Most current American fiction,by its very nature, and especially science fiction and fantasy, generally tends to repudiate the “absurdist” movement of the French existentialists of the mid-twentieth century. Does this repudiation, both directly and through its indirect influence on other media, actually perpetuate the very question that the existentialists raised, as well as help fuel the high degree of religious belief in the United States? Now that I have at least a few readers stunned…

I’ll doubtless end up grossly oversimplifying, but since I don’t wish to write the equivalent of an English Ph.D. dissertation, we’ll go for a modicum of simplicity. Sartre and Camus and others of the absurdist school tended to put forth the proposition that, in essence, life had no intrinsic meaning, that it was “absurd,” and that, in as illustrated in Camus’s L’Etranger, the only real choice one had in life was what to do with one’s life, i.e., whether to take a meaningful step to end it or to let life continue meaninglessly.

The question is, simply enough: “Does an individual life have intrinsic worth or meaning by the mere fact of existence?” The absurdist view would tend to imply that it doesn’t. The deeply religious Christian view is that every single life has meaning to the Deity.

While I can’t claim, and won’t, to have read even a significant faction of the something like 30,000 new adult fiction titles published every year, at times I have read a large fraction of what’s been published in the F&SF field, and I can’t recall more than a handful of books that discussed or considered intelligently the absurdist premises or more than a tiny fraction where the characters acted as though life had no intrinsic meaning. In some, a disturbing fraction, I have to admit, that intrinsic meaning was to be available to get slaughtered by the heroes or the villains, but a certain sense of value was still placed on the lives of even the most worthless.

Is this comparative authorial lack of interest in the possible meaninglessness of life bad? Not necessarily. In LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, however, one of her characters makes the statement that to oppose something is to maintain it. I’d suggest, following LeGuin’s words, that the continued cheerful, and unthinking assumption that life has intrinsic Deity-supported meaning leaves all too many readers and people wondering if that is really so… and why they should believe it.

For whatever wonder may be generated, though, very little finds its way to the printed fiction page.

I will offer one observation and clarification. Many, many authors speculate on the meaninglessness of a given character’s chosen life path, but that isn’t the same as whether life has an intrinsic meaning to or within the universe. In fact, I could even claim that the realization of or belief in a meaningless occupation or set of acts affirms the idea that life is meaningful in a cosmic sense — an application in a backwards way of LeGuin’s words.

Yet… on one side we have a universe some sixteen billion light years across in all directions with some 100 billion galaxies, each with between 50 and 100 billion stars, with the believers in intrinsic meaning claiming that each life has a special meaning. And there’s almost no one on the other side?

Well… maybe there are many on the other side, but outside of Richard Dawkins and those few like him, I’m not seeing all that many, and I’ve certainly not read about many heroes or heroines who look up into the night sky and consider the odds on whether life has that kind of meaning. Almost a century ago, Alfred North-Whitehead observed that when one wishes to understand truly a society, one should examine the basic assumptions of that culture, those which are so basic that no one has ever scrutinized them. I’d submit that one of those assumptions underlying western European-derived culture is that there is a God-given meaning to each life, and that the fact that the absurdist proposition died away so quickly suggests that this assumption remains strong… and largely unexamined.

I tend to deal with this issue, as I suspect a few other writers do, at the second remove, by having my characters act along the lines of: If there is a God/prime mover, then we should do the best we can because that’s what expected; if there’s not, it’s even more important that we do our best because we’re not getting any divine support.

But I do wonder if we’ll see many popular atheist/absurdist heroes or heroines anytime in the near future.

Many years ago, when all my grown children were still minors, one of them wanted to know why I seldom said that anything they did was good. My answer was approximately, “You’re intelligent and talented, and you’ve had many advantages. I expect the merely good from you as a matter of course. If you do better than that, then I’ll be the first to let you know.” Perhaps I was too hard on them, but that was the answer I’d gotten from my father. But my answer clearly didn’t crush them, or they survived the devastation of not having a father who praised everything, because they’ve all turned out to be successful and productive, and they seem to be reasonably happy in life.

As some of my readers know, I’m married to a professional singer who is also a university professor and opera director. She has made the observation that these days almost any musical or stage play, whether a Broadway production in New York, a touring Broadway production, a Shakespeare festival play, or a college production, seems to get a standing ovation… unless it is so terrible as to be abysmal, in which case the production merely gets enthusiastic applause. The one exception to this appears to be opera, which seldom gets more than moderately enthusiastic applause, even though the singers in opera are almost invariably far better performers than those in any stage musical, and they don’t need body mikes, either. Maybe the fact that excellence still has a place in opera is why I’ve come to appreciate it more as I’ve become older and more and more of a curmudgeon.

My wife has also noted that the vast majority of students she gets coming out of high school these days have almost all been told through their entire lives that they’re “wonderful.” This is bolstered, of course, by a grade inflation that shows that at least a third of some high school senior classes have averages in excess of 3.8.

In a way, I see the same trend in writing, even while I observe a loosening of standards of grammar, diction, and the growth of improbable inconsistencies in all too many stories. I’ve even had copy-editors who failed to understand what the subjunctive happens to be and who believed that the adverb “then” was a conjunction [which it is most emphatically not]. Matt Cheney notwithstanding “alright” is not proper English and shouldn’t be used, except in the dialogue of someone who has less than an adequate command of the language, but today that means many, many characters could use it.

At the same time, I can’t help but continue to reflect on the change in the meaning of the word “discrimination.” When I was growing up, to discriminate meant to choose wisely and well between alternatives. A person of discrimination was one of culture and taste, not one who was prejudiced or bigoted, but then, maybe they were, in the sense that they were prejudiced against those aspects of society that did not reflect superiority and excellence.

But really, does everything merit the equivalent of a standing ovation? Is excellence measured by accomplishment, or have we come to the point of awarding standing ovations for the equivalent of showing up for work? Can “The Marching Morons” of Cyril M. Kornbluth be all that far in our future?

To begin with, I have to confess I’m as guilty as anyone. About what? About writing about writing, of course. Now… for some background.

When I began to consider being a writer, I thought I was going to be a poet, and I did get some poems published in various small poetry and literary magazines. And then, there was this escalating altercation in Southeast Asia, and I ended up piloting helicopters for the U.S. Navy and didn’t write very much. When I got out of the Navy, I started writing market research reports dealing with the demand for industrial pneumatic accessories by large factories. Then I wrote a very bad mystery novel, awful enough that I later burned it so that it could never be resurrected. Only after all that did I attempt to write science fiction, and after close to ten years of hit or miss short-story submissions, with only about half a dozen sales while I was working full-time at my various “day jobs,” I finally got a rejection letter from Ben Bova which told me to lay off the stories and write a novel. And I did, and I sold it, and I’ve sold, so far, every one I’ve written since. Now… all this history is not bragging, or not too much, but to point out that virtually all the writing I did for almost forty years was either occupational-subject-related or poetry or fiction that I hoped to see published — and even more hopefully, sold for real money and not copies of magazines and publications.

All that changed a year ago, when I started blogging… or more specifically, writing about writing or about subjects that bear on writing, if sometimes tangentially. Instead of writing fiction for publication, I’m writing close to the equivalent of a book a year… about writing. I’m certainly not the only one out there doing this. In fact, I’m probably one of the later arrivals in this area.

But I can’t help wondering, no matter how my publicist has said that it’s a good idea, if there’s something just a bit wrong about writing about writing, instead of just writing. What’s happened to our culture and our society when readers seem to be as interested, or more interested, in writing about writing than in the writing itself. And why are so many younger writers going to such lengths in their blogs to attract attention?

At least one well-known publisher has noted that no publicity is all bad, but is this sort of thing all that good? Or is it not all that good, but necessary in a society that seems to reward shameless self-promotion as vital for success?

Who could say… except here I am, along with hundreds of others, writing about writing.

Some twenty years ago, when I was a consultant in Washington, D.C. [i.e., beltway bandit], a chemicals, paint, and coatings company came up with an environmentally safe way to get rid of their hydrocarbon leavings [still bottoms]. They wanted to transport and sell them to a steel company, which would then use them in its smelting process. This had the advantage of first, destroying the semi-toxic waste in a safe fashion that did not harm the environment, and second, providing a cheaper source of usable carbon for carbon steel. Not only that, but the steel furnaces were far hotter than commercial hazardous waste incinerators. To me, it seemed perfectly reasonable. Needless to say, this environmentally beneficial trade-off never occurred.

Why not? Because the U.S. EPA wanted to make sure that the process was 100% regulated, and that meant that the steel company would have had to apply for a hazardous waste disposal permit and submit itself to another layer of extremely burdensome federal regulation. Even then, U.S. steelmakers were having trouble competing, and more federal regulation would have compounded the problem. So, instead of having a cheaper source of carbon and a cleaner environment, the steelmaker paid more for conventional carbon sources, while the chemical company had to pay money to have its still bottoms incinerated in an approved hazardous waste incinerator. This didn’t help the American economy or the environment very much.

Unfortunately, I can now understand the combination of reasons as to why this happened… and why it continues. Most industrial companies haven’t historically acted, frankly, in the best interests of the population and the environment as a whole. That’s understandable. Their charter is to make money for the corporation and its shareholders, and one of the underlying and unspoken assumptions has historically been that corporations will do so in any way that is legal and will not besmirch their reputations. Likewise, because most corporations haven’t exactly been trustworthy or all that responsible for the larger issues, government bureaucrats haven’t been all that willing to trust them without imposing restrictions.

And exactly how did we get to this point?

First is the fact that, no matter what most people in the United States say, they essentially believe in a world of limitless resources. Somehow in some way, they believe, ingenuity and technology will keep things going, and there’s no real shortage, and if there is, it’s caused by government regulations or business greed. Second, we believe that competition is the way to ensure efficiency and lower prices. Third, we don’t trust government.

The problem is that all these beliefs are partial truths. There are great resources, but not unlimited ones. Competition indeed spurs lower prices, but it also encourages cut-throat competition and continued attempts by those who produce goods and provide services to transfer costs to others. Pollution transfers costs to the public, as does deforestation, strip mining, and a host of other activities. And government is certainly an institution to be wary of… but it’s the only institution that has the power to rein in out-of-control giant corporations, or on the local level, lawbreakers.

So… we have a society that is basically adversarial. Even our legal system is designed more like a stylized trial by combat than a means of finding truth or justice. How often does the better attorney transcend the “truth?” We’ve just seen a case where a pair of attorneys kept silent for years even when they had evidence that an innocent man was unfairly convicted. Why? Because our adversarial system would have disbarred them because revealing that evidence would have meant they were not fully representing the interests of their client.

So long as there are “excess” resources, an adversarial society can continue, but how long will a United States, with 5% of the world’s population, be able to continue to consume 26% of world resources? The Wall Street Journal just reported that literally billions of dollars worth of fuel is being wasted at U.S. corporations because cooperative waste reduction and energy efficiency initiatives keep falling afoul of adversarial attitudes between different divisions, differing regulatory agencies, and differing executives. At the same time, over the past five years, the price of energy has tripled…and that doesn’t count the costs of the energy-related war in Iraq, or the recent Russian announcement that Russian oil production has peaked and is declining.

Yet… are we seeing any changes? If anything, it appears as though our society is becoming even more adversarial, and that leads to a last question.

At what point does an adversarial society self-destruct?

The other day, as I was considering the origins of war, some observations came to me. When I thought over history and what I know, I realized — again — that most wars have economic origins, regardless of their widely identified or proximate causes. Helen didn’t have the face that launched a thousand ships, regardless of what Homer sang and others later inscribed. The Mycenaeans were after the lucrative Black Sea and Asia Minor trade dominated by Troy.

But that led to a second observation — that very little science fiction or fantasy actually deals with the hand-maiden of economics, that is, business itself, or even delves into the business rationales that explain why so many business tycoons cultivate political connections. Charles Stross’s The Clan Corporate deals with alternate world mafia-style types who mix special abilities, alternate worlds, murder and mayhem with business, and more than a few books cast corporate types as various types of villains. While I know I haven’t read everything out there, it does seem that books that deal with business itself are rare. One of the classics is Pohl and Kornbuth’s The Space Merchants, and two of my own books — Flash and The Octagonal Raven — deal heavily with business, but I can’t recall any others offhand.

Considering just how involved businesses have been in the disasters and wars of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s rather amusing that so few SF authors have taken on the challenge of dealing with business directly. Is it so impossible? Or is business just dull? Let’s see. One of the strongest factors in contributing to the Civil War wasn’t slavery, but the desire of indebted southern planters to repudiate their debts to New York bankers. Because of the influence of U.S. business types in Hawaii, a U.S. warship in Honolulu effectively supported the pseudo-revolution that overthrew the independent Hawaiian monarchy and turned Hawaii into a U.S. territory. The need for a shorter route for U.S. shipping prompted the U.S. to foment and encourage, and then support militarily, an independent Panama… and made U.S. construction and domination of the Panama Canal possible. Most of the industrialized world collaborated to put down the Boxer Revolt in China because they didn’t want existing trade agreements — and profits, including those from the opium trade — destroyed. Japan effectively started its part of WWII in order to gain resources for Japanese business, and Hitler was successful not just because of popular support, but because his acts restored German business. And, of course, despite knowledge of what was going on in Germany, during the early part of WWII, a number of U.S. companies were still in communications with their German counterparts and subsidiaries. More than a few industrial firms in the U.S. were opposed to an early pullout in Vietnam, and interestingly enough, the Texas-based firms prospered greatly, especially after Kennedy’s assassination. Now we have a war in Iraq, which occurred as oil demand continued to grow in the U.S. and after Iraq had given indications that it wanted to base its oil sales on the euro and not on the dollar. And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg.

So… is business really that dull? We have expose after expose about what happens, and each year it seems to get more sordid… yet comparatively few authors seem to want to extrapolate into the future. Or is that just because none of them feel that they could possibly imagine anything wilder and more corrupt than what has already happened?