Just recently, a comparatively young British author, with several highly-praised and decent-selling fantasy novels, announced that she was leaving her full-time writing to become a chemistry teacher.  Her reason for doing so?  The pressure to write at least a book a year and to promote each book endlessly and enthusiastically.

More than a few other aspiring authors will doubtless shake their heads, perhaps even mutter under their breath  that the author in question is acting “spoiled.”  After all, aren’t authors in the business to write and sell books?  And writing and selling books requires producing regularly and selling.  Those are the conditions required by the profession today. Certainly, in other professions, such as medicine, law, dentistry, I’ve know those who left a profession because of the conditions exacted by the profession itself. Writing on a professional level isn’t any different… or shouldn’t be.

At the same time… writers come in all flavors, predispositions, with wide ranges of ability.  Some can easily write a good book a year, if not more, and others may labor for years to produce a good book.  Still others may labor for years to produce a barely publishable novel.  Unfortunately, as massive conglomerates have taken over the publishing business, and as tele-media hype has invaded the printed fiction market, the pressures on publishers, editors, and writers to produce more books – and preferably more of whatever sold a lot last time – has continued to increase.

On top of that, as the British author noted, writers are supposed to become one-person non-stop marketing machines to build their celebrity, despite the fact that the traits that make one a good writer are usually not the ones that make one a “good” celebrity. The problem with the current system is that it presses all writers toward being the same, creating similar, disposable, and soon forgotten entertainment.  By doing so, it makes it harder and harder for writers who don’t fit the mold to be successful financially, and that means that unique writers and books are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the market.

Frankly, I’m one of the fortunate authors, because I was able to build readership gradually, literally over more than a decade, in a way that is, from what I’m now observing, close to impossible for most newer authors.  These newer, and usually younger, authors face two sets of distinctly different pressures – first, to create something that sells well and that is distinctive, but not too distinctive or different and, second, to continue with the same “franchise” without losing the novelty that distinguished them in the beginning.  This is virtually impossible for any length of time.

To date, I’ve written four fantasy series, all in different “universes,” all with distinctly different magic systems and cultures, and all with more than one set of main characters and with individual books telling stories in different time periods. And, along the way, I’ve also continued to write and successfully sell stand-alone SF novels. Twenty years ago, that sort of approach was rare, but I certainly was far from the only author who did so.  Today, offhand, I can’t think of a single other younger author who does so, suggesting to me, at least, that such an approach has become even rarer, although there must be some who still do.  That there are so few doesn’t surprise me, not with the emphasis of marketing and hype, because, unless an author is well-known, trying to sell a new and different series or novel becomes more and more difficult, especially a second series.  It also doesn’t lend itself to media tie-ins of the sort such as A Game of Thrones. In the fantasy field, in particular, there are almost no huge best-selling stand-alone novels, and I can only think of a single writer who has had top-fifteen best-sellers in different fantasy series [although he didn’t create one of the best-selling series].

The problem with this market-driven approach to publishing is that it tends to reward “more of the same and faster please” rather than “better and different.”  And that’s a pity, especially when it leads talented authors to walk away from the field because they don’t fit “the marketing mold.”  It also rewards disproportionately those authors who are able to spin out one series endlessly and, to a much lesser degree, those who’ve been able to establish themselves as a “brand” apart from any specific work. 

And that’s why, unless matters change, especially in fantasy, we’re likely to keep seeing most authors tied to a single massive series.

In reading over the backgrounds of various would-be candidates for president, I came across one with an apparently outstanding educational background – college degree, followed by two different law degrees, government service, and later, election to Congress.  So how can such an outstanding individual, at least on paper, claim that global warming is a hoax?  I’m well aware that there are still some reputable climate scientists who have doubts about the human contribution to global warming, but the vast, vast majority of reputable scientists in the field have virtually all come to the conclusion that global warming is real and indisputable, even if they don’t all agree on the cause or causes. Every glacier in the northern hemisphere is melting away, as well as most in the southern hemisphere.  The northern polar ice is at its smallest dimension since records have been kept.

So how can a clearly well-educated individual dispute global warming?  Isn’t education supposed to allow one to look at all the facts and come to a wiser conclusion?

Not exactly.  A wide array of analyses and tests on brain and mental functions over the past decade has established that education usually doesn’t work that way because the majority of human beings are subject to a mental process called “confirmation bias.”  In the simplest terms, this means that virtually all of us tend to form our opinions first and then seek confirmation of those opinions afterward.  In practice, recent studies show it gets worse than that, because more highly educated individuals have access and exposure to a far wider range of facts and information – and then pick and choose the facts necessary to support their view.  In dealing with global warming, for example, they’ll pick the three studies out of a thousand that dispute global warming, and claim that those studies are the ones that count.  Precisely because such individuals are more highly educated, their convictions are even more unshakable than individuals who are less highly educated, and they’re generally unresponsive even to a massive weight of evidence.

The problem is even worse when such individuals deal with issues outside their fields of expertise, because they firmly believe that their expertise applies everywhere.  This is why often noted scientists or other professionals take strange positions in fields in which their expertise is limited or non-existent, such as attorneys in politics becoming “experts” in economics or environmental or trade issues,

I have to wonder how many of these politicians ask the simple question, “Do I believe this just because I want to?”  But, even if they do ask the question, I fear that their confirmation bias will tell them that they’re just analyzing the facts accurately… and that all those who disagree with them just don’t understand the obvious.  I mean… isn’t it obvious?

I recently read a review in The Economist of a new translation by the poet John Ashbery of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.  Rimbaud, of course, was l’enfant terrible of nineteenth century French poetry, but also a creative genius who died as a trader in Africa, never even knowing that Verlaine and others had published his various poems in book form in his absence.

One of the aspects of Rimbaud’s genius, according to the reviewer, was the way in which he used words, often choosing words with multiple and conflicting definitions, where each definition of the word imparted a differing but still relevant meaning to the line and the poem as a whole.  The reviewer also points out, that in some cases, because the English translations of the French words do not have such multiple meanings, that Ashbery was forced to choose between one of two or three English words, thus limiting the impact of the word or line as rendered in English.

As a writer, I’ve also come across similar problems in dealing with the translation of my words into another language.  The most obvious case was the Swedish translation of The Magic of Recluce.  I was initially approached by a Swedish reader who was also a translator.  He told me that the name “Recluce” did not translate into Swedish, and that the allusions contained in Recluce didn’t, either. We talked for a time, and then he later emailed me with good news and bad news.  The good news was that the alternative names he’d worked out for certain places in the Recluce Saga had been accepted by a Swedish publisher, and that the book would be translated into Swedish.  The bad news was that he didn’t get the translation assignment. [I did give him an exclusive interview, which he said he’d managed to sell.]  So, The Magic of Recluce appeared in Sweden and the Scandinavian countries as Larlingstid: Sarlands Historia… and I have no idea what the connotations and allusions of that title are in Swedish.

The problems in translation, unhappily, go well beyond the simple, because there’s more than the meaning of mere words to deal with. Terry Pratchett, for example, once said that a translator contacted him and complained that quite a number of terms and puns and other things didn’t translate into the language at hand.  Sir Terry is reputed to have said, “Don’t translate it literally.  Just make it funny!”  I pity the translator, but supposedly he did the job… and well.

And at times, a writer’s very outlook can’t be conveyed into another language.  When I was told that a Russian publisher had picked up the rights to several of my novels, my initial reaction was to say, “Please… no…”  But I followed the professional’s creed, smiled, pocketed the modest royalties… and winced in silence.  From what I can tell, the books did horribly, and that didn’t surprise me, from what I’ve learned about Russian outlooks and culture from a number of close Russian friends.  Interestingly enough, and far from surprising, the only readers I know who like the Russian versions are people who are bilingual in Russian and English.

At times, though, translations work marvelously well.  I know a mid-list writer who’s never had a smashing success in the United States, but who wrote a historical fantasy set in Turkey – and the Turkish edition was at the top of the Turkish best-seller list for close to a year.  It may have helped that the translation was done by a well-known Turkish poet [even in Turkey, it appears, poets can’t make a living on just their poetry].

Then there’s the English/American issue.  More than a handful of famous people and wits have deplored the fact that Americans and Brits, not to mention Scots, the Irish, and even Aussies, don’t speak the same language, even when we’re using the same words.  For some reason, it appears that I write in a form of English that appeals to certain people in all English-speaking lands, but appeals only to a handful of editors, even in the United States.  Perhaps the one area where my appeal to readers is as great, if not greater on a percentage basis, as in the United States is in the central and western reaches of Canada.  Can I explain why?  No… but I’m grateful, whatever the reason.

Based on observation and experience, I’d caution beginning writers not to agonize over translations. All you can do is hope for a good translator who can make your words work… and pocket the royalties with a smile.

In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision [ Connick vs. Thompson], the Court ruled 5-4, essentially that the office of the District Attorney in the city of New Orleans did not have a responsibility to ensure that its attorneys were properly trained, and therefore, the city was not liable for unprofessional behavior on the part of the four attorneys who withheld and suppressed evidence that would have exonerated a man erroneously sentenced to death… and thus the city had to pay no damages to the man who had spent 18 years in prison.  Less than a month before Thompson’s scheduled execution, a private investigator discovered that prosecutors had hidden evidence that exonerated Thompson. Later investigations discovered that in 25% of the death penalty convictions during the tenure of District Attorney Connick as chief prosecutor, evidence was withheld or suppressed by the DA’s office.

New Orleans is far from the first city in which such abuses have occurred, but it does appear to have been the first in which they’ve been documented so thoroughly, and that documentation and the fragmentary evidence from other cities strongly suggests that all too often district attorneys are more interested in “winning” than in justice.  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Thompson case also illustrates, to my way of thinking, how coservatives, from business executives to politicians to jurists, so revere the conservation of money for those who have it in large amounts, that they are willing to twist the law, and the federal budget to almost any extreme.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m equally willing to point out that the far left has for years essentially taken the position that all income effectively belongs to the government, and that government should determine what income levels are “fair” through the taxation system.  In addition, the far left has effectively endorsed, through its support of unbridled tort claims against business, the medical profession, and any defendant with “deep pockets”, that justice can be obtained merely through massive damage claims, despite decades of experience that shows that seldom, if ever, do malpractice claims resulted in expelling poor physicians from practice or in obtaining actual improvement of products and services.  What such tort claims do accomplish, in the majority of cases, particularly class action lawsuits, is to enrich the lawyers.

Both the liberals and the conservatives are wrong in focusing on money and/or winning, rather than on law or justice, because in focusing on winning and money, the justice system reverts to trial by combat, and in that combat, ethics and justice both lose to unbridled ambition and greed.

While the Thompson case certainly was about money, the Court did not, and likely could not, deal with the issue of whether the compensation Thompson had obtained from the lower court case was excessive.  The Court could, and should, have held that the previous case law and precedents required that the city of New Orleans had a duty to train its district attorneys to follow the law themselves, while noting that the compensation awarded to Thompson for their failure to do so was excessive.  Instead, the Court overturned those precedents. That decision was a clear indication that the U.S. Supreme Court, as presently constituted, is far less interested in justice than it is in making a statement about excessive tort claims, twisting the law to do so, and thus, in effect, legalizing the unethical and unprofessional behavior of local prosecutors who had themselves twisted, if not broken, the law.

In the Thompson case, the prosecutors broke the law, convicted an innocent man, and, after the fact, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that more than twenty years of case law did not apply, and therefore the city of New Orleans had absolutely no legal liability for failing to ensure that its attorneys followed the law. And if a local government cannot be held accountable, how can anyone be sure of justice?

Or is the Court decision merely an after-the-fact affirmation that in the United States, the pursuit of money and winning at any cost trumps justice every time?

Former President Gerald Ford once noted that any government big enough to accomplish everything you want will be big enough to take everything you have.  A similar observation might be made of the combination of technology and business. Think about the history of how technology has become an integral part of business, especially large businesses.

I’m not that old, and I can remember when people traveling abroad actually arranged for letters of credit with foreign banks, a concept that is not only unnecessary today, but not even the faintest of memories in the minds of most people. I can also remember when there was essentially no interstate banking, and when “charge cards” – essentially the forerunners of today’s credit and debit cards were essentially local or limited to accounts at a single business, such as an oil company. The first “national” credit card was the “Diner’s Club” card, launched in 1950, but a national credit card system didn’t develop until the mid-1960s, and it was close to a good two decades after that, if not longer, before credit cards were a feature on a world-wide basis. Today, you can use a debit or credit card for a cash withdrawal/advance in most large cities across the globe and not have to carry hundreds or thousands of dollars in travelers’ checks.

Of course, none of this would have occurred without massively large banks, and massively large banks with nationwide and international outlets and connections aren’t feasible without technology and high speed computers and networks. 

But progress comes at a cost… and that cost is vulnerability.  The same technology that allows you to withdraw cash from your New York or Denver or Charlotte bank from where you are, whether it be Amsterdam or Buenos Aires or Sydney, also makes it possible for a hacker in Ukraine or Bulgaria to tap into your account.  The same technology that allows you to buy and sell stock in minutes from your home computer is the same technology that allows programmed trading systems to do so in milliseconds and crash the entire New York Stock Exchange in minutes when the slightest thing goes wrong. The Obama Administration is pushing for national centralized and computerized medical records, something that already exists in many states and hospital networks, in order to allow you to receive better treatment if you fall deathly ill or are injured away from your home… but that technology is far more susceptible to misuse than the “antiquated” paper files and charts that were once only located in your local hospital and your doctor’s office.  With the growth of the new technology has also come a massive growth in medical records fraud, especially involving insurance and government medical programs.

The point is simple.  Technology multiplies everything, both the benefits and the liabilities, the gains and the thefts, and because it does, unless a technologically “improved” system is designed to minimize abuse, abuse will multiply faster than benefits.  But… all the abuse prevention systems and passwords have the effect of making to harder to access the new technology – so that most of us who have any online presence or business needs either have password after password or court fraud and abuse by using simple passwords or employing only one or two for everything.  And that, of course, increases vulnerability. 

So it’s no wonder that the total cost of electronic-based fraud is skyrocketing.  Not only that, but the “official” totals don’t even include the uncounted personal time lost in dealing with such problems as spam and would-be fraud… or forgotten or mistyped passwords. 

Yes… we have progressed… but it’s been a great deal more costly than most of us realize, and it’s likely to get more so… not less.

Lady Gaga and Mother Teresa – world class marketers!  That’s what a column in the latest edition of The Economist [that I’ve read, at least] declares.  This struck my fancy, especially after my earlier blog about Lady Gaga’s marketing, because if you include Richard Wagner, or Adolph Hitler, who, whatever else he was, was a superb marketer of himself, and a whole range of other individuals across a range of occupations, it becomes clear that marketing is merely a tool.

Now… most people would say, “Duh… that’s not rocket science… or even close.”

And they’d be right, but what most people don’t get are the implications behind that finding.  The right wing fiscal conservatives believe in unfettered markets, with no regulation, or as little as possible, while those on the far left believe that no market can be trusted in any way at all. In effect, the “pure” free market types believe that a free market is a moral instrument, and even if they deny that phrase, the fact that they refuse to believe in controls and regulations declares that, whether they’ll admit it or not, they believe the free market to be “moral” or to behave in a moral way.  On the other hand,

It’s no surprise that those on the far left declare unfettered capitalism as immoral, and requiring a heavy dose of regulation to cub its “immorality.”

Yet in practice, superb marketers know how to use the tools of marketing to sell anything at all, as noted in the Economist column. That “anything” can range from Nazi propaganda to pop music to greater faith in a deity.  Especially in a technological society, marketing is merely the tool, a means to an end.  If the means of marketing are unfettered, so is what’s sold and how;  if they’re too tightly restricted, commerce grinds almost to a halt, and you end up with a police state and a black market as the only market with a semblance of economic function.

And what’s the point of all this?

The point is simple.  Because marketing is a tool, and a powerful one at that, it needs to be handled like any other system with great power – with the kind of safeguards that prevent its abuse while not destroying its very effectiveness.  One of the principal reasons for the economic meltdown of several years ago was the effectiveness of real estate sales people, lenders, and investment bankers in selling what amounted to flawed and unsafe products to people without the ability to understand its implications. In addition, as more and more evidence has shown, significant numbers of lenders and investment banking firms engaged in shady, and in many cases, illegal actions in granting and processing these mortgage loans. 

What’s absolutely more appalling and horrifying is that little has been done fundamentally to deal with such problems, and that investment bankers continue to rack up multi-multi-million dollar bonuses for continuing the same sort of practices and behaviors that led to the last crisis… all of which definitely suggests that “free” markets do not, by themselves, engender anything close to moral behavior, that, in turn, suggesting the need for better and more effective tools in governing the U.S. financial system.

 Just remember, every superb marketer believes that he or she, and what they’re selling,  is the best thing since sliced bread, and that includes Adolph Hitler, Lady Gaga, and Mother Teresa.

In a recent non-fiction book, In the Garden of Beasts, author Erik Larson recounts the story of William E. Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from June of 1933 until December of 1937.  What is so surprising about the story is that it has not been told before, at least to my knowledge.  Within months of his posting to Berlin, Dodd was reporting on the beatings and detentions of American tourists by the Nazis, the beatings and torture of Germans who failed to salute storm troopers or who dated Jewish people, and other clear signs of a police state deteriorating into a world menace.  Yet, Dodd’s reports were mocked and derided by colleagues and superiors in the State Department in Washington, D.C., and he was chastised when he finally refused to meet with German officials because such meetings were a total charade.  In late 1937, he was forced to resign and was replaced by Hugh Wilson, who described Hitler as the “man who has pulled his people form moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity.”  Dodd returned to the U.S. and toured widely, reporting on what he had witnessed in Germany.  Then his wife died, and he died in February 1940, well before Pearl Harbor.

It’s clear that the U.S. government knew for years of the atrocities of the Nazis, long before the attack on Poland and the outbreak of war and more than a decade before U.S. soldiers uncovered the horrors of the concentration camps. It’s also clear that they didn’t really want to know what was happening in Germany.

What’s most discouraging about this is that, almost 75 years after Dodd’s death, we still have a government – and a great number of citizens – who “don’t want to know.”  No one really wanted to know about genocide in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, or Ruanda, or Darfur.  No one really wanted to know about the financial disaster lurking in sub-prime mortgages.  No one really wants to know about the dangers of global warming… the list of denials and deniers is almost endless… and all of them had what they believed to be good reasons… and all of them were wrong.

You can’t fix a problem you don’t recognize or one whose existence you deny.  It may make you feel more comfortable… until it can’t be denied, until hundreds of thousands or millions have died, or the bombs are falling around you, or the storms get worse and worse…

So… what’s exactly so good about our not wanting to know, both individually and as a society?  That we don’t have to do anything… and we can secretly hope that it will miraculously go away or that someone else will deal with it?

The other day, as I was trying to extricate my vehicle and myself from one of the few traffic snarls in my town of some 30,000 odd people, I couldn’t help but ask why we had a traffic jam at all around the sole shopping center in more than sixty miles in one direction and two hundred in the other, especially in a town with more than enough open space. There have already been a number of accidents at the intersections adjoining the shopping center, where multiple streets converge all too closely within less than a block, including an interstate highway off ramp, and that’s before all the retail spaces have been filled. 

So how did we end up with such a dangerous situation, and one which now requires a multi-million dollar relocation and rebuilding of the interstate access ramps and roads? The answer boils down to a free-market failure. The shopping center developers designed the shopping center to maximize the amount of retail usage for the amount of land involved. The town was happy with this because that also maximized the property tax revenues.

One of the defenses mounted by those who complain about government regulation of business is that businesses cannot stay in business if they create too many dissatisfied customers. While this is dubious at times, if not more often, it’s definitely untrue in several sets of circumstance that have become more and more common in modern society. The first case is where the “customer” has no way to track and no way of knowing who or what business has created the problem.  The second is where a customer deals with the business only once or twice in a lifetime.  The financial meltdown created by the housing/mortgage collapse embodied both of these circumstances

The dangers around my shopping center embody just the second, because the shopping center developers developed the only shopping center in my town and likely the only one, given demographics, for at least a generation.  Once the land is planned, subdivided, and built, they’ve made their bundle, and because they can’t do it soon or perhaps ever again in this town, free-market economics press them toward making as much as they can, regardless of the consequences. Under the threat of having a badly designed shopping center or none at all, the town caves in… and the citizens are left with the mess, and the taxpayers (including those in cities hundreds of miles away, since the interstate ramp rebuilding will be partly funded by the state) will fund all the remedial measures.

Economists call those costs external diseconomies or negative externalities or the equivalent, but what it amounts to is that unchecked free markets, or those not scrutinized enough, have a disturbing tendency to foist way too many costs off on others, not to mention deaths at times – and certainly in the case of the financial meltdown, all those billion dollar profits and high bonuses were never recovered while the taxpayers picked up the tab, and no one compensated those whose lives were ruined.

While I’d be the last person to endorse government planned and directed economic development, because that’s just another road to ruin, I’d also be one of the last to endorse unchecked free markets. We need a balance between the two – and that’s something that none of the politicians or the multibillion dollar corporations seem to want, whether it’s in the planning and regulating of the design and operation of local shopping centers or the nation’s financial structure.

Lately, there have been a number of scientific articles raising the concept that individual free will does not exist, based on, among other things, the scientifically established fact that the body actually begins to react micro or milliseconds before a person “decides” to take an action.  I have some considerable difficulty with this concept, as I suspect is the case among the majority of individuals who regard themselves as thinking individuals, if not among almost all people, not just out of sheer egotism, but out of a few practical considerations, the first of which is that absolute “determinism” or even biological programming doesn’t take into account that, in a myriad of ways, we do not control our environment.

Just take last week in Joplin, Missouri, when killer tornadoes ripped through the town.  The individuals caught in that situation had no control over that situation, nor could they have forecast where and when that tornado would hit.  Nor do we realistically know what events created by other theoretically thinking entities will impact us, or if they will, and when. Computer studies have suggested that the variables involved in directing/predicting events in our universe would require an entity/computer/whatever several magnitudes larger than the universe itself.  To my mind, at least, this suggests that the concept that we’re all directed by an outside force isn’t either practical or workable. 

Yet the scientific evidence remains, and continues to grow, suggesting we act before we’re conscious of deciding.  Is this a lack of free will? 

Or do we act intuitively/emotionally and then rationalize the action/decision?  Even if this is so, and some neuroscientists suggest that such is the case, exactly on what are our “intuitive” or emotional reactions based?

The simplest answer is that they’re based on a combination of nature and nurture, of genetically determined predilections and learned behaviors and reactions. But since societies and cultures have changed, often drastically, over the generations, and since modern societies do exist and function, if imperfectly, and since we have made great scientific strides over the past 10,000 years… something has to allow us the flexibility to change and to make decisions in unforeseen situations and under newer circumstances.

What if it’s as simple as… through our families, our background, our education, and our interactions, we actually pre-program ourselves and then rationalize that pre-programming?

Then… our choices, our free-will [if you will] are not based on the moment, but upon what we have learned and experienced when we were not actively “deciding.”  Yes, I know every action is in fact a decision, but every decision is based in part if not in whole on what we’ve previously experienced.

But then… I’d be the first to say I haven’t the faintest idea where one draws the line, except to observe that, when I’m writing a book, often there are many different ways where I could take the work… and, in looking back on my life, who and what I am now is in so many ways not what I was years ago, while I can see others who’ve changed not at all over the years… and that, at least to me, suggests that perhaps our free will lies not in the decisions of the moment, but in what we do to learn and “pre-program” ourselves.

Just a thought…

The other day I ran across an article in the business section of the newspaper that described the marketing behind Lady Gaga’s newest album as revolutionary… the first campaign to fully utilize all aspects of the social media revolution to promote the album.

This approach is revolutionary in terms of the technology, but not exactly so in terms total self-promotion. That was pioneered, again in music, more than a century ago by Richard Wagner, who, in addition to being a musical genius, was also a marketing genius who was the first artist to make himself inseparable from the product in all dimensions, from its design, creation, production, and in the end, even the very physical forum in which his works were presented, a forum which endures at Bayreuth… more than a century after his death.

Wagner was incredibly successful in creating a form of opera which was essentially self-referential, whose “truths”[although derived from other sources] existed wholly within the opera itself.  That self-referential structure, with its emphasis on what might be called Nordic mythical truths, was tailor-made for Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda machine because, first, the music was powerful and essentially nationalistic and, second, the “truths” presented in Wagner’s work required and needed no understanding outside the works themselves.

Prior to Wagner, and for many artists, even well after him, the emphasis was on the work, and at the highest levels, artists attempted to reveal what they saw as the “truth” through their work, but the majority of such works contained references well beyond the works themselves and often attempted to make sense of the “greater world” beyond the work.

Some still do, but with the growth of the Ipod music culture of personalized music and especially with social media, this gets harder – and such “exterior-referenced” artistic attempts at revealing greater truth become less interesting and less personally relevant to those in the social media world, because the whole concept behind social media is to tailor the online world of the participant around that participant, to create a self-referential narcissism.

The difference between the “old” approach and the, if you will, “Wagnerian/Gaga” approaches is that the old approach was based, at its best, on the affirmation and understanding of something greater than the artist or the reader/listener, while the “Wagnerian” approach is based on selling the product through its isolation from other conflicting “truths” and the cult of the composer/producer, while the “Lady Gaga” approach to selling her music is designed to go a step beyond fusing artist and work, and fuse the artist, work, and audience in a form of self-identification and self-validation, independent of “outside” truths or references.

Am I being alarmist?  I don’t think so.  Over the last few months, three major U.S. symphony orchestras have either declared bankruptcy or given indications that such is likely in the weeks ahead.  Others have either frozen or cut salaries or schedules.  Bookings and appearances for classical musicians and singers are declining rapidly.

The more simplistic and the greater the narcissistic appeal a work of music has, the greater the likelihood that it will be commercially successful.

And since music, even more than literature, reflects a culture, this trend should be disturbing… not that any narcissist would even bother to care.

Last weekend, I was at a science fiction and fantasy convention, and among the events was a panel with Robert Sawyer, the Canadian author whose books were the inspiration for the short-lived television series Flash Forward.  The panel was on the subject of the impact of the “Me Generation” on publishing and F&SF.  Several days after the panel, I came across a blog complaining that there should have been someone on the panel who belonged to the “me generation,” since neither Sawyer nor I obviously did [although I must point out that Rob is a number of years younger than I].  That got me to thinking about the premises behind the complaint.

The first premise is erroneous and has belonged to every younger generation since the time of Socrates, if not before.  It is the belief that no one older can possibly understand what the younger generation feels and believes. That is, of course, utter trash.  Every older generation was once young and felt the same way. Some in the older generation have forgotten or chosen to forget and thus do not “understand,” but many, many of us do remember and understand.  We also understand what things we then believed to be true were not as we thought.  This process is known as maturation, also thought of as ossification by many of the younger generations.

But the second premise is the one I really want to address. That is the unspoken assumption, especially among the media, that every issue has another side worth exploring and presenting.  I’d be the first to agree that every issue has another side.  Even Hitler had another side, as did Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden.  But just because there is another side doesn’t mean that such a side is either worth presenting in any depth or that it should be justified by the media or the intellectual communities.  I’m sorry, but, for example, we really don’t need, nor should we be exposed to in-depth expositions of the justification for genocide, pedophilia, serial killings, etc.

Why not?  Isn’t that a violation of freedom of information and the press?

It is if it’s mandated by government, but the press and media need to exercise some self-restraint.  Again… why?

Because, in the simplest terms, in-depth presentation of bad information, poor logic, and the like, especially without critical assessment, gives it a credibility in the eyes of a public too credulous and too accepting of what the media present, particularly whatever is the flavor de jour.  Do I think either limitation or such critical assessment is likely to happen?  Not on your life… or at least in my lifetime. The media is far too interested and far too driven by profit to risk being the first or among the first by actually taking time to read and consider the implications and whether one side or the other of a current story is little more than fluff, if that.  Above and beyond the profit considerations are the pseudo-legal ones.  They don’t want to court lawsuits by suggesting one side of a truly one-sided story has little to recommend it.  That’s how and why the tobacco industry, some of the energy industry, the climate change deniers, and even the financial industry [and its supporters] get almost a free pass.  All these people do is suggest and sow doubt with facts and theories that range from being statistical outliers to being outright wrong or totally irrelevant or by pointing out nitpicking lacks or insignificant weaknesses in data. That way they call claim that they’re true skeptics.  By the way, you can tell the true skeptics from the ideologues by watching what happens when more well-supported data appears.  The true skeptics analyze and consider it; the ideologues find yet another and different basis of support for their stance.

The problem, of course, is that all ideologues believe that the “other side” is non-existent, while those who are open-minded actually consider the other side. But the fact remains… there are some stories and some situations, some of them vital to us and our future, where the “other side” is weak or essentially non-existent… and all too often no one will claim that the emperor has no new clothes.

It’s often been said that no artist can be truly and accurately judged in his or her own lifetime… and I think that there’s a great deal of truth in that,

Neither Shakespeare nor Mozart were considered the leaders in their fields at the times of their deaths, as I’ve noted before.  And of the two Cassatts of the nineteenth century, the “colossus” was considered to be Alexander, the president of the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad, while his sister Mary was an artistic dabbler.  Today, only economic historians know about Alexander, while almost every art student knows about Mary Cassatt, the American impressionist.  Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime;  today his works are worth millions.  Almost no one knew anything about the poet Emily Dickinson in her lifetime.  Her works are quoted everywhere, and many of her poems have been set to music.

The same lack of “present-day” appreciation exists outside the area of artistic endeavor as well. For example, perhaps the only town in Japan to face the worst of the recent tsunami and survive was the fishing town of Fudai, thanks to the dogged persistence of Kotaku Wamura, a ten term former mayor who survived the devastating 1933 tsunami as a youth and who spent almost thirty years lobbying and finally getting built a more than fifty foot high seawall and an equally high and massive set of floodgates.  His insistence on building such tall structures was regarded as an expensive folly when they were completed in the late 1970s, but Fudai survived with all buildings intact, if some ended a little damp, at a time when virtually every other town and city in the path of the tsunami was reduced to rubble.  Wamura endured scorn and ridicule for his projects and died before he could see how they saved his beloved home town and its people.

As in so many instances, the man was not fully appreciated until long after his death, and in his lifetime, his floodgates were doubtless decried as not “cost-effective” – or whatever the equivalent Japanese economic jargon might be.  The projects cost an equivalent of $30 million in 2011 dollars, and they saved more than 3,000 lives and all the buildings in the town.  U.S. economists reckon that, in safety and environmental terms, it’s not cost-effective to implement measures that exceed from $250,000 to $1,000,000 per life saved. Even at the lower end of that scale, Wamura’s seawall and floodgates “saved” $700 million in life-costs, not to mention the rebuilding costs.

So… why is it that we so often praise those whose works and deeds do not endure and ignore those whose deeds and works have a lasting impact?

Over the past few months, with the paperback release of Arms-Commander and the initial hardcover release of Lady-Protector, I’ve had a number of requests for another book about each of the protagonists.  Likewise, I’ve had a number of readers express disappointment that I would be leaving Rhennthyl, the protagonist of the first three books of The Imager Portfolio, in order to write another sub-series featuring a different main character set in a different time period in the history of Solidar.  The most extreme reaction of which I know is one I’ve mentioned before in several fora, where a reader got so upset that I had the main character of the first three Spellsong Cycle books die of old age in the second subseries… and the reader hurled the fourth book at a hapless bookseller while taking my name in vain.

If I look at the sales charts of fantasy books in particular, it’s fairly clear that readers reward handsomely those authors who write long and voluminous series about the same character or sets of characters.  The same trends are evident in urban fantasy and the thriller/mystery genres.  Yet while writing a long series with the same characters pleases many readers, there are those who want a writer, even their “favorite” writer, to write book after book where each book is significantly different from any previous book.

I can’t count the number of reader reviews over the years that complained that my latest book was too much like a previous one, even while the majority of my readers requested more books in that particular series and more books about a character that they loved.  Yet, at the same time, a significant number of readers also asked for more of my “different” science fiction books.

As many sages have noted, and even the late Rick Nelson in his song “Garden Party,” you can’t please everyone all the time, and, unhappily, if you’re an author, there’s always the chance that something you write will please almost no one.  And yes, I did have one of those books.  It was called The Green Progression, and I wrote it with Bruce Scott Levinson, and after twenty years I can count the number of people who truly liked that book and told me so on one hand.  But… if you’re one of the few who actually has a hardcover, I did see a bookseller offering a copy for $287.00.  Fortunately, only one of my books has been that kind of disaster, at least so far.

The other aspect of what readers want is that what they want often does not agree with what the reviewers think is “excellent,” and very, very few runaway best sellers receive rave reviews, at least in science fiction and fantasy. Some years in the past, one author, who shall remain nameless, received glowing review after glowing review.  That author is no longer published and has not been for quite some time, perhaps because the last book issued by a major publisher had over 90 percent of the copies printed returned unbought. 

Then there are other authors, who sell well enough to live comfortably, and who receive good reviews in general from reviewers at Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, but who tend to be ignored or panned by reviewers in the F&SF field.  Such authors seem able to balance technical skill and popularity to some degree, and make a living as writers, but seldom if ever, publish the runaway best-seller.

All of this suggests, as all of those of us who have endured as professionals in the field know, that for the reader what matters first is how gripping the story is, and how well it is told comes second, because what most readers really want is the story, and, for most, but not all,  preferably another adventure with characters they love.

The other day I was amused, and somewhat horrified, if not particularly surprised to read that I did not “simply engage in religion-bashing.” but that I was “outright hostile to religion.”  Where did this come from?  From a theological blog that, on the basis of thoughts and acts of one Van Albert, the protagonist of my novel, The Ethos Effect, declared that, “One can presume, however, that his [Modesitt’s] basis of ethics is a strictly humanistic one.”  I did contact the author, and he most graciously and kindly apologized and revised the blog to reflect the fact that my characters [and not me] took stances contrary to what he believed to be the proper religious acts and beliefs… and I have no problem with that.

This sort of thing, however, does raise an issue.  How often do readers jump to conclusions about what an author believes on the basis of a single novel? Or even a single series, when other characters in other books have acted differently and on different ethical bases?

Another author [Poul Anderson, I believe[except I was wrong, apparently, as noted below]]] said that there was a term for readers who equated the views of characters with the views of the author, and that term was “idiot.”  I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, because there’s no doubt that, no matter what we as authors claim, some [if not more] of what we believe seeps into what we write.  Some authors are almost opaque, in that it’s difficult to discern what they truly believe, and with others, their beliefs gush from every page.  But… with still others, while beliefs seem to gush from the page, those beliefs may not be those of the author, or only part of the beliefs of the author.

Human beings face ethical dilemmas all the time, and our actions spark ethical questions on a daily basis, and some of what we write comes close to real-life situations, such as in the recent case of the killing of Osama bin Laden.  One of the larger questions that faces any society is the issue of justice when that society is faced with the issue of preemptive action or reactive action.  What might have happened in Europe in the mid-to-late 1930s if the U.S. and European powers had moved against Hitler before millions of Jews and others were killed?  On the other hand, one could claim that the wars in Iraq or in Vietnam were largely preemptive and disastrous.  The overarching ethical problems in such cases are that preemptive action is arrogant and chancy and could result in more deaths than doing nothing, but often doing nothing leads to greater evils, as in so many cases in human history. 

As an author, I’ve written on both sides of this issue, because, from what I’ve seen, no “absolute” religious or ethical philosophy provides a satisfactory guideline in mitigating human misery.  Oh… philosophers and theologians can claim their positions are the “right” ones, but every “right” position still has times when it multiplies human misery.  So I’ve explored this issue and others… as have many, many other writers.

And, in my books, each character takes a stand.  Sometimes, the stands agree, and sometimes they don’t.  At times, ethically, everyone loses, even when they triumph materially… and, from what I’ve seen, that’s life.  That part – that I’ll admit – reflects what I’ve seen.  But to infer what a writer believes from a single novel… or series…that’s stretching. 

But… in a way, readers do it all the time… and that’s one of the perils of being an author.

Now that bin Laden is dead, commentators, agitators, and even people of conscience have raised the question of whether the means of his death was “justice.”  Before rushing to judgment on this question, I’d like to raise another question: What exactly is justice?

There are more than just a few definitions of justice, but here are the ones most commonly cited: (1) the quality of being fair, even-handed, and impartial; (2) the rendering of what is due or merited; (3) conformity with the law; (4) the administration of the law; (5) the means by which the law is administered; (6) a judge; (7) the abstract principle by which right and wrong are determined.

Setting aside the definitions for a moment, what are the facts, in brief?  Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the Twin Towers bombing, the Pentagon bombing, as well as who truly knows how many other terrorist acts.  In his various speeches and communications, he fully acknowledged that.  So… there was no question of his guilt. By his acts he caused the deaths of well over 3,000 civilians in the United States who were not in any way threatening him.  Over the years, he continued to agitate and plan other activities in which hundreds if not thousands of Muslims were also killed.

Now… from what I’ve seen so far, those who are questioning whether his death was an act of justice and who are suggesting it was murder, since it appears that he was not holding a firearm at the time he was shot, are saying that he should have been captured and held for trial, claiming that under the laws of the United States such a trial would constitute justice.

Such claims certainly have a certain appeal and, shall we say, technical legal merit, but they carry with them an assumption that justice can only be meted out in one way and in one form, i.e., through the U.S. court system.  As a former Naval officer who had to once serve as the presiding officer in a special courts martial, I can attest that, as a nation, we have at least two accepted forms legal jurisprudence, with very different presumptions behind some of the proceedings.  French jurisprudence dates from the Napoleonic Code and also has different presumptions, as do justice systems in other nations.

The idea underlying all such systems is that “justice” is determined under a set of laws and proceedings meant to determine guilt or innocence and to mete out an appropriate punishment, under the authority of law, in the case of those found guilty. But such legal systems are only a mechanism for assuring that “justice” is done, and when the focus is placed strictly on the means, rather than the outcome of the process, as many Americans already know, often “justice” is not achieved.  If the “means” are always supreme, then justice is often unserved; but if the end is the only goal, any means can be justified.  How then does one determine exactly what is justice?

In the case of Osama bin Laden, there is absolutely no doubt that he was guilty of causing thousands of deaths.  The penalty for such scope of murders is usually death.  Bin Laden’s death was accomplished, either advertently or inadvertently, by Navy SEALS under the orders of the President of the United States, dutifully elected, and thus was accomplished by an authorized government agency, in general accord with the punishments meted out for murderers and serial killers by U.S. courts or military tribunal or courts martial.

Was this an “ideal” solution? No, it wasn’t.  But there are times when an emphasis on process and procedure are not necessarily possible. In this case, no one is hiding what was done, or generally how it was done, and the President has acknowledged that it was done under his orders. 

So… was bin Laden’s death justice?  Or does justice only occur when an exact set of procedures and processes are followed, regardless of the outcome?

One of the commenters on this blog actually raised this question, if not quite so bluntly, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, although there’s far more to the issue than mere labeling.

But I’ll start with politics and the question of why there are so few women in the U.S. Congress.  As I’ve noted in several earlier blogs, men, as do virtually all male primates, are more inclined and, in general, more interested and more skilled in political networking.  I suspect this has to do with genetics and natural selection, in that men operate in a constantly changing socio-political structure for single-minded goals, usually power and sex.  And if you don’t think political power isn’t related to sex for men, you have no idea of how politics operates.  Henry Kissinger once observed that power was the greatest aphrodisiac of all, and the exploits of more than a few U.S. Presidents tend to confirm that.  The American two-party system, in turn, is geared to simplify both networking and power-seeking; that wasn’t its original design or purpose, but its evolution from that design which tended to reflect early American society.

Women, on the other hand, tend to operate on two entirely different net-working styles, one a shallow communications network predominantly with other women and the other a far smaller and deeper network, primarily with women who are relatives and close friends.  Neither networking “style” is suited to the changing alliances and power plays of the kind of networking politics employed and enjoyed by the majority of men.  Women, once they’re mature, also tend to have a longer focus, most likely in part because child-rearing has historically and genetically been their role for almost all of human history, and politics, particularly at present, is incompatible with a longer focus.  It’s all about immediate gain, which is representative of male sexuality as well – get as many women as possible as much and as quickly as possible.

Female-oriented institutions, such as the nuclear family [and there is more than one variety of nuclear family], are “designed” for longer term stability, which is necessary if one wants children to survive, especially under optimal conditions.

Now… I’m not preaching here, or advocating, merely expanding the issue and question, and asking if there is a democratic/representative political structure that would be less structurally biased toward either gender.  I’m certainly not the first to make such a suggestion or observation.  Both Ursula K. LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sherri Tepper, in a number of her books, have made similar observations, both directly and indirectly.  I will say that, outside of some feminist rhetoric, I haven’t seen anything that approaches a scholarly analysis of the issue [not that such may not exist, but if it does, I doubt if it’s been widely circulated].

Any thoughts?

Last week a poll revealed that 75% of the American people are dissatisfied with the U.S. Congress, and that’s one of the lowest figures for Congressional popularity in some time, if ever.  On the surface, one might conclude that, to improve its standing, all Congress has to do is to reverse course.  Alas, that would result in close to the same figures, I suspect.

Why?  Because, if you’ve been reading about all the Congressional shenanigans, you know that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Republican senators aren’t happy with the Democrat-controlled Senate or the President, and the Democrat-controlled Senate and Democratic representatives are close to furious with the Republican-controlled House. 

For all these ideological differences, there’s one absolute similarity between both sides in Congress.  Neither they, nor their supporters, really want to deal with the facts of the situation they face.  In reality, if they did, most of them feel they’d soon be voted out of office.  Both sides are wrong, and neither side can afford to admit it… or to compromise.

Everyone agrees in principle that the U.S. government can’t keep spending more than we collect in various tax revenues.  What they’re vigorously opposed on is where to make up the difference, either through spending cuts or increasing revenues.

We can’t keep increasing the amount the federal government spends on health care unless we increase taxes, and if we cut federal health care expenditures to avoid raising taxes, the cuts will be so deep that the poor, the lower middle class and working classes will suffer when they reach retirement age, if not before. The same problem exists in dealing with Social Security – unless future retirement ages are increased, but that will likely result in effective benefit cuts because, for a variety of reasons, many older workers retire before they’re eligible for full benefits.

There are other funding sources, of course, but one or another entrenched interest opposes them, and thus, so do the legislators beholden to those interests.  We’ve all seen the disasters, for example, created by the speculation in all sorts of financial transactions.  So what about a federal tax on securities and stock market transactions?  Not just on capital gains, but on the transaction itself, paid not by the investor but by the entity handling the trade.  Do you really think Goldman-Sachs would let Congress anywhere near that? Most agriculture subsidies go to corporate farmers?  Do we really need them?  Especially when the ethanol tax credit raises food prices?  Just try to cut those subsidies and revenue losses.

Over forty percent of all Americans pay no federal income taxes.  Just see what happens if any legislator suggests that they should.  What about getting rid of mortgage interest payment deductions for second homes?  Not first homes, but second homes, vacation homes, etc.?  Why should taxpayers get a tax deduction for a vacation home?  Suggest this, and the realtors and the bankers will be after any Congressman who does.

The list of possible fixes is long, and many of them would indeed work, but one thing is clear.  Everyone knows the system needs fixing, and no one wants to pay for it.  Each interest wants someone else to pay for it, and because that’s so, Congress can’t come up with a solution… and everyone’s mad at Congress, because each representative and Senator is indeed representing the interests of those who either elected them or contributed the funds that elected them.  But, for all the talk about reaching a solution, woe betide any representative who thinks about compromising with the other side.

Just ask former Senator Bob Bennett what a single vote toward a compromise does to a senator’s career.

Let me say from the onset that I am not the biggest fan or supporter of Barack Obama, and I certainly think he’s made more than his share of mistakes, both in leadership and in the tactics he’s used or failed to use in attempting to set and carry out his policies.  That said, I am absolutely and totally appalled by the continuing furor over whether he is a U.S. citizen and the fact that he felt compelled to use his own discretionary funds to send an attorney to Hawaii to obtain an official birth certificate from the state government there. 

Copies of his birth certification have been available online for years.  There are newspaper stories in the original Honolulu papers from fifty years ago announcing his birth in Hawaii.  Come on… those couldn’t have been planted fifty years ago.  Who back then even knew that the son of an 18 year old Kansas girl and a black Kenyan graduate student would be president of the United States? 

Now, I realize that such rational arguments will not suffice against the blind fanaticism of the most rabid “birther” types, because nothing penetrates fanaticism, whether that fanaticism is of the far right or the far left, or of Islamic fundamentalists or of hard-core IRA members or of the extreme Northern Ireland protestants.

But why do the rest of us buy into this “debate”?  Why do the supposedly “reputable” members of the press keep fanning the issue to keep it alive?  Why do theoretically intelligent politicians and candidates harp on it?  Because there’s nothing too low and base they won’t do to garner votes from the most ignorant and prejudiced of Americans?  And why is it even being discussed when the United States is involved in two or more wars, when the financial and economic future of the United States is on the line, and when the Congress will have to decide the future of what our government will be like in what it funds and what it does not, and who gets taxed how much and who doesn’t? 

Is it because no one wants to face the hard issues, including the issue of global warming, which was certainly a factor in the formation of the terrible tornadoes that just devastated Alabama?  Is it because all too many Americans don’t understand much of anything beyond their daily focus… or that they just don’t care? Because the press is incompetent in conveying what is at stake?  Or because most Americans don’t want to know that they can’t keep having all the programs that now exist without raising taxes and that they and their elected representatives must choose between fewer and less comprehensive programs and comparatively lower taxation [but likely some more taxes] and continuing all current programs with much  higher taxes, particularly on the middle class [since, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, taxing just the richest of the rich won’t raise the necessary revenue]?

Both the Republicans and the Democrats are effectively avoiding dealing with these issues and threatening, implicitly, if not explicitly, to shut down government and to destroy the credit-worthiness of the United States rather than back down – and the lead item in the news is that the president has been forced by media and popular pressure to provide – once again – an “official” copy of his birth certificate?  And now some of Obama’s black supporters are outraged that he did provide the certificate, while our “bread and circus” media hypes the whole situation.

If we aren’t the laughing stock of the world over this “birther” nonsense… we deserve to be.

Last week I read a review of the new Robert Redford movie, The Conspirator, and ran across the following: “It should be tense and thrilling, full of rich, powerful performances; instead it will make you feel like you should be taking notes in preparation for a high school exam.  And like the last film Redford directed, the terrorism drama Lions for Lambs, it’s painfully preachy and sanctimonious.”

Since I haven’t yet seen the film, I can’t comment on the first part of the above excerpt, but the second part suggests I might like the film, possibly because I thought Lions for Lambs was a good film.  I understand why many people didn’t like it, because it hits perilously close to all too many American illusions and self-deceptions, and given Redford’s choice of topic in The Conspirator [the trial of the boarding house owner who was suspected of helping Lincoln’s assassin], I suspect his latest movie is likely to do the same, if in a historical context.

The review, however, raises a legitimate question about all forms of “entertainment,” a question I’ll put in a satiric form, given my views of most of the most popular entertainment available today.  Does entertainment have to be largely, if not totally, devoid of meaningful content, depth, and questioning to be entertaining to the majority of today’s audiences and readers? 

Obviously, this question and the answer affect me personally and professionally, but they affect all writers, directors, and producers as well.  For years I’ve been criticized, as have Redford and a few others, by some readers for being “preachy,” and it’s no secret that books and movies that raise the kinds of questions we offer seldom, if ever, reach the top of the sales charts.  That’s understandable, and by itself, not a problem.  We all know the risks involved in attempting to make something deeper and more intellectually provocative. But what I’ve also noted is that more and more reviews are defining good entertainment in terms of, if you will, total detachment from depth or reality, and the movie producers are obliging them, such as with new releases that feature almost exclusively car chases, crashes, mayhem, sex, and violence.

Details of actual history, as are likely to be brought up in The Conspirator, can’t possibly compete in terms of instant visual appeal, but do all movies have to have the same kind of appeal, and do movies that don’t have such appeal have to be denigrated because they don’t?

One of the things [among many] that bothers me about the kind of reviews such as the one I’ve quoted above is the implication that anything with detail can’t be entertaining or engrossing, and that anything serious has to be “thrilling” to compensate for the seriousness, as if a quietly taut drama can’t be entertaining.  One of the most “sinister” movies I’ve ever seen shows no violence and contains no direct threats and yet reveals total social control of a family and a society where everyone is perfectly behaved.  It’s called The Age of Innocence.  Of course, just how sinister it appears to viewers depends entirely on their understanding of history and how societies work.

If you want dark and sinister, truly dark and sinister, review the backroom deals leading to the last financial meltdown – no car chases, no shootings, no bombs, no speeches, and no rabble-rousing.  Just men at desks pursuing profit and destroying millions of jobs, thousands of businesses, and creating uncounted suicides and broken homes.  But those details aren’t entertaining… and showing them in a movie would be far too preachy, and definitely not entertaining, or even exciting.

Give us zombies, the living dead, vampires, or car chases any day.  We just want pretend thrilling, not the truly sinister… and that’s fine, but enough of running down movies and books that deal with aspects of reality.  If reviewers don’t like them, they should just say that they’ll bore most people because they’ll make them think too much… that’s if they’ve got the nerve to say so.

As a result of a blog earlier this month and the paperback publication of Arms-Commander, I’ve received inquiries about and statements declaring that I’m a man-hater and pushing “feminist propaganda.”  Now, I’d be the first to admit that I’m fond of women. More than fond, in fact, but then, after having been married three times, if far more years to the lady whose companionship I now enjoy and appreciate than either of the other two, and having six daughters as well as two sons, it would be strange if I didn’t have a great interest in and appreciation of women.

That appreciation, however, has little to do with the facts of the situation on this planet and in the United States.  As I noted earlier, even in the relatively more “advantaged” United States, on average, working women make about 25% less than working men do.  The differential between men and women doing the same jobs ranges from almost nothing to as much as 40% at the higher corporate executive levels, but women’s pay remains, on average, significantly below that of men in the same or similar positions, as documented rather clearly in the current lawsuit against WalMart currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Although a recent article in the Wall Street Journal declared that working single men and women between ages 22 and 30 earned roughly the same amount, that purported equality doesn’t address the fact that there’s still a huge discrepancy between genders among married men and women and among older age groups. Despite the fact that women have had the ability to vote and run for public office in the United States for roughly a century, less than twenty percent of members of Congress are women. 

The situation was far worse in the past, and still is in many other nations across the world.  People tend to forget that less than two centuries ago, in the good old USA, married women could own no property, and all a woman’s clothes and her jewelry, even if provided by her family or earned or made by her, belonged to her husband.

Yet… when I write a book, such as The Soprano Sorceress or Arms-Commander, which depicts a woman in a fantasy world fighting against situations such as this, it’s called by some feminist propaganda or ultra-feminist. 

Come again?  I’ve depicted conditions similar to those which have existed for the majority of the time that human culture has existed on Earth… and I’ve had the nerve to suggest that, first, such conditions aren’t exactly fair to women, and, second, that a talented woman might just do better than a bunch of chauvinistic men. It’s not exactly my imagination that the three British rulers with the longest time on the throne were all women – Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II – and two of those three lived and ruled in a time when ruling wasn’t just ceremonial, and the times that they ruled were among those when Britain’s power was at a zenith.

It’s considered “realistic” when a novelist depicts sword-play and blood and gore in visceral detail, but unrealistic or propagandistic when he or she depicts sexual politics and traditional and historic gender roles in equally accurate detail?  But then, those who complain may really be suggesting that I’m pushing propaganda by suggesting that a woman can and would do better. 

As women take their places in more and more critical and important occupations, it’s becoming all too clear that very often they can do better than many of their male predecessors and peers, as incidentally that Wall Street Journal points out, and perhaps the fact that I occasionally depict that [as well as occasionally depict some truly competent and villainous women] troubles those readers who seem to think that the past gender roles of men and women were as matters should be and that I should not even attempt to suggest otherwise, either in science fiction or fantasy.

That’s feminist propaganda?