The past half-year’s round of presidential political primary contests in the United States has raised cries of sexism, racism, and even ageism, hardly surprising when the three leading candidates are, respectively, a woman, a black man, and the oldest man ever to seek the presidency for a first term. My wife and I were discussing this when she made the observation that all three “isms” are really just different forms of “placeism.”

By that, she meant that sexism against women is really just a manifestation of the idea that a woman’s place is, variously, in the home, raising children, or even just plain barefoot and pregnant… and that a woman who aspires to be president, or a corporate CEO, or a noted surgeon is, heaven forbid, leaving her culture-required or God-decreed “place.”

Likewise, a black man who aspires to be president is also out of place, because, for many people, whether they will admit it or not, a black’s place is one of subservience to Caucasians. And, of course, an older man’s place is in a rocking chair, on a golf course, or doing some sort of volunteer good works.

Such “places,” while certainly tacitly accepted and reinforced to some degree in most cultures across the globe, don’t have a basis in fact, but in custom. For generations, if not centuries, bias against people “of color” [and this also refers to Asian prejudices against Caucasians, Bantu prejudices against Bushmen, Chinese biases against all outsiders, as well as Caucasian prejudices against blacks or American Indians] has been based on the assumption that whoever was defined as being “of color” was genetically “inferior.” Now that the human genome has been largely sequenced, it’s more than clear that, not only is there no overriding genetic difference in terms of “race,” but the variations between people of similar “races” are often greater than the differences between those of one skin color and another.

The same argument applies to age. Senator McCain is far younger than a great number of world leaders who accomplished significant deeds at ages far older than the senator presently is. But in our youth-oriented society, someone who is old is regarded as out-of-place, with values and views at variance with popular culture, as well they may be, for with age can come a perspective lacking in the young. And, yes, with age for some people comes infirmity, but that infirmity is based on individual factors and not on a physical absolute that, at a “pre-set” age, one is automatically old and unable to function. As with all the other “place-isms,” ageism is effectively an attempt to dismiss someone who is older as out of place with the unspoken implication that the oldster is somehow unsuitable because he or she refuses to accept the “customary” place.

All such placeisms are rooted in prejudicial customs and flower into full distastefulness and unfairness when people hide behind the unspoken prejudice of tradition, religion, or custom and remain either unwilling or unable to judge people as individuals.

The results of a study published in the May 31st issue of The Economist also shed a new light on “placeism” with regard to women. The study surveyed the tested abilities of older male and female students in mathematical and verbal skills across a range of countries and cultures. The researchers concluded that, in those cultures where women had the greatest level of social, economic, and political equality, women’s test scores in math were equal to those of men, and their verbal skills were far greater — even greater than the current gap in countries such as the United States, where women already outshine men. In short, if men and women are treated as true equals with regard to rights and opportunity, on average the women will outperform the men in all mental areas. Could it just be that men understand that, and that instinctive understanding is why in most cultures men want to keep women “in their place?”

Heavens no! It couldn’t be that, could it? It must be that women are just so much better suited to the home or, if in the public arena, supporting men, just as black are far better in athletic endeavors because their genes make them better in sports and less able in politics and business, and just as all old people have lost all judgment the moment they’re eligible to join AARP or collect Social Security checks.

That’s right, isn’t it? After all, there’s a place for everything, and everyone has his — or her — place, and we know just where that should be, don’t we?

Literary critics like to write about the importance of an author and his/her work, but many of them seldom put it quite that way. They write about themes and styles and relationships and relevance, but, most of the time, when they write about an author, they’re only guessing as to whether an author will really have a lasting influence over readers and culture and whether anything written by that author will resonate or last beyond the author’s lifespan.

Because critics seldom seem to consider history, although they’ve doubtless read about it, readers tend to forget little things like the fact that Shakespeare was NOT the pre-eminent playwright of his time, and that Beaumont and Fletcher ended up interred in Westminster Abbey long before the Bard did. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature, but few today read anything of what he wrote anymore, except for The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and a handful of poems.

Publishers and booksellers tend not to care as much about potential influence, but about sales — or popularity. And, of course, our current media culture is all about instant-popularity. So… in the field of fantasy and science fiction, the media tends to focus on the mega-sellers like Harry Potter or The Wheel of Time. Certainly, both series have sold well and inspired many imitators, but how well will they fare over time in influencing readers and overall culture?

Will either approach J.R.R. Tolkien? Or for that matter, Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley?

Tolkien was both popular and influential, to the point that a great many of today’s popular fantasy writers are not influential at all. They’re merely imitators, using pale similarities, that include trolls, orcs, faerie, variations on European feudalism, and the same kind of vaguely defined magic as Tolkien employed. These writers have sold a great number of books, but exactly what is their influence, except as extensions of the approach that Tolkien pioneered?

Poe could be said to have pioneered the horror genre, with a relevance and an influence great enough that movies have been made and re-made more than a century after his death. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has long outlasted her considerable output of scholarly and other works and is perhaps the model for the nurture/nature conflict horror story.

What works of today’s F&SF writers will outlive them?

As has been the case with all cultures, while all of us who write would like to think that it will be our works that survive, in almost all cases, that won’t be so. That realization may well be, in fact, why I intend to keep writing so long as I can do so at a professional level. That way, if my works fall out of favor, I won’t be around to see it. And if they don’t, well, that would be an added bonus, even if I wouldn’t know it.

Still… what factors are likely to keep a book alive?

Some of them are obvious, such as an appeal to basic human feelings with which readers can instantly identify. Other factors, such as style, are far more transient. Shakespeare’s work, with its comparative linguistic directness, has fared far better than those writers whose style was considered more “erudite.” And with our mass-media-simplifying culture, I have great doubts that the work of writers whose appeal to critics is primarily stylistic will long endure. Works which explore ideas and ideals and how they apply to people are more likely to last, but whose works… I certainly couldn’t say.

For all that the critics write, with their [sometimes] crystal prose, I have to wonder just how many of them have accurately predicted or will be able to determine which works of today’s authors will still be around — and influential — in fifty years… or a century.

Recently, I was asked, as I am occasionally, very occasionally, to judge a writing contest. It was an extremely painful experience. Now, in past years, one of the more agonizing aspects of going through manuscripts was dealing with the rather deplorable grammar and spelling. Clearly, spell-checkers and grammar checkers have had an impact, because the absolutely worst grammatical errors have largely vanished. The less obvious errors of grammatical and syntactical misuse remain, as do errors in referential pronouns, among others.

What struck me the most, however, was the almost total lack of story-telling. In years past, I read awfully-written and ungrammatical work, but a large percentage of the submissions were actual stories.

This, of course, leads to the question — what is a story? For most people, trying to define a story is like the reputed reply given by an elder statesman when he was asked to define pornography. “I can’t define it, but when I see it, I know it.” That sort of definition isn’t much help to a would-be writer. So I went back to my now-ancient Handbook to Literature and checked the definition:

…any narrative of events in a sequential arrangement. The one merit of a story is its ability to make us want to know what happened next… Plot takes a story, selects its materials not in terms of time but causality; gives it a beginning, a middle, and an end; and makes it serve to elucidate character, express an idea, or incite to an action.

Robert Heinlein once defined a story this way: “A story is an account which is not necessarily true but which is interesting to read.”

Put more directly, in a story, the writer has to express events so that they progress in a way that makes sense, while hanging together and making the reader want to continue reading.

Almost all of the stories I read were anything but interesting to read, and not just to me, but to a jury of first readers, none of whom could recommend any. So the first readers thought they weren’t seeing something and passed all of them on to me. Unhappily, they were right. But why?

In considering these stories, I realized they all shared several faults. First, while almost all had a series of events, there was no real rationale for those events, except that the writer had written them. In real life, there is, as the definition above notes, a certain causality. It may be the result of our actions or the actions of others, or even of nature, but events do follow causes, notwithstanding the views of some quantum physicists. A story, at least occasionally, should give a nod to causality, either through background or the words or actions of the characters. After a reader finishes the story, he or she should be able to say why things happened, or at least feel that how they happened was “right” for the story.

Second, all too many of the stories shifted viewpoints, even verb tenses, almost from sentence to sentence. This is a trend that has been growing with younger writers over the years, and I think it’s probably the result of our video culture, with its rapid camera cuts, and multiple plot lines, but what works, if imperfectly, on a video screen, doesn’t translate to the printed page because a reader doesn’t have all the visual and tonal cues provided by video. The words have to carry the action and the emotions, and when those words are absent or scattered among a number of characters, the reader is going to have trouble following and identifying with anyone.

Third, almost none of the stories showed any real understanding of human character and motivation, yet one of the unspoken reasons why most readers read is because of the characters or the glimpses of characters. Again, I suspect that this lack of understanding stems in large part from a video entertainment culture that focuses on action to the exclusion of character. I’ve noticed this change in other ways, as well, because many younger readers have great difficulty in picking up on subtle written clues to character in novels. I’ve seen more than a few comments about books, my own as well as that of other authors, decrying the lack of characterization, while older and more experienced readers often praise the same books for their depth of characterization. Because I’m not of the younger generation, I can only guess, but it appears to me that when they write, while they may imagine such characteristics, they neglect to write them down, believing that other readers will imagine as they do, even without any written clues. Needless to say, each of us imagines differently, and without cues, many readers may not imagine at all, which leads to a lack of interest.

In the end, a story has to contain all the words, phrases, description, and causality necessary to carry the reader along. Or, as one man put it years ago, “If it doesn’t say it in black and white, it doesn’t say it.”

Science fiction and fantasy have always dealt, at least ostensibly, with change, about how the future might be with technology, aliens, biotech, or whatever, or how our world or others might be if some form of workable magic existed. In a world where change is ongoing and seemingly accelerating, we tend to forget that for much of human history change was either slow or non-existent. And it wasn’t just a question of technology. The Ptolemaic Egyptians had a rather interesting array of technological gadgets. And they were nothing compared to what had already been developed in China. The Roman Empire implemented Greek technology, but added little, except concrete, central heating, and plumbing, despite conquering a large section of the “known” world. So why did technology lead to change and ever more change in post-Renaissance Europe and virtually none in earlier prosperous societies?

Africa is clearly the cradle of homo sapiens, and where tool-making began, yet after the Egyptians, the Nubians, and perhaps the Carthaginians, in a sense, nothing changed, and societies in Africa declined, both in cultural and technological terms. Why?

Today, after several centuries of comparatively rapid change, despite outward appearances, the pace of change is again slowing. About the only significant change in space exploration and travel over the last forty years has been the advances in communications and video areas so that we can see more of the solar system and the universe in far greater clarity. We still can’t get anywhere significantly any faster, and, in fact, we’ve really done less human traveling in space. Do better pretty pictures of space represent a real change, or just an illusion of change?

Despite Einstein and atomic power, essentially we’re still using an improved model of the first atomic power plant. That’s after fifty years of accelerators, totamaks, and other gadgets designed to discover more about the nature of matter and energy, and we don’t seem much closer to practical fusion power than a generation ago. The fastest commercial air travel is slower than it was two decades ago. We have a better understanding of medicine and better medical procedures, but much of our own population and most of the rest of the world can’t afford the costs of availing themselves of such medical improvements. Will such costs eventually choke off real change in the medical procedures available to most people?

According to some test scores, American students are smarter and improving in their knowledge of various subjects, and certainly there are more students in both absolute and percentage terms who are completing high school and college. Yet the high-level functional literacy rate of college graduates and post-graduate degree holders continues to decrease, and the absolute performance of males is declining relative to women. The United States, despite a century or more of effort to eliminate sexual discrimination, is one of the few western industrial nations that has never had a female head of state, and, unless matters shift dramatically, has never even had a major party candidate who was female. The U.S. is also the most overtly religious of the major western industrial nations. Does that religious background mitigate against significant real change in the gender power balance? And perhaps in other aspects of society?

Both Democratic Party candidates have called for “change,” but for what sort of change? I don’t see a call for re-invigorating our space program, or more more research in basic science, or for real and fundamental change in our approach to education, or anything approximating real change. What I see is an emphasis on changing who controls government and resources and who benefits from them, and that’s not the same thing… is it? Really?

Those of us who write science fiction and fantasy are often considered to be people who enable escapism through our writing. Certainly, I’d dispute that, particularly given what I write. But…even if the charge happened to be true, which it’s not, we writers would hardly be the only ones in U.S. society institutionalizing escapism.

The other day a husband and wife who are acquaintances told me how upset they were by the university commencement address given by a Nobel laureate because the scientist had laid out rather directly and bluntly some of the challenges that the next generation would have to face, in particular those involving energy supplies and global warming. They both felt that a commencement address should be inspiring and uplifting, and “not a real downer.”

On the one hand, I can see their point. Hitting bright young graduates between the eyes with the cold water of realism is not exactly encouraging, when commencement is considered “their” day.

On the other hand, times have changed. Many long years ago, when I was in high school, educators made a practice of pointing out one’s short-comings in more than graphic detail, day after day, while suggesting that major improvements in attitude, effort, and skills were the only way to avoid a life of failure and lack of accomplishment. And when one got to college, the “standard” entry address to college freshmen was: “Look to your left; look to your right. By the end of the year, one of you won’t be here.” In those days, there was a draft and a war in Vietnam, and for young men, at least, not being there meant a good chance of being somewhere else — a place distant, hot, damp and dangerous. And more than a few students didn’t make it through the curriculum. Those that did finally got to hear an excessively optimistic speech about how they would go forth to conquer the world… or at least their chosen profession.

Today, except in a comparative handful of institutions, education tends to be all about encouragement and reward for often negligible accomplishments. For all the talk about tightening standards, and the like, the functional literacy of American university graduates continues to decline, even while the grades given — and received with little gratitude — has continued to inflate. Given the recent financial crises, it’s also clear that fewer Americans seem to know enough basic mathematics to understand how to calculate the impact of a mortgage payment on their monthly budget… or even what a budget might be.

So… we’ve moved from a more realistic system of education, where the commencement addresses were always falsely encouraging, to an educational regime that tends to exude false hope and low standards, but where commencement addresses are occasionally sobering. Personally, as a curmudgeon and cautious optimist, I think the old system prepared more students for the real world… and back then false hope was limited to an occasional commencement address and not dispensed throughout an entire course of studies.