In Shakespeare’s King Henry VI (part 2) Dick the Butcher declares, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” a statement which, in the context of the play, is actually one in support of lawyers, but if Shakespeare were living today, I’m not so certain that Dick and Jack Cade wouldn’t be supporting the lawyers [since Cade’s purpose was to undermine the rule of law], given not only the damage they’ve wreaked on U.S. society with the excesses of tort claims, but also the unseen and unacknowledged damages that have been incurred at almost all levels of society as a result of the efforts of businesses, governmental entities, and other organizations to avoid litigation.

Trial lawyers continue to insist that medical tort claims lawsuits are necessary to remove bad doctors, while ignoring the facts that very few such claims ever lead to a doctor being removed from practice and that the abundance of medical malpractice lawsuits has increased the cost of malpractice insurance astronomically in some specialties, even for those doctors who’ve never had a claim against them. An associated problem is the fact that doctors often ask for more diagnostic tests than medically necessary, just so that they can claim that they haven’t overlooked any possibility and to bolster themselves against malpractice claims. As a result, healthcare costs increase. Everyone focuses on the issue of costs to the victims of bad medicine, but there’s been no real consideration of the costs to the rest of the profession or the increase in costs for healthcare insurance, and for those purchasing it.

While this is the most public example of the costs of attorneys, it’s far from the only one.

Post-tenure review is now becoming more and more widespread at universities, despite the fact that a very small percentage of tenured faculty actually abuse their position or fail to meet their obligations, yet the post-tenure review documentation required at regular intervals takes goodly amount of time to prepare. It also takes a fair amount of time for the committees to review it, and yet very few faculty members are found wanting and dismissed. So why can’t universities employ a process asking suspect faculty to submit such paperwork, rather than spending all the time and effort to review all tenured faculty? Because the lawyers fear lawsuits alleging discrimination, and the post-tenure review process insulates the university from the claim of discrimination. But a faculty member dismissed by either process can still protest and file a lawsuit. In effect, post-tenure review does little to weed out tenured faculty who aren’t cutting it. What it does do is increase the paperwork burden on the rest of the tenured faculty, because the documentation required is extensive, while making the job of a few university lawyers and administrators easier.

Another area where lawyers engage in costly litigation is in “patent trolling,” where lawyers essentially practice a form of legal shakedown by making “patent infringement” claims on productive companies, often on the flimsiest of cases. All too often, the companies being sued simple settle, because the time and effort to fight such claims would be even greater than the settlement costs. A recent study pegged the unnecessary costs of patent trolling at nearly $30 billion annually in direct costs and more than $80 billion in indirect costs.

The same sort of process occurs in business, in everything from warranties, privacy policies, personnel policies, you name it. Legal documentation is expanding everywhere. Why? Because organizations are trying to minimize the chances of costly litigation. Why do they need to go to such extremes? Because other lawyers are looking to fatten their finances through litigation or the threat of litigation. This is incredibly obvious, yet, with the exception of malpractice claims, I’ve never seen even an estimate of the national cost added to business, education, and life in general by litigation and the threat of litigation. And, of course, Congress refused even to consider limiting malpractice tort claims under the Affordable Care Act, possibly because trial lawyers contribute considerable sums to congressional campaigns.

I’m not against lawyers, and there are more than a few in my family, but I’m certainly against litigation and legal processes that don’t improve matters and whose costs continue to spiral.

For some time, I’ve wondered why on earth the Russians were committing so much in the way of military force in Syria, ostensibly in support of the government of Bashar al Assad. What do they gain by that? Especially given the ethnic fragmentation and conflicts that aren’t going to be resolved by more bombs and deaths, and which may in fact be increased by such measures? Then, there’s another question. Why is Vladimir Putin so intent on building up the Russian military at a time when Russia seems to face uncertain economic times, if not economic chaos?

In Syria the Russians have provided all manner of “aid,”including close air support; attack helicopters on the battlefield; high-precision strikes with missiles like the short-range Iskander; artillery support; special forces backup; intelligence; targeting; electronic warfare and even mine clearance. Although some of the top attack aircraft were recently flown back to Russia, attack helicopters that are less susceptible to the sandstorms that blow this time of year replaced them. A recent CNN report revealed that, in addition to first-line jet aircraft and helicopters, the Russians have also deployed modern main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and surface-to-air missile systems, not to mention a satellite-based missile guidance system.

On May 10th, Putin himself stated, “Since the start of the operation, Aerospace Forces planes have flown more than 10,000 combat missions against international terrorist facilities on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, have conducted a large number of strikes on the territory and have engaged over 30,000 targets, including more than 200 facilities for extracting oil and refining oil and crude oil feedstock.”

Putin also noted that the conflict in Syria brought out certain problems with new Russian weapons and systems, problems which he indicated will be soon addressed. It’s almost as if the Russian Syrian initiative was as much to field test new weapons and systems as to tell the world that Russia is back on the world stage with a totally revamped military structure and posture.

At the same time, Russian attacks continue to destroy civilian targets, ostensibly in pursuit of ISIS, but in practical terms, every attack creates more refugees, and the war in Syria has created roughly five million refugees to date. In addition to the more than a million Syrian refugees already in Europe, three million have fled to Turkey, a country with already contentious social and ethnic confrontations that the flood of refugees can only exacerbate. Lebanon, a country of 4.5 million people, also with a divided cultural and ethnic society, hosts over a million.

Barriers against the flood of refugees are going up all over Europe, either mental or physical ones, at a time when much of Europe faces economic difficulties, as well as where a significant number of nations have shown an overall unwillingness to markedly expand military capabilities. Add to that the fact that the United States military is already over-extended, and a majority of Americans are tired of overseas military operations that seem to offer little hope of resolution and only more American casualties.

What, indeed, could Vladimir Putin be thinking?

The local university has implemented a new course/faculty evaluation plan. A significant number of faculty members hate it because it requires far more time and demands all too often quantification of the qualitative and the unquantifiable, and it also requires using the same parameters for describing learning outcomes for all the various disciplines. The result is that either professors must oversimplify or only evaluate those aspects of their courses that can be described and measured by the accepted parameters. The reason for the adoption of the new evaluation system was to provide “hard data” for use by university administrators to prove to accrediting bodies and to the state legislature that the university is successful in educating students, in short, to make the administrators’ jobs easier and to present “data” that the legislators can understand at a glance. Or in other words, the lower-paid faculty must spend even more time on administrivia in order to better enable higher-paid administrators to justify their jobs. Put another way, to shift work to others while essentially requiring a process that will present oversimplified and often misleading results.

Furthermore, professors can be downgraded for having “too many learning objectives,” even if the nature of the course requires a number of disparate learning objectives. Of course, the easy way is simply to come up with generic learning objectives, but that results in poor data… and good data doesn’t fit the “mold” in all too many cases.

Add to that student evaluations, in which 18-22 year olds attempt to evaluate what they “need” from professors who have spent at least a decade learning and applying their expertise. Such evaluations often require even more time and effort on the part of the professors to rebut the often erroneous judgments of inexperienced students. More to the point, study after study has shown that the most consistent result of student evaluations is not improvement in education, but grade inflation, and that means that not only do ever more intrusive student evaluations put more burden on faculty and fail to improve education, but they do so in an effort by administrators primarily to make universities more “student friendly” and marketable.

This sort of work-shifting permeates society today.

Take another cost-shifting measure – the decision by major U.S. airlines, except Southwest, to charge fees for checked luggage. While this has increased revenue for those airlines, it’s also increased costs for TSA, which has to hire more employees to screen the vastly increased number of carry-on bags, as well as increasing security screening delays at U.S. airports. This cost-shifting creates costs for the taxpayers who fund TSA and delays for passengers.

Then, too, as I’ve mentioned before, the proliferation of email requests for status reports in organizations and businesses results in employees spending a greater and greater share of their workday answering such requests rather than doing actual work. It may make their supervisors’ tasks easier, but it’s a drag on productivity, which isn’t all that high these days anyway, and it’s resulted in longer workdays for employees.

Every time that I take an airline flight, buy an electronic book, stay in a hotel, purchase an appliance or piece of furniture, no matter how small, or even buy groceries, I’m asked or prompted to fill out a survey – and if there’s something wrong, I’m supposed to suggest how the seller or vendor could do their job better. Isn’t that their job? Yet we’ve been sold a bill of goods that the seller is just asking for our opinion because our opinion counts, when it’s both as marketing tool and a way to obtain data on a lower-cost basis.

Walmart and other retailers get in on the cost-shifting movement by setting up self-check-out lanes, resulting in fewer cashiers. More than once at stores, I’ve ended up doing self-check-out, even when a cashier could so it faster, because the lines at the cashiers were so long.

Yet another form of cost-shifting is practiced by governments, either state, local, of federal, when they offer “tax breaks” to businesses for various purposes. Those tax breaks may indeed create jobs and the like, but seldom do they cover the foregone tax revenues, which means that the “new jobs” are at least partly subsidized by the old taxpayers.

Yes, indeed, cost-shifting, another example of the capitalistic great American economy… and yet I see almost no one who’s willing to call it for what it is, an additional cost on taxpayers and consumers.

As most of my readers know, I’m not exactly fond of electronic piracy of my books, or of anyone’s books, and I’m certainly not the only author or editor who feels that way. While much of the publicly expressed concern over piracy has focused on fiction and music, there’s an even more problematical aspect of piracy – that of scientific journals and papers.

The battle over electronic piracy of scientific papers and journal articles has become a huge issue since the founding of Sci-Hub by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011. According to Science magazine, in the six months from October 2015 through the end of March 2016, 28 million documents were downloaded from Sci-Hub, with the greatest number of downloads going to China (4.4 million), India (2.6 million), and India (3.4 million).

The problem is simple. Legal access to the majority of scientific journals and papers costs money, and especially for scholars in the developing worlds, or scholars at educational institutions without the funds to obtain wide access, the cost of keeping up with developments in their fields becomes prohibitively expensive and enormously time consuming. Obtaining just the permissions for the papers a U.S. university linguistics researcher needed took over a year. An Indian scholar discovered that to legally obtain copies of papers to stay current in his field every year would cost five times his annual living expenses.

At present, as calculated by Science, Sci-Hub’s downloads represent only about five percent of the total number of science documents downloaded in the world every year… but those numbers are growing, fueled by the increasing need of scientists and other professions to follow current scientific developments and by the fact that a huge number of those professionals who need access for their professions have either limited legal access, no legal access except by paying out of their own pockets, or the time required to use other legal ways of obtaining access.

No matter what anyone says, useful information doesn’t come cheaply. I’m not a scientist, but as a science fiction writer I need to stay current. I did a quick checklist of the science periodicals that I take and read – and my annual “information” costs come close to $2,000, and I’m talking only about periodicals and science books that represent a small fraction of the documentation a full-time scientist or researcher needs to know.

That’s one side of the problem. The other side is one that very few consumers/users of fiction, music, or scientific documents seem able to grasp – the cost of assembling, editing, copywriting, and overall production of these documents is far, far, greater than the final cost of physical production. Another difficulty is that recent studies have shown that too many science papers haven’t been properly peer-reviewed and vetted and their results can’t be replicated. That also takes not only money, but a structure that’s not supported by piracy or by an information disseminator such as Sci-Hub.

Add to that the fact that most researchers and scientists aren’t paid much, if anything, for having their work published, and those who profit most from scientific publishing are companies like Elsevier, not either the researchers or the users/readers of those documents

According to Marcia McNutt, the editor-in-chief of Science, “Today, digital publishing is just as expensive as print for a state-of-the-art Web design that incorporates multimedia, is responsive to desktops, tablets, and smartphones, and maintains access to back content.”

All of which means we have a problem that’s going to get worse. If piracy of scientific documents follows the path of fiction, what happens to all the checks on falsified or sloppy research…or who is rightfully credited with what…or who gets paid for coming up with an innovation. These areas are already problems, and I don’t see the world of increasing intellectual piracy solving them.

Now…the world isn’t going to stop if fiction writers don’t get paid and all “creative” writing becomes essentially a hobby because not enough readers want to pay the real cost of production, or if classical music dwindles to nothing, or if art reproductions return all artists to a semi-starving situation. But the piracy and distribution of scientific documents is, to me, a different situation.

It could be that I’m totally wrong… but… if I’m not…?

We’ve been through the Emmys, Grammies, Oscars, and the Hugo finalists have just been announced, and now we’re entering university graduation season, with all the awards bestowed at each university’s ceremony or ceremonies.

Once, back in the dark ages when I was actually in school, pretty much the only award given to students was that of valedictorian. When my wife the professor began teaching at the local university, there were just two faculty awards – one for excellence as an educator and one for excellence as a scholar, creator, or researcher. This past graduation there were thirteen awards for faculty and something like eight major student awards, and likely more than a hundred lesser student awards (although that’s a guess on my part based on the awards given in one of the six university colleges) because I don’t intent to spend days tracking them all down.

Everywhere I look, it seems like there’s been award proliferation. In the realm of speculative fiction alone, there are not only the Hugos and the World Fantasy Awards, but a whole list of regional and national awards, not to mention the Nebula Awards, the Sideways Awards for alternative world SF, the Prometheus Award for Libertarian speculative fiction, the Carl Brandon awards for speculative fiction by or about people of color, the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, the James Tiptree Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and a host of others as well. What I’ve found interesting about all these awards isn’t so much who has won them as who has not.

I’ve also noticed the same “phenomenon” in regard to the faculty awards at my wife’s university. Most of them go to “politically astute” professors or those I’d classify as either one-time flashes or “flavour du jour,” rather than to professors who have created flourishing programs from nothing, received national recognition for achievement or scholarship, or those whose students, while students, have received multiple and continuing awards for their accomplishments. Oh, yes, I forgot “popular” professors, usually easy-grading, cheerleading types who always factor in the awards.

A similar sort of result occurs, from what I’ve seen, in the F&SF field and elsewhere. The bottom line is simple. No matter what anyone says, the vast majority of awards in any field tend to be popularity contests of some sort or reflect favoritism on the part of the judges, if not both. Even juried awards can be prejudiced in one way or another, and having served as a judge on a juried award, I’ve seen that happen as well.

Probably one of the most reliable indications of excellence is when something remains known, respected, and moderately popular well after the time of its creation. That’s certainly not an infallible guide, but it’s a start. As for “current” excellence – for books, anyway – sales figures are about as reliable as awards, and sales figures that endure for decades are definitely more reliable than one-year sales or a burst of awards in a single year. In the end, neither awards nor sales are necessarily an indication of excellence.

Awards are nice to have, but, alas, they never meant as much as most people thought, and with the flurry of awards proliferation, most of them mean even less now… but I certainly wouldn’t turn down a Nobel Prize, not that one is ever going to a U.S. F&SF writer.

Reviewers of all sorts – from those in Kirkus and The New York Times to those offering their opinions on their blogs or on Goodreads or Amazon – generally attempt to assess authors according to their standards. And that’s really what reviews are all about.

What tends to get overlooked, if not positively ignored, is that there ought to be reviews about readers as well. Because, just as authors differ, so do readers, and what pleases one reader can often infuriate another. And, just because I’m feeling contrary, I’ll offer some reviews of the types of readers I’ve observed over the last forty years or so, although you shouldn’t attribute too much meaning to the order in which I’m presenting these reader semi-stereotypes, even if they’re only my stereotypes.

I’ll begin with every author’s favorite type of reader – the enthusiasts. They like reading and books, and many especially like a particular genre or subgenre of fiction, and some are only wildly enthusiastic about a given author. Authors who have large numbers of enthusiasts are fortunate indeed, although often enthusiasts can be very reticent to admit their enthusiasms, which can leave some authors bewildered – as I was for years – because such authors sell books but can find very few people who admit to buying them.

Other types of readers are a more mixed bag, such as the literalist purists, for whom three typos in book provide discomfort, and more than that occasion physical pain, who also often have difficulty with authors who employ words in ways that require knowledge of more than the first dictionary definition, and who are outraged if the author portraying a low-tech culture uses a different weight for a stone’s worth of merchandise [despite the fact that there were different “stone-weights” for different commodities until the nineteenth century].

Following the literalist purists come the one-gender readers. They’re usually but not exclusively male and have virtually no interest in or possibly no ability to identify with a protagonist of the opposite gender, let alone protagonists with complex genders.

I’ve also noted in the past that there are readers who seem to believe that literary romance cannot be complete without copious and explicit sexual encounters. Call them the over-sexed romantics, as opposed to the prudish romantics for whom the merest direct implication of sexual encounters sends them for the literary equivalent of smelling salts.

For the stylistics, the words themselves offer the greatest satisfaction, so much so that often the plot or what passes for one is merely a bothersome necessity, some of whom prone to gush over or luxuriate in the work of Mervyn Peake or Gene Wolfe.

The secret violence lovers are those readers who find all manner of means to praise books of dubious quality so that they can deceive themselves into believing the books they enjoy are better than they are, rather than accepting the fact that they personally have a touch of the voyeuristic sadist in themselves and really like all that violence and rough, if not vicious, sex. Those who have a touch of the stylist get double pleasure out of Game of Thrones.

The gourmet bibliophiles comprise one of the smallest groups of readers, those who want excellence in every aspect of what they read, and who are actually intelligent enough to know what excellence is and well-read enough to discriminate between the merely popular, the flavor-de-jour books of the pseudo-literati, and the books of depth. Unfortunately, they’re usually disappointed, given how rare excellence is, and how often literary flash is taken for depth.

Then there are the fictional gourmets, for whom plot is a device to carry them from fictional meal to fictional meal, and I suspect a number of them read my novels, particularly the “Ghost” books.

In stark contrast to the gourmet bibliophile and the stylist is the minimalist – otherwise known as the slam-bam-thank-you-sir-or-ma’am type. They go straight to the story, like a famished wolf to bloody meat. This kind of reader demands only the bare-bones story, and forget about metaphor, allusion, or anything requiring diversion from the pursuit to the bloody, sexual, or explosive end, and if a book doesn’t have one of those, for them, it’s not worth reading.

Then we’ve also seen the recent rise of the genderists, for whom no book is satisfying except those that explore in depth beyond that of the Challenger Deep the role, identify, function, malfunction, dysfunction, optimal theoretical function, including all other ancillary functions, of all possible genders and permutations thereof, preferably in overstated understatement.

More and more in the realm of speculative fiction, we’re seeing the immersers, or the compleatists, those who not so much read a given series, but would prefer to live and spend their entire existence in just the world of that series. And yes, I’ve given them a series just like that in the Saga of Recluce.

Related to the gourmet bibliophiles are the cogitators, the thinkers who get great pleasure in books so deep that they can find additional twists and meanings on re-read after re-read and who find what the minimalists insist upon is akin to reading primers or simplistic graphic novels.

Now… I’ve probably missed type or two of reader, and most likely many readers have characteristics of several types, but since readers are always rating writers, I thought it was only fair for a writer to review readers, turn about being fair play, so to speak.

One of the ever-increasing problems created by technology – and especially the internet and cellphones – is a failure, particularly by the younger generations, to understand that waiting until the last moment can be a problem, sometimes even a disaster. I’m perfectly well aware that procrastination has been a fault in every “younger” generation since before the time of Plato, but from what I’m observing, that particular fault seems to be lasting longer among the young and spreading to a greater segment of the population.

Part of the reason for this, I’m personally convinced, is because of the “instant” nature of communications. Especially in the high-tech world, one can reach people immediately, and more and more businesses are expecting their employees to be available electronically all the time. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this has some considerable downsides, but one of those downsides I haven’t mentioned in any depth is that such communications expectations lead to other expectations, particularly that physical products and goods can be available equally swiftly.

In this regard, Amazon has also been fostering unrealistic expectations. It’s one thing to be able to pack and ship an existing product in less than twenty-four hours; it’s something entirely different to be able to create something unique in the same period, or to write a detailed analysis about something new, with which the analyst has had no experience, in the same period. In short, doing the work actually takes far more time than one-day shipping the product, or electronically zapping an analysis to whoever needs it.

My wife the professor sees this all the time. Students think that they can learn a piece of complex music overnight or at least in a few days. They think they can write papers overnight… and they indeed can, except that such papers seldom make sense because they simply throw things together because they haven’t spent time doing the background study necessary.

Then there’s the associated problem. All this technology that we use today has a far higher failure rate than the old-fashioned manual typewriter did…and when that’s combined with waiting until the last moment… is it really anyone else’s fault when your hard drive fails at four in the morning because you put everything off? Is it anyone else’s fault if the internet goes down for the two hours just before the deadline for acceptance of the paper, project, grant application, or whatever? Or that the color printer runs out of toner and the office supply store won’t be open until nine o’clock?

This just doesn’t happen to students. Boeing screwed up the production of its new 787 because the company decided to outsource manufacturing and relied on “just in time” delivery. It became such a disaster that Boeing had to build more facilities to manufacture certain key components. The “instant” aspects of technology aren’t infallible, and they’re only part of the process, and everything requires lead time and planning – something that all too many people from students even to engineers seem to be forgetting.

On a recent trip, I read a book by an author I’ve known, on and off, for more than twenty years, a book that had gotten good reviews from a publication that seldom gives them. I’d never read the author’s work, but others I know have and thought highly of it. So I read the book.

The first thing I’ll say is that it was extraordinarily well-written. The language, the sentence structure, the revelations about the main character, the pacing… and I had to force myself to finish the work, although I did.

Why did I have such trouble reading to the end? Because it was about an extremely gifted and creative artist, who was intelligent and perceptive, often empathetic, and sometimes kind… yet also arrogantly and persistently self-destructive in pursuit of greater and greater “shock value” in the name of artistic creativity. The writer portrayed the protagonist brilliantly, and in a fashion that left little doubt about the writer’s understanding of the protagonist’s struggles, faults, and failures in dealing with the world, but primarily in dealing with other largely self-destructive and arrogant individuals. The book ends on a single upbeat note… with the absolute implication that the struggles, failures, and self-destructive behavior will continue past that momentary resolution and single grace note of happiness.

In some ways, it’s almost a masterpiece, and in some readers’ minds it likely is. It’s certainly true to life, because I’ve not only read about such self-destructive behavior, but I’ve also seen it and known individuals like that, particularly creative ones. I’ve also seen far too many painters, film-makers, writers, photographers, sculptors, musicians, and others attempt to perpetuate shock value for the sake of shock value while touting it as creativity. The book certainly raises the question of whether creativity and self-destruction are the two faces of the same coin, as well as the suggestion that there’s a darkness beneath the font of creativity, and to that last possibility I’d have to agree. With what I don’t agree is the near-absolute correlation the author suggested between extreme creativity, shock value, and self-destructive behavior, although there’s little doubt in my mind that there have been and likely always will be those highly creative individuals who are also highly self-destructive.

In the end, I could barely finish the book simply because I find that self-destructive behavior, and shock value for the sake of shock value by creative individuals is a waste of human potential and talent, perhaps a tragedy in the case of those who cannot help themselves, but all too often a failure to accept the fact that creativity is almost never fully appreciated by the majority of the human species and almost invariably is ranked well behind material sustenance and personal power, regardless of the greatness and excellence of that creativity… or the toll taken on those who create.

A book that portrays creativity as the path to self-destruction and near nihilism certainly represents one possible life-path, especially today, when the public value of any artist is measured primarily by the cashbox, and when all too often the excesses of shock value are highly rewarded. I just can’t praise a book so depressing, or find a character that unwilling or unable to turn away from the darkness worth either a mention by name or a read of subsequent adventures. Creating is hard enough and good creators scarce enough that reading about those who cannot deal with the pressures and the challenges of their own abilities [and turn to the dark side, if you will] is the last thing I want to read about. But sometimes, it takes just such a book to remind me of that.

We all have expectations, pretty much about everything, and from what I can tell, that’s the “normal” condition for human beings. We also have a tendency to rate, judge, or assess much of life and its components by how well those people, items, products, books, movies, and even the weather meet our expectations. That’s also normal.

The problem with that “normal” behavior, however, is that our assessments, and thus, our expectations, may not be especially accurate or in accord with the expectations of others. If we’re reasonably accurate in our assessments, and so are all those with whom we associate, few are likely to question us, and those questions are easily dismissed.

But what if our assessments are not all that accurate, and we’re in agreement with most of those with whom we associate? The general reaction, from what I’ve observed, is, again, to dismiss contrary opinions as inaccurate and unfounded, and to re-affirm bonds with those with whom we associate. Sometimes those dismissals even take the form of “I expected better of….”

But when time and events demonstrate absolutely that certain expectations were wrong, how many people ever admit that past assessments and expectations were in fact inaccurate.

Again, from what I’ve observed… very few. Reactions range from denying that one ever had that opinion to denying that the facts and events even existed. Today, the Turkish government is busily denying that millions of Armenians were killed about a century ago, despite a wealth of absolute evidence. Millions of Christian believers deny evolution and some even deny the age of the universe, again, despite a massive amount of rather substantial evidence.

I do wonder what the rabid supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will say when it becomes factually obvious that what those two promise cannot and will not be accomplished. Will they claim they were deceived by their expectations? Or will they blame the candidates? Or blame those of us who never had any positive expectation that they would accomplish political miracles? Or will they say, “I expected better…”

…might just as well be called dominance management, because conflict usually arises when two parties can’t agree with each other. The most likely results are: (1) one party gives in rather than deal with the conflict; (2) one party forces the other to give in through greater force of some sort, physical strength, financial strength, political strength, strength of personality, sheer endurance, some combination of those, or the threat of those; (3) compromise of some sort; or (4) total disengagement, which can range from polite and cordial agreement to disagree to absolute and continued hostility, either concealed or overt.

Most people, I’ve discovered, don’t think of conflicts in that way, but from what I’ve observed that’s the spectrum of responses to ideological, political, financial, or physical conflicts.

What complicates such conflicts is usually, but not always, the assumption by one or both of the parties of some form of superiority, either moral, intellectual, or physical, which can make any form of real agreement difficult. And when one party is forced to agree to or to accept the terms of the other party, the result is almost inevitably anger and resentment, particularly when the party forced to agree believes fervently in his or her moral or intellectual superiority, which is all too often the case, or that they’ve been wronged in some fashion.

That also means when someone is coerced/forced into agreement against their will, such agreement will only last so long as the “superior” party can enforce their will.

All of which is a reason why the United States eventually “loses” wars and conflicts in places like Vietnam and the Middle East, because we don’t want to pay the price for continuing to enforce our desires on others, which is what is necessary when the belief structure of the majority of the people of a country is at odds with our belief structure. In places where we have “won,” it has taken generations of occupation to shift belief structures, and, in the case of our own southern states of the Confederacy, one could make the case that even 150 years later, those “old south” belief structures still persist in a large number of people.

That doesn’t mean the United States can always avoid using force, but if we don’t want to spend or bleed ourselves dry, most use of force should be restricted to simply stopping the worst of what we can stop, without attempting to force ideological/political change on other cultures.

On the domestic front, we’ll also end up locked in an exhausting and debilitating deadlock unless we return to the basics of the “civil society” envisioned by the Founding Fathers, that is, a society based on a compromise over what should be legal and what should not be, because with more than a fifth of the country now identifying themselves as non-religious, and with very differing core beliefs between evangelicals and other faiths, any attempt to impose religion-based strictures on the entire population will only fuel more conflict… and that’s the last thing any of us need in these troubling times.

Philosophers have debated what is a good or moral action for thousands of years, but from what I can tell, there’s one aspect of the problem that I’ve not seen often debated – and that’s what constitutes an act or action.

This might be illustrated by the “runaway trolley” dilemma. An empty trolley breaks loose and is heading down the track toward a group of five unsuspecting workers. A bystander sees a switch and realizes that she can throw the switch and divert the trolley onto another track, where there is only one worker. Should she turn the switch?

If she does, one argument goes, she has taken an action that will kill one person, and that death is by her act. If she does nothing, the trolley does what it would do, absent intervention, and kills five, but the bystander did not cause those deaths.

Now, speaking frankly, I think the reasoning here is absurd, but it’s clear that there’s a school of thought [the intentionalist school] that believes that it’s somehow less moral to throw the switch because that’s an affirmative act that causes a death. The results school of thought, of course, simply says that one death is preferable to five.

To my way of thinking, the problem with the intentionalist view is that it doesn’t recognize that the failure to act is in fact an action. Deciding not to act should be judged on the same grounds as acting is.

Yet more and more I see people deciding not to act, or not to get involved, because they see all courses of action, particularly in politics, as immoral or unethical. All too often, they’re correct about the perceived courses of action, but what I don’t think they’re correct about is that not acting, i.e., participating, discussing, voting, even running for office, is also an immoral action, because it abdicates responsibility for the outcome to those who are willing to dirty their hands, particularly since, in this day and age, those willing to speak out long and loudly, and vote, and persuade others to do so, seem to be those who represent the extremes in civil dialogue and politics.

Today, in a political sense in the U.S., we’re facing a form of the runaway trolley dilemma, and part of the dilemma occurred in the past when fewer and fewer non-extremists decided not to get involved in grass-roots politics, either through inertia or through the misguided belief that political involvement was immoral.

Failure to act is an act.

Currently, it appears as though terrorism is almost everywhere in the world in some form or another, and while Islamic/Jihadist terrorists seem to be the most visible and active, they’re certainly not the only ones.

What tends to get overlooked both in dealing with terrorists and terrorism is the long-term result of such activities. The immediate result is, of course, hundreds and thousands of deaths and injuries annually, and a great deal of anger and fear. For all of the so-called idealism or religious fervor of the Islamic terrorists, the goal of their terrorism isn’t to inspire the creation of some great Islamic state. It’s to disorganize and destroy civil society, to create chaos and unrest, and to demonstrate that civil society cannot cope with terrorism. Once such chaos exists, the only way to restore order is through absolute force – and in the Middle East in particular the only unified forces that exist are largely based on some version of Islam.

But what gets overlooked in all of this is that terrorist acts and murders don’t in themselves destroy civil society. Popular reaction to those acts does. Moreover, the popular reaction is almost always the strongest in countries and societies that already have the most authoritarian and repressive societies. It doesn’t matter that the Taliban might be even worse than the Afghan warlords; the warlords are so oppressive and corrupt that there’s already little love of the civil society, especially in a land that still remains tribally fragmented. It also doesn’t matter that ISIS is even worse than the Syrian government… and so it goes.

This kind of scenario is scarcely new. In a way, the Russian revolution followed a similar path, as did China, and much of southeast Asia… and the groups that had already gathered and mustered a monopoly on force were the ones who ended up governing.

A strong civil society is the greatest bulwark against the long-term effects of terrorism, but for a civil society to remain strong requires that the great majority of people support it. In turn, the greater the degree of oppression, perceived inequality and discrimination, and the greater the perception that there is no hope of advancement and improvement for most people, the more likely terrorism will be effective in fragmenting a society… which is the first step to revolution or social chaos and break-down.

Does that sound at all familiar?

The other day I realized something that probably should have been obvious, but that I’d never thought much about. There are millions of readers in the world, but there are very few characters in books who actually read books. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t recall a book I’d read – except my own – where a character reads a book or mentions one or quotes from one. It could be that my memory was faulty; so I went to my bookshelves and looked at all the books lined up there, and tried to think of a single one that mentioned reading or writing books, and I finally found one – Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax – and recalled another one – Gene Wolfe’s The Borrowed Man.

Now, I’m certain there are others out there, but I’m willing to bet that the percentage of F&SF books that have characters who actually read or write books is less than five percent. I’m not talking about reading or writing books as the focus of novels, but just as a mention of part of the character’s lives.

Yet biographies of great people usually mention books in some fashion or another. Almost every biography of Lincoln has the story of the borrowed book that he had to replace, and Jefferson’s love of writing and books is certainly renowned. Patton read the classics, and Churchill won a Nobel Prize in literature. Scores of famous people mention the Bible or quote from it, but seldom do authors depict the equivalent in F&SF.

Likewise, almost every human culture has some form of music, and while a larger percentage of F&SF books mention/show music, the percentage is small compared to the field as a whole, despite the ubiquity of music in history and life.

Then there is the issue of family. Families play a part in everyone’s life, and whether immediately present or not, definitely influence actions and motivations. Again, there are more books that show this than there are novels that depict books…but comparatively few F&SF books use familial interactions and pressures.

Just a few thoughts on what’s often not there.

Way back in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea of “the social contact.” The simplified concept is that government represents a tacit contract between the people effectively to be governed and behave in order to escape the “natural state” [which Rousseau tacitly admits never existed, but that’s another story].

One of the interesting facets of his concept was that the social contract tended to break down if the income inequality between the rich and the poor became too great, which in fact is exactly what happened with the French Revolution several decades later in the last years of the century, and after Rousseau’s death. In point of fact, it’s rather interesting to note that in the more than 300 years since Rousseau made that observation, there have been more than a few revolutions and a great deal of social unrest in times of great income inequality.

At present, the United States is in one of those periods. According to Rousseau, the popularity of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump should scarcely be surprising, given that income inequality in the United States has now surpassed the income inequality of the previous period of greatest inequality in the 1890s, which was, of course, the time during which William Jennings Bryan ran for President as a fundamentalist/pro-silver/anti-big-money Democrat. After three years of economic depression, in 1896, Bryan carried 22 of the 45 states at that time and took almost 47% of the vote, despite being outspent by a five to one margin by McKinley.

Today, what is interesting is that the “establishments” of both major U.S. political parties are being challenged by those within the respective parties who feel economically and/or politically threatened or disenfranchised by the current political system. And, no matter how the next election turns out, the problem of income inequality isn’t about to disappear.

The greatest danger is, in fact, is if people think that the election resolves the problem, because then, nothing effective will be done, and most likely both income inequality and economic conditions will worsen.

Why?

It’s fairly simple. Right now, corporations and other institutions are literally sitting on close to a trillion dollars in uninvested dollars. These dollars are not invested because those holding them do not see a market for the goods or services that could be produced with them. The reason for this is that too many Americans are too poor to purchase anything but the basics. The idea that low taxes on high earners makes more money available to create jobs is, like a lot of simplistic “solutions,” half-right. It does make money available, but no one is going to use that “excess capital’ to create that many new jobs in the U.S. if a huge percentage of the population can’t afford the goods and services created by those jobs.

This is where a massive government-funded infrastructure development program would help, provided it’s designed right, and not merely a subsidy to the construction and technology industries. We have hundreds of thousands of unsafe and/or rapidly decaying bridges and tunnels, unsafe municipal drinking water systems, an air-traffic control system that verges on the obsolete and inefficient, a power grid that could be destroyed by a solar flare, thousands of miles of highways that are crumbling, national parks that have billions of dollars of delayed and deferred maintenance… and we do nothing about any of this, while nearly a trillion dollars of uninvested capital sit largely idle because unemployed or underemployed workers haven’t the money to buy anything except the extreme basics – if that.

Yet, as I’ve argued, and as have others, in the end, those ultra-high earners, the one tenth of one percent, could likely make even more money if they were taxed a bit more and those taxes put to work in improving infrastructure.

Will it happen?

I have my doubts. I suspect it won’t until the social unrest and economic stagnation become even worse, which they will, unless matters change in the mindset of the American political system. The problem is that, if matters get too much worse, we may face a revolution, rather than an evolution. I could be wrong, I’ll be the first to admit, but right now, the odds are in favor of pessimism.

The past six-month period has been one of the worst for us that I can recall in years in terms of the number of friends who have suffered, some of whom have died. All this suffering that I’ve witnessed has brought home to me a tremendous short-coming in our modern medical system or structure. It’s simple enough. In prolonging life, especially in treating some forms of cancer, in saving wounded soldiers and victims of accidents who surely would have died in earlier times, in fact as recently as a decade or two ago, we have created a massive problem and source of suffering – a huge increase in people suffering agonizing pain.

So many forms of medical treatment can now keep people alive, but at the cost of continual pain. According to the National Institutes of Health, 17% of all Americans suffer severe pain intermittently, and 65% of those – 11% of the U.S. population – suffer daily, chronic, and severe pain. Yet while we have relatively effective forms of pain control for mild pain, the only substances currently effective for severe pain are opioid-based, and the problem with these is that with continued use, they become both addictive and less and less effective. So those in pain take more and more, and often mix those painkillers with alcohol, just so they can dull the pain and sleep, which is another reason why there are so many deaths as the result of combining alcohol and painkillers.

Yet this problem is scarcely recognized by most people. Nor is there any real recognition of why this pain problem has occurred. I certainly didn’t grasp its magnitude until recently, when more and more people I know ended up with excruciating pain. Instead, there’s an incredible push to stop the “overuse” and “abuse” of opioid painkillers. In my home state of Utah, the LDS Church effectively blocked even a modest piece of legislation that would have allowed the medical use of cannabis products and extracts [all specified as non-hallucinogenic]. The upshot of all these efforts appears to be that even terminally ill people are often being denied painkillers adequate to mitigate their suffering, but if they’re terminally ill, why worry about whether they’ll become addicted?

I’ve seen reports on promising new developments in non-addictive and non-hallucinogenic painkillers, but it will be years before any of them are widely available. In the meantime, what are we going to do for the more than 25 million Americans dealing with severe pain on an on-going basis? [And, no, I’m thankfully not one of them.]

Just tell them to hold on because we don’t want them addicted to opioids or marijuana?

Just as people have different tastes in food, they have different tastes in the “art” they enjoy and appreciate, and, for the most part, people tend to rate more highly art and food that they enjoy. I will submit that, while people should be allowed to enjoy what they enjoy in food and art, there are food dishes that are markedly superior to what most people would claim is “the best” and there are books, paintings, performances, and musical compositions that are superior to what is popular.

This past weekend I saw two performances of the opera Little Women [and, yes, there is such an opera] as performed by the local university’s opera theatre, which, in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit was produced and directed by my wife the professor. The opera was commissioned roughly twenty years ago by the Houston Opera, and when performed by the Houston Opera in 2000, was recognized as a masterpiece by The New York Times and other critics, and a television production was then done by the Houston Opera for the 2001 PBS Great Performances series. A few hundred people saw the university production, and the audience was very receptive and enthusiastic. The professional musicians who saw it rated it highly.

Three weeks before, some of the same singers participated in a choral extravaganza in the same theatre – and the music was all 1970s rock and roll. More than a 1,000 people filled the theatre, and the audience went wild. The professional musicians thought it was “fun,” but quite a number questioned why a university’s classical music program was putting on a rock and roll concert. The chorus director replied that it was to build support for the music program, and to increase attendance, despite the fact that the music program is designed for two groups of students – those who will teach the basics of music in secondary school and those who will play or sing professionally, either classically or semi-classically.

The vast majority of the people who attended the rock and roll concert did not attend the opera. I have no problems with that. Nor do I have problems with rock and roll concerts.

What I have a problem with is the tacit admission by the Music Department, by putting on both concerts, that rock and roll is on the same level of expertise and excellence as operas, symphonies, oratorios, art song, or chamber music. While I will admit that there are actually a handful of popular rock and roll and country music performers with excellent classical training, the vast majority couldn’t do vocally or instrumentally what most graduating seniors in the good music programs across the country do on a daily basis.

Liking what you like is fine, but popularity is not excellence, and that’s something that is getting lost more and more in a culture that rewards the bottom line far more than excellence.

As some of my readers might recall, way back last August, I made the observation that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would do far better than people realized, although at that time, I did express doubt that Trump would be able to capture the Republican nomination. While I had a better feel than most for the depth of anger, what I didn’t realize was how many Republicans would become literally too angry to think and how much they wanted to lash out at all politicians, regardless of what it might do to the country. The attitude of these voters is literally that they don’t care, that the country and the rich have screwed them, and that they’ll be damned if they’re going to vote for any “professional” politician.

I spent close to twenty years in politics, largely in Washington, D.C., and I loathe the “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” myth, the idea that all politicians are either up to something illegal or incompetent. In fact, most politicians are very good at voting what their constituents want. What almost no one wants to think about is that such lock-step voting is exactly what’s caused the current gridlock in Washington. Politicians who want to keep their jobs are well aware that voting against their constituency is likely to cost them their job. So they don’t. And no one can afford to compromise. And political views are polarized with enough strength on either side that not much can get done without compromise. The less that gets done, the angrier people are and the more likely they are to punish politicians who show the slightest hint of moderation. Yet with all the anger, a huge number of people react by becoming more extreme, totally failing to recognize that they – not the politicians – are the cause of the problem. In general, the politicians fall into one of two categories, those who are ambitious and unscrupulous in exploiting that extremism, or those who are true-believing extremists who glory in that extremism.

Along with this failure of recognition is that too many of these angry voters also fail to realize Donald Trump is in fact a consummate politician who has read the public mood far better than any of the “professional” Republican politicians and who is exploiting the wide-spread anger by appealing blatantly to those angry people and promising to do things that are either physically or financially impossible, unconstitutional or illegal, or just plain stupid – and the anger of those supporting Trump is so strong that his supporters either just don’t care, are truly ignorant of the impossibility of any of Trump’s promises being enacted, or believe that what Trump says is merely rhetoric to get him elected.

But then, being angry and venting makes so many of us feel better. The difficulty is that all that venting doesn’t solve the underlying problems, and, in this case, will only make them worse.

Absolutist moral pronouncements may be good guidelines for personal behavior, but they make very bad laws. And there’s a very good reason why this is so: absolute moral pronouncements are simple, and neither the universe nor society is. Equally important is the fact that human society has never been able to agree on exactly which moral codes should be enforced and how. Secular laws are by necessity a compromise between conflicting moral codes and beliefs based upon points of agreement [at least, ideally].

One of the basic principles behind the structure set up by the Founding Fathers of the United States was the idea that laws were to be legislated by a civil body, not by religious authority, and that those laws should recognize fundamental civil rights as superior to religious doctrine and rights. The reason for this was basic. They had seen and often lived through a time when people were tortured, killed, or otherwise persecuted for what they believed, and those acts were enabled by laws enacted pursuant to religious authority.

Yet today, we have tens of millions of Americans who are demanding laws to enforce their religious beliefs on others under the guise of religious freedom, effectively repudiating the idea of civil rights through their determination to enact and enforce laws restricting the rights of others based on religious beliefs.

One of the great ironies I see in today’s political debates and often hate-filled rhetoric is that the same people who are so deathly afraid that President Obama or others might impose Islamic Sharia law upon the U.S. are all too often those same ultra-conservative evangelicals who want to impose the “Christian” equivalent of Sharia on the United States – effectively limiting rights for women, legal recognition of religious practices, and the arrogation of religious beliefs over civil rights. Yet those individuals cannot see that what they want is essentially the same structure as ultra-traditional Islamists, but a structure supporting their own ultra-conservative beliefs and enforcing those beliefs on those who do not share them.

I’m very much in favor of civil rights, the right of an individual to do what he or she pleases so long as those acts do not physically harm others – and that includes forms of indirect harm. You should not have the freedom to pollute the air others breathe or the waters others must drink. I have great problems with laws that effectively marginalize others under the guise of religious freedom. I also have problems with those who wish to eliminate laws that protect health and the environment on the grounds that such laws restrict the freedom to do business. Obviously, no law can be perfect, but legislating absolutes is the route to tyranny, not morality.

Almost invariably, the majority of mail that we receive is from charitable organizations, the preponderance of it from so-called charities to which we do not contribute nor most likely never will. There are some, I admit, that once received a contribution in a moment of weakness on our part, but never will again. The unanswered telephone solicitations are even more disturbing, because we have never contributed to anyone or anything based on a telephone solicitation.

It appears, in fact, that everyone and everything has its own charitable organization. While this perception is in fact erroneous, it still feels that way to me, perhaps because there are over a million and a half charitable organizations in the United States alone. And after the scattered revelations of the past few years about the compensation of those running charitable organizations and the fact that, in all too many cases, far too much of donated funds to legally permitted 501(c) (3) organizations goes to anything but the purposes for which they were ostensibly founded. From what I can tell, there are foundations for almost every form of ill-treated or endangered species, particularly mammals, land-based and aquatic, and large avians, not to mention scores of foundations dealing with social ills, justice, discrimination, civil rights, conservation and environmental improvement – the list is truly endless.

The problem, of course, is that a great many of them address very real problems. Far fewer do so efficiently and cost-effectively. Some address problems that don’t seem to be problems to me, such as the “need” to “return” federal lands to either the people or the states [not that either ever held those lands], and some spotlight problems that cannot be solved by greater application of resources.

If people wish to give money to these causes, so be it, but should all these donations be considered tax-deductible? For that matter, should donations to religious organizations be tax-deductible? Such deductions add to the federal deficit and, in essence, require higher taxes on everyone.

Now, I know that many conservatives feel that government attempts to do too much in social programs and believe that private charity is more suited to dealing with many of these problems, but isn’t providing tax deductions for charitable and religious organizations effectively the same as a government subsidy? And all too often, the cost of subsidies is far greater than anyone knows because it’s essentially hidden. The more than one and a half million U.S. charities spend 1.5 trillion dollars every year, an amount equivalent to the 40% of the federal budget. Given the billions poured into charities, if charity were that effective, shouldn’t we be seeing better results?

Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While many – and I’m one of them – would generally agree with his words, I’d take it a step further. We live in a magic world, indeed, a magic universe. Einstein theorized that this was true in his equation E = mc2, which essentially equated matter and energy. In practical terms, the development of technology since then has proved that the only difference between “matter” and energy is form, in that all matter is composed of structured energy.

While what we perceive and experience as matter is not “solid” in the sense we emotionally believe and physically experience, since on the sub-atomic level matter is largely empty space, but what could be called, in an over-simplistic sense, the interplay of energy fields. Part of the effect of those fields is to create what we experience as matter, essentially barriers, or at least limitations, to the inter-penetration of other “matter-energy-fields” – a universe, if you will, of energy whose flows and fields we interpret variously as energy and/or matter within a space-time framework.

Theoretically, anything can be transformed into anything else, given enough energy and a sufficiently advanced technology to restructure the energy flows and structure. Whether we as a species will ever master such restructuring doesn’t take away from the fact that it is at least theoretically possible.

That understanding of the universe colors my view of “virtual reality,” because “virtual” or, more accurately “cyber-enhanced-partial representation of physically modulated perception,” seems to me to be a denial of the very wonder of the physical universe, or at least a wish-fulfillment escape from it. Now, I’ve seen enough of death, misery, and oppression to understand all too well why many are embracing virtual reality. It’s a very real attraction, one whose dangers and pitfalls James Gunn outlined more than half a century ago in The Joy Makers [and even earlier in “The Hedonist”], but as Gunn pointed out, it’s so much easier to escape into one’s personal virtual reality than to remake a failing and imperfect society.

And that would be a tragedy in a universe already so magical… but the choice is ours.