One universal characteristic of people, even highly educated individuals, is that we tend to prefer simple and uncomplicated answers, even to problems that are anything but simple.

That’s one of the reasons why getting people to understand the danger of global warming and climate change is so difficult, and when you add in the problem that the effects of what world industries and what billions of people choose to do today won’t fully impact the world ecosphere for years, if not for decades or generations, the difficulty becomes much greater.

The heat waves the U.S. is experiencing right now are the result of “normal” summer weather patterns boosted by years of underlying incremental changes, and these changes have impacts in all sorts of interlocking changes. There have been literally thousands of studies confirming these effects, and essentially no reputable ones refuting the overall trend, yet people see all those numbers and throw up their hands.

The article here [ https://www.tomorrow.io/weather/blog/global-warming-status/] [brought to my attention by a reader] presents those interactions without presenting the myriad of numbers and calculations behind the descriptive analysis. But the numbers do exist, supported by thousands of studies over years. Despite claims to the contrary, there’s no reputable evidence against global warming or against the human contribution to it.

Yet, accurate as I believe the article to be in general terms, there are always outliers that climate deniers will cite, using hard numbers for a specific instance. For example, the vast majority of glaciers in the world are shrinking, but there are a handful that are increasing. Antarctic ice shelves are crumbling in overall extent, but inland build-up of Antarctic ice is increasing in some areas because warmer ocean air around the Antarctic holds more moisture that turns to snow in colder areas.

People also rely more on personal experience and anecdotal evidence than on statistics. But anecdotal evidence and experience only persist as long as individuals live. I can personally testify how the importation and stockpiling of massive quantities of water by the Denver Water Board fueled runaway growth in the Denver Metro area, with a resulting local micro-climate that is far more humid than the dusty plains where I grew up [which are now damper and hotter wall-to-wall suburban houses]. But there are fewer and fewer of us who can testify to those times, and if there’s no one left to relay those stories and you don’t trust statistics and records, the actual facts get ignored… or ignored even more.

Dialogue is a key component of the vast majority of fiction, and certainly of the kind of books that I read and write. While readers and writers can have distinctively different views on dialogue, often what readers, and even some editors, think is “realistic” dialogue is nothing of the sort.

Over the years a small number of readers have occasionally complained that my dialogue is too formal. And compared to the way many people talk today, it probably is, but throughout history, the educated and professional classes in any society have used more formal dialogue. Some languages even had “high” and “low” versions. Ideally, dialogue should be specific to the characters and their culture, not to what’s comfortable or familiar to editors, but in writing there has to be compromise. I’m not about to write in the equivalent of high German, but the word choice of those who would be speaking in that fashion should suggest formality.

What many Americans, in particular, fail to understand is that most cultures have far tighter social customs and restrictions, as did an earlier United States, than the U.S. does at present. The January 6th attempted “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol reflects this. In no earlier U.S. period would that many Americans ever thought it proper to storm the Capitol. It wasn’t “the way” things were done. And certain phrases and terms just weren’t used in “polite society.” What tends to be forgotten is that in most societies and times, the equivalent of “polite society” is where the power lies.

In practice, that means less formal dialogue belongs to the outsiders, not the insiders. It also means, even in fantasy and science fiction cultures, if they’re to be realistic, that there should be unlegislated or customary restrictions on what is proper to be said in public, and in private, and on what actions are “beyond the pale.” Obviously, customs change over time in any culture, but history has shown that societies without unspoken restrictions seldom endure, while enduring societies have more unspoken restrictive customs and speech patterns than are obvious to the casual or careless observer.

Over the weekend, I read a letter to the editor in the “local” paper (it’s mainly about St. George, but includes regional news and some stories about Cedar City). The writer was deeply concerned about the rapid and uncontrolled growth in St. George, and how the pleasant and friendly town had changed into a small city with traffic and rude drivers, growing air pollution, runaway building that would lead to water shortages, and other urban problems.

Then the writer went on to describe how the same process had occurred in the Los Angeles in which he’d grown up.

Now, the writer was totally accurate, possibly even understating how much St. George has grown in the past twenty years, but it didn’t even seem to occur to him that he represented the reason why St. George has grown so much. In both Cedar City and St. George, the “immigration” numbers from California are staggering.

When we moved here from New Hampshire twenty-eight years ago, the reasons were purely economic and professional – the only full-time job in her field that my wife could find (after massive cutbacks in the New Hampshire higher education system) was here. Writers are portable, female soprano opera directors not nearly so much. At that time, the move was far from ideal, but there weren’t any other feasible options. We bought an existing house [which we slowly spent twenty years repairing and upgrading] on a street where only one other family happened to be “immigrants” – and he was another academic from the east coast.

For the first fifteen years after we arrived, only three houses in the two block stretch in our area changed hands. Since then, more than half the homes have been sold, and every one of them, except possibly one, has been bought by a family from California, most of them retirees.

This is happening all across the southwestern corner of Utah. I understand why people want to leave California, particularly retirees who can sell homes in California for ridiculously inflated prices and buy a retirement house in Utah (often larger) for far less, but it does mystify me that those who come here don’t seem to understand that, when so many of them descend upon a largely rural and arid area, they’ve become part of the problem, particularly when a good percentage of them oppose local government controls on growth, but then complain about uncontrolled growth.

When I was a teenager, all too many years ago, I knew a few other “guys” [how else can I refer to males of that indeterminate age too old to be teenagers and too immature to be adults] who doted on their cars. Now, I’ve always liked cars, but I never obsessed over them. I once thought I wanted a Jaguar XKE, that is, until I drove one and discovered that its only redeeming quality was the speed it could attain, and that its handling left a great deal to be desired.

And until I was much older, my cars were all used, and, frankly, their original owners had bought them for practicality, except for the cherry red Corvair, and I have no idea why the grandmother who owned it previously had bought it. I got it because it was affordable.

But back in the late 1950s, the car guys all seemed obsessed with lowering and/or raking their vehicles and then replacing their mufflers with glass-packs, which apparently, in those days, met the legal definition of mufflers. The result was, predictably, that you could hear those vehicles coming from blocks away, possibly for a good mile in the then-exurban area where I grew up.

I thought that era was gone, and it seemed to be, except in the last year or so I’ve begun to see giant trucks with lifted suspensions. I can also hear them a good half mile away because they’re even louder than the 1950s vehicles equipped with glass-packs. They vibrate the double pane windows in the house, and set every dog on the street either to barking at the intrusion or whining in terror, depending on age and breed of the canine and the temperament of the owner. These are not old clunkers driven by post-teens, nor are they driven by men of my age and older trying to relive a misspent youth. They’re usually massive late-model shiny pickup trucks, usually either gleaming white with lots of chrome or jet black… and occasionally metallic red. What they pick up is another question, because some of them have a truck bed so high that it would require a cherry-picker or forklift to load it. Oh, and the worst of them belch black smoke.

Now, I can understand the need for hauling things. We have two vehicles. One is an economical 21 year old Toyota RAV, and the other is an 11 year old Tahoe, necessary for hauling such things as opera props, stage furniture and the like, but I still can’t figure out the appeal of the monsters that roar up the hill on which we live… or what else they’re useful for… and for that matter, how they’re even legal under current emissions and noise standards.

I couldn’t see the appeal when I was a teenager, and I still can’t… unless it’s the desire to be as assertively and ostentatiously obnoxious as possible.

The other day we received a box delivered by one of the major package delivery services that looked like it had been through a battle zone of some sort. Despite double-walled thick cardboard packaging and copious internal packaging, the contents reflected serious and repeated impacts of some force. Now, I’m not mentioning which of the three major outfits serving us [USPS, FedEx, or UPS] delivered this package, because I’m not seeing much difference between those carriers. No matter which entity delivers packages, at least one in ten arrives looking that way.

As I’ve mentioned before, thanks to the “success” of Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot, for us, shopping for much besides basic hardware, home maintenance, and food requires either a three to four hour drive [one way] or online purchases. The only boots that fit my feet are no longer sold here, nor are any shoes my wife can wear. The same is true of my shirts, trousers, and vests, and anything my wife would want to wear, either in public or private.

It didn’t used to be that way, but that’s the result of the undeclared monopolization of the United States, at least for anyone who doesn’t live in a major metropolitan area. And from what my offspring who live in such areas say, it’s even sometimes true there.

That’s one big reason why, all across the country, more and more gets delivered. But the problem with this is that it’s put enormous stress on all the delivery services. Too many people in those services could care less about labels such as “fragile” or “perishable.” So… there’s more and more damage.

As a result, shippers are resorting to bigger boxes, more bracing, and more padding. That increases shipping costs, and those packages take up more space. The extra packaging creates more waste, and there aren’t enough recycling operations to handle it.

But the monopolists aren’t the ones bearing all the additional financial and environmental costs of their operations. Everyone else is, one way or the other.

Earlier this summer, Naomi Osaka, the then number one woman in the world in professional tennis, refused to attend press conferences and then dropped out of the French Open and subsequently decided not to play at Wimbledon, citing her mental health. Officials at the French Open noted that the terms for playing included the requirement to attend press conferences and threatened to fine her for non-appearances at press conferences.

Being a successful professional athlete requires years of grueling preparation and takes a toll on the body, not just in contact sports such as football and basketball, but even in sports that don’t seem as physically damaging, such as golf and tennis. That’s why sports careers are usually short, and why players want to make as much money as they can while they can. This can create personal stress.

I understand that. It’s part of the structure. What I have trouble with is when players get upset with the media, whether it’s in football, basketball, golf, or tennis. Like it or not, without the media there wouldn’t be the money behind professional sports, and that’s because professional sports are entertainment. High-stakes, high-personal-impact, high-stress entertainment, but still entertainment.

Professional musicians get paid for how they entertain. The same is true of writers. Both can face a great deal of adverse public criticism.

Now, no entertainer, athletic or otherwise, should be subjected to abuse from the media or the general public, but neither should athletes or entertainers be exempt from reporting by or meeting with the media, especially when they’ve signed contracts that require media contacts, and particularly when they’re making what top athletes and entertainers earn. A certain amount of press second-guessing and pressure comes with the territory, and not all of it will be favorable. If an athlete or entertainer doesn’t like it, then maybe they should reconsider their choice of profession.

Almost every true professional in any field faces criticism, either from superiors or subordinates, from clients and/or customers, or from media or government regulators. And for most of us, opting out isn’t an option. I don’t see why it should be for professional athletes, particularly given how much those like Naomi Osaka make, and when the terms are laid out in advance.

This August will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the initial publication of The Magic of Recluce. It was not nominated for any awards in the field when it was initially published or thereafter.

The World Fantasy Award for books published in 1991 had six finalists for best novel. Of those six titles, one is no longer available in any form, except possibly through rare book dealers. The other five are available in Kindle, but not from their original publishers. Of those five, the only new print format is trade paperback or print on demand form. Only one of them is selling at even a mid-list level currently.

There were five Hugo finalists for books published in 1991. Again, from what I can tell, all five are available in kindle format. Only one of the five is listed as having a current in-print paperback edition. Three have modest mid-list sales.

The Magic of Recluce is obviously available in Kindle, audio, and mass market paperback, and has been continuously in print for thirty years, unlike most of the award winners initially published in the same year.

Now, I’m far from the only author who can make such a claim. Perhaps the most notable example is Robert Jordan. None of the books in The Wheel of Time were even nominated while Jordan was alive, and the one Hugo nomination The Wheel of Time received was in 2014, seven years after he died.

Betty Ballantine, the co-founder of Bantam and Ballantine Books, once observed that there were other more important honors for a book than immediate awards. Awards are often fleeting, but sales over the years are more likely to indicate, at the least a lasting appeal, and, at times, true excellence unrecognized by awards too often based on “standards du jour.”

I don’t think it’s any surprise to most thinking people that the federal government is spending too much money that it doesn’t have. Yes, we need infrastructure improvements, desperately. We also need to spend more money on basic, basic research, because that’s the foundation for future technology and it’s the kind of research that U.S. industry doesn’t spend enough on, but we need to pay for that spending by increasing taxes, not by printing money and creating more debt.

And we need to increase taxes now… before we destroy our economy.

Right now, we’re told that the economy is recovering…and it is, but barely, and that recovery is being pushed by increasing debt. We cannot keep funding more and more programs based on debt. While liberal economists claim that these programs will generate more tax revenue, the facts show that the marginal revenues generated by such programs are less than the additional costs of the programs.

So far, the government has been able to manage the debt by artificially manipulating interest rates to keep them low, and, as I’ve also pointed out more than once, the federal government has changed the criteria it uses to calculate inflation. This combination, if continued, will have disastrous several results.

First, lower calculated inflation rates allow the government to pay less interest on federal debt instruments. Those lower “official” inflation rates also reduce cost of living increases on Social Security benefits and military retirement, and any other federal programs indexed to official cost-of-living indices.

One financial expert, Jared Dillon, pointed out this week, “If we calculated inflation the same way we did in 1990, the inflation rate would currently be 8%. If we calculated it the same way we did in 1980, it would be at 13%.”

But… if the official interest rate were anywhere near that, the government would have no way to pay the interest on the national debt – except by printing more money, which would spark runaway inflation. The government can’t afford to do that.

So, in the meantime, the actual purchasing power of Social Security benefits is being even further eroded. The purchasing power of the dollar continues to decline, and that means maintaining federal programs takes more and more inflated dollars.

At the same time, those low interest rates discourage traditional private saving and investment and encourage people trying to maintain the value of their savings into more and more highly speculative investments, which has led to an asset “bubble” and inflated housing prices nation-wide.

Without a significant tax increase, this inflationary bubble will just get worse, and no matter what happens, the U.S. faces turbulent and difficult economic times ahead, times that cannot be resolved by artificially low interest rates and printing more money.

Almost never does a day go by when we don’t receive at least one solicitation from a charity, the vast majority from charities to which we have never contributed and to which we most likely never will. But even charities to which we have contributed continue to “remind” us of how great the need is, often in the same letter in which they offer thanks and a receipt for a previous contribution.

Our personal policy is never even to answer telephone solicitations – we monitor the call screen – and do not answer unknown numbers. People we don’t know can easily leave a message if it’s that important. We also have a firm policy of one contribution per year to each charity, although there are two or three for which I might occasionally – very occasionally – make an exception.

Despite years of adherence to those policies, we still get attempted telephone solicitations and an average of more than twenty charitable solicitations by mail every week. There are a number of “charities” whose name I recognize because they’ve sent so many appeals that we’ve never acknowledged. Some of the charities we do support still attempt to obtain multiple donations, which I ignore.

These days there seems to be a charity for damned-near everything, and they each want to persuade potential donors of how great their need is. Some of those needs, I know, are real. Some are real in the minds of those who created the charity, and a great many, I suspect, address a “need” of some sort as a way of doing well for those who administer the charity.

I’m old enough to recall when there were few enough “national” charities that one could remember most of them – The Red Cross, United Way, March of Dimes, and a few others. Now there are literally thousands, if not more. Yet what puzzles me is the fact that as national health and living standards have improved, charities have proliferated, and, according to the Treasury Department, American individuals, foundations, and corporations donate $450 billion every year.

Some of this charitable proliferation is likely because many people have become more aware of needs and inequities not addressed by government and religion. Some of it is because, as medical care and social support networks have improved, people who would have died early or from battlefield injuries are surviving. Some of it is because the definition of need has broadened enormously, to include animals, as well as international and environmental needs.

For all that, somehow, I have a hard time believing that so many people are so much worse off now than they were a generation or two back.

The other day I read about a 31year-old National Guard veteran who is dying of stage four colon cancer because of two things: excessive exposure to airborne toxic chemicals created by U.S. Army disposal techniques by deployed forces and a lack of effective medical care by the V.A. after discharge from active duty.

I wish this surprised me, but it didn’t. It’s merely a newer version of what happened in Vietnam with Agent Orange and other exposures, and it’s due to a basic flaw in U.S. society. As a society, unless required by law, we never plan to follow through adequately, in terms of both maintenance and funding. Let’s send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, but don’t plan for safe disposal of waste and damaged or abandoned equipment because it’s either too costly or too dangerous and, especially don’t plan for and fund adequate rehabilitation for those who come home injured and possibly disabled. The failures of DOD and the V.A. in these areas have been exposed and publicized for decades, but nothing has changed that much.

That’s not the only military aspect, either. At one point several years ago, something like thirty percent of military aircraft were unavailable for flight because of the lack of maintenance and spare parts.

But it’s not just about veterans. It’s everywhere. The United States built the greatest highway system ever, but it’s falling apart everywhere, especially the bridges, because there’s never been enough funding for maintenance and repair. The same is true of the electric power grid – especially in Texas. It’s true of dams and water projects.

It’s true in education. We’ve created a system where the only way for most young people can hope for a decent-paying job requires going into debt for years. From what I can tell, almost no one in authority ever seriously asked about the economic, social, and practical repercussions of such a system while it was being created. Nor did anyone ask if “the college for everyone” model made sense for young people or for the nation as a whole.

The principal reason why the college cost fiasco occurred is that almost every state in the Union decided years ago not to maintain the state’s per pupil funding at public colleges and universities while expanding enrollment and facilities (lower state taxes were clearly a higher priority). And it’s often worse than that. At my wife the professor’s university, in order to serve the increased enrollment mandated by the legislature, the university has raised funds for new buildings from donors, but the legislature skimps on maintenance funds for those buildings, and big donors are far less willing to support the less glamorous business of maintenance and support. A previous dean of the library system was removed from his position because he had the nerve to tell the provost that there was no physical way to supply the services demanded by the administration with existing funds. They eliminated his position, but haven’t found any way to fund those services. Now, this year the university has had to cap new enrollment for the coming school year because the soaring price of housing has created a severe shortage of affordable student housing – not to mention housing affordable for anyone in Cedar City who is not comparatively affluent.

The southwest of the United States is suffering the worst drought in 1200 years and reservoirs are at all-time lows. Yet more and more people are moving there every year, and until the last year or so, the politicians and industrial leaders ignored the experts who kept warning of the problem.

And those are just a few examples of the failure to look ahead and to follow-through on commitments.

While public opinion polls currently are less than infallible, at least when they’re attempting to forecast election results, their margin of error is usually within a few percentage points. This means that polls are often not terribly useful in predicting national election results, but they can be very useful in quantifying public sentiment… and sometimes that quantification is frightening… if one considers the implications.

For example, public opinion polls show that roughly half of Americans are unconcerned about election laws that effectively restrict voting access or otherwise give a partisan advantage to one party, including continuing gerrymandering. This group of roughly half of American is much more concerned about infrastructure, immediate pay improvement, and climate change. From what I can determine, more people appear to support Trump’s lie about having the election “stolen” from him than the number who are concerned about election restrictions.

I can certainly agree that for someone unemployed or underemployed, getting a job or getting a better job is of far greater concern than future electoral restrictions, but ignoring current and future election law restrictions is only going to make it harder to improve problems such as inadequate education, wages suppressed by a low federal minimum wage, a crumbling public infrastructure, and the growing challenge of climate change, because the people who back restricting the right to vote, both directly and indirectly, are predominantly the same people who oppose dealing with the problems of low-income, unemployed, or underemployed people. Those who push election voting restrictions are also among those who benefit the most from keeping wages low and who oppose increasing the minimum wage.

Yet far too many Americans fail to understand that restricting voting access, over time, is just as much an economic issue as a legal issue; it’s just not as obvious to most people.

Almost all the time, novels – and their authors – are judged by how they depict what happens in their work, and how the protagonists and possibly the antagonists act, either to further or thwart the action. Sometimes, the protagonist must accomplish something against great odds, and sometimes he or she must thwart the diabolical plans of the antagonist.

In real life, however, sometimes there’s a third possibility – that an evil is occurring slowly and inexorably and that very few people are aware of that evil or that they’re aware of the events and don’t see them as evil. As a result, no one does anything, or too few people do anything.

Now, there are more than a few novels where the protagonist appears in such situations and attacks and miraculously and quickly brings the evil and the evildoers to an end. In history and real life, however, that usually doesn’t happen… and when it does, it usually takes time and/or a war or two and also, usually, very few people are pleased with the results.

In the first century or so after the creation of the Islamic faith, women played notable and powerful roles, but as the clerics (male) became more powerful, women became less so and were marginalized on a continuing basis… and few if any men with power did anything about it, certainly nothing that reversed that trend. Now, personally, that strikes me as a growing evil, but it clearly didn’t bother the men of the faith.

Certainly, the western European conquest of North America didn’t seem in the slightest evil to the conquerors even though the results were effectively genocidal as far as Native Americans were concerned, and, from what I’ve seen, even to this day, more sympathy and publicity goes to the descendants of slaves than to Native Americans.

But to write a novel where evil grows… and is either praised or ignored? There are some – such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, 1984, and others – but, face it, how many books as dark as those do most people want to read, especially in stressful times? Most readers want excitement and uplifting stories.

The “problem” with uplifting stories is that they can either become wish-fulfillment escapes or create the idea that change for the better is the norm and that it’s not that hard to accomplish.

So what’s a writer to do?

The other day I came across an interesting article in Archaeology dealing with an ancient city I’d never heard of – Ugarit. The city was founded around 2000 B.C. on the coast of what is now northern Syria, presumably because it had a good harbor. As an independent city-state located on the northern border of the Egyptian empire and on the southern border of the Hittite empire, for roughly 800 years Ugarit maintained semi-independence and prospered as a trading hub. At some time in the period 1350-1315 B.C. Ugarit became a vassal-state of the Hittite Empire, but remained self-governing, and continued trading with both Egypt and the Hittite Empire, as well as with other Mediterranean lands.

Unfortunately, Ugarit was attacked, burned, and leveled by the “Sea Peoples” in roughly 1185 B.C., during a period when the “Sea Peoples” also obliterated states and cities in Cyprus, Canaan, and Turkey . The area around Ugarit was not reoccupied for almost 300 years, and the ruins of the city were covered and never reoccupied. But because all records were kept on clay tablets, more than 5000 have been recovered since the 1930s, and many have been translated, revealing that the city was a wealthy commercial hub, where five separate writing systems and eight languages were in use simultaneously. Ugarit also boasted a large royal palace and a hundred and fifty foot tall temple to Baal that was likely also a lighthouse towering over the harbor.

Culturally, Ugarit was also different in other ways from neighboring lands. Women had far more autonomy compared to contemporaneous cultures, and records show that women owned property in their own right, that unmarried or widowed women could be heads of households, and that queens had separate estates and held prominent diplomatic and religious positions. Poems and what appear to be scripts for plays with stage direction have also been discovered, written in the Ugaritic language, as well as works from other cultures.

In the century before Urgarit’s fall, the scribes there developed and began to use the first alphabetic system that included signs for vowels, but the destruction of the city was so thorough that no one survived or returned, even to claim buried hordes of wealth, and it was more than two centuries later before the Phoenicians re-developed alphabetic writing.

In reading all that, I couldn’t help wondering how much else was lost, and whether history would have been different if a city-state I’d never heard of had survived.

Recently, I read a review of a forthcoming S&SF book that began by trashing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby as a story about insufferable and deeply uninteresting spoiled rich heterosexual white people and their petty self-centered problems. And on the surface, the reviewer is correct. But on a deeper level, Gatsby is also about an ambitious and flawed outsider trying to force his way into the power structure to gain acceptance.

Now whether one likes Gatsby or not, it’s simplistic to characterize the novel as being merely about spoiled rich people, just as it would be simplistic to characterize N. K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season as a future survival story in a world dominated by plate tectonics or Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as being about survival on a frigid planet inhabited by hermaphrodites.

Yet too many readers and reviewers only consider the superficialities when reading or reviewing books. Currently, marketing doesn’t help either, because good and complex books don’t lend themselves to “elevator pitch” descriptions. And too often, the elevator pitch descriptions, either by the publisher, reviewers, or readers, focus on what can be described simplistically, rather than what cannot, when what cannot be described in simple terms may be what the novel is really all about.

And yes, there are those few, ultra-intellectual reviewers who go to the opposite extreme and focus on how the author’s psychic traumas and/or personal life (as is most likely the case with Gatsby) are reflected in the “subtext” of the book, or how the writer should or shouldn’t be supported because of his or her or their political outlook, any or all of which, while they may or may not be true, has nothing to do with whether the novel is a good piece of work on its own.

According to studies, “critical” reviews, for the most part, don’t influence sales that much. It’s more likely that sales influence reviews, one way or another. Yet far too many writers, especially those with “literary” aspirations, worry about reviews, which they can’t control, rather than spending that energy on writing the best book they can.

The other night we took visiting family to a very nice local Italian restaurant, one that, while not pricing menu items the way they would be on either coast, would not qualify as inexpensive anywhere, except perhaps in comparison to Michelin starred restaurants.

Everyone in our group was dressed in a fashion I’d call tasteful casual, the women in dresses or blouses and trousers, the men in slacks and collared shirts. The restaurant is enclosed and air-conditioned and was close to full. Not a single man besides those in our group wore a collared shirt, and several inhabited shorts or trousers that either swallowed them or which they barely fit into. Most wore flip-flops or tennis shoes without socks. And the T-shirts had generally seen better days. Hell, the T-shirts I do yardwork in were in better condition than some I saw in the restaurant. The women weren’t any dressier, either.

When we took our daughter and her daughter to the airport, many of those entering the security check point were attired in an even more “casual” fashion.

I’m not talking about well-fitted T-shirts and jeans with sneakers. I’m talking tank tops and too tight shorts revealing too much corpulence in the wrong places and flip-flops.

Now… I realize that I’m certainly less casual than almost any writer out there, since for nine months of the year I write wearing long-sleeved dress shirts and slacks [usually with vests], switching to polo shirts with slacks only when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees F. I do wear boots, rather than sneakers, but that’s because any brand of sneakers I’ve tried hurts my feet. I don’t expect other writers working at home to follow my sartorial preferences [not that many could ever be persuaded], but wearing worn T-shirts to nice sit-down restaurants does strike me as being in bad taste, and it can’t be a matter of money, because people without money can’t afford those restaurants.

Is it the idea of “freedom,” carried to excess, i.e., “I’m comfortable dressing like a slob, and I should have the freedom to be a slob everywhere?” Or is it that good taste or manners are obsolete and considered irrelevant? Or possibly, the flaunting of wealth and power through a total disregard for neatness and taste?

If that’s the “new wealth,” I’m in even greater support of higher income taxes.

Last week our son and his wife came to spend a week with us, and a good time was had by all. Said son is the U.S. manager for a small, family-owned, boutique British retail firm, which means he’s financially comfortable, but not extravagantly paid. They flew coach, and his observations on the air carrier were succinct – “They try to nickel and dime you to death.”

For example, although they’d booked their reservations together, when they got to the airport they were told they couldn’t sit together unless they paid another $75. Since the airline going to Utah isn’t the one he flies on business, the baggage fees were $25 per bag. I lost track of the various other fees involved.

His experience is hardly unique. Everywhere I look, there are fees tacked on. Get a new cellphone, even with the same carrier and with the same number, and the odds are you’ll be charged an activation fee – even though said “activation” takes a few minutes at most. I can see such a fee for a new customer… but for an existing one?

Can you even get a new car for the advertised base price? And would you want to drive it? How many people stay with “basic” cable or satellite television services?

Higher education is notorious for such fees. Books, lab fees, activity fees, accompanist fees, parking fees, etc. And I’m sure everyone can cite other examples.

Part of the reason for all those fees is because almost everyone shops for everything on price… and retailers and others use low prices to lure people in, and then tack on the fees, because the initial low prices often don’t even cover costs.

My wife the professor is always amazed at how often university students don’t look at the bottom line when choosing a college or university. A higher-cost more selective university will offer a student what appears to be a significant scholarship, perhaps double what a less prestigious college might offer, but so often the students only compare the scholarship offer and not the bottom-line cost. If tuition is $30,000 a year at university A, and a student is offered a $15,000 a year scholarship, the tuition cost is $15,000. University B, with similar offerings but less prestige, offers a $10,000 scholarship against tuition of $20,000… and the student or family often pick the higher scholarship, even though they’ll end paying [or owing] $20,000 more after four years. Of course, since universities are identical, other considerations have to be weighed, but so many students – and their parents – don’t even think about that.

But… everywhere I look I see this pattern… and how many people fall for it.

For the past several years there have been various “furors” in the F&SF writing community about who’s been publishing what, about who’s not publishing what, and about which type of books are getting nominated for what awards. The latest semi-furor seems to rest on the idea that traditional publishing houses, i.e., the big New York publishers, will collapse because they’re now publishing a much wider range of books, instead of largely publishing the kind of F&SF books released from roughly 1955 to around 2000, that is, largely male-dominated, action-oriented, speculative fiction where the emphasis was on science or magic and action. Not that a lot of other types of F&SF fiction weren’t also published, beginning in the 1970s and increasing over the years, but the trend has been toward a broader range of F&SF. The result, predictably, is that fewer writers who produce “traditional” male-oriented action F&SF are getting published, and those who aren’t getting published or not as much aren’t happy about it.

First, if I’ve figured correctly, fiction only comprises 45% of total book sales revenue, and F&SF only comprises about 15-17% of total fiction sales, or roughly seven percent of total revenues. I may be a bit off, but those figures are in the right ball park.

The other aspect I’ve noticed is that, very quietly, the traditional publishers are inspecting their bottom lines and weeding out editors and imprints that aren’t selling that well. I don’t see them throwing out authors whose books sell well just because they write action-oriented fiction featuring predominantly male characters.

Second, over the past three centuries there’s always been a market for inexpensive written stories and entertainment, but who published it and how has changed over time.

The “penny-dreadfuls” of the mid-1800s in Great Britain were cheap, usually gory. adventure/crime/horror stories aimed at young men, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the market was swamped with “penny” knockoffs. They were printed on paper so flimsy that very few examples remain.

In turn, they were followed, not only in Great Britain, but in the United States, and elsewhere, by the era of pulp magazines, which by the mid-twentieth century largely gave way to the mass market paperback. I was personally very familiar with F&SF mass market paperbacks, because my mother had a small gray bookcase filled with them, and they cost during that time from thirty-five to fifty cents, thirty-five cents then being roughly equivalent to $3.50 today. But what gets overlooked in such comparisons is that that thirty-five cent paperback was only 150 pages long, compared to the massive 350-600 page plus paperbacks of today. In essence, mass market paperbacks cost about as much per page as they did sixty years ago.

The cost problem isn’t so much inflation; it’s purchasing power. In 1960, a worker could buy at least two paperbacks for an hour’s minimum wage. Today, an hour’s work at the federal minimum wage won’t even buy one mass market paperback.

This makes lower-cost e-books more attractive, and with the advent of e-books, writers who don’t want to deal with traditional publishers or writers rejected by them can self-publish, and most of those who do so charge less than traditional publisher. Often, as was the case with the penny-dreadfuls and pulps, the production quality and distribution leave something to be desired. But sometimes, those production qualities are good, and sometimes the writing is also good, but, from what I’ve seen and sampled, on the whole most indie-produced work technically isn’t as good as what’s turned out by traditional publishing.

The bottom line, as I see it, is that indie publishing offers an opportunity for writers either rejected or ignored by traditional publishers, for various reasons, and some few will likely make far more money than if they were traditionally published.

Most won’t, but even those authors who are traditionally published aren’t always able to support themselves on their writing income. I was “successfully” published in the traditional fashion for twenty years before I could support myself on my writing. Today, unlike in the past, self-publishing is practically and economically feasible, and there’s still the opportunity to carve out an income and readership for those authors not chosen by traditional publishing.

But despite the appearance of indie publishing, I don’t see the traditional publishers going away, partly because while the indie market and the traditional market overlap, they’re not exactly the same, and, besides, the market’s big enough for both.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:

I’ve been reminded that during the later part of the pulp era and most of the mass market paperback era, comic books were also a significant print entertainment forces, and, of course, now graphic novels are in the mix.

Once upon a time you could at least count on the vast majority of politicians in either party telling the truth some of the time and there being at least a grain or shade of truth in the rest of their statements. Like everything else in politics the speaking habits of the majority of politicians in both parties have polarized.

The majority of the Republican Party, in its efforts to hang on to what it believes are its core supporters, has essentially decided that even a pretense at speaking something vaguely resembling the facts is not only unnecessary, but that the only way it can hold onto any power – and possibly even win the next election – is to spread lies and more lies. Lies, of course, that are more attractive to Republican rank-and-file than the truth.

Now, there’s always been a strain of this in politics, the most notable in recent eras being the Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who invented the numbers of Communists he thought was plausible in whatever group he was targeting at that moment. There’s also been a strain of virulent anti-immigrant “nativist” politics throughout our entire history as a nation. The “anti-black” politics permeated the Democratic Party until Lyndon Johnson pushed for civil rights, and then those who opposed full civil rights [or sometimes any civil rights] migrated to the Republican Party.

For all that, the current lies pushed by Republicans pretty much take the cake. No other political party has ever tried to deny the results of any national election by force. Sometimes, they’ve manipulated the system, but having a sitting President incite a riot to deny the results of an election is unprecedented. When a Republican congressman says that the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol wasn’t much more than a normal tourist event, when the Republican leader in the House of Representatives continues to insist that the election was stolen, when the Republican Party strips one of the most conservative members of its conference of her post because she stood up against those lies, it’s not about political beliefs, and it’s certainly not about anything close to the truth.

Now… the Democrats aren’t saints, and they often are very “selective” about the truth, but at least there’s some truth somewhere. They do have facts and statistics about oppression and Republican voter suppression, about poverty, and about the inadequacy of the minimum wage. It’s a shame that they’re not nearly as strong about economics, but we can survive bad economics, partly because economics work, despite the politicians, but laws based on lies will destroy a democratic society long before bad economics will, and bad economics can be fixed without resorting to a civil war.

After all, the last time states decided that mandating oppression and denying the vote was a state’s right didn’t turn out all that well.

The other day I ran across a reference that showed the percentage of national wealth in the U.S. held by “generations” when their median age reached 40. When the baby boomers reached forty, they held 21% of the national wealth; gen-X had 9% at age 40; while millennials, who just reached 40, hold only 5%. For a number of reasons, which I won’t go into here, that’s not surprising.

The next statement, however, did catch my eye, because the writer asked why the most-educated generation was the least wealthy and prosperous. Needless to say, my first reaction was to think “millennials” aren’t the most educated generation; they’re only the most ‘degreed’ generation.

As I’ve noted, on and off for years, overall, education has been dumbed down over the last fifty years, largely because of the push to get more high school and college graduates. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that the brightest, most educated millennials are generally as bright and as educated as the brightest in any previous generation, but to get there, they’ve had to pile up graduate degrees, and, as a result, have also piled up enormous debt, which is obviously one of the reasons they have a smaller share of the national wealth.

As for those other millennial college graduates, the ones who aren’t at the very top, I personally believe they’ve been even more cheated than those millennials skilled and fortunate enough to come out on top. The remaining millennials, in all too many instances, labor under the illusion that they’re well-educated, even when they cannot write a coherent paragraph, analyze a problem, complete a task without detailed instruction and continual supervision, or understand that every single profession requires a great deal of grunt work, perhaps high-level grunt work, but grunt-work all the same. Too many of them have been so “spoon fed” mere bits of knowledge and are so afraid of making as mistake that they have very little, if any, initiative.

It’s not that they’re without intelligence or ability. It’s that they’ve never been taught how to fully use those abilities, nor have they been taught young that failure isn’t fatal and that there are always consequences. It’s that the education system, society, and, frankly, often their parents, have failed them, and it’s been an incredibly expensive failure, both for them and society. While almost no one in power will admit this failure, at the same time the costs to these “lost millennials,” and to society, are still piling up and will for years to come.

With all the furor about inequality of income, inequality in education, and statistics being tossed out about how poorly minorities do on standardized tests, maybe all the experts and education consultants ought to take a hard look at some basic facts. The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 37% of U.S. high school seniors could read proficiently and less than 25% were proficient in mathematics. Interestingly enough, in 2018, roughly 37% of Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

The bottom line is fairly simple. If a student isn’t proficient in reading and mathematics, the odds are extremely high that they won’t do well college or in most high-paying fields. Not only that, but roughly half of adolescents and young adults with criminal records have reading difficulties. Similarly, about half of youths with a history of substance abuse also have reading problems.

Study after study has shown that the vast majority of students who don’t learn to read well in grade school never will catch up, which is borne out by the fact that 63% of high school seniors still can’t read proficiently. This isn’t helped by the fact that high school students have moved from reading to other leisure entertainment venues over the last 50 years. In 1970, 70% read from magazines or books daily; today the figure is 16%, and reading bits and pieces from a computer screen isn’t the same as reading a book.

In addition, individuals who develop reading skills are far more likely to develop writing skills, and the decline in writing skill among students entering college is at least partly, if not largely, linked to the decline in reading – both reading required in school and reading for pleasure or self-education.

As I’ve noted in other blogs, basic reading and writing are skills that need to be learned before the brain’s linguistic centers mature, which generally occurs in the mid-teens – certainly well before students enter college. What politicians and bureaucrats – and too many activists – tend to overlook is that mastery of the basic skills of reading and mathematics at an early age is far more important than all the furor over tests, GPA, social/economic inequality… or even a broad curriculum or cultural diversity.

Admittedly, students who come from higher economic backgrounds have a tremendous advantage because their background boosts the skills and referents essential to become a proficient reader. But as certain schools have demonstrated, those skills have been successfully taught to the most economically disadvantaged children. The larger problem is that too much is being “taught” too early to far too many students who don’t have the linguistic skills to really grasp that knowledge… or to learn material on their own, which becomes increasingly important in secondary and higher education.

The furor over tests such as the SAT or ACT misses a fundamental point. The test scores reflect, not just raw intelligence, but also the ability to process the material swiftly and accurately. Since most tests are timed, students who cannot read quickly and well and calculate quickly and accurately are penalized and classified as less able. And, unfortunately, they’ll be “penalized” for the rest of their life, because employers want jobs done quickly and well. Slow readers and calculators may be accurate, but in the real world time is money.

The solution doesn’t lie in removing or changing standardized tests, or in fiddling with college admission criteria. It lies in improving those two basic skills at a young age, and I don’t see the many educators or any politicians on any level addressing that in a meaningful or useful way. Until it is, all the proposed reforms involving colleges and higher education are essentially rearranging the same old flawed furniture.