increasing revelations of back-dated stock options, misstated or incorrect financial statements, excessive executive pay, bookkeeping schemes to put expenses off the balance sheet. Yes, a business does have to make a profit to stay in operation, but emphasizing the quantifiable to the exclusion of all other factors leads inevitably to excess. What about fair-dealing, open communications, good service, reliability in products and services?

In entertainment, across the board, the issue is the ultimate in quantification — what sort of movies, games, programs, and music will appeal to the most people and bring in the most dollars, regardless of how crude, rude, and culturally repugnant they may be to tens of millions of Americans. Even more disturbing is the denigration of excellence as elitism and the pressure to exalt fame in any form increases, whether on one of the endless Survivor shows or on Fear Factor and various adaptations and clones. How does one quantify the loss of excellence, or the disillusionment with the United States occurring in other nations when people see what passes for entertainment in the USA? How does one quantify the loss of civility created by a media that increasingly seeks advertising revenues by fostering adversary journalism? How much crime and corruption results from this? What are the dollar costs in police and social remediation?

What about the areas of space and science? Yes, small unmanned satellites and space probes are certainly more cost-effective, but exactly how do they kindle a spirit of adventure and public support for space exploration? Aircraft design has now become a matter of how many bodies can be crammed into what space for maximum profit, a situation almost praised recently in the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, lost baggage claims, delayed flights, and customer complaints are at all-time highs and have been for the last three years.

There is a place for numbers and quantification, but let’s try to remember that not everything can be or should be quantified, because trying to quantify the unquantifiable, as Dilbert noted, is nothing more than a process of lying.

Over the past year, I’ve received a number of questions about why more of my books are not available as e-books. I’ve discussed this with my editor and others at Tor, and the answer is fairly simple. Tor doesn’t like losing money. Most e-books don’t cover their costs of production.

At this point, someone always points out that Baen Books makes lots of their books available online and electronically. That’s true, but it’s not primarily because Baen thinks that it will make money on those formats. In fact, the goal of making electronic editions available on-line is to get readers to buy the hardcover and paperback editions of those books, as well as other Baen products, not to make millions, or even thousands, from e-books.

While there are readers who prefer to read in e-book and electronic format, the vast majority of readers still prefers books in some print format and is likely to do so for some considerable time. Now… I’m definitely not against e-books, although I frankly prefer books employing the printed page because most of my reading occurs when and where using electronics would be inconvenient or difficult, if not impossible. And… in time, science may well resolve such issues, but for the moment, as an industry, book publishers are faced with several options, none of them even close to perfect. They can create few or no e-books and alienate that small minority who prefer them. Or they can use e-books as loss-leaders and trust that the readers will eventually buy more of the print kind to cover the costs and losses of e-books. Or they can selectively release as e-books those novels which have a large enough audience that the small percentage of readers who prefer e-books is large enough for the publisher to come close to covering e-book costs.

The last position appears to be the strategy most publishers, including Tor, are following, but that creates particular problems for me, because certain of my books sell far more than others, and that means — as I have been told more than a few times — that more than half my books are not available in any electronic format.

At this point, there’s very little I can do about this situation, but since I haven’t seen much discussion about this point — except surrounding the Baen initiative — I thought it might be useful to discuss the situation.

The other day I was reading The Atlantic Monthly and came across a statement by one of their reviewers who noted that he had “never bothered with the genre” of science fiction because of its “dearth of sex.” After I re-read the statement to make sure I had read what I thought I had read, I began to think about his aside.

The assumptions contained in and implied by that statement, besides being flat-out incorrect, also illustrate, I believe, the ignorance and intellectual poverty of those who have anointed themselves as the U.S. literary “establishment.”

First, to say that sex is not part of the SF genre, as anyone who has read it widely knows, is patently false. To paraphrase a noted scientist, that statement is so incorrect that it’s not even wrong. Now, I happen to be older than the reviewer is, and while the SF of the 1950s, with some notable exceptions by Philip Jose Farmer and others, did not deal with sex directly, since the 1960s there’s certainly been a significant segment of fantasy and science fiction that deals with sex, sometimes far more graphically than is to my taste, and it often deals with sexual issues that few mainstream novelists explore. Even in the comparatively prudish 1950s and earlier, however, F&SF dealt with sexual dynamics, if not always that well. Admittedly, in those days, it seldom went past the bedroom doors. But in that period, comparatively little English language fiction did so.

To make such a totally inaccurate assertion, even as an aside, about another fiction genre reveals both ignorance and contempt, leavened heavily with arrogance.

Second, the paramount implication of the reviewer’s statement is that no fiction genre which does not deal graphically with sex can claim to be literature, nor can it be considered as such. While I will be among the first to note that sex and sexual tensions are among the primary drivers of human behavior, I will also note that to explore the social, practical, political, and psychological implications of sexually-motivated human behavior does not require that each and every novel explore in graphic or even semi-graphic details the mechanics of sexual plumbing.

Third, the emphasis on sex, and its graphic portrayal novelistically, is in fact sexist. Humans do have sexual drives, but their biological basis is skewed by gender. Put relatively bluntly… men want sex; women want sex with attached conditions, such as security, closeness, babies and protection. This is not to say that there are no men who want closeness and children and no women who want sex for itself, but there is a biologic bias in the direction I indicated. The graphic portrayal of physical intimacy is, in most cases, effectively exalting the masculine preference.

Fourth, graphic portrayal of sexual intercourse is all too often, but not always, merely a tool for selling more books, and as such, a confession of literary ineptitude. If a writer cannot carry his or her readers without lots of sex and plumbing, what are the literary and redeeming qualities of the work? A good writer ought to be able to make the moment when a character leafs through a telephone directory [or an email address list] interesting, and without a striptease being involved. This does not mean that there are not novels that deal well and meaningfully with sex and physical intimacy. There certainly are, but there aren’t nearly so many as their authors think there are.

All in all, I found that single aside in a three page review far more revealing than anything else on those pages, including the basics of the review itself, which, by the way, was about a biography of Kingsley Amis.

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.