As at least some of my readers know, I began my career in science fiction by writing short stories, initially primarily for ANALOG when Ben Bova was the editor. I still have a love of short stories, but, since they don’t come anywhere close to paying the bills, for me, and I suspect for most writers, short stories are either a labor of love or to get experience, if not both, along with a little income.

One of my very personal problems with a great deal of the short fiction that I’ve read in the last decade is that, in my very prejudiced and personal opinion, too many of the stories being published are either techno-gadget stories or excessively dark. I have nothing against either a good techno-gadget story or a dark story. I’ve certainly written my share of techno-gadget stories, particularly early in my career, and I’ve written a few dark stories – not insanely dark and vicious ones, but quietly dark tales. I do have a dislike of dark and gimmick stories in great numbers, but that’s a personal preference of mine, clearly not shared by many editors and readers.

From what I’ve seen, the predominance of “dark” stories isn’t limited to F&SF, either. In fact, “dark” seems to be the predominant flavor all too much of the “mainstream.” Now… I know there’s a great deal of funny and witty chick lit being written, but as a male, for me a little of that goes a long way.

I still do write short stories, although the last one I had published appeared in print over two years ago, but to achieve what I want in a short story seems to require intense bursts of work, followed by weeks or months of unconscious contemplation, followed by revision, more contemplation, and more revision, all in the spaces between novels, or at least chapters of novels. Then, add to that the fact that most of the stories I write seem to appeal more to anthologists and book editors than to U.S. magazine editors. Beyond that… yes, there are more short stories coming, but not for a while.

The other day I was talking to my editor, something I attempt to do weekly, and in discussing the industry he made the observation that hardcover sales were largely holding on, overall, although this varied to some degree by author, and that the explosive growth of ebooks had stopped, with a very slight increase in overall sales last year, while the sales of mass-market paperbacks had continued to decline far faster than the sales of ebooks had increased. In my own sales, I’m seeing a modest increase in the combined sales of hardcovers and initial ebooks, although the percentage of hardcovers is declining slightly while the percentage of initial [i.e., higher-priced] ebooks is increasing. The sales of ebooks sold at the “paperback” price continues to increase, but not as much as the sales of mass-market paperbacks have declined. On the other hand, ebook sales of older books have strengthened, largely because, I suspect, few bookstores carried new copies of older paperbacks, and readers who want those books are turning to ebooks.

Obviously, I can’t speak for other authors, but what I’m seeing suggests that a strong backlist may become even more of a necessity, at least for those authors who do not become instant, or near-instant, mega-sellers. The problem for newer authors, of course, is how to get published enough times so that you have enough of a presence in readily accessible venues, largely internet these days, so that readers who have not read you will see your name enough to want to try your work. The associated difficulty is making certain that the venues where your name appears are venues that appeal to those who will like your books. This can be anything but easy. For example, there are several forums where the forum-leader [for lack of a better word] or leaders are inclined to be favorable to my books, but from both the tenor and volume of the comments, it’s fairly apparent that either a great number of the forum frequenters are not… or that those who do like my books refrain from commenting… and I‘ve never been able to ascertain more than the obvious fact that some frequenters of those forums and sites like my books and some don’t. I hope for the dominance of the silent readers who like and buy my works while continuing in all ways that are feasible and cost-and-time effective to maintain a certain visibility… but that’s far easier for an established author than a newcomer with only a book or two out there.

I could name a handful of relatively new authors who have been incredibly successful in building sales through an internet presence, but they all seem to have a very good and accessible sense of humor, both in print and in person. I can also name a number of authors whose careers have essentially vanished because their public presence is almost non-existent and their personal appearance and presentation are less than stellar, and some of them are technically better writers than others who have continued to publish and sell. Yet I can also name at least one best-selling author who has essentially no public presence outside of the books and whose personal appearances have often been reputed to be disasters to the point that the author’s publisher prefers not to tour the author.

All of which goes to show, I suppose, that continuing success in writing doesn’t ever boil down to a magic formula that any new or would-be author can follow to the letter and gain success. But then, hasn’t this always been the case?

At our house, after twenty years, we’ve finally decided to remodel and add to the dining room and kitchen. Given that the so-called dining room is scarcely larger than an extra-large walk-in closet [no, I’m not kidding], and that I’ve been promising my wife that I’d do something about it for fifteen years, it’s definitely overdue. Why so long? Let’s just say we’re conservative about spending and raising eight children was expensive… but that’s not what the point of this is all about. It’s about stuff.

When you remodel, we’ve discovered, you have to move things out of the space to be remodeled, and in our case, out of the adjoining garage. And then you discover the stuff… stuff you vaguely realized you had and kept, just in case. But, guess what, in all too many cases, just-in-case never came, and you’ve still got the stuff. Like fifteen baskets, of different sizes and assortments. Like five boxes of extra tiles for counters and the like [which we’ll now never need because the 1980s tile is going].

Then there were the flower vases. My wife’s a performer and director, and she gets flowers occasionally. I also send her flowers. They come in various vases, and we’ve kept the really nice looking ones – and then in cleaning out things, you discover several boxes of really nice flower vases, some of them red glass and green glass, and a couple – maybe more than a couple – that look like crystal but really aren’t… and only three or four have ever been used again.

And paint! There were four gallons of dried-up gray floor and deck paint,not to mention five separate gallon cans so old, and of such strange colors that I wondered if they might have been left by the previous owner, except that they never left anything. I did keep the newest can of deck paint.

Now, not all stuff is useless. I really wondered what I was going to do with the eight different socket sets I inherited from my father-in-law, but having those eight socket sets has saved me more grief over the years… and the same with the four sets of Allen wrenches,and the fifteen that don’t belong to sets. Why does every furniture manufacturer, every tool maker, everyone who makes everything use a different dimensional Allen screw?

But then I found more replacement parts for the sprinkler system than I ever recalled buying, most likely because I couldn’t find the first sets because they were in another box, neatly stacked, but unlabeled, on the garage shelves. We’ve always been fairly neat and organized, but when you don’t look in those neat and organized boxes and stack another neat and organized box on top, well…

And, oh, yes, the broken Christmas deer lawn decorations – three gathered over the years and left stashed in the garage attic because they wouldn’t fit in the mandated city garbage cans, and I never took the time to make the ten mile trip to the city dump [and yes, it is ten miles away, in an abandoned open pit iron mine, but that’s another story]. I could go on, but I think I’m made it clear.

And the sad thing is… we really thought we were organized and only kept what we really needed.

As a science fiction writer, I’ve generally tied to keep my “space drives” at least tenuously related to scientific reality as we currently know it, but that distance is likely more attenuated than many readers realize.

In doing some research for my next book, I came across the speeds of the fastest outbound human space craft, which is currently Voyager 1, at 38,610 mph, or roughly 10.7 miles per second.  For those who are interested, the speed is measured outbound, because anything launched toward the sun will have its velocity increased by the sun’s gravity.  As an example of that, when Comet ISON was discovered in 2012, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, its inbound speed was calculated at roughly 10.5 mps, but by the time it reached perihelion, that speed was between 63 mps and 360 mps (or 1,300,000 miles per hour)[that depended on who was doing the calculating, because exact figures were not possible, given that ISON was either so close to the sun or actually on the far side of the sun from earth at the time around perihelion]. The fastest sun-grazing comets could theoretically reach a speed of over 400 mps.

If a human spacecraft could attain and maintain such a speed headed out of our solar system, it would still take over 118 days to reach the average orbital distance of Pluto from the sun… and something like 2,300 years to reach Alpha Centauri [those are rough calculations; feel free to refine them].  These figures indicate why SF writers tend to focus on interstellar travel through “jumps,”  “warps”, wormholes or the like, especially since there’s the not-so-small problem of what happens when one encounters a comparatively immoveable object at that velocity.  While space is largely empty, it appears as though most solar systems have all sorts of objects scattered around their periphery and approaching any other system with that sort of velocity would be problematical.  So, of course, we writers come up with screens and shields, and never mind the energy consumption required for such powerful drive systems and the requisite shields.

Then, too, according to Einstein, any object approaching the speed of light would also gain a huge amount of mass, possibly infinite mass… and there’s not enough energy to push that mass.  So… we’re back to getting around the speed of light and all those pesky relativity problems.

Theoretically, from what I’ve read, a so-called Hawking wormhole could be used to thwart the speed of light limitations.  There’s just one catch – to create one would require the energy of a small black hole… each time it was used.

Is it any wonder that more fantasy and less hard SF is being written?  And that the vast majority of all the space operas [including, I must admit, some of my own SF] ignore those facts? 

What most people in the United States accept without thinking about it too much is that American democracy – or our representative democratic republic, if one wants to be technical about it – rests largely on voluntary compliance with the laws of the land.  We also have a Congress designed to update and make new laws as necessary, and an elaborate judicial system designed to interpret those laws under the guidelines laid out by the Constitution.

The situation that developed in Bunkerville, Nevada, between rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM is an example of what can happen when people adopt a view of what laws apply to them and what do not, and defend their position with force.  There is absolutely no doubt that Bundy is a fairly big-time law-breaker.  He is grazing his cattle on federal lands without permission;  he has not paid grazing fees for over fifteen years; he owes the federal government over a million dollars; and he and the other ranchers and close to a thousand hangers-on with fairly heavy weapons gathered to oppose the BLM round-up of the offending cattle. Fearing bloodshed, the BLM backed down, at least for the moment.  Bundy justifies this on the grounds that his family has grazed on the lands since the 1870s and that he therefore has a “right” to those lands.  Unfortunately, according to news reports, some local officials are sympathetic.

I’m not sympathetic to Bundy’s views.  I’m outraged, and anyone who understands American democracy and values it should be equally so.  Why?

First, Bundy’s claims aren’t even good law.  Second, allowing the force of arms to flout two fundamental bases of the American system sets an example that could more easily than many understand lead to an even greater breakdown of law and order…or equally unpleasant, an even greater establishment of preferential law enforcement based on the power of arms and money. As for the legal “issues,” those are basic.  According to the treaty of Guadalupe Hildago in 1848 that ended the Mexican War, all of the states of Utah and Nevada became U.S. territory, and any lands owned by Mexican citizens remained theirs and all others belonged to the federal government.  Since Bundy’s ancestors weren’t there at that time, and the only inhabitants were native Americans, either the lands belonged to the federal government or to the local inhabitants.  If Bundy is claiming that land rights belong to who was there first, then the lands rightfully belong to the native Americans.  Otherwise, legally, they’re federal lands.

The more troubling issue is the use of “second amendment rights” to flout federal law on federal lands. If the government used force to arrest Bundy and seize his cattle, it would have resulted in bloodshed and outrage on the part of the ranchers, which would, in turn, have justified in their minds the need for arms and protection against the government for taking away “their rights.”  But, by backing off, the BLM reinforced the idea that the government defers to power of some sort, especially if one considers the economic meltdown of 2008, where hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes, their jobs, and often everything… and where not a single bank or mortgage company has ever been indicted for fraudulent loans, and where financial executives are once again getting enormous bonuses. We have the highest rate of imprisoning people in the industrialized world, and possibly in the entire world, and most of them are people without power. More and more government is portrayed as the enemy. As an illustration, one right-wing Washington, D.C., newspaper put it this way, “the elites in D.C. aren’t happy about the drubbing that they took at the hands of a citizen’s movement in Nevada… Their protest sent a message to anyone with a beef against Washington that if you stick to your guns, you can win.”

Exactly how long before voluntary compliance with law and ethics erodes even further? Especially with about one quarter of the population stockpiling weapons, and with continuing dissatisfaction, and with more and more examples of corporations and others with power either avoiding the law or paying it off?

And how long can one keep a democracy when it’s clearer and clearer that power trumps ethics and law – apparently always?  And even if the BLM does punish Bundy, how many people will just see it as a case where justice is only enforced against those without the power to oppose it?