One of the largely unacknowledged aspects of the incredible speed at which personal and professional communications technology change is the fact that such changes not only often waste more time than they save, but that they pander to and foster self-centeredness.

I’ve mentioned the time-wasting before, but I continue to be reminded of it again and again.  Almost every month, my editor’s publishing firm changes some aspect of their software, which means that when I ask my editor for certain information, it always takes longer because it seems that just as he’s learned all the bells and whistles from the last upgrade, the company changes something else.  The same thing occurs at my wife’s university, and even with all those upgrades her computer got ransom-virused – and she’s never used it for anything but business [her IPad is much more convenient for the personal stuff, and I have to admit it doesn’t seem half so prone to viruses, even if it does have other glitches].  Because I have to keep current for a number of reasons, I’m now wrestling with some annoying features of Windows 8.1, and I’m still angry about the fact that the latest version of Word occasionally effectively deletes what I’m working on – without activating the automatic back-up/save if I type too fast and accidentally hit a three key combination that has an H in it.  I don’t mind too much activating spell check or creating a new document, but deleting what I’ve just written has me wanting to assassinate the system designer or marketing manager who decided such add-ons were good. All of these rapid and continuing “improvements” waste most people’s time, but because just enough people upgrade, if you don’t, before long you’re getting documents you can’t open.  So what’s convenient for a comparative handful of IT techies and tech geeks becomes anything but convenient for the rest of us, especially for those of us who use technology as a tool to accomplish something else, rather than to create “new” features just in order to make that claim.

The other aspect of our modern communications revolution is that it both isolates individuals and encourages a self-centered attitude.  Take cellphones.  We now have acquaintances, and even some friends, who switched from landlines to cellphones. Most of them don’t even tell anyone, as if everyone should know.  Then, maybe they posted it on Facebook, as if it happens to be everyone else’s duty to find out.  And when you can’t reach them, they’re the ones who are upset, but it’s rather difficult to reach people without their phone number, either for texting or talking, especially now that more and more of them are abandoning email, except for business.

And social media.  What if I don’t want to be on Facebook or LinkedIn or… whatever?  Or tweet on Twitter?  That’s my choice; it’s anyone’s choice, but now, the attitude of all those on Facebook is that they no longer have to make an effort to actually reach out to others; they just have to post on Facebook, and others have to reach out to them to find out how things are going.  It’s not that people are more selective.  They can’t be, not if they’re posting on social media sites.

But then, maybe that’s not because they’re self-centered.  Maybe it’s because they’ve spent so much time wrestling with technology that’s supposed to be easy, and isn’t, that they only have enough time to post on social media and send 128 character tweets.

Unfortunately, the problem of “rights” is even larger than just religion, as adjudicated in the Hobby Lobby case, because first amendment to the Constitution also states: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” The Roberts Court has effectively declared in the case of funding political campaigns that restrictions on contributions are a restraint of freedom of speech. The problem with the Court decision is that it doesn’t address the question of what occurs when the combination of massive amounts of money combine with high technology to assure that the predominant publicly disseminated “speech” dealing with elections is that of the wealthiest one tenth of one percent of the population. In effect, the multi-million dollar megaphones of the rich drown out the views of anyone else. Yes, those without that kind of funds can speak, but their words go largely unheard.

In certain respects, this isn’t a new problem. Because of their position and wealth, the founding fathers had greater access to the press, and often used it, at times not in the noblest of ways, to further their own interests and ends, but because of the lack of instant communications, a press that was largely local, and diverse regional interests, none of them had access to the entire society either continuously or in real time, nor did they have the ability to buy ink and exposure in all media outlets in all states. They could not and did not conceive of the media concentration and penetration that exists today. Their interest was to assure that all views had a chance to be heard.

Yet in citing the Constitution to allow unlimited political contributions and “independent” political media expenditures that are effectively unlimited by individuals who can keep the amount of their contributions hidden, as well as their very identity unknown, the Roberts court has effectively undermined the very goals of the founders in crafting and adopting the first amendment, because the combination of money and technology effectively diminishes the freedom of speech of those who lack both money and access to technology, and, not incidentally, diminishing any public “right to know.”

Yet the far right trumpets this as a victory for free speech when it is really a victory for anonymous plutocratic propaganda.

I don’t watch soccer/football much, in fact, seldom, but I did end up watching the World Cup semi-final match between the Netherlands and Argentina… and the result underscored something I’ve said before, except with regard to basketball. Mastery of the simpler aspects of anything is key to continued success.

The Netherlands and Argentina played to a scoreless tie after regulation, and then after another 30 minute additional period the game was still scoreless.  Argentina converted four out of four penalty kicks in the shoot-out, while the Netherlands failed on two out of three attempts. While a penalty kick isn’t nearly as easy as a basketball free-throw, it’s far, far easier than scoring a goal in play, when it’s often difficult to even get near the goal with the ball, let alone get a clear shot.  Argentina made that abundantly clear, by not being able to score a single goal in two hours of play, but by putting four out of four shots in the goal in the shoot-out.  The Netherlands lost by not being able to accomplish the simpler tasks in the game.

This “case study” goes well beyond soccer or basketball.  I’ve seen people lose jobs because they failed to write a simple thank you note, or to recognize a former colleague or superior in a different setting.  I’ve seen more than one beginning writer destroy/abort his or her career by arguing violently with editors who have seen scores of writers come and go.  I’ve seen political careers tanked because no one asked a simple question – How did things get this way? – before going off in a direction that considering the answer would have most likely precluded.  I’ve seen singers lose competitions because, when talents were evenly balanced, the singer with more carefully chosen attire and polite mannerisms topped sloppy dress and flip mannerisms. And in all these cases, and others, the individuals involved were anything but stupid.  They just relied on their innate brilliance or talent and ignored mastery of simple skills.

A successful writer needs more than mere story-telling ability and more than mere skill with words, and, more than sometimes, some of those extras are simple skills, such as tact, thank-you notes [NOT emails,unless you’re in the tech world, where hand-written or print thank-yous have become a symbol of backwardness], and a certain amount of respect for those who control one’s fate.  And, oh yes, just plain showing up on time…or getting manuscripts in on time — and, here George R. R. Martin is the exception who proves the rule.

More than a few times, I’ve commented on how important it is for a fantasy or science fiction writer to understand basic societal economics if that writer wants to portray a workable and realistic fictional society.  In recent years, more and more writers have become clearly aware of this, and their books reflect this.  More recently, however, the comparative absence of finance and banking has struck me, yet some form of banking, whether it be counting houses, money-lenders, or the like, has existed in virtually every human civilization that became sophisticated enough to have iron tools. Any form of wide-spread trade requires at least a rudimentary financial system, and a financial system allows what one might call an oligarchical concentration of power and wealth, which in turn feeds intrigue and scheming.

One of the problem with portraying stock exchanges and banks is that few writers really understand them enough to portray just how much they can multiply either evil or good…or how quickly they can turn what seems to be good into total disaster. And, of course, the usual depiction of the banker/financier ranges from Shakespeare’s Shylock, to Dickens’s “early” Scrooge, to Mr. Potter in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life,   to, more recently, the bankers and brokers in Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street. The problem with such one-sided depictions is that they actually understate the impact finances and financiers have on society and government.

The key role a financial system plays in any economy is to provide liquidity, because without liquidity transactions and trades become almost impossibly difficult.

I recently read an incredibly detailed massive fantasy epic, one that depicted almost all aspects of society – traders and their formal and informal associations, rulers and their bureaucracies and sycophants, military types, barbarians, entertainers, crafters, laborers, merchant princes, even authors – but not any financiers or bankers, despite a welter of trade and conflict between adjoining lands.  A great story – but I kept wondering what financial structure was behind it all, and why the bankers, or their equivalent, didn’t put the brakes on some of the idiocy, because successful bankers do tend to be conservative [except in today’s USA], sometimes foolishly so.

So… for better or worse, don’t forget the bankers… or their equivalents.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the Hobby Lobby case, declaring that companies, at least those privately held, are not required to provide birth control benefits under their health insurance plans when providing those benefits is against the religious beliefs of the company’s owners.  Whether the decision sparks other lawsuits or remains a relatively narrow example of an owners’ religious beliefs being able to dictate the scope of health benefits provided to employees remains to be seen.

The underlying issue that the Supreme Court did not address, and which Congress has also steadfastly ignored, is the degree to which Constitutional and statutory “rights” of individuals have been either enhanced or diminished by the exercise of the “right” to apply religious freedom” to others.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the Court verdict essentially states that an employer can effectively limit the access of employees to health care, solely on the basis of religious beliefs.  The employer is not denying birth control services to employees, because employees can theoretically purchase those services on their own.  But there are other aspects to consider, which the Court either did not consider or decided were not important enough to be a factor.  First, when an employee must pay additional funds for health services that the law declares other businesses must provide to their employees, the employee’s access is diminished or costs are increasing, if not both, and they are in a position whereby their total effective compensation is effectively lowered by the employer’s assertion of religious freedom. Additionally, other businesses, which do not have a religious exemption, will likely pay higher costs for employee healthcare insurance.

Thus, in effect, others must pay for Hobby Lobby’s “religious beliefs.”  Obviously, this would not be the case if there were not a law requiring insurance coverage, but there is, and the Court did not strike down the ACA as infringing on religious beliefs. In effect, the Court’s decisions declare that a public policy requiring health care coverage is Constitutional, but that effectively any employers with a clear religious affiliation can refuse to provide coverage for any procedure against their beliefs.  This effectively equates privately held corporations with churches, even though churches are non-profits, and money-making corporations like Hobby Lobby not.  All this brings up an interesting situation, because the Constitution declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” but there’s nothing in the Constitution to forbid the Court from issuing a legal opinion that effectively states that religious beliefs trump civil law and can be used to deny some citizens benefits that most others are entitled to receive under that civil law.  This strikes me as a rather dangerous precedent, particularly when it is endorsed and supported by so many of those who have railed against the fact that Islamic Sharia law supersedes civil law in the Middle East.  It’s wrong for Muslims to have Islamic law trump civil law, but fine for American corporations to sue, and win, for religious beliefs to trump civil law?

Not that any of the far right will see, or care, about the hypocrisy involved. They got what they wanted, and that’s all that matters to them.

In Starship Troopers [the book, not the movie], one of Heinlein’s characters makes the point that the society which governs Earth at that time isn’t necessarily the best, but that it has one redeeming feature – it works and operates reasonably well.  There are many aspects to that society with which critics have taken issue over the years, especially in recent years.  Some of that criticism reflects changes in society from the time at which Heinlein wrote the book, such as the fact that there is no longer the underlying feeling among a majority of the U.S. population that patriotic male citizens owed a certain unqualified duty to support their country with military service in times of war. The criticism about the details of Heinlein’s future society tends to overlook the basic point he was making about governments – they have to work well over time if they are to survive and their people are to prosper.

In turn, for popularly-supported governments to work reasonably well, the citizens have to have a common set of core values and socially and legally enforced basic rules that apply to all. Today, I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. government may still work, but there’s a real question as to whether it works reasonably well, and an even greater question as to how long it will work under the current deadlock between the two political parties, whose espoused core values are becoming increasingly divergent, and who keep coming up with more and more exceptions to those core values with which one group or another disagrees.

In the worst of cases when the core beliefs of citizens differ widely, each side perceives the other as an extremist, if not an out-and-out enemy, which is the case in all too many Middle East countries today. In the United States, the situation is structurally different.  Those who are politically active tend to be more extreme in their beliefs.  Whether politics attracts extremists or extremists flock to politics to attempt to impose their beliefs on others, the result is exactly the same. Those active in political parties are more extreme in their views than the vast majority of Americans, and the most extreme views tend to dominate party politics.

This growing extremism among political activists has several impacts.  First, the percentage of Americans who identify with either major political party has declined steadily, to the point where independent voters outnumber either Republicans or Democrats. In 1940, for example, less than 20% of voters identified as independents, while today the number of independents is approaching 50% of those eligible to vote. Second, the ideological gulf between Republicans and Democrats is at the widest point ever measured, and widening, and greater percentages of each party are inclined to portray the “other party” as the enemy.

Current and past history demonstrate clearly that great and unbending ideological differences make workable governing difficult, if not impossible, and yet the extremists in both Democrat and Republican parties, particularly the Republican party at present, are advocating even greater extremism as solution to governmental deadlock.  Neither seems willing to recognize that extremism in pursuit of ideological purity has never resulted in a workable government and has, if unchecked, always led to disaster, and that in the end, the only beneficiaries are the arms merchants and the undertakers.  But then, the extremists always insist that it’s the other party that’s extreme.

Obviously, different writers have different styles, and some writers’ styles are almost indistinguishable from others, and some writers’ styles are very different. Occasionally, a writer’s style is so unique that it’s virtually impossible to imitate or emulate, and, in general, such writers tend not to be huge financial successes, although a very few do manage it, usually those whose styles do not scream out the nature of their uniqueness.

That’s easily said, but what is style? According to the sixth edition of A Handbook to Literature, “Style combines two elements: the idea to be expressed and the individuality of the author. From the point of view of style it is impossible to change the diction to say exactly the same thing; for what the reader receives from a statement is not only what is said, but certain connotations that affect the consciousness.” Or what about this definition? “In fiction, style consist of the codified gestures by which the author tells the story.” Or this one by the mystery author Nancy Curteman? “Style is not what an author writes, but the manner in which she writes it. It is an author’s unique way of communicating ideas. One might say that style is the verbal identity of a writer. An author defines her style in word choice and syntax.”

The last definition centers on how a writer chooses words and sentence construction to convey the story to the reader. There are two aspects of that conveyance. The first is whether the words and structure are clear and in general accord with the “rules” of grammar, or at least enough so that the reader understands what is going on. The second is how the reader perceives that construction, and often that perception is based on the reader’s skills as a reader, having little to do with the writer’s skills as a writer. Use of unfamiliar terms, less common tenses, or extremely complex sentences are often cited as “stylistic” flaws, but their use, per se, is not a stylistic flaw. Only their misuse is.

Another question about style that’s especially relevant to fantasy and science fiction is whether the ideas presented are themselves part of style, or whether only the way in which they are presented represents style. This may seem like hair-splitting, but it’s really not, at least not in F&SF. In mainstream fiction, including mystery novels, frankly, the ideas are all out there. Most of them have been there for centuries, if not longer; so the stylistic issues center around the presentation of the ideas, not the ideas themselves, and this this mindset is reflected in the Curteman definition above.

By presenting new ideas or new perceptions about technology that does not yet exist or magic, which may never exist in our universe, except in the sense described by Arthur C. Clarke, an author changes the reader’s context, and by changing that context, influences, and perhaps even creates conflict with, the reader’s normal connotations of what some words may represent. By initially presenting “black” as the color of order (with the associated connotation of “law”) in the early Recluce books, I definitely challenged certain perceptual connotations, at least for American and western European readers. In a different way, the “culture” novels of Ian Banks also create challenges to standard connotations, and certainly so do the works of China Mieville and others.

Add to this the possibility that the presentation and development of an idea in fiction cannot truly be separated from the way in which it is presented and developed, and that suggests that critics and readers who talk about a writer’s style and ideas as if they are separate are missing the point. Over the years, I’ve read and heard comments about writers along the lines of “great ideas, poor style” or “great style, weak ideas.” That’s missing the point. Ideas are a part of style, not separate from it. Elegantly crafted sentences without the support of ideas well-presented are the literary equivalent of empty calories, and ideas thrown baldly at the reader might be classed, using the food metaphor, as raw meat of some type or another, possibly digestible, but hardly palatable to most. Or put another way, good style is when an author captivates you to the point where you enjoy the meal without thinking of either the ingredients or the way in which the chef put it together.

As I’ve noted before, almost all human beings desire certainty, except for the adrenaline-junkies and thrill-seekers, and yet, as more than a few savants have noted, nothing in life is certain except death, and, usually, taxes. In terms of personal and political action, the problem with waiting for absolute certainly is that the price for that certainty is too often astronomical. At the same time, acting precipitately on too little information may be unnecessary or also costly with no positive results.

That’s the dilemma that politicians face today. Given that any action by government is costly, and given that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to throw a senator or representative out of office for failing to act, it’s no wonder that most elected officials are loathe to act on anything that doesn’t either approach a certainty in the minds of their constituents, or that has any significant cost. When I was the legislative director for a congressman, he said that the problem most elected officials had was that they addressed problems that hadn’t really proved to be problems. Needless to say, he was very conservative, and he wanted certainty before committing himself. In fact, however,the only things that approach a certainty in politics are the views of the extremists of either party, which is likely one reason why the Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted over fifty times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though it is just as certain that the Senate Democrats will block any vote on repealing the ACA in the Senate.

Despite an overwhelming majority of climate scientists declaring that global warming exists and that it is man-made, those who oppose the actions necessary to address global warming insist that there is not enough certainty in the existing evidence. This is tantamount to declaring that they have no intention of changing their minds until there is no possible doubt that global warming exists and is anthropogenic. Given that the rate at which global warming is proceeding – which is, by the way, without any doubt, the fastest rate in the history of the planet – it will likely be a minimum of twenty to fifty years, if not longer, before there’s enough evidence to convince a significant fraction of the doubters… and at that point, we’ll most likely have locked in a sea-level rise of at least fifteen feet over the next two centuries, with even greater increases in sea-levels, tremendous long-term damages, and remediation costs in the trillions of dollars.

Now… if global warming does not proceed that quickly, exactly what will be the effects of earlier remediation efforts? First, they will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants. Second, greater use of cleaner and renewable energy sources will extend the life of all energy sources needed for a technological society. Third, reforestation and sensible land use will benefit people across the globe. Fourth, better management of industrial, corporate, and personal wastes will result in cleaner land, rivers, and oceans. And most important, since global warming will proceed, the overall costs will be lower. None of these are exactly undesirable for either the United States or the rest of the world… or our children or grandchildren.

Can we really afford the cost of waiting for “absolute” certainty?

… all believers are irrational, sometimes mildly so, and sometimes wildly so. When I mentioned this to someone I know, she replied, “Belief makes people stupid.” I don’t know that I’d go that far, at least not with all people, but what people do in the name of belief is sometimes puzzling, and at times mind-boggling.

Here in Utah, there was a newspaper story about woman, described as an intellectual, who was ex-communicated from the LDS faith years ago because of her “liberal” views, who still attends church services, although she cannot enter a temple or take part in any “higher” church functions. This is a faith that has just threatened to excommunicate LDS women who have spoken out decrying the lack of women in church leadership. Why do they still want to be LDS priests and bishops in a faith that, for all its protestations to the contrary, minimizes the position of women, as evidenced in cold, hard fact? Utah, with a legislature overwhelmingly male and LDS, has the greatest pay discrepancy between men and women. It also extols marriage for time and eternity, yet has a divorce rate above the national average. There are also LDS gays and lesbians who still want to be “part of the church.” Why? Why would anyone wish to be part of a faith that funded the initiative in California to outlaw gay marriage, or part of a faith that denounces acting on same-sex attraction as a sin against God and nature?

Christians don’t fare any better on the rationality test, either. One study showed that eighty percent of Christian pastors under the age of 45 did not believe in global warming. Seventy percent of evangelical Christians don’t, either. According to a Pew survey, over 80% of American Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. More than 60% believe that the story of Noah was factually accurate and that the entire earth was covered in water within historical times.

“Belief stupidity” isn’t limited to religion, either. Why is it that almost a third of conservative Republicans, the Republican true believers, insist that President Obama is a Muslim, while only eight percent of Democrats do? Or why 75% of Tea Party Republicans deny global warming, while 67% of the population as a whole say that it is occurring? Devout Democrats are no better in their irrationality; they’re just irrational on different subjects. More Democrats than Republicans believe that astrology is scientific; lasers are made from sound waves; genetically modified foods are harmful; vaccines are harmful; organic food is more nutritional than conventional food. And when facts conflict with political beliefs, studies show that something like sixty percent of both Democrats and Republicans will choose their political loyalties over conflicting facts that are scientifically and factually verifiable, and then they’ll argue that the facts are “wrong” or go well out of their way to find one example or fact that seems to support their views.

All of which suggests that perhaps the most dangerous words are “I believe.”

Just the other day, a dissatisfied reader charged me with using “hard-to-say” names, and there have been a few comments about the names I’ve used over the years, as if I had committed a horrible sin by not using plain Anglo-Saxon-English names. But… if I’m depicting other cultures, why would they necessarily have plain English names?

That said, are my choices of names that outrageous? Let’s see about protagonists’ names from recent books: Lerial, Quaeryt [more about this one later], Vaelora, and Paulo. Protagonists’ names from older books: Lerris, Creslin, Dorrin, Justen, Nylan, Cerryl, Lorn, Kharl, Saryn, Anna, Secca, Alucius, Mykel, Dainyl, Rhennthyl, Van, Tyndal, Trystin, Jonat, Johan, Llysette, Ecktor, and Keir. Perhaps not always usual names, but hardly tongue-twisters, and almost all of either one or two syllables.

Now, there are a few names that are a little harder to pronounce, such as Quaeryt, Megaera, Seliora, Luara, Kiedron, or Emerya, but “Quaeryt” is derived from the Latin “quaero,” meaning to search or question, and isn’t that much different in spelling from “query.” “Megaera” is a direct crib from mythology; she was one of the Greek/Roman furies. “Luara” is actually a Russian name, and apparently is also the name of an up-and-coming young pop singer [although I used the name in print when she was only five]. And while I thought I made up the names Kiedron and Emerya, it turns out that Kiedron is a Polish name, and Emerya is Turkish, which suggest that quite a few don’t think those names are so out of line.

What the complaints about the names reveal, unhappily, is a form of cultural chauvinism on the part of the complainers, a form of “if it’s not immediately recognizable, I feel uncomfortable.” The complaints also reveal something about the way people were taught to read. While I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that readers who have trouble with the names tend to be those who weren’t taught reading on a phonetic basis and who are thrown by even slightly unfamiliar spellings. I will also freely admit that since I borrow, if not outright steal, from classical sources [as well as others], readers with either open minds or wider educations are less likely to be put off by the references.

But while the Bard said,

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”

I’d have to disagree. Names do have connotations, and sometimes even denotations, that convey differences, and I believe an author should choose or create names that do so… whether or not they’re plain English or not.

I receive a certain number of comments about my work.  Some readers cannot wait for the next book, and others, an apparently much smaller number, dismiss my books as repetitive. With that wide a gap, is one group wrong… or deluded… or not comprehending?  I’d have to say, “No.”

This kind of dichotomy has likely existed from the time of the first novels and lies in the basis of the human psyche.

Obviously, at least obviously to me, a novel or story must initially entertain or otherwise provide some form of satisfaction to the reader. However….a novel which merely recounts a series of adventures or events, without an underlying value structure that motivates or challenges the protagonist and the reader, no matter how threatened the protagonist may be or how great his or her achievements may be, is essentially a mindless adventure story, or, if there are no adventures, a totally meaningless mass of words, even if each sentence is perfectly polished.

This would suggest that readers who continue to read my novels, or those of any other writer, for the entertainment value alone, but find them “repetitious” aren’t getting the refreshment or reaffirmation of their deeply held values because the values depicted through the story don’t resonate with them.  After all, we all know that there’s nothing more tiresome than someone telling stories that reiterate old platitudes that we’ve rejected, found unsatisfying, or that don’t match our perceptions of how “the world” operates or how we’d like it to operate. That’s why one group of readers can find a book deeply satisfying and another group, equally intelligent and perceptive, can find the same book repetitious and “boring.”

While a large number of readers read primarily for entertainment and escape, a significant number read for more than that, for a greater understanding, often of who they are and what they believe, as well as to affirm – and sometimes to challenge – what they believe and hold dear..

Although I doubt there are any sociological studies that test this thesis, to me it makes perfect sense why Game of Thrones is so popular and resonates with so many viewers and readers.  The values, or lack of values except self-interest, and the comparative moral relativism embodied in Martin’s work reflects a widely held popular perception about the current power structure in the United States and other technological societies – that everyone is corrupt and venal to some degree and that everyone is, foremost, out for his or her own self-interest, regardless of the consequences to others.

That’s why, frankly, I have little interest in Game of Thrones, and found the one book I forced myself through to be a well-written but boring repetition of violence and human venality that held little appeal to me, while millions of others find it absolutely spell-binding.  And I suspect many of those millions would find, and have found, my work “repetitious.”

All this suggests that when someone reads the work of a long-published and successful author and labels it repetitious, it’s far more a reflection on the views of the reader than an objective assessment of the work in question.

I generally don’t write about conventions and the like, but since my trip to Phoenix involved my very first comicon, I thought I’d make an exception, particularly since my first F&SF convention was almost thirty years ago, and that means this is likely to be one of the few convention reports I ever make.

Yesterday, I had just checked in as a guest author at the Phoenix Comicon when, out of the blue, sirens blared, and lights flashed, and loud-speakers announced a possible emergency and ordered everyone to walk quietly to stairs and exits and not to take elevators and escalators and to leave the building… out into 108 degree heat.  The problem?  A concession stand had been located too close to a heat sensor. And that was my introduction to the Phoenix Comicon.

Later on Thursday, there was a science fiction and fantasy author kickoff panel, and I found myself seated between Carrie Vaughn and Naomi Novick, and the three of us were flanked by Patrick Rothfuss and John Scalzi, with Scott Lynch and Seanan McGuire next to John, while a pair of troubadours named Paul and Storm serenaded us with a semi-rock parody ballad which was a sort of ode to George R.R. Martin” that extolled George to “write faster, write like the wind.”  I can’t remember much of the rest of the song because I was laughing too much, except for the line complaining about “killing all our favorite characters” and wondering if there’d be anyone left to kill after the next book.

I also discovered I had an actual table, conveniently next to Gini Koch, who writes books much funnier than mine, and across from Yvonne Navarro, and some twenty yards from the empty table of John Scalzi, who clearly has no need to talk to fans – actually he has to avoid them after his popularity almost caused a riot at the San Diego Comicon, or so several very reliable sources reported to me.  I did a signing at the Tor booth on Friday, and Tor actually gave out free copies of The Magic of Recluce for me to sign.  The time for the signing ended just about the time the copies ended; so that was for the best.

Saturday I had a panel on World Building economics, and it showed just how far F&SF has come in terms of economic sophistication. Twenty years ago, almost no one but me talked about or made economics central to their fantasy. At this panel, I had Pierce Brown on my left, who also has a degree in economics as well as spent several years in the financial industry, and Scott Lynch on my right, who has engaged in extensive studies of medieval and Renaissance-level economies and banking systems.  Possibly the best F&SF economics/worldbuilding panels I’ve ever been on… and Scott and Pierce were also most humorous.  Sunday brought back-to-back panels: “The Really Epic Epic Fantasy Panel” and “Keeping A Long-Running Fantasy Series Fresh.”  Both followed their descriptions.

On Monday, I got to the airport early, but possibly not early enough, because I discovered that my flight to Salt Lake had been delayed, and that I’d just missed an earlier flight, meaning that I’d miss my flight home to Cedar City.  As I write, I’m sitting in the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, wondering whether I’ll make the Cedar City flight in Salt Lake [highly unlikely, but barely possible, at least theoretically, if I sprint through the Salt Lake airport, provided there are no more delays] or whether I’ll have to cool my heels in Salt Lake for five hours and have to have my wife drive 60 miles to pick me up in Saint George slightly before midnight.

In any case, that’s the only cliff-hanger I can provide.

LATER NOTE:  I did have to hasten [half run/ half brisk walk] through the Salt Lake Airport to make my connection.  I made it, just as they were closing the doors, but my suitcase didn’t.

There’s an old, old advertising maxim that says something to the effect that “you don’t sell the steak; you sell the sizzle.”  It was true sixty years ago, and it’s even more true today… especially in F&SF.

At almost every science fiction convention or conference I’ve attended over the past five, possibly even ten years, there’s been at least one presenter or guru, if not a whole raft, insisting that the first step to becoming a successful author is, in essence, establishing a huge internet/social media presence.  And there’s at least one very successful author in our field who’s done that, as well as a great number of other moderately successful authors who’ve also done the same thing. While I fully understand the rationale in this day of hype, personality, and instant access, I have to wonder what this does to the amount and quality of actual fiction writing.

On the one hand, if you want to be a professional author and paid for your work, there’s little point in writing something, no matter how excellent, if no one knows you’re writing it and if no one buys it because they don’t know it’s there.  And, like it or not, with the tight margins in publishing these days, very few first-time authors get overwhelming amounts of support from publishers. This problem is compounded by the shorter window during which new books – by almost any author except those extremely well-established – receive attention from readers, bookstores, bloggers, and other media. In short, authors have to work harder to be visible.

The problem is that the nature of the internet is “instant.”  If there’s not something out there practically every day, all too many readers lose interest. I’ve tried to avoid the posting every day syndrome by posting my blogs twice a week and by trying to make them “deeper” and not nearly so much about matters I regard as trivial.  That’s not snobbery, but a recognition of my own limits.  I don’t do light humor and personal trivia well, certainly not along the “cat on bacon” variety.  Even so, posting blogs just twice weekly means that I’m writing 50,000 words a year for the website, and those aren’t words that are going into books.  Both my editors and publicists have been able to see a certain effect from that, especially compared to authors of my vintage and style who have not established even a modest internet presence, but it’s difficult to quantify how much difference it makes.

Is that difference in sales because of the website, forum, and other internet efforts?  Or is it merely because what I write is still appealing to readers?  Both?  Some of each?  How much of each?

Then there’s the other question.  How much are readers affected by a writer’s internet presence and persona?  The other day I read a comment suggesting that one popular author [not me, thankfully] was a far better blogger than an author, but that was something that the author’s readers didn’t seem to catch, because, according to the blogger, the writer was a competent author and an outstanding blogger, and readers thought the author was outstanding in both areas.

My gut feeling is that the commenter is on to something, and that a good internet presence creates an impression of greater authorial ability than may exist, while a poor or non-existent internet presence likely has a negative effect – but only among readers who are active on the internet.

All that said, there’s a real question about the trade-offs.  To what degree does all the effort to develop and maintain an internet presence detract from an author’s principal task, which is to write good and entertaining books?  A website and blog, no matter how entertaining, won’t bring in much income, but if a new author isn’t an instant best-seller, without some form of vigorous self-promotion, he or she may not be around too long, no matter how good the writing.  And then, once you’re established, what happens if you try to cut back on that daily and continuing internet presence?

As I’ve noted before, stereotypes persist in all human cultures, unfortunately partly because they’re convenient mental shortcuts, and partly, again unfortunately, because the group being stereotyped almost always has within it individuals, almost always a significant minority, if not more, whose characteristics fit that stereotype. There are two kinds of buy-ins, one by outsiders doing the stereotyping and one by members of the group being stereotyped.

Part of the underlying problem with stereotyping is that stereotyping often results from pressures either within or outside the group being stereotyped. Historically, for example, Jews were stereotyped as being usurious and greedy money-lenders, but in much of Europe for centuries, money-lending and banking were among the few non-menial professions open to Jews, and certainly it was the most lucrative. Among young inner city ethnic males, failure to adhere to certain styles of dress and behavior can be detrimental to one’s health and well-being. The problem, unfortunately, is that such attire and behavior are regarded as socially undesirable, if not a warning of imminent danger, by most of those outside that ethnic male community. This obviously creates not only a social but an economic problem. The behavior and dress that allow day-to-day survival mitigate against success outside the community.

The same pressures also exist in other “communities,” although they’re seldom mentioned. Wall Street financiers are often stereotyped as greedy, heartless, and self-centered money-grubbers. The problem there is that, at least from what I’ve seen, having any sort of conscience or awareness of the impact of their actions beyond Wall Street is extremely detrimental to their day-to-day success.

At the same time, what all too many people within such groups fail to understand is that appearances and behavior matter. They affect perceptions of outsiders and how they deal with members of the group being stereotyped. What also overlooked, or at least seldom mentioned, is that stereotypes are far more detrimental to members of groups with less economic and political power. Unemployed and less educated minority youth seldom have either; Wall Street financiers and attorneys, aka shysters and ambulance chasers or, in more refined circles, “hired guns for sale to the highest bidder,” have both power and money, and money and power tend to override stereotypes, which may be another reason why so many pursue both so vigorously, rather than actual expertise in a given field.

There’s no easy answer to stereotyping, as Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, just found out, when trying to explain how he’d react to encountering various “stereotypes” on a dark street. Yet I’d be willing to bet that 99% of all Americans would do exactly what he said he’d do.

Some dictionary definitions of “monster” include: (1) one abnormal, unnatural, or hideous in appearance or (2) one that inspires hate or horror because of cruelty, wickedness, depravity, etc., (3) a fabulous creature compounded of parts from various animals, as a centaur, dragon, hippogriff, etc. Readers of my books will likely have noticed that I don’t have many, if any, alien monsters running around. There are a few dangerous creatures here and there, such as the stun lizards of Naclos in the Recluce series or the sandwolves or dustcats in the Corean Chronicles, but they’re not monsters. They’re just dangerous predators. I’ve also written about a few alien species, but they’re alien, with different motives, and not monsters, at least not in the traditional fantasy or literary sense.

Yet, lately, particularly in the last ten, perhaps fifteen years, we’ve had an explosion in F&SF monsters – werewolves, vampires, evil creatures from faerie, zombies, truly malevolent ghosts, and I’ve found myself asking why on two fronts. Why are so many authors and readers fascinated and enthralled by all these monsters, and why am I totally uninterested in reading about most of them? I’ve certainly sampled the current offerings, and I remain largely unthrilled and unenthralled.

Part of the reason these monsters are so popular with so many readers is that they show a direct danger and an obvious power, and in most cases they’re bested by a largely standard human being, or one close enough that readers can identify with him or her. I think that gives many readers a sense of meaning and power that’s seemingly missing in our complex culture where it so often seems that no one can get much of anything constructive done – especially in the last few years when so many of those who make the most money can’t even be considered to be doing anything constructive.

For me, at least personally, that poses a bit of a problem, because most of the real monsters I’ve encountered or even read about haven’t been alien – they’ve been monstrous human beings, usually very successful at rationalizing their actions in some way or another… or in justifying them by placing some sort of blame on other people because life hasn’t gone the way they wanted. But then, that kind of monstrosity doesn’t sell millions of books or make blockbuster movies. Even so, my “monsters” are likely to remain the human kind. For me, they’re much more interesting… and, hopefully, for my readers.

This past weekend, an interesting analysis appeared in a number of newspapers, showing that the highest-paid people in medicine weren’t the doctors, but the “senior management” types in healthcare. Hospital directors make a lot more than the most expensive surgeons, and multiple times what general practitioners do. This is a problem, but it’s not confined to medicine. It’s everywhere. The senior executives in pharmaceutical companies make ten times what their top researchers make – if not hundreds of times. In my wife’s university, from what I can determine, nine of the ten top-paid individuals are “management” types, and most of the top fifty are either management types or professors of business or management. The same has long been true in corporate America as well.

The question is, then, just why are these management types so much more valuable than those under them who actually do the work, design and make the products, do the market research, sell those new products, teach the students, build the highways, heal and repair the sick. Not only that but even among the top executive types, pay levels are marginally related, if even that, to actual performance or worth to society. The highest-paid individuals in America are hedge fund managers and other financial types whose greatest accomplishments are speculation and speed-trading, which is essentially legal high-speed graft and extortion, justified by them as “providing market liquidity.” Study after study has shown that the highest-paid executives tend, overwhelmingly, to be taller, good-looking males – whose actual performance on the job is, on average, less than that of either shorter male CEOs or women.

These facts are anything but unknown. So why do we continue to select and reward individuals and occupations that aren’t the best for improving life for the vast majority of us? For that matter, why don’t corporations pick executives and managers based on more than a modicum of talent and a maximum of appearance and charisma? And what’s the societal point of minimizing productive people and resources in the United States so that a comparative handful of executives and speculators can pile up more hundreds of millions or billions of dollars?

Are we really that self-destructive?

The last few days, with graduations occurring somewhere practically everywhere, it’s not surprising that I’ve run across columns, letters, and blogs all decrying the increase in the cost of education. They’re all correct in the fact that the cost of education has increased faster than the rate of inflation, and almost all of them are wrong about most of the rest of it, especially their “remedies” for reducing costs.

The first thing that people tend to forget is that a huge component of the increased costs is the number of students attending college. In 1960, only 7.7% of the population had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2013, the percentage was 33.5%. Now, considering that the U.S. population was 180 million in 1960 and was 317 million in 2013, that means that there were only about 14 million people with an undergraduate college degree or higher in 1960, while there are 106 million today. No one seems to be considering the cost of at least tripling the infrastructure needed to educate close to a hundred million more students. And in some ways it’s worse than that, since in 1960 roughly forty percent of graduating high school seniors entered college and fewer than half graduated from college. Today, more than 66% of all high school seniors enter college, and still only about half make it through. With a still increasing population, that requires more facilities and more teachers.

Some of this problem could be solved by stricter admission standards and more rigorous grading and higher academic standards, especially on the secondary school level, both to improve preparation for college and to weed out early those students either unable or unwilling to do college-level work. Greater investment in teaching high level, non-college skills would also help, but all of these are currently politically highly unlikely.

The second factor is that in all areas, but especially in the more technical areas, the cost of educational equipment and facilities has increased. When I taught university more than twenty years ago, most faculty didn’t have computers. Now they all do, and they’re necessary, given state and federal requirements. Laboratory equipment is far more expensive, as are building and safety requirements.

Interestingly enough, while university personnel costs have increased significantly, the largest area of growth has been in administrative personnel, while cost growth in teaching faculty has been restrained by hiring far fewer tenured and tenure track faculty and ever greater numbers of part-time adjuncts, so that on average college and university faculty have gone from being more than two-thirds full-time faculty to one third full-time and two-thirds adjunct, while the numbers of high-paid administrators have continued to increase, in some instances by as much as ten times the increase in full-time faculty.

Then, as I’ve mentioned earlier in other posts, the share of who pays the overall cost of education at public universities and colleges has also shifted dramatically over the past fifty years, from the majority of such costs, often 90%, being paid by the state in the immediate post WWII era, to the present, where, on average, 90% is now paid through student tuition and fees.

Given all these factors, and the fact that public universities and colleges, who educate the vast majority of students, have essentially limited staff and faculty pay to less than the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, any significant cost cuts in teaching personnel are not possible, no matter what anyone claims, and no one seems willing to even look at administrative bloat. In addtion, because the college-age population is still increasing, the need for more facilities and equipment isn’t likely to shrink, either. The only question is whether voters and taxpayers are willing to increase the state and local governments’ share of funding higher education, so that less of a cost burden falls on the student or the student’s family, or whether the United States will, by default,effectively restrict higher education to those of greater means and to the comparative handful of less affluent students who are so brilliant that they can obtain scholarships and grants.

The biggest problem American companies and probably every other corporate-level business in the world has is that few of them, if any, understand that there can indeed be too much of a good thing, or at least too much trying to obtain too much of a good thing, especially when that “good thing” happens to be increased revenues or profits or increased CEO and high-level executive compensation. Revenue and profit have become such a dominating target that almost none of their CEOs or corporate boards ask, “How much is enough?” Those that do ask invariably answer, “As much as we can get.”

I’m not against profit, just as I’m not against eating, but trying to gorge on profits is the corporate equivalent of gluttony, and sooner or later it results in either corporate unwellness, terminal corporate illness, or societal malfunctioning on a grand scale. Corporations are continually trying to do more with less, in order to increase revenues and profits, but none of them ask what the results of their “success” will be, or the implications for the future.

The other day I went to get a plastic pipe joint for my sprinkler system – just a piece of PVC pipe maybe five inches long at most. When I got home I discovered I actually had an unused one, but I thought they were different. They were. The new one was almost an inch shorter than the older one, which means that it’s not as strong. I suppose it doesn’t make that much difference for a buried sprinkler system pipe, but the problem is that making things smaller and cheaper while selling them for the same price or even more doesn’t stop at PVC pipe. It goes into things like General Motors car ignition switches, whose failure resulted in people being killed, all for a savings of a dollar a car. And the only lesson Detroit has learned since the Pinto fuel tank disasters is that people eventually forget.

The problem with doing more with less and maximizing profits is that the goods and services are cheaper, that fewer employees have good paying jobs, and the profits go to those already well-off, either through dividends, capital gains, or higher compensation. All that makes executives happy and well-paid, and investors equally happy – but only for the moment. The problem is that ninety-five percent of Americans (and before long it’s likely to be 99.5%, it isn’t already) aren’t sharing in this wealth, and, as I’ve noted before, in a consumption driven economy that also imports more than it exports, as income inequality increases, the ninety percent have less and less to spend, and that means that they buy less and they buy cheaper goods. It also means that welfare and food stamp program costs go up, yet with tax revenues already in deficit, that means that infrastructure programs have lower funding, as do research, defense, and education, among others necessary for the successful functioning of society.

In effect, the quest for greater revenues at all costs is bankrupting the country, slowly but inexorably. And for what, so the top 25 hedge fund managers can make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America? So U.S. corporations can outsource more and more jobs? Maybe, just maybe, if the top ½ of one percent of the earners in the United States had to pay taxes at U.S. levels in the 1960s, they might not be so obsessed with profits, and we could pay for the basics society needs without running deficits, and we might get back to 1960s prosperity. And… please… don’t talk about welfare cheats; the biggest cheats are in the finance industry.

But don’t count on any real tax and structure reform happening so long as the Republicans claim that higher taxes are job killers. Higher taxes on the right people aren’t. Tell me, honestly, exactly what benefit do all those exorbitant multi-million dollar compensation packages provide for the country?

The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have formed another committee to investigate the so-called Benghazi scandal. Besides being a waste of time and money, it’s also an example of the total self-centeredness and the failure of the Republican Party even to follow their own self-proclaimed principles. The deaths of the U.S. Ambassador and three others were tragic. They shouldn’t have died, but let’s look at the situation. The two possibilities for the cause most cited are: (1) the killings were motivated by a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video produced in the U.S. or (2) the attack was planned and executed by anti-American Islamic terrorists. The bottom line is that four people died because a great many people in Libya and throughout the Middle East hate Americans and because security was not adequate. In the larger context, it doesn’t matter that much which anti-American cause led to the killings. The real cause was poor security, and and that was not caused because the Congress had cut State Department funding, but because the career staff of the State Department, not the Secretary of State, not the political appointees, had allocated the security personnel as they saw fit and failed to offer adequate support for the ambassador when he visited a CIA post in Benghazi. Yet the Congressional investigations continue to focus on former Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama, for their misleading political statements about the issue, rather than on those in the State Department who were actually responsible for the lax security. Of course, Clinton and Obama tried to spin the issue after the fact. So did the Republicans, and they’re still trying. The problem here is that yet another hearing won’t do a damned thing to solve the problem. It will convince die-hard Republicans – again – that Clinton and Obama are out to mislead the public. It will also convince die-hard Democrats, again,that the Republicans are continuing to avoid doing anything constructive while using the Congress as a basis for personal attacks. And, guess what? The left and the right are both correct… and totally ignoring the real problems and issues.

Now… in this light, let’s look at the BLM mess in the west. We have a Nevada rancher who has refused to pay grazing fees for twenty years. After twenty years of essentially doing nothing, the BLM suddenly decides to seize his cattle. Hundreds of self-proclaimed militia appear, armed with everything from handguns to high-powered rifles and semi-automatic weapons. The BLM backs down, again, and the “militia” remain patrolling the area and stopping residents and others at will. This is hardly an issue of an overbearing government. For years, the BLM has charged grazing fees set as low as legally possible, at rates often as low as ten percent of what private land owners charge and far below the rates charged by states on state-owned lands. In addition, the BLM has failed to maintain the lands, at least with regard to wild horses, so that there are tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands that can only support a fraction of that total, and excess of 2,000 alone in just Iron County, Utah. Yet, last week, a BLM wrangler was threatened by two men, one of whom was armed, for actually transporting horses to a holding area, and an elected state official led an illegal ATV ride through a roadless area closed to motorized vehicles, in protest of BLM procedures protecting environmental and archeological features of the area.

In both of these cases, we have Republicans and Democrats both playing politics… and neither side seems in the slightest interested in addressing the underlying problems. We don’t need another political Benghazi investigation; we don’t need posturing over citizens’ and states’ “rights” to claim federal lands, so-called “rights” that have no basis in law. And we certainly don’t need self-proclaimed militia telling residents and government alike what to do. What we need is less posturing and more action, but, of course, almost no politician really wants action because enforcing the law and looking into real incompetence, as opposed to politically-trumped-up issues, just upsets various political interests and costs votes, and votes are apparently far more important than law or good government to the vast majority of politicians. But then, maybe after so many years in politics, they really can’t even tell the difference.

The vast majority of people believe what they want to. What distinguishes a thinking individual from a believing individual is that thinking individuals do their best to evaluate all the facts in their environment and in the universe, not just the ones that support what they believe. What complicates this is that some individuals believe in things that are so; that is, what they believe is aligned with what the facts indicate is in fact so, but they do so out of belief, and often the basis for those beliefs rests upon other biases not grounded in fact. Add to that the fact that someone can be a thinking individual in some respects and a total “believer” in something that is anything but grounded in fact in others. In life, most of us are a mixture of thinker and believer.

From what I’ve observed and from what some psychologists report, all too often when “loyalties” that require adherence to a belief ungrounded in fact [and by that I mean the preponderance of fact and not just selected facts] conflict with the preponderance of fact, loyalties almost always win out. Thus, a far greater number of Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim than do Democrats, while a far greater number of liberals oppose all genetically modified foods than do conservatives. Extreme fundamentalist Christians cannot accept evolution because it conflicts with an essential loyalty. Extreme libertarians believe that minimal or no government secures the most freedom for the most people, despite the bloody evidence of all human history to the contrary.

What makes all this even more of a problem is that when one marshals even what might seem an unassailable array of facts and proof against a belief with little or no support grounded in reality, all such an assault does, in the vast majority of instances, is to strengthen the belief. Which is why a small army of self-proclaimed and armed militia members continue to patrol the side-roads around Bunkerville, Nevada, most firmly convinced that Cliven Bundy, the man who owes the federal government [i.e., the taxpayers] over a million dollars, is a patriot supporting states’ rights, in particular rights that the state of Nevada relinquished in writing upon gaining statehood, and rights that are superseded in writing in the Constitution, that very document those true-believing militia types insist they are upholding.

But then, how many of us have beliefs ungrounded in fact and reality that we uphold against the evidence all around us, evidence we choose not to see because it conflicts with what we need to believe?