Decades ago, the late science fiction writer Mack Reynolds wrote a novel depicting a future United States in which citizens received one “basic” vote, and then could “earn” additional votes for various accomplishments, such as earning advanced degrees, completing a period of military and/or public service, etc.  At the time of the book, Reynolds received a great deal of flak for that concept, and I suspect, were anyone to advance such an idea today, the outcry would likely be even greater.

But why?  In point of fact, those with great sums of money already exert a disproportionate amount of influence over the electoral process, especially in the United States now that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted corporations and wealthy individuals access to the media that is only limited by the amount of their resources, in effect granting such entities the impact of millions of votes. The rationale for the court decision, which has in effect been legally sustained, is that restriction on the use of money for advertising one’s political views and goals is in effect a restriction on first amendment freedom of speech rights.  The practical problem with this decision is that, in a culture dominated by pervasive mass media, the result is to multiply the effect of exercising freedom-of-speech rights manifold for those who have large amounts of wealth.  Since, given the costs of effectively using mass media, only the top one or two tenths of one percent of the population can exercise such media-enhanced rights, the result of the decision is to give disproportionate influence to a tiny fraction of the population.  Moreover, as a result of the decision, in most cases, donors to groups and corporations availing themselves of this “right” do not even have to disclose their donations/spending.

The Court’s decision essentially grants greater weight in determining who governs us strictly on the basis of income and wealth.  Are not other qualities and accomplishments also of equal or greater value to civilization?  And if so, why should they not be granted greater weight as well? That was really the question Reynolds was addressing in postulating such a change in American society, and it’s a good question.

Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, consider the fact that the way in which our current system operates grants greater governmental influence to a small group of people whose principal talent is making money.  It does not grant such influence to those who teach, who create, or who perform unheralded and often dangerous military and public service, and as the revelations about Iraq have showed, at times such money-making operations have in fact been based on taking advantage of American soldiers deployed abroad, so that those with great sums of money not only gained electoral influence, but did so at the expense of those who served their country… and many of whom died doing so.

Then… tell me again why we don’t need an electoral or regulatory counterbalance to unbridled use of wealth in trying to influence elections.

The other day, someone commented on the blog that, unfortunately, Imager’s Intrigue and Haze were boring and major disappointments.  I replied directly, something I usually avoid doing, at least immediately, because the comment punched several of my buttons.  As many of my readers well know, my first fantasy, The Magic of Recluce, features Lerris, a young man who, at the beginning of the novel, finds virtually everything in his life boring, and everything that he railed against at the beginning far less so at the end… yet the world in which he lives has changed very little.

I have no problem with readers saying that they personally found a book of mine – or anyone else’s – boring… or whatever.  I have great problems when they claim the book is boring, without qualifications.  A book, in itself, is neither exciting nor boring.  It simply is.  When a reader picks up a book and reads it, there is an interaction between what the reader reads and what the writer wrote.  What a reader finds interesting depends at least as much on the reader as the writer.  There are some books that have been widely and greatly acclaimed that I do not find interesting or enjoyable, and that is true of all readers.  In general, however, books that are well-written, well-thought-out, and well plotted tend to last and to draw in a greater percentage of readers than those that are not.  The fact that books with overwhelmingly positive reader and critical reviews that also sell large numbers receive comments like “dull,” “boring,” and “slow” suggests that no book can please everyone.  That’s not a problem.

The problem, as I see it, is that there are more and more of such unthinking comments, and those comments reflect an underlying attitude that the writer must write to please that particular reader or the author has somehow failed if he or she has not done so.  This even goes beyond the content of the books.  A number of my books – and those of many other authors – are now receiving “one-star” or negative reviews, not because of faults in the book, but because the book was not available immediately in cheaper e-book versions at the time when the hardcover is published.  Exactly how many people in any job would think it fair that they received an unsatisfactory performance review because they didn’t offer their services at a lower rate?  Yet that’s exactly what the “one-star-reviewers” are essentially saying – that they have the right to demand when and at what price what version of a book should be released.

It took poor Lerris exile and years to understand that Wandernaught was not boring, but that he was bored because he didn’t want to understand.  But that sort of insight seems lacking in those whose motto appears to be: Extremism in the pursuit of entertainment (preferably cheap) is no vice, and moderation in the criticism of those who provide it is no virtue.

On my way to and back from the World Fantasy Convention, I managed to squeeze in reading several books – and a bit of writing.  One of the books I read, some three hundred plus pages long, takes place in one evening.  While I may be a bit off in my page count, after reading the book, I thought that of the more than three hundred pages, the prologue and interspersed recollections and flashbacks amounting to perhaps fifty pages provided the background for the incredibly detailed action, consisting of sorcery, battles, fights and more fights, resulting in… what?  An ending that promised yet another book. To me, at least, it was more like a novelized computer game [and no, it’s not, at least not yet].  If I hadn’t been on an airplane, and if the book hadn’t come highly recommended, I doubt I would have finished it.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more it bothered me, until I realized that what the book presented, in essence, was violence in the same format as pornography, with detailed descriptions of mayhem in realms of both the physical and the ghostly, with just enough background to “justify” the violence.  While I haven’t done as much reading of the genre recently as I once did – I read 30-40 books in the field annually, as opposed to the 300 plus I once read – to offer a valid statistical analysis, it seems to me that this is a trend that is increasing… possibly because publishers and writers are trying to draw in more of the violence-oriented gaming crowd.  Then again, perhaps I’ve just picked the wrong books, based on the recommendations of reviewers who like that sort of thing.

And certainly, this trend isn’t limited to books. In movies, we’re being treated – or assaulted, depending on one’s viewpoint – with more and more detailed depictions of everything, but especially of mayhem, murder, and sexually explicit scenes. The same is true across a great percentage of what is classified as entertainment, and I’m definitely not the first commentator to notice that.

Yet… all this explicitness, at least to me, comes off as false.  Older books, movies, and the like that hint at sex, violence, terror, and leave the reader and viewer in the shadows, so to speak, imagining the details, have a “reality” far more realistic than entertainment that leaves nothing to the imagination.

This lack of reader/viewer imagination and mental exploration also results in another problem, lack of reader understanding. I’m getting two classes of reader reviews on books such as Haze, in particular, those from readers who appear truly baffled and those who find the book masterful. The “baffled” comments appear to come largely from readers who cannot imagine, let alone understand, the implications and pressures of a society different from their own experience and preconceptions… and they blame their failure to understand on the writer.  The fact that many readers do understand suggests that the failure is not the writer’s.

All this brings up another set of questions.  Between the detailed computer graphics of games, the growth of anime, manga, and graphic novels, the CGI effects in cinema, what ever happened to books, movies, and games that rely on the imagination? A generation ago, children and young adults used their imagination in entertainment and reading to a far greater extent. The immediate question is to what degree the proliferation of graphic everything minimizes the development of imagination. And what are the ramifications for the future of both society and culture?

Recently, I read some reader book reviews of a science fiction novel and came across a thread that surfaced in several of the reviews, usually in a critical context.  I realized, if belatedly, that what I had read was an underlying assumption behind much science fiction and something that many SF readers really want.  The only problem, I also realized, is that what they want is something that, in historical and practical contexts, is as often missing as present.

What am I talking about?  The impact of technology, of course.

Because we in the United States live in a largely technology-driven, or at least highly technologically supported, society, there is an underlying assumption that technology will have a tremendous impact on society, and that every new gadget somehow offers an improvement to society.  I have grave doubts about the second, but that’s not the assumption I’m going to address, but rather the first, the idea that in any society, technology will triumph.  I’d be the first to agree that one can define, to some degree, a culture or society by the way in which it develops and uses technology, but I’d have to disagree on the point that developing technology is always a societal priority.

Imperial China used technology, but there certainly wasn’t a priority on developing it past a certain point, and in fact, one Chinese emperor burned the most technologically advanced fleet in the world at that time.  The Chinese developed gunpowder and rockets, but never developed them to anywhere close to their potential.  As I’ve noted in a far earlier blog, the Greeks developed geared astronomical computers thousands of years in advance of anyone else… and never applied the technology to anything else.  Even the British Empire wasn’t interested in Babbage’s mechanical computer.  And, for the present, at least, western civilization has turned its back on supersonic passenger air transport, even though it’s proved to be technically feasible.

Yet, perhaps because many SF readers are enamored of technology, there seems to be an assumption among a significant fraction of readers that when an author does not explore or exploit the technology of a society and give it a significant role, at least as societal background, he or she has somehow failed in maximizing the potential of the world depicted in the novel in question.

Technology is only part of any society, and, at times, and in some places, it’s a very tiny part.  Even when it underpins a society, as in the case of western European-derived societies in our world, it often doesn’t change the societal structure, but amplifies the impact of already existing trends.  Transportation technology improves and expands the existing trade networks, but doesn’t create a new function in society.  When technology does change things, it usually does so by changing the importance of an existing structure, as in the case of instant communications.  And at times, as I noted above, a society may turn its back on better technology, for various reasons… and this is a facet of human societies seldom explored in F&SF and especially in science fiction, perhaps because of the myth — or the wish — that technology always triumphs, despite the historical suggestions that it doesn’t.

Just because a writer doesn’t carry technology as far as it might go theoretically doesn’t mean the writer failed.  It could be that the writer has seen that, in that society, technology won’t triumph to that degree.

The vast majority of political observers and “experts” – if pressed, and sometimes even when not – will generally admit that the American political climate is becoming ever more polarized, with the far right and the far left refusing to compromise on much of anything.  For months now, the Republican party in the U.S. Senate has said “No!” to anything of substance proposed by the Democratic leadership, and in the health care legislation, for example, the Democrats effectively avoided dealing with any of the issues of interest to the Republicans, some of which, such as medical malpractice claims reform, have considerable merit.

Yet, if one looks at public opinion polls, most Americans aren’t nearly so radical as the parties that supposedly represent them, although recently that has begun to change, not surprisingly, given the continual public pressure created by the tendency of media news outlets to simplify all issues to black and white… and then to generate conflict, presumably to increase ratings.

Add to this the extreme media pressure placed on any politician who seeks a compromise or another approach outside of either party positions or his or her own past pronouncements, and we have a predictable outcome – polarization and stalemate.

There are times when stalemate may be preferable to ill-considered political action, but at present, there are a number of areas affecting the United States where some sort of action is and has been necessary.  A relative of mine just got her latest health insurance bill – over $1,000 a month for single-party coverage – and this wasn’t a gold-plated health plan by any means.  For two people, the premium would have been over $1,600 monthly, or over $19,000 a year.  Now… the median family income in the United States runs around $50,000 at present, and a $1,600 a month health insurance bill is over 35% of that – and doesn’t include deductibles and co-payments.  Single parent households have a median family income of  roughly $35,000, and $1,000 a month is more than a third of before-tax income.  These figures do tend to suggest that some sort of action on health care insurance was necessary, but the vast majority of one party effectively declared that they weren’t interested in anything proposed by the majority party, and the majority party effectively refused to consider any major issues brought to the table by the minority.  By parliamentary maneuvers, the majority slid through legislation thoroughly opposed by the overwhelming majority of the minority – and further increased the political polarization in Washington.

Similar polarization can be seen on other major issues, from immigration to energy policy and climate change legislation, and, of course, taxation.   One party wants to soak those who have any income of substance, and the other wants to reduce taxes so much that we’ll never dig our way out of the deficit.  Those who would suffer the greatest taxation don’t have enough to cover the deficit, and cutting or eliminating taxes, as some have proposed, would destroy us as a nation.

Tell me… exactly how does this polarization resolve anything?