L.E. Modesitt, Jr. – The Official Website

Home

The Books

Welcome

Like most authors, I want my readers to have as much background information as possible, particularly about recently released books, and books that will be published in the months ahead. But it’s equally important for new readers to learn about the books already out there. Those are some of the purposes of this site.

Another reason for the site is to acquaint you all with the range of my books. Just because you liked one of my fantasies doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that you will like one of my “hard” SF novels. I’d hope that you would, but another point of this site is to give you more information so that you know more about what I’m writing and what I have written.

Thanks again for reading my work, for supporting me, and for keeping the written word alive and well!

—L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

Writers and AI
June 24, 2025

AI is coming, regardless. And while AI applications will have a strong impact on manufacturing and production, they’re also going to affect so-called white-collar clerical and lower-level data-management, as well as routine computer coding.

Authors and artists won’t be exempt, either. Artists who do illustrations for books and other publications are already complaining, and at least some publications are refusing to use artwork solely or partly AI-generated.

As for authors, a number of lawsuits have been brought in California and New York courts against various AI companies for copyright infringement because the companies employed unauthorized copying of authors’ works to train their generative AI models.

The discussions around this appear muddled, at least to me. Intelligence has to “learn” in some fashion. I’d read more than a thousand SF books and all the stories in ANALOG (including some from the Astounding Science-Fiction era) for fifteen years before I ever thought about writing a story, let alone a novel. So have a great many other authors.

The problem I have with the way the AI companies approached this was that while I had to pay (or occasionally borrow from the local library) to read and learn, these companies used pirated copies and paid no one. Some have attempted to claim “fair use,” which is absurd, given that “fair use” case law doesn’t allow use of extended prose in any form.

So why shouldn’t the AI companies pay royalties to authors whose works aren’t in the public domain? Shakespeare doesn’t need the royalties, but living, breathing, and working authors need and deserve them.

Since none of these legal suits have yet come to trial (so far as I can tell), we’ll see what the courts have to say.

Of course, those lawsuits don’t address the fact that dialogue from movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems.

I could be underestimating the potential of generative AI, but I doubt that it will ever produce truly great prose or poetry, or even well-written mid-list fiction, but I have no doubt that, in time, it will be able to churn out serviceable methodical fiction with little uniqueness.

As in many fields, we’ll have to see, but in the meantime, the AI companies have no business pirating current authors’ works in an effort to eventually replace them.

Manufacturing: Facts and Myths
June 16, 2025

Manufacturing in the U.S. isn’t declining. In fact, total manufacturing output has increased by thirty percent over the past twenty years.

Figures from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis show that, even in the so-called “Rust Belt” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), manufacturing output has increased by 14 percent over the last twenty years. In the south, output has increased 25 percent over the same period, while output has increased by 114 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in California, 70 percent in Oregon, and 39 percent in Colorado.

So why does everyone think the U.S. is manufacturing less?

The simple answer is that there are fewer jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 16 million jobs in 2005 to 13 million at the end of 2024. At the same time, the hourly wage rate for manufacturing production workers has increased by 75%, but the cost of living has increased “officially” by 64% (I say “officially” because the official figures understate real inflation felt by most people).

At the same time, U.S. population rose from 296 million in 2005 to 347 million in 2025. So while the U.S. population increased by 51 million people, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 3 million. Put another way, one in eighteen Americans worked in manufacturing in 2005, but in 2025 only one in twenty-seven did.

All this translates into the facts that there are fewer manufacturing jobs, which on average pay in real terms about the same as they did twenty years ago. So those working in manufacturing, on average, haven’t seen significant improvement in real wages, and there are fewer jobs, largely because of greater technology and more automation. In addition, an increasing percentage of those jobs are requiring greater and greater skills.

This also suggests that increasing manufacturing in the United States won’t significantly increase the number of jobs being created, no matter what Trump and the Republicans claim.

Too Rough?
June 12, 2025

In the world of golf, today begins the U.S. Open, one of the four major tournaments in professional golf. This year, it’s being held at the historic and extremely difficult Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, outside Pittsburg. A hundred and twenty-five golfers qualified to play in the Open, and after two rounds, the field will be cut to sixty (plus any others who tied for the last spot) for the last two rounds. The winner will take home $4.3 million, while even the 60th place finisher will pocket something like $43,000.

Apparently, some of the professionals who qualified to play in the tournament have been complaining about the length of the rough (the grass outside the comparatively manicured fairways).

My sympathy for those complaints is ambivalent. First, the rough is there to penalize golfers with less control of their game. Second, the rough is there for all players. Third, by design golf is a game/profession designed to test those who play it because there are so many variables that can affect a player, and they’re often capricious. The wind can pick up or die down at times. Rain between rounds can change how fast the green is or how heavy the sand in a bunker might be.

Every golfer faces those varying factors, and professional golfers work extremely hard to sharpen their game to minimize their impact. But when a single stroke can make a difference of anywhere from thousands of dollars to over a million dollars, it can be difficult to be philosophical.

One young and moderately successful (and single) young pro golfer actually posted what it cost him to play the pro tour, and his rough estimate was $6,000 a week, and that was with comparatively basic costs. Given that the PGA tour consists of something like 32 tournaments and seven other events, there is certainly a fair amount of mental strain as well.

All of which might also explain why I gave up golf young, especially since, despite all my efforts, I was a high handicap amateur.