Over the past few years, there have been endless commentaries about the younger generations, and those have ranged from praising them as the most capable, most intelligent and most promising generation yet to total condemnation as spoiled brats who believe that they’re entitled to whatever they want by virtue of their mere existence. One problem with such assessments is that they all tend to be blanket judgments, and each generation is made up of a range of individuals with differing abilities and capabilities. Another difficulty with such judgments is that each up-and-coming “generation” reacts to the societal environment in which they grow up.

I see a certain amount of truth in the observation that at least a significant portion of the young people who are entering the work force or who will do so in the next few years do in fact feel “entitled” to privileges, income, and position for which they are not yet equipped. But I don’t see too many of those who are already in the work force asking, “Why do they feel this way?”

The answer, to me, at least, is that a large number of parents, and, unfortunately, also a large number of teachers who have felt forced by parental pressure, all have conveyed the message that these young people are “special,” not by dint of achievement, academic superiority, or sheer perseverance, but simply because they exist. With this has also come the totally erroneous idea that self-esteem must precede competence. Coupled with these messages is another insidious idea — that each of them can be anything he or she wants to be. Then, the third leg of this proposition is the underlying assumption that “my” child isn’t like all the others. My child is special; the others aren’t. This leads to the assumption and incredible legal pressures to bend, break, or discard the rules.

My wife is a college professor, and she has been threatened with legal action on several occasions, all of which occurred when she insisted on applying exactly the same standards to one student as those applied to others. These were not extreme standards, but the issues of attending classes and rehearsals, of turning in work on time, of being in class and taking tests. In all cases, the students involved, and/or their families, were incensed that she did not see that family picture-taking sessions took priority over dress rehearsals or tests, whose dates are were announced in writing months before, or that students who illegally used university copying equipment to print defamatory material with sexual implications against other innocent students should face disciplinary actions, or that dropping a class three-quarters of the way through the semester without doing the work resulted in failing the class. More and more often, parents are insisting that “special” circumstances apply to their children, and they’re threatening teachers and schools who don’t grant such exceptions, so much so that a number of universities have begun to hold sessions for professors, briefing them on such possibilities.

In a functioning society, there are limits. If you can’t pay the mortgage, sooner or later, you will lose the house. If you commit violent acts repeatedly, eventually you will get caught and punished. If you don’t do you job the way it needs to be done, before long you’ll be working somewhere else… or not working.

Yet many of these very same parents fret about the “entitlement generation.” And just who raised that generation?

I did break away from the computer on Sunday night to watch some of the Academy Awards ceremony… and one part of the awards absolutely appalled and floored me, and that was the award for the best original song.

It could be that I was so negatively astonished because I’ve always been under the impression that songs were supposed to have more than a dozen words, rather than the same ten repeated endlessly. Or it could be that I believe that they’re supposed to have melodies longer than a commercial jingle, and that those melodies should be better than those of a commercial jingle.

Of the three “nominees,” I don’t think any single one had a phrase longer than about four bars [maybe six?], before repeating. All had simplistic and droning repetitive rhythms, as well as equally simplistic lyrics. All three “songs” were the song-writer’s equivalent of classical music minimalism crossed with repetitive rhythm… and people claim opera is boring? Compared to what I heard on Sunday night, I’m not so certain I’d rather not sit through all sixteen hours of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle than spend fifteen minutes listening to such so-called songs… and supposedly these were the “best” of 2008?

In this light, one of the most ironic aspects of the ceremony was the music number performed by Hugh Jackman and a hundred or so others that proclaimed that “the musical is back.” Oh… virtually all the lyrics were from older musicals, cannibalized or perhaps zombie-ized, for the production. No… it appears that musicals may be resurrected by Hollywood, but they’re not being created or born because no one seems able or willing to write songs that are actually songs… or, if they can, those who produce the movies seem unwilling to include anything that’s actually an original song.

Now, I’ve seen a number of very good new movies over the past year, with a number of good songs as part of the soundtracks, or even performed. BUT…none of those songs were new or original. Where are the modern equivalents of Love is a Many Splendored Thing, White Christmas, Over the Rainbow, Moon River, You Light Up My Life, The Way We Were, The Windmills of Your Mind, or The Shadow of Your Smile? Even the losers of past years — such as Nobody Does it Better, On the Road Again, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, Our Love Affair, That Old Black Magic — are far better than recent winners.

Just what happened to actual song-writers? The ones who knew what melody and lyrics were and who could move listeners without the aid of gyrating dancers and near-lethal percussion?

It’s now time for the usual scramble for F&SF readers — or at least the hard-core and devoted ones — to put forth their nominations for the Hugo Awards, the annual reader popularity contest of the World Science Fiction Convention, which, by the way, will be held in Montreal in early August. As a prelude to this exercise, all sorts of “best” lists and “recommended” lists have popped up everywhere.

In looking over the reading lists that I’ve so far seen for the year, several things stand out.

First, most of the novels — well over 80% — appearing on most “recommended” lists come from “big” publishers, but most of the works that are shorter than novel length don’t come from the larger name print magazines, but from a variety of sources.

As others have observed, there’s also an increasing “British” flavor to the recommended novels. Whether this is a result of changing reviewer/recommender tastes or better British writing or just happenstance… who knows?

Another interesting fact was that, although there is no Hugo category for author collections, several recommended lists do mention them, and almost no recommended single author collection was listed as from a “major” publisher, although a number of authors with recommended collections from smaller presses are in fact novelists who are published by major publishers. This, along with the proliferation of stories recommended from smaller sources, tends to suggest that the story market is a far different market than the novel market. I can certainly recall when far more story collections were issued by major publishers.

This trend is also reinforced by the recent demise of several long-running “best of” anthologies, as well as the movement of other “best” anthologies from major publishers to smaller presses. I fretted about the decline of short fiction reading in an earlier post, and this trend seems to be continuing, with short fiction retreating to various lower-volume/total revenue venues, such as online or limited print-run magazines, so that the number of short stories published may actually have increased in recent years, without the total volume of readership increasing significantly… or perhaps even declining.

Since I clearly couldn’t read all of the books listed, my overall impressions are based on the comparative few I did read, the authors, and the summary recommendations, but I have the feeling that many of the recommended books listed as science fiction verge on the edge of adventure science fantasy, while of those listed as fantasy, few would actually fall into the “popular” definition of fantasy. I suspect this illustrates a trend more among reviewers than among readers.

All in all, it’s an interesting time in the world of F&SF… and I just hope it’s not “interesting” in the sense of that ancient Chinese curse.

With all the publicity about the greed in the financial and auto industries, everyone’s asking how it all happened, and pointing the finger… but very few are pointing it in the right direction. I’d like to suggest where the finger belongs can be determined by looking at a few numbers and what they represent… and what they don’t.

To begin with, the “real” U.S growth rate over the past half century has seldom exceeded 3.5% annually. Over the past 20 years or so, productivity growth has generally been around or slightly below 10%. Over the 1900-2005 period, corporate profits averaged around 5%., yet since 2002, corporate profits were running more than 50% above that average, and in 2007, they were almost 60% above that average, yet inflation was reported as “nominal.” How could this possibly be? Productivity wasn’t up that much, nor were costs down. In fact, until 6 months ago, energy costs were skyrocketing. What caused the reported profit increases was leveraged liquidity, since the costs of all those derivative-based funds weren’t shown as costs on anyone’s books, and even turned up as assets on many companies’ accounting ledgers.

Yet, the stock market kept climbing, largely because the analysts kept pointing out that the P/E ratios [price/earnings ratio] of stocks were far below historic highs and at a 10 year low. The only problem with that was that the earnings were in all too many cases deceptively inflated.

Housing prices continued to inflate, based on demand-fueled, statistically flawed lending models that resulted in far too many people being given loans that could never be repaid.

Add to that the feeling that inflation was low and under control, based on government statistics. According to those figures, except for a period in the 1970s, inflation has been below 4.0%… except… the measurements for inflation, as I noted in an earlier blog post, have been changed to eliminate such key aspects of daily living as housing, food, and energy, and including those would increase the number by as much as 40%, and be far more realistic. What this meant was that Americans on the lower side of the income scale were getting squeezed, because so many of their benefits, from Medicare to Social Security, weren’t keeping up with real price increases, since those benefits were indexed to the “core” inflation numbers. Then, just before everything turned sour, consumer debt peaked at an all-time high.

Throughout this entire situation, I doubt that any number produced by anyone was essentially accurate, or that, no matter how hard any analyst tried, any statistical assessment could be more than an approximation.

For various reasons, ranging from out-and-out greed to misguided altruism, we’ve created a system where few if any of the metrics industries and government use are accurate, and some are so far from such accuracy as to be laughable… if the results weren’t so tragic. Yet, in case after case, when those few analysts who did understand and had the nerve to speak out tried to point this out, they were ignored, if not pushed out, because the deception was so much more comfortable to so many people. Just look at the analyst who tried for years to get the SEC to investigate Bernard Madoff. He couldn’t “prove” through evidence; he only knew that such reported returns were impossible in practical terms, just as the returns on all the derivatives turned out to be.

No one can save us from our own self-deceptions… except us.

A recent edition of The Economist graphed popular belief in the theory of evolution on a country by country basis and noted that, with one exception, belief in evolution tended to follow prosperity. The exception to this finding was, of course, the United States. While the Scandinavian nations were listed as those with the greatest percentage of the population [75% and over] believing in evolution, believers in evolution in all of the western European nations surveyed exceeded 60%, while only 38% of Americans believed in evolution as a true description, and over 45% of Americans surveyed believe in Biblical versions of human creation, as opposed to evolution.

I looked at the numbers slightly differently. To me, it appeared that, in those nations where belief in evolution was highest, the social and political infrastructures were more “socialistic,” in that health care and income security were near-universal, whereas in the United States, there is greater variation in both income and in health-care security than in all the other industrialized nations surveyed. Put more bluntly, this suggests that people turn to religion when they perceive their lives as less certain or economically secure.

This correlation might well suggest that the more “free-market oriented” and less economically regulated a nation’s economy is, the more religious its population tends to be. This might well lead to other disturbing corollaries. Do the arbitrary nature of most deities and the rules of their faith come from a culture’s economic inequality and social uncertainty? Or does the arbitrariness of religion essentially justify income inequality? Certainly, there seems to be a correlation, because the nations where the people have democratically rejected gross income inequality also seem to be the ones who have turned most from religion.

Could it be that religion is really a covert apologist for inequality? And that Marx just might have had it right?