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.

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?