I recently discovered that a number of readers have decided that my books fall into a category that I’d heard in passing over the last several years – “competence porn.”

I don’t have a problem with readers finding my protagonists competent – as well as even some of my villains. My problem lies with the category itself, possibly because I’m definitely old school, and while I can’t object to knowledgeable adults reading and viewing pornography, it’s definitely not my thing. As Marian Zimmer Bradley – who definitely knew pornography – once observed, pornography is mainly concerned with anatomical plumbing. Combining pornography with competence exalts the former and degrades the latter.

And I have a real problem with degrading competence, especially at a time in our history where everyday competence is getting rarer and when fewer and fewer young people can read or write competently. Classifying books with competent main characters as a type of pornography is the last sort of thing we need today.

Part of the idea behind the “competence porn” classification is a failure to understand that competent characters aren’t perfect. Even the most competent individuals make mistakes; it’s that they seldom make stupid mistakes in their own field, because competence requires knowing your field.

Another problem with the term “competence porn” is the current tendency of far too many readers to denigrate genres, subgenres, styles, and authors that they don’t like. I understand that many readers like and want fallible characters who get into messes because they’re not competent. Some readers want to root for such characters. That’s what they like. But that doesn’t mean that what they don’t like is bad. Sometimes it is; many times it’s just not to that reader’s taste.

I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with anyone who denigrates books that feature excellence and competence. If an author doesn’t write competence well, one can fault the work, or the way it’s handled, but terming books that feature competent main characters as competence porn is a disservice to both the authors and to the ideal of competence.

This past semester, my wife, the voice and opera professor, has been faced with the most fragile and unprepared group of incoming students that she’s seen in more than fifty years of teaching, although for the past decade or so she’s found that incoming students have become increasingly fragile and less academically prepared.

Not only are the vast majority unable to write a coherent paragraph, but most of them have difficulty reading material that the majority of previous classes could handle. They also have difficulty following class discussions, in turning in assignments on time, and in being able to attend class regularly. And we’re not talking about minority students, but predominantly western USA whitebread students.

They consider writing a thousand word essay as a major and unnecessary trial and fifty pages of reading a week as excessive.

Every single faculty member in the music department is facing the same issues, as are faculty members in any department that is attempting to actually get students to study and to learn. According to a university staff psychologist, roughly forty percent of the incoming students in the university suffer from depression and/or have anxiety issues.

In the field of music, as in most fields, professional musicians and music teachers have to know the music, the techniques, and the history behind their studies, but these incoming students don’t know how to write or how to learn and memorize music. They’re under the illusion that they can Google everything, and they often get sullen or resentful when they find out that they can’t… and they also can’t be separated from their cellphones. Under university policy, while faculty can request students to put away cellphones, faculty can’t prohibit them in class. One student in another department even requested that the university director of ADA certify her cellphone as a psychological necessity after her professor asked her to stop using it incessantly in class.

Many of them break down in tears – and the males tend to be bigger babies than the women – when they discover that they actually have to work to pass a class.

Yet the administration pressures faculty members to do everything they can to keep students in school, even students who’ve missed weeks of classes because they’re too stressed out to attend classes.

Given the way the students are when they arrive at the university, there’s too much they’re not being taught in elementary and secondary schools, and they’re certainly not being taught true self-discipline or accountability. But everyone seems to think it’s the job of college faculty to undo all the damage caused by overindulgent parents and elementary and secondary school teachers bludgeoned into submission to the “self-esteem” requirements forced on them, largely by parents.

The first two definitions of “interface” are: (1) the point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc. meet and interact and (2) a device or program enabling a user to communicate with a computer.

One of the greatest problems with the increasing use of computerized systems is that all too many human/computer interfaces are flawed, both on the human side and on the computer side, as exemplified by the following examples.

A little over a week ago, the local Walgreens called to remind my wife that she was due for her second Shingles shot. She couldn’t do it immediately, but she had time after a dental appointment last Tuesday. So she stopped in at the Walgreens around 5:00 p.m. and went to the pharmacy. There was no one waiting for anything, and two pharmacy technicians and a pharmacist were on duty. She asked for the shot. She was told she had to make an appointment, except the store’s pharmacy telephone information line said that appointments were only necessary for COVID and flu vaccines, and that people could go to the pharmacy without an appointment. The main Walgreens website said the same. She pointed out that when she’d called the store, she was told she didn’t need an appointment for Shingles. She came home furious, but she called for an appointment, but was told by the Walgreens central vaccine scheduling office that they could only schedule COVID and flu shots by telephone. Other shots had to be scheduled online. But when she tried that, the Walgreens system wouldn’t schedule anything but COVID and flu. Another call back to Walgreens vaccine scheduling didn’t solve the problem, but the person on the other end suggested a Walgreens’ scheduling subsite that she could go to directly, a site that wasn’t listed anywhere. That worked… so far as getting the appointment, but that site wouldn’t accept her doctor’s info, which mean more of a wait when she did get the shot.

That’s definitely an example of an interface problem.

Another example is something experienced by a Canadian reader who was trying to obtain a Kindle version of ISOLATE from Amazon.ca [the Canadian Amazon outlet]. He could get the audiobook and the hardcover, but not the Kindle ebook. The same was true for a number of his Canadian friends. I brought the matter to TOR’s attention, and my editor looked into it. Amazon replied to TOR that there was no problem. The links worked fine. Except they didn’t for those Canadians. Paradoxically, my Canadian friend got the Kindle from Amazon.com [the U.S. Amazon], but he informed me that Amazon.ca still said the Kindle version was unavailable, not only to him, but to number of others.

I’d like to think that these are isolated examples – but they’re not. Too many organizations have websites that are close to impenetrable even for people with considerable familiarity with computers, not to mention those businesses with semi-AI telephone systems that not only work poorly, but often never allow a caller to talk to a real person, or only if the caller spends forever going through menu options and trying to reply to a computerized voice saying “I didn’t get that. Did you mean XXXX,” or the equivalent.

Yet more and more businesses are relying on flawed computerization and voicemail systems that don’t deal with real-world people and their problems… and with the shortage of workers, this problem is likely to get a lot worse.

Now that Isolate is finally published, I’ll be interested to see if reader reviews follow a familiar pattern to that of my earlier books, a pattern, interestingly enough, that also occurs in the political world.

Once one of my books is published, usually the first reader reviews are mixed, but almost immediately, along with those who liked the book are those who go to great lengths to find faults with it, of all sorts. Those quibblers and naysayers tend to have a greater presence in the days and weeks immediately following publication, but then, over time, those who quibble and carp about what’s in the book and about what’s not (and find the book “boring”) drop off, and later comments tend to be more positive.

What I find interesting about this is that it’s very similar to the reaction to major political events. Whatever the event or occurrence, the naysayers are usually out in force first, whether it was January 6th, or Obamacare, or walls and immigration, masks and vaccination.

Part of the similarity, I suspect, lies with the subject matter. Neither politics nor my books are simple, and anyone who’s studied either knows that. Anything that’s complex tends to draw opposition, possibly because saying “no” is always easier than a considered and thoughtful response.

In addition, in dealing with large numbers of people, even the best crafted regulation or law will have repercussions on someone. If a vaccine is 93% effective (and that’s high for a vaccine), that means that it doesn’t work well on 7% of those who receive it.

Likewise, even the best crafted thought-provoking book will irritate some people, and as study after study has shown, negative reactions show up more often first and more strongly than positive reactions. This has been true in politics as well. The AMA and most businesses were initially dead-set against FDR’s Social Security proposals. Going back a bit farther, the southern states would have blocked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had slavery been outlawed from the beginning.

But it doesn’t always happen that way, which is why, sometimes, it’s better to think things over, from books to politics.

In the United States of today, I’ve observed two types of arrogance manifested by those who have ability and power, usually but not exclusively by males. The first type of arrogance is that typical of most elites in most societies – that they’re special and everyone should know it, even if they gained their position, power, and wealth largely aided by factors they had little to do with, such as family economic and social position.

The second kind of arrogance is the assumption that, if they can do it, anyone can, if others only work hard enough. I’ve seen this kind of arrogance manifested far more than a few times, usually by white males. I’m not saying that most of them didn’t work hard to get where they got, because many of those I know did in fact work hard, but all too often hard and even hard smart work isn’t enough.

What few of them fail to realize, or at least to acknowledge publicly, is that many of the aspects of their lives that they take for granted as “normal” are anything but normal for tens of millions of Americans, things like a stable home life growing up, having enough to eat as a child, a decent grade school and secondary education, living in a low-crime area, not having an ethnic/cultural background that makes strangers suspicious, having good role models.

Another factor that too many “self-made” individuals ignore or minimize is the role of luck and timing. I owe a great deal of my success to what I’ve learned from my wife, yet how we met was statistically effectively impossible.

A publisher once told me that the great success of a particular book/series was made possible by a set of circumstances that existed for only one five-year period ever in the publishing industry. Now, the writer in question had been published previously and could have likely continued as a successful midlist author…and perhaps eventually done better than that, but those circumstances and the fact that the publisher recognized them gave the author far greater success than others who had equal ability, but wrote earlier or later in time.

I’m not writing about myself, but in my case, I got my first and long-standing editor as a result of the intersection of three facts – the fact that I’d published a handful of stories in ANALOG, that he read short stories because he compiled anthologies, and that he recognized my last name because he’d known my cousin [with the same uncommon last name] in college. Those were just enough to get him to read my first novel… and to publish it and eventually many others. And it was pure luck, from my point of view, that he then became an editor for a publishing start-up then known as TOR.

Yes, I sold my first stories over the transom to people I’d never met, and I worked hard, damned hard, and I sent that first novel to every F&SF editor whose name and address I could find, but I’ve known lots of other authors who have worked hard and weren’t in the right place at the right time with the right book. And even after that, it took me another ten years to be able to become a full-time writer.

It’s been said by others that great success comes when hard work meets great opportunity, but hard work doesn’t always meet such opportunity. For those reasons, and quite a few others, I find that it’s arrogant when someone says, “If I can do it, anyone who works can do it.” It’s just not that simple… and it never has been.