A very recent review of Arms-Commander opined that the book was, as expected, essentially Recluce “comfort food.” I think it’s more than that, but as an author I can live with such a commentary. What really bothered me about the review was the opinion that Saryn’s opponents should have learned from others’ mistakes and adapted to her tactics.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s far from the first time this criticism has been aired, both regarding my fantasy and SF, and the critics don’t seem to have learned from their mistakes, either.

There are several points that the “critics” don’t seem to understand. First, there’s a vast difference between “receiving information” and “learning.” Learning requires not only assimilating the information, but responding to it and changing one’s actions and behavior. To learn from someone else’s mistakes, you have to know about them and understand why they were mistakes. In a low-tech society word doesn’t travel fast, and sometimes it doesn’t travel at all. And when it does travel, you have to be able to trust the bearer of that news. You also have to have enough knowledge to be able to understand what went wrong. Now, in the case of Saryn, and Anna and Secca in the Spellsong Cycle, most of their opponents — and officers — who made the mistakes didn’t survive them. Even when a few did, those that did weren’t likely to be trusted, especially in Lornth, where most lord-holders don’t trust any other lord-holders.

Even if knowledge of such defeats reached others, the knowledge of how those defeats occurred didn’t. This isn’t unique to fiction. The conquests of Alexander the Great tend to follow the same pattern. He had a new way of waging war, and yet almost no one seemed to adapt. Even with more modern communications, how many generals in World War I sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, essentially in exercises in futility, seemingly unable to understand that the infantry charges of the past didn’t work against barbed wire, machine guns, and deep trenches? Even the high-tech U.S. armed forces took almost a decade to switch from conventional war techniques to wide-spread counter-guerilla tactics in Vietnam [and some critics contend we never did].

Even if you do understand what happened, to counter it you have to change the way you operate, usually the way you’ve trained your forces and your commanders and subcommanders. Even in the best of cases, this doesn’t happen quickly. I’ve been a teacher and a swimming coach, and my wife is a singer and voice teacher, and we both know it takes years to get most people to change long-held and incorrect techniques. It’s not something that happens overnight or even in weeks or seasons. And sometimes, after a certain age, people simply can’t change their way of dealing with matters.

Finally, even if you think you want to learn, if that learning requires letting go of long-held beliefs and biases, in many, many cases, it simply won’t happen. Instead, you’ll attribute the problem to other factors or ignore it totally because you hold those beliefs so dearly.

Yet the medieval level holders and barons of Lornth, with no communications faster than horses, no understanding of what really happened, no trust in each other [which was what caused many of their problems to begin with], and no desire to change their tactics and way of life, should have understood what Saryn was doing, essentially before they even had word, and revolutionized everything they knew about warfare and fighting in less than a season?

The idea that any significant fraction of people, and particularly institutions, learn, adapt, and respond quickly is more fantastic than anything I’ve ever put in print.

A website [Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist] just posted a quote from Arms-Commander, in which a character notes that “it is better to be a just tyrant who provides freedom than a dead ruler who tried to be fair in an unfair world.” Almost immediately an anonymous commenter observed that “a tyrant, even a just one, can never provide freedom. It’s antithetical to the very nature of the word.”

I was instantly torn between the desire to laugh hysterically, to go postal, or to sigh in despair. After having spent a lifetime studying government and politics, not to mention nearly twenty years in Washington, D.C., in a number of federal positions in both the executive and legislative branch, and after two tours in the U.S. Navy, I think I have a fair understanding of how governments do and don’t work. So…

First… NO government provides “freedom” in the absolute sense. All governments restrict certain practices and behaviors in order to maintain order, because without order, people literally do not have the “freedom” to walk down the streets safely. Even with such restrictions, the order created may not be anywhere close to desirable — except when compared to the state of no effective government at all, as one can currently see in Somalia. The degree of restrictions and how much order is created varies from country to country and system to system, but restrictions on behavior for the safety of others are anything but “freedom” in the ideal sense.

Second, the original meaning of “tyrant” was a ruler who seized power outside of the previous legal system. In that sense, the founding fathers of the United States were tyrants. Now… they justified that rebellion and seizure after the fact by creating a system that was superior to what preceded it. We can call them authors of democracy, founding fathers, and the like, but a significant number were in fact rebelling aristocrats who did in fact sometimes behave like the popular conception of tyrants, and who insisted on enshrining the legality of slaveholding, certainly a local, if not a regional tyranny. Yet they provided more “freedom” than the previous system.

Likewise, “freedom” and even “liberty” have been evolving terms. In the United States, originally “liberty” was effectively limited to white males, and predominantly property owners. Slaves, women, and children had few legal rights. In practice, and in law, “freedom” is the granting of certain rights to certain classes of people, and the less restrictive the conditions circumscribing those rights are, the “freer” those people are judged to be.

Given that, by definition, in practice, there’s no difference in the moral status as a ruler between a “tyrant” and a “legitimate” government. How each attained power may have a moral connotation, but the “morality” or “ethics” of their regimes depend on the acts and laws by which they rule and the results. Franco was a dictator and a tyrant of Spain, yet Spain today is a free and democratic nation that works, as a result of his “tyranny” and reforms. On the other hand, Salazar of Portugal operated a brutal secret police and impoverished that nation.

Tyrants aren’t, by definition, any more antithetical to freedom than any other class of ruler, because all rulers, democratic or otherwise, in order to maintain a civil society, restrict freedoms. Period.

“I couldn’t do it.’ Those are my wife’s words every time I talk about reading though reader reviews of my books. Many authors won’t do it. I’m one who does, grudgingly, very grudgingly, because I’m still a reluctant optimist, but I believe that you can learn something from anything — even reader reviews.

Unfortunately, maybe those other authors are right, because I don’t much care for what I’m learning, and it doesn’t seem to be of much use, not if I want to keep trying to become a better and better writer. At first, I thought that I was imagining things, but then, because I do have a background in economics and analysis, I decided to apply some basic analysis — and I used The Magic of Recluce as the “baseline.” Why? Because it’s been in print continuously since 1991. It’s not a perfect baseline or template, because the reader reviews I used [Amazon’s] don’t begin until 1996, but it gives the longest time-time of any of my books. Over that fourteen year time period almost 35% of readers gave the book a five star rating; 25% gave it a four star rating; 18% gave it three stars; 8% gave it two stars; a little more than 15% gave it a one star rating [and yes, that adds up to 101% because of rounding]. More interesting, however, was the timing of ratings and the content of key words in those ratings.

To begin with, for the first two years or so of ratings, comprising roughly 20% of all ratings, all the ratings were either four or five stars, and not until 1999, eight years after the book was first out, did it receive a one star rating. Not just coincidentally, I suspect, that was the first review that claimed the book was “boring.” More than half the one and two star reviews have been given during the last five years, and virtually all of the one star reviews use terms such as “boring” or “slow.” From the wording of those reviews, I suspect, but cannot firmly prove, most come from comparatively younger readers.

The fact that more and more readers want “faster” books doesn’t surprise me. Given the increasing speed of our culture, the emphasis on “fast-action movies” and faster action video games, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. What does bother me is the equation of “fast” to “good” and the total intolerance that virtually all of these reviews show for anything that takes thought and consideration. The fact that more than twice as many readers find the book good as those who do not, and that a majority still do indicates that there are many readers who still appreciate depth, but the change in the composition of readers, as reflected in the reviews, confirms, at least in my mind, that a growing percentage of fantasy readers want “faster” books. Again… no surprise, but the virulence and impatience expressed is disturbing, because it manifests an incredible sense of self-centeredness, with reader reviews that basically say. “This book is terrible because it didn’t entertain me in the way I wanted.” And terms like “Yech!”, “Yuck!”, “Such Junk?”, “its [sic] horrible”, and “total waste” certainly convey far more about the reader than about the book.

As an author, I understand all too well that not all authors are for all readers, and there are authors, some of whom are quite good, who are not to my taste. But there’s an unconscious arrogance that doesn’t bode well for the future of our society when fifteen percent of readers state that a book is terrible because it doesn’t cater to the reader’s wishes — and throwing the book through a window because it doesn’t [yes, one reviewer claimed to have done so].

I’d say that they need to grow up… but I’m afraid that they already have, and that they’re fast approaching a majority, at least among the under 30 crowd. Two recent articles in other publications highlight the trend. The latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly has one explaining why newspaper articles are too long and basically gives what amounts to a variation on the USA Today format as an answer — quick juicy facts with little support or explanation. And what’s really frightening was the conclusion of an article in the “Week in Review” section of The New York Times last Sunday — that youngsters who are now 4-10 will make today’s young people seem like paragons of patience.

Newspeak, here we come.

On the Locus online site, there’s a discussion about who might be considered a worthy successor to the “grand old man” of science fiction — the late Robert A. Heinlein. A number of names are mentioned, and those contributing all give reasons for their selections. Something about this bothered me when the discussion was launched weeks ago, and, slow as I can sometimes be about the obvious, “it” — or several “its” — finally struck me.

What’s the point of the discussion? For all his accomplishments and faults, and he had both, Heinlein was unique to his time and place. Many of those involved in the discussion acknowledge this, but what isn’t brought up is that the same is true of most writers with any degree of accomplishment and originality.

Although few have noted it, Heinlein’s greatest claim to fame was that he combined originality, ideas that were usually less than jaded, and solid writing with popularity. According to one of the most senior editors in the F&SF field, the number of his individual titles that approached or exceeded million-seller status is “remarkable.” As a new biography to be published by Tor indicates, he was a complex man, with an equally complex and involved personal life.

So… why is anyone looking for his “successor”? Can’t the man be appreciated, or attacked, or analyzed, or whatever, for what he was? Has “sequel-itis” so permeated the critical F&SF community that some writer or writers must be jammed into a designed place?

Everywhere I look these days in entertainment — whether in cinema, music, books, and even games — there’s a tremendous pressure to fit. If an author or a musician does something different, there’s usually far more negative pressure and comment than positive. Much of that pressure is financial. I’ve noted on more than one occasion that any one of my “series” fantasies earns far more than one of my few critically acclaimed SF books — and this is not by any means exclusive to me.

In this light, even the discussion about successors to Heinlein nags at me, because I see it, perhaps unfairly, as another aspect of trying to come up with easy categorization in a field where such categorization is anything but easy and where labels create false expectation after false expectation. For example, it’s fair to say that a “Recluce” book should be a “Recluce” book, taking place in that world and adhering to the rules of that world, with a similar style, but is it fair for readers and marketers to insist that every book I write follow that style?

Certainly, that is the pressure. Some authors actually have a different pen name for each “style” of book they write, but what does that say about readers? Are so many so rigid in their habits and mindsets that they can’t look at anything different by the same author? Or have the marketing mavens conditioned them that way?

How about accepting/rejecting Heinlein for what he is, and doing the same for the writers that have followed him, instead of looking for quickly identified niches and tropes? When reviewers and critics who are supposedly analytical and thoughtful do this, that, frankly, bothers me even more. They should know better, but, then, maybe I’m just expecting too much.

Or does looking at each writer and book for what they are require too much thinking and depress the bottom lines of the industry?

The Economist reported that the U.S. Air Force has put in a request to procure 2,300 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles — not for personnel entertainment, but to hook together to build a supercomputer for ten percent of the cost of ordering one. This isn’t a one-time fluke, either. The USAF has already built and is operating a computer constructed from 336 PS3s. U.S. troops are using slightly modified off-the-shelf electronics for everything from calculating firing trajectories to controlling drone RPVs.

While I’m perfectly happy as a taxpayer to see cost-effective procurement, examples such as these give me a very uneasy feeling… for a number of reasons. First is the obvious fact that anything that is commercial and open can eventually be cracked, hacked, snooped, and sabotaged. Granted, for some applications that’s unlikely or doesn’t matter, but controlling drones? Second, even the example of the USAF procurement gives the “bad guys” new ideas and capabilities. And third, somehow the thought of our supposedly high-tech military having to rely on the gaming industry for the latest technology — and they are beginning to do so, thanks in part to complicated and Byzantine U.S. military procurement regulations — suggests that there’s something a bit askew in our national priorities, especially when a Nigerian national paying with cash, carrying no luggage, traveling alone, and already on the terrorist watch list can get to the point of almost detonating an incendiary device on an aircraft about to land in Detroit.

We don’t seem to be able to carry through on relatively routine security measures; we rely on gamers for high technology; we haven’t been able or willing to build a supersonic replacement for the Concorde; we’re behind the entire rest of the world in implementing high-speed ground/rail transport; and our most profitable industries are financial manipulation and litigation.

Now… it also turns out that some of these gaming devices provide essentially the guts of supercomputers… and that they have far-reaching medical implications.

For all this, I must say that I have to salute the gaming industry… but what exactly does that say about the state of American drive, initiative, and technology in every other area?

Are we so into video gaming that the rest of our high-tech industry needs to subsist on the fruits and scraps of electronic entertainment?