The vast majority, if not all, of evolutionary biologists believe that one of the critical factors in the rise of the homo sapiens, as reflected in the species terminology, was the ability to think, an ability that led to sophisticated tool-making, agriculture, organized societies, and so forth. The combination of thinking and a tool-making culture has led to the creation of ever more sophisticated tools and a greater understanding of life and the universe.

But… if a trend observed by two U.S. researchers continues to take hold, all that may change. The two studied graduate students using high level computational tools and found that, when solutions eluded the students or when the results were unsatisfactory, almost invariably, the students attempted to figure out new and different ways to use the computerized tools and never addressed either the structure of or the assumptions behind the questions they had posed or the approach they had taken in addressing the problem at hand. In short, they had stopped truly thinking analytically and had reduced themselves to mental mechanics, as opposed to higher-level thinkers.

This isn’t just a problem for doctoral students in the sciences. It’s already everywhere. Because a large number of students have never really learned basic mathematics, they can’t estimate solutions, and if a calculator or computer is wildly off, they often never catch it. Many retail employees have trouble making change. Students seem to assume that all the answers are somewhere on the internet.

These and other examples suggest that people are blindly relying on the answers and methods provided by modern technology, instead of asking questions and thinking about the approaches and implications. Again… this isn’t new. A good twenty years ago, when I was working in the environmental field, I watched researchers and public policymakers get sucked in by mathematical models and accept the output relatively uncritically… and when, as a consultant, I asked some rather pointed and critical questions, they all deferred to the models as if they were infallible. They’re only models of reality. Sometimes they come very close, and sometimes they don’t, but it takes thought to determine which. That was twenty years ago, and today it’s even worse. Most trades on the stock market are handled by the computers of large funds, and those trades are in turn determined by mathematical algorithms, which are based on certain assumptions. But what happens if the assumptions change? Who’s watching?

This isn’t necessarily a problem when such thoughtlessness occurs in those people whose occupation isn’t supposed to be thinking, but it seems to be happening more and more often among those whose expertise is supposed to include analytical thought.

Now… just take this trend another step forward, to when we get more and more intelligent computer systems, even AIs. Certainly, Kubrick and Clarke anticipated this in 2001: A Space Odyssey with Hal… but very few viewers seem to see the parallels to our own culture today. Will homo sapiens give way to homo unsapiens without anyone even thinking about it?

One of the problems most, if not all, writers have is that, no matter what most of us claim, we tend to dwell, if not obsess, over what the readers and reviewers don’t see that seems perfectly obvious to us. And each of us, as writers, has certain predilections. One of mine, shared by some other writers, is to write about strong and powerful individuals.

I don’t and can’t bring myself to write about detective mages so stupid that they make four or five major mistakes, any one of which should have killed them, in every book. I don’t write about weepy and helpless women, nor about powerful but stupid villains.

But, of course, a good book is about overcoming challenges, and readers want to see protagonists tested to their limits. One reader told me, “Make sure you really abuse your heroes.” One of the possible problems with this is that external challenges may not be the real obstacles. I’ve seen incredibly talented people essentially throw their lives away, and I’ve seen moderately talented but ambitious people succeed where more talented but less driven individuals failed. So one of the formulas suggested by writing gurus is that internal challenges should mirror the external ones, or vice versa.

All that said, very little can stop an incredibly talented, intelligent, and driven individual. This means that, in books as in real life, powerful individuals are seldom realistically threatened or done in by others. Yet there seems to be a feeling that fictional characters who are “too strong” are not believable because they have no weaknesses. Part of that is because most of us can’t identify with them, and we’d prefer to identify with the underdog. That’s why the story of David or Goliath — or Seabiscuit — still resonates with people. But strong characters do have weaknesses. They can be done in by a combination of other powerful individuals, by their own weaknesses, or especially by their ties to others.

This certainly isn’t a new concept, but it tends to be overlooked, although it was laid out fairly bluntly in Gordon Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not. No one can stop Tam Olyn… but he turns aside from destroying an entire culture because of love — and would in fact be devastated if anything happened to Lisa. There’s certainly no one individual who could stop my own character Alucius by the end of Scepters, but he is and will always be held hostage to the love of his homeland, which is highly vulnerable, and his way of life. In the end, the near-invincible Mykel and Dainyl both end up vulnerable and hostages to life and those they love. In a similar sense, the women of Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country control everything, and yet remain hostages.

Yet, all too many readers and reviewers tend to think of external vulnerabilities as the most challenging. Whether external or internal vulnerabilities are the greatest depends on the character and the situation, which is as it should be, not upon a preconceived assumption that large and visible dangers are always the hardest to overcome.

What if we’ve all missed the point of the war in Iraq? What if the real agenda of the Bush Administration was not to keep the Iraqis from establishing a Euro-denominated oil bourse, or to ensure U.S. access to Iraqi oil once Saudi Arabia collapses to revolution, or to assure future significant revenues for the Bush family’s consulting firm? What if the real agenda was to weaken and destroy science education and training in rational thought in the United States, in order to further creationism and fundamental religious beliefs?

Now… some may claim that might be going a bit too far, but, in support of the Bush war budget, the latest Congressional appropriations take huge cuts out of fundamental research in physics, so much so that Fermilab in Illinois and Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center together will lay off more than 300 scientists and employees, essentially closing for all practical purposes. Why? Supposedly because the something like $95-$100 million required is needed more to fund the war than for physics research.

Pardon me, but I don’t see cuts in $200 million bridges to nowhere, and the cuts in federal funds for physics research amount to tenths of a percent of the annual costs of waging the war in Iraq. Such research cuts won’t add anything meaningful to the war funding, but they will cripple American physics research for years, if not longer.

We’re already suffering a decline in U.S. born and bred scientists, not to mention science and math teachers, and we’ve adopted “security measures” that effectively curtail the education and possible future assimilation of foreign-born doctoral students in the hard sciences. Could all this just be another part of the grand creationist conspiracy to damp down and wipe out critical scientific thought?

I mean… how could it be anything else? After all, much of American economic and military success has been based on our historic ability to entice the best minds and thoughts from around the world and to offer them rewards well beyond what they could ever have achieved in their homelands.

Surely, no thoughtful person would want to destroy one of the fundamental bases of American success and prosperity just through stupidity and oversight, would they? So there must be a reason for this policy. There has to be, doesn’t there? What else could it be but a great fundamentalist and creationist plot?

While some readers will doubtless laugh at what follows, I still have the feeling that I went, almost overnight, from “up-and-coming writer” to “he’s-been-writing-forever.” It wasn’t all that many years ago when my editor asked me to introduce myself to a young writer who had just sold his first book. I introduced myself and got a blank look, followed by the statement, “I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of you.”

That was less than eight years ago, and I’d published almost thirty books. Now, I see comments like, “The Recluce Saga is older fantasy, but still good.” A former publicist remarked that, “I can’t believe the Recluce Saga is still going.”

Times do change, and I’ll have to admit that my reaction to one of the changes probably marks me as being of the “older generation.” This change has to do with how writers tend to get started. When I first began to write seriously, my naive thought was that, if I wrote well enough and worked hard enough, I’d get published. And I did… and it happened. It also happened for other writers.

Today, I can think of more than a few would-be writers who seem to spend more time promoting themselves on the internet than writing or attempting to improve their craft. And in a way, they remind me of juvenile ravens, because they tend to collect in a gaggle [although technically and grammatically and practically, the term is an “unkindness”], where they spend an inordinate amount of bandwidth and space commenting on the writing field and promoting the new works of the younger writers, whom they wish to join. Call it the support of the “new” by those who wish also to be the newest of the new.

I don’t mind that aspect of it. A majority of the “young” have always done that. I never was in that majority, but that’s another story that won’t be told. But what concerns me is the amount of time that this represents. This is not, for the most part, time spent refining one’s craft as a writer. It is not time spent creating stories or novels. It is sheer personal promotion, often before the writer is question has much of worth to present.

Is it understandable? Absolutely! Now that only one or two F&SF of the major publishing firms accept unsolicited manuscripts, how else can a writer find a way to get either an invitation from a publisher or an agent interested?

Is it good? I don’t think so. More than a few editors have suggested to me privately that the technical quality of submissions is declining. That’s not to say that some are not good, or that all of that decline results from the shift of energy from writing to promoting, but they’re fewer and harder to find. It also is a trap, I suspect, because maintaining a high-visibility website takes a tremendous amount of time. If the site declines, so does viewership… and visibility. But in a culture that is incredibly media-driven, not “improving and advancing” is seen not as stability, but as failure. So, in order to attract “attention,” more and more effort is required for promotion, and less and less time is available for actual writing and learning the craft.

Add to that an increasing pressure to produce profits by the parent companies of larger publishers, and what happens? More and more profit is generated by a handful of books and by media knock-offs, while good books that don’t appeal widely don’t get published by the majors and/or are put out by smaller presses.

From that point of view, it seems to make sense for a newer writer to try to build a following through the internet, but the problem is that when they’re all chasing the “flavor de jour” they’re all trying to appeal to the exact same audience, and that audience is still not a majority of the book-buyers, even in F&SF, and the rest of the audience is often put off by the “flavor de jour” and purchases fewer books.

Do I have an answer? I’d suggest that more new writers take a risk, a real risk, and concentrate on writing and not promotion. Remember, neither J.K. Rowling nor Robert Jordan needed a website presence to get started. They just needed books that lots of people, and not just the internet crowd, wanted to read.

As some of my readers know, I spent time working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency all too many years ago, and later as a consultant dealing with environmental regulations, among other matters. One of the most contentious matters then, and still, was the issue of what a human life was worth. If an environmental regulation costs industry [and consumers, because the end user eventually always pays the cost] ten billion dollars, but saves a thousand lives… is it worth it? What if it only saves ten lives?

This issue, whether we like to think about it, is everywhere. Why do we buy life insurance? That’s a form of valuing life. Why do we spend precious hours in exercise and physical fitness? It’s another way of valuing life by attempting to prolong it in better health.

But there’s one area where our laws and our attitudes are far, far behind — and that’s in the area of financial fraud and embezzlement. Just last week, the second largest bank in France announced that a rogue trader employed there had effectively lost over $7 billion by diverting over $50 billion in bank funds to personal speculative trades. This is the largest loss ever created by a single individual, but it’s not anything new. The fraud at WorldCom, Global Crossings, and Enron resulted in billions and billions of dollars of losses. The amount of mortgage fraud arising from the latest real estate bubble has yet to be tallied.

And what does this all have to do with the value of lives?

It’s simple, actually. Most people work. They invest their lives in working and in trying to save or buy a house or stay at a company long enough for their pension to vest or put aside money for an IRA. When embezzlement and fraud cause them to lose all or part of those investments, in effect, part of their life has been taken. The same thing happens when someone is scammed or phished out of funds on the internet.

In the federal regulatory system, although no one wants to talk about it openly, essentially regulations have established a range of values for human life. Depending on the situation and other factors, at one time that range was effectively from one to twenty million dollars. Doubtless, it’s higher now.

Take the current French situation — seven billion dollars. Seven billion dollars taken from people, admittedly in smaller bits than a whole life, but… if a life is worth twenty million dollars, then the embezzler or fraud artist has committed the equivalent of 350 murders.

Far-fetched, you say? Think about Enron. How many lives were shortened because of health insurance lost? Or because employees lost their retirement? How many investors lost income, either directly or through other pension funds, and what did that do to their lives? How many families’ lives were disrupted?

We’ve tended to treat this kind of white-collar crime as if it were almost victimless, but it’s not. It’s just that the embezzler and fraud artist take a little bit of life from thousands or millions of people, and we seem to think that it’s somehow not nearly so bad as single heinous murder. Yet, I’d be willing to bet that every major fraud/embezzlement case results in actual deaths or at least early deaths among the victims. Most major embezzlers and fraud artists lose what assets they have and serve a few years in jail — maybe ten at most. Some, like the head of Global Crossings, actually get to keep their ill-gotten gains and serve no time at all.

Maybe, just maybe, if the damages incurred by the victims of embezzlement and fraud were converted into the equivalent of murders… then we might have a bit more deterrence, and possibly certainly more justice.

I don’t see this happening… but it should be considered, if not adopted.