As some of my readers know, I was trained as an economist, and economists occasionally lapse into statistics, and, in this case, I will offer some figures associated with recommendations about purported quality of the books that you read.

Last month, the vaunted Locus published its list of recommended books released in 2007, 40 in all, of which 22 were science fiction and 18 were fantasy. Since these books were deemed to be of quality by Locus reviewers, as someone who is skeptical of any one source, particularly any one source of experts, I decided to make a comparison of the Locus findings to the reviews, or lack thereof, in Publishers Weekly.

Of the forty books Locus listed as superior, PW gave exactly 11 (or 27.5 %) starred reviews, their mark of quality. I would have made a similar comparison with other “authorities,” such as Booklist and Kirkus, but, alas, I don’t have access to their full databases, nor do I wish to pay their exorbitant rates for that privilege, but I will note that a number of books which did receive starred reviews from other sources such as those were not included on the Locus list. In the interests of full disclosure, I will point out that none of my books figure into these statistics, since nothing I published for the first time in 2007 received any listings by Locus or starred reviews [not that I know of, at least] from anyone else.

Having some interest in statistical oddities, I also noted that the Locus list predominantly featured male authors [72.5% of the recommended books were authored by males]. The breakdown by gender and genre did change slightly, since 77% of the SF titles were by males, as compared to a mere 67% of the fantasy titles. From my infrequent perusing of Booklist and Kirkus review summaries, I do retain the impression that at least several of the books receiving starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus, and not included in the Locus list, were written by women.

For another comparison, the final Nebula ballot lists five novels. So far as I can determine, exactly one of them got a starred review from PW, but three of the five were on the Locus recommended list. And, of course, four of the five Nebula nominees were written by men.

All this suggests that there’s definitely a difference in who and what are considered quality between those officially “in” the F&SF field, and those not so in. But then, haven’t we always known that?

ADDENDUM: After I originally posted this, the thought occurred to me, as it might to many readers, that the selections by Locus reviewers and the Nebula voters might merely reflect the gender distribution of authors and titles in the F&SF field. So I did a quick analysis of the 2008 advance title listings of the twelve publishing imprints that are projected to issue more than 30 books. Of the twelve, six will publish more titles by men, and six will release more titles by women. Overall 56% of the more than 750 titles listed for those imprints will be authored by men and 44% by women [and I gave 1/2 credit to each gender where there were mixed gender co-authors]. To me, that does seem to suggest a certain gender disparity.

A great deal of campaign rhetoric seems to concern itself with issues involving institutions or faceless groups — the greedy corporations who shift jobs to third world countries, the illegal immigrants who take low-paying jobs and keep decent wages from being paid to Americans, the predatory lenders and banks, the automobile industry that lobbies against decent mileage standards for cars, the health-care industry that bankrupts the forty million Americans without health insurance… and so it goes.

And more than a few politicians and public figures all have ways to punish these groups and institutions. Satisfying as thinking about punishing such institutions is, any such punitive solution won’t solve the problem, and it’s likely to hurt other individuals even more, often those who’ve already been injured.

No…I’m not being a corporate apologist… just a realist. The reason why corporations are corporations, why they incorporated in the first place, was to limit, if not to eliminate entirely, personal liability for its executives and employees — except in clear cases of direct criminal behavior.

So… if lenders market mortgages to low-income or high-risk borrowers whom they know are likely to default… or who end up paying far more than they might have with a 30 year mortgage… and then the lenders securitize those mortgages and sell them to investors, what can anyone do? The government will find it difficult, if not impossible legally, to regain the lost assets, and will spent millions in attempting anything. The borrowers will still lose their houses, and the investors will lose a great deal of the money they paid for the securities. The original homeowner or homebuilder might not lose money, but, then again, they might end up with a devalued property. Since a significant portion of mortgage lenders nationwide were involved to some degree, punishing them all would only make buying homes more difficult for everyone. Punish the “more guilty?” Where do you draw the line, legally and practically? How can you legally punish someone for bad judgment and for ethically reprehensible but legal lending practices?

If government changes the law to deal with abuses, as it has done many times in many areas, two things inevitably happen. The overall transaction costs go up, and seldom are any but the worse of the abuses curtailed, because the perpetrators go on to find another legal way to do the same thing.

The problem with corporate and institutional misbehavior is two-fold. First, corporate law effectively shields corporate decision-makers from being held liable for bad or questionably legal corporate decisions. Second, even if corporate misbehavior is wide-spread, the fall-out from negative actions will still fall disproportionately upon the innocent. In the case of Enron, for example, employees at all levels of Enron headquarters knew that the company was running a phony second trading room. They may not have known about the off-book financial manipulations, but scores if not hundreds, knew about the phony trading room, and few if any reported to authorities about that bit of fraud and deception. But, before the collapse, Enron had 5,600 employees, the vast majority of whom were innocent, and most of whom lost their jobs, their retirement, and their future. A handful of executives were found guilty, but that did nothing for the thousands who suffered.

Similar events unfolded with Global Crossings and WorldCom, although the unraveling of both those corporations had far more to do with bad management. Still, in the end, that bad management had disproportionately negative impacts on innocent employees, suppliers, and investors.

Is there a workable governmental solution? I honestly don’t know, but it’s clear that corporate law creates a real barrier to individual responsibility at the corporate executive level. It’s also clear that corporations continue to fire incompetent or unsuccessful CEOs and send them off with “golden parachutes” paid for by consumers, the shareholders, and, in some cases, even indirectly by government.

The same factors are at work in government, another institution. To get elected, politicians promise what the majority of people want, but they seldom, if ever, tell anyone how they’ll pay for it, except in generalities, usually targeting the “rich” and corporations. That doesn’t work, because the rich have better lawyers and accountants, and the corporations are legally structured to pass on all the taxes and costs to the consumer. Add to that the fact that government isn’t generally all that efficient, and we wind up paying more taxes for programs and services that usually don’t satisfy anyone… and then we blame the politicians — every one of them except “our” representative, who did what “we” wanted. After all, more than 90% of all incumbents get re-elected.

Of course, the most workable solution would be if we, as a culture, backed off the demand for more and more at the lowest possible price to ourselves… but then, we couldn’t blame the government and all those greedy corporations for doing whatever they legally can to meet our demands. And who’s to say that the corporate executives, and the higher education executives, and the health care executives, not to mention the politicians, just wouldn’t keep padding their expense accounts and payrolls?

Of course, a greater societal emphasis on individual ethics and responsibility over “fame and fortune” wouldn’t hurt, either. But… I confess a certain skepticism about seeing that happen anytime soon in the reality-TV culture we’ve developed.

Why do human beings go to war? This is a question that scholars, psychologists, historians, economists, military leaders, and others have debated over the ages. I won’t propose an answer to the question, but I will raise some questions about some of the commonly accepted reasons.

If human beings are generally aggressive, and war results from that aggression, why is it that we always go to war against comparative strangers and attempt to kill them, when most violence experienced by most people is from those they know and to whom they are far closer? Historically, in the United States, approximately 22 percent of murders were committed by family members of the victim, while in 53 percent of the cases, the offender and victim were acquaintances. Other offenses, from rape to robbery, from fraud to assault, are not committed against us by those in other lands, against whom we make war, but by those in our own communities.

Another reason given for war is a national need for resources or economic gain. Yet most wars cost far more than any potential gain to either party. By definition, the loser doesn’t gain and may lose independence and resources, and its citizens can lose personal freedoms, if not their lives. But the winner often loses far more than it can possibly regain. The current estimate for the relatively “small” [and it is, in historical terms] war in Iraq is an annual cost of $200 billion. Almost five years into this war, the U.S. cost alone is approaching one trillion dollars and has resulted in nearly 4,000 deaths of U.S. military personnel. This doesn’t include, depending on who is making the estimates, the deaths of between 60,000 and one million Iraqi soldiers, terrorists, and civilians. And for this expenditure, exactly what did we gain, either economically or politically? We aren’t getting any more oil, and we haven’t lowered the price of crude oil. In fact, before the 2003 invasion the price of crude was running at around $30 a barrel, and lately it’s been running over $90/barrel, and sometimes over $100/barrel, and we’re more dependent on imported oil than ever.

Another reason that people give for war is the need to project or protect power and leadership. Let’s see. We seized the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish American War, occupied the islands for over 40 years, lost men defending them in WWII, spent billions propping up corrupt governments, and finally turned over billions of dollars of facilities to the Philippine government when the last U.S. military bases were closed in 1992. Fifty years after we lost over 50,000 men in Korea, we’re still faced with a renegade regime in North Korea that is flirting with developing a nuclear capacity, and we’re still paying to maintain troops in South Korea. Thirty-five years after we lost over 55,000 soldiers and pulled out of Vietnam, we’re the ones begging for trade concessions from them… and from China. After two invasions of Iraq and one of Afghanistan, we haven’t stopped Al Qaeda, and we’ve lost more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than we lost civilians in the 9/11 twin towers disaster.

Another reason for war is “to protect ourselves.” I’d be naive not to say that at times this is a necessity, as in the case of WWII, but I have trouble seeing how the war in Iraq has increased our safety, or how fighting in Vietnam made us safer.

Another reason given is to “protect human rights.” Again, pardon me, but history doesn’t show the United States exactly rushing to protect all the Jews of Europe against Hitler. We did show great sorrow after the fact, but pretty much all of the major non-Nazi powers of Europe, as well as the United States, ignored what was going on until after WWII. We’ve ignored, except for a few diplomatic notes and protests, the genocide in Darfur, and the abuses of Stalin, Pol Pot, and countless other dictators — except when it suited other purposes. And now, we tolerate a president who claims that restricting torture of suspected terrorists will make us weaker as a nation.

So just exactly why do we as humans have to fight so many wars? Could it just be that, all protests to the contrary, as a species we really like conflict?

I’ve only seen this addressed directly once in SF, in Alan Dean Foster’s series The Damned. And, from what I recall, that series didn’t do all that well. He postulated that humans were bred to be warriors… and we didn’t want to face it. Neither did many of the critics. Imagine that.

A well-known publisher often tells a story of his early days in the publishing business when he visited a large commercial book-buyer to present the titles forthcoming from the firm he then represented. After the presentation, the buyer looked at the young salesman and said, “How can you say all that with a straight face? Last year, you came and told me that those titles were the best ever, and the ones you just told me about are better than the ones that were the best ever? I only have so many feet of shelves, and every year you and the others come and tell me that this year’s offerings are the best ever…”

If the Locus annual review of the number of F&SF titles published is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it’s not as close to the real numbers as any such compilation could be, last year 1,710 original F&SF books were published, of which 693 were hardcovers, along with 1,013 reprints of already-existing titles. But how many were “really good books?”

How about 1,710? After all, these publishers wouldn’t publish books that they didn’t think were good, would they? Well… maybe a few that would appeal to people with, shall we say, “particular tastes.”

Of course, this all brings up the question of what “good” means. For some people, it means a fast and exciting read that removes them from their not-so-wonderful day job and otherwise mundane circumstances. For others, it’s all about the choice of words and structure of the sentences [I kid you not; I’ve seen books described as classics that had NO plot and no action]. For others, it’s the play of ideas or the characters.

Even the so-called experts don’t agree. I’ve seen SF books listed as “Best of the Year” by Kirkus or Booklist that don’t make the annual and long Locus recommended reading list. Books that get starred reviews by Publishers Weekly can get poor reviews from various genre reviewers. One of my books that got starred reviews from most sources and won awards got a very mediocre review from Romantic Times [which, believe it or not, reviews lots of F&SF].

All this confusion may well explain why the largest reasons people pick up books are either because they already know the author OR because a personal friend or close relative has recommended it. I suspect the latter works because we tend to know what our friends like, or don’t, and can factor what we know about them into our choices. It works both ways. If one friend in particular raves about a book, I’ll probably never read it because I know from experience that I’ll most likely hate it.

One reviewer lamented recently that she could find fewer and fewer books to recommend, but is that because there are fewer good books… or merely fewer books of the kind that meet her criteria for excellence — or, perhaps, a little of both?

In the end, though, I’d have to say that there aren’t nearly so many good books as the publishers claim and more than any individual reviewer would admit. But then, that’s just my opinion on “really good books.”

There’s always been this human feeling that sometime, somewhere in the past, was a golden era, from which we as humans have fallen. For the ancient Greeks, it was the Golden Age, for devout Christians, the Garden of Eden. For those of English heritage, it was Camelot, and for at least some Americans, it was the American Camelot of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The problem, of course, is that none of them existed as envisioned by their believers. Early Greek history was blood-soaked, with life brutal and short, and that was if you were male and free. Even under the original terms of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had to be unperceptive and not-too-bright, because they weren’t allowed a full range of knowledge, and if the archeologists are correct, the original garden was located in an area near the Persian Gulf that was conflict-ridden. The time of the Arthurian Camelot was the warlord-torn period following the retreat of the Romans from Britain, when no one was safe and nothing secure, and during the Presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, literally nothing was accomplished except a failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the near-Armageddon of an atomic conflict over Cuba, and the most philandering in the White House in history [facts papered over and/or conveniently ignored by revisionists of all stripes].

Today, politically, Barrack Obama is appealing to that yearning for change, and those who long for Camelot and the Golden Ages that never were are flocking to him, his incredibly well-spoken words, and his visions. While that yearning for a golden and simpler time is certainly understandable, and an eternal human wish, wishing for and following such a spellbinding orator is nothing more than another manifestation of the human desire for a better life paid for by someone else. This isn’t to say that such desires aren’t powerful and that they can’t change things. They do… and seldom for the better.

Hitler promised dreams of a better life, and so did Mussolini, and so did Huey Long in Louisiana. Lenin roused the proletariat, and Mao marched the Long March toward peace, prosperity, and improvement… and one thing that they all had in common was the desire to take from one group to give to another in the name of a more perfect society.

Me… I’m much more impressed by an imperfect Winston Churchill’s promise of only “blood, sweat, and tears,” because that’s how the world is improved, not by harkening to times that never were and suggesting that they can be achieved just by “wishing” for change or voting for or supporting a particular man or woman on a white horse.

All too often those dreams of a Golden Age have only presaged a lifetime of nightmares.