Last Sunday, I made a trip to the local KFC outlet for our annual fast-food fried chicken fix.  When I arrived inside, I was greeted by an enthusiastic server – male, twentyish, Caucasian, speaking unaccented Utah American, asking for my order. I told him, very distinctly, that I wanted, “Two two-piece meals, extra-crispy, each one with a wing and a breast, one with coblet and wedges, the other with wedges and macaroni and cheese.”

He immediately told me that it would be a ten minute wait for the original recipe thighs and wings.  I pointed out that I’d ordered wings and breasts.  He said that I’d still have to wait for the wings.  I pointed out that I’d ordered extra crispy, not original recipe.

All I’d said to him was my order.  I was the only customer. I was polite.  I didn’t whisper, and I didn’t yell. Why wasn’t he listening?  He wasn’t wearing IPod earphones.

One of the reasons I carry a list of my books in print with me to signings and conventions is because I’ve learned that even many readers can’t remember what I said a few minutes before.  I don’t remind them of this, not when my objective is to sell more books. I just circle the book in question on the list and hand them the paper.

My wife had to tell a clerk at a local store three times what pieces of dinnerware she wanted ordered, and then had to call back three times because the order had somehow been forgotten.

I’d like to think that these are unusual occurrences.  Unhappily, they’re not.  Every teacher in my wife’s department reports happenings like this, day after day. Students ask, “When was that due?” not three minutes after they’ve been told, sometimes when the date is also on the assignment sheet right in front of them.

On a related note, I’ve also seen at least five different reports in the media stating that rates of criminality don’t differ at all between American citizens and illegal immigrants. Yet, time and time again, I see anti-immigrant rhetoric deploring the higher crime rates of immigrants… or claims of higher crime rates in Arizona at the same time that the FBI has listed Phoenix as one of the five safest cities in the United States.  Yes… I know that certain border communities have higher crime rates… but that’s like claiming American citizens are more prone to crime because certain sections of New York City or any other large American city have high crime rates.

Has the proliferation of blackberries, Iphones, and the like resulted in acute hearing loss, or accelerated attention deficit disorder?  Impaired short-term memory loss?

Or is it because, with modern communications, we can increasingly tune out anything we don’t want to hear, immerse ourselves only in the music and news that suits us, and refuse to talk to anyone except those on our personal e-communications net?

The past year has been a banner one for hate-mongering.  We’ve had Proposition 8 in California and all the money and rhetoric on both sides of the issue of various gay rights in California and elsewhere.  We’ve had the vitriolic debate over healthcare, and the increasingly bitter strife and arguments over immigration and illegal aliens.  We’ve had the TEA Party explosion over taxation, which has been so irrational that at times [as I’ve noted] the TEA Partiers have sunk some of their strongest and most effective legislative allies. Lurking in the background remains the bitter and often violent controversy between “pro-choice” and “right-to-life” factions over abortion.

In all of these instances, parties on all sides assert that  they’re asserting their first amendment rights of freedom of speech.  Such assertions seem to be accepted without reservation, as if this right is unlimited.  In fact, it is not.  In 1919, in Schenck v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision affirming federal law limiting freedom of speech.  In that opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that in wartime, conditions are such that greater restrictions on free speech are indeed constitutional, and that:

“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the  substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

Although the Congress has not declared war in the conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan, the United States is still engaged in the longest war in its history, and many other freedoms have been effectively curtailed.  Air travel requires in-depth search of self and belongings without any criminal intent on the part of the passenger and certainly no probable cause. Yet we not only allow, but actually support and pay for virtually unlimited hate-mongering by media personalities.  That hate-mongering stirs up civil unrest, state legislation that is most likely unconstitutional, uncivil behavior, and discrimination… and all in a time of war.

Why is this occurring? Because it’s profitable for the media outlets.  The more conflict that’s generated, the more the number of listeners increases, and the more advertising rates and revenues increase.  In effect, the media has succeeded in successfully turning hate into a paying commodity – and all too many Americans are buying it… and effectively working to destroy many of the very principles on which the nation was founded.

As I have stated before, every single person in the United States is either an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants.  Exactly what is the difference between those seeking to live in the United States and our forebears?  Some will claim that our ancestors came legally.  Some doubtless did, but many were convicts and criminals.  Others were fleeing chaos and war – just like the majority of those trying to reach the USA today.  The hate-mongers claim that the “illegal” immigrants bring more crime.  Statistics show that the rates of crime between “legal” Americans and “illegals” are almost identical.  Such facts tend to get buried in the hate-filled rhetoric.

Interestingly enough, given the magnitude of the financial melt-down and the subsequent Great Recession, we’ve had comparatively little hate-mongering against Wall Street and the financial types who perpetrated it.  Even Bernie Madoff got off comparatively lightly in the media.  Why might that be?  Could it just possibly be because the media pundits who stir up all this hate don’t want to bite [at least not too hard] the hands that pay them for all this hate-mongering?

But, of course, any suggestion that Congress consider restrictions on broadcasting hate and inciting civil unrest will immediately draw cries about how free speech can never be infringed.  Except that the Supreme Court already ruled that in times of war… it can.

We have laws against other toxic substances.  What about toxic speech?

One of the problems that the “social” scientists have historically had is the lack of empirical evidence and data necessary either to support, reject, or modify their theories of human behavior. The July 24^th issue of New Scientist contains a story reporting a source of such data – the internet and the world electronic communications net, both of which track large numbers of people and their behavior.

In one on-line tracking experiment involving 14,000 people, dealing with the popularity of music downloads, the researchers investigated the influence of excellence and of “popularity.”  Their results showed, unsurprisingly to me, at least, that recordings that listeners rated as good in terms of quality rarely did poorly and those rated as poor seldom did well.  But… when listeners were able to see how others rated a recording, termed “social influence,” the popularity of some “good” recordings soared, often wildly, and the popularity of “poor” recordings declined even more.  In addition, the researchers concluded that, when social influence is a factor, accidents as much as true quality determined which songs were at the top of the chart… and that herd instinct played a significant factor in amplifying the effect of those accidents.

While no research to date has apparently been published focusing on book sales, this early research on social influence tends to support my own observations – that the bottom-line requirement for success as a writer is to be able to write well.  Beyond that, how popular a writer is depends largely on crowd dynamics and social influence.

Certain writers have been able to create some of that influence through blogs and Twitter, but those who have are [sorry to say, for all their efforts] the beneficiaries of luck and timing as much as anything else, because for every writer who has been able to generate such “social influence” there are scores who’ve gone through the same steps, some offering better “quality” and some offering less, who’ve not been anywhere near as successful.  In short, “wild” success still remains a crap-shoot, but pretty much any sort of success remains dependent on at least competency in writing and story-telling.

What the research doesn’t address to date, and probably never will be able to address, even with the wealth of information on the internet, is how closely reader or listener perceptions of how good something is tracks actual excellence, given the subjectivity involved in assessing such excellence.  I’ve noticed, for example, that there’s a definite difference in reader perceptions of my books, as manifested in reader reviews, between the reviews on the Amazon Canada, the Amazon UK, and the Amazon.com sites.

The other question, given the growing role of “social influence” created by on-line social communities, Twitter, and by reader reviews on sites such as Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, is how long excellence, as opposed to being “not terrible,” will even matter.  Certainly, in popular vocal music the overall technical quality of singers is on average far lower than it was sixty years ago, and back then the singers didn’t have the electronic “correction” technologies now available in every recording studio.  Admittedly, the performance spectacle element of pop music concerts and music videos can be awesome, and that’s not surprising, not with the ever-greater emphasis on the visual, but does this mean that manga and anime will continue to elbow out “real” books in bookstores and other book outlets?

Given the factors of excellence, visual appeal, and social influence, I’m getting the feeling that quality [not even excellence] is coming in last in determining what books are published and how well they sell.  But then, excellence has always tended to be last.  It just wasn’t that far back a century ago.

At one point, I wondered why the United States has less overt “corruption” and bribery than most other nations, but that was before I analyzed what corruption is and the different forms that it takes.  Although recent usage of the verb “to corrupt” tends to emphasize terms like “to pervert” or “to destroy morality” or “to debase or ruin,” the original meaning of the Latin roots means “to break thoroughly or completely.”

Governments are the institutional means by which societies accomplish common social goals and keep the peace.  In the original sense of the word, a government that cannot do either or both is thoroughly broken, i.e., corrupt.  What lies behind a society’s ability to function, as well as a government’s effectiveness, is the simple matter of trust.  If a government official cannot be trusted to do his or her job without a bribe, or in the worst cases, even after a bribe is paid, then that official is corrupt.  There’s an old definition about an “honest politician” – he’s the one who stays bribed, and there’s an element of truth to that, because that sort of “honest politician” can be trusted to carry out whatever the bribe was for.

In the United States, in this context, how much is “broken” by corruption and in what fashion is it broken?  Commentators, particularly on the left, claim that the political system has been “corrupted” by the power of special and moneyed interests, and that the recent Supreme Court decision affirming the right of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in “public interest” campaign spending symbolizes that corruption.  Yet… is that corruption, when it is accomplished through the workings of the system society has set up?  It may not be “good,” according to those who oppose the unchecked power of money, but is it corrupt?  On the other hand, by any definition, politicians who take cash, either under or over the table, are corrupt… but what about those whose votes are determined by whose legal campaign contributions are the largest and most faithful?  Yet, compared to most countries, the U.S. has a comparatively low percentage of politicians who take bribes or illegal cash.  Does the “legal” granting of favors amount to corruption?

I’d have to say it does not, because, under the terms of that argument, answering to voters becomes a form of corruption, since the politician is taking the favor of votes in return for providing various goods to his constituents.  In essence, any legal trade-off could be called corruption.  In fact, the system works.  We may not like the results, but we have the right, and the power, to change it. In a truly corrupt nation or municipality, the people, by majority vote or act, do not have such a choice.

Why has it worked out this way in the USA? I wouldn’t claim to have all the answers to this, but I suspect it’s because our terribly convoluted and complex system offers many avenues for people to influence the outcomes of governmental decisions and because the government has historically been generally trustworthy. I would note that “trustworthy” does not necessarily mean “excellent”; it means that the government and its officials keep their word and carry out policies and rules generally as they’re laid out.  You and I may not like those laws and policies, but they carry them out.

That issue, in another sense, is what lies behind the Arizona immigration law and furor.  The people of Arizona don’t believe that the U.S. federal government can be trusted to carry out what they believe are federal responsibilities.  The problem there is that the government believes it is carrying out its responsibilities under the law. Technically, I doubt there’s much question about that, but there is an implied contract involved, which, although unwritten in more than general terms of “enemies foreign and domestic,” implies that government needs to protect people against “invasion” and loss, and the people of Arizona believe that contract is being broken.

But… is it?  And if it is, who is breaking that contract?  The government… or all those who hire illegal aliens and all those who buy the illegal drugs of the illegals’s gangs?  Is it the government that is broken. i.e., corrupt?  Or is the government taking the brunt of the blame for not addressing the “corruption” of others in the way that large segments of the population would like?

Corruption is, in some form or another, endemic to human societies and has been throughout history. The only question seems to be in what forms it exists and to what degree it impacts societies and individuals.

At present, the United States is facing a heated political issue over immigration, but what I find disheartening about the debate is that it is centered almost entirely on the symptoms of a larger set of problems, rather than on the problems themselves.  The estimated eleven million illegal immigrants that have flooded into the entire United States, but especially into and through the American Southwest are a problem, yes, but they’re symptoms of a far larger set of problems that the majority of individuals and politicians are ignoring with various phrases along the lines of, “We have to stop the illegal immigration and deal with it first before we can address the other problems.”

Duh!  Given that we share a border of over 2,000 miles with Mexico, there is no cost-effective and practical way to seal that border.  Doing so will require spending tens of billions of dollars erecting and manning guard towers and shooting people – or doing the equivalent with RPVs and technology.  Among other things, I really don’t like the idea of the United States, the land of the free, being reduced to creating the western equivalent of the Berlin Wall, while instituting a police state within those walls to determine who’s here “legally” and who’s not.

The second problem is that it’s still not likely to work, because the pressures that have created that massive flow of immigrants still remain and are increasing. One of those pressures, like it or not, is that a significant percentage of the Mexican government, especially on the local level, is so corrupt that the drug cartels are often considered more honest and reliable than the government. The associated problem is that the drug cartels operate one of the most profitable lines of business in the world – and the most affluent customers in the largest single national market happen to be Americans.  Because corruption in Latin America has rendered government often powerless, the various cartels are fighting for market share of the drug market there – and in parts of the American Southwest – and unlike American commercial enterprises, they’re fighting for that market share with guns and bullets.

One of the other aspects of governmental corruption is a proliferation of paperwork, regulations, etc., that cannot be surmounted except through some sort of bribery.  This makes any sort of business growth extremely difficult, and often dangerous, and without business growth the economy and people suffer.  While the United States has its share of regulations and paperwork, our form of “bribery” is a “legal” combination of bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians [it’s more complex than this, but the extended principles still hold in the more complex reality of U.S. commerce and law].  We have more bureaucrats than we ought to have because, without them, we’ve discovered over our history, the business and moneyed interests have tended to work people into an early grave under unsafe conditions.  To combat the excessive zeal of the bureaucrats, we have attorneys.  And we have politicians, who respond to both campaign contributions and voter ire.  It’s frankly, a form of legalized bribery and interest pandering,  but it does get the job done without having every petty official demanding a bribe under the threat of shutting down a business or sending someone to jail for violating this or that minor rule.  It also tends to keep competing for consumer dollars and market share confined to the economic arena and political arenas, rather than fighting it out with guns.

The problem is that, for whatever reason, very few Latin American governments have been able to institutionalize within a legal framework the power-struggles of competing interests or to control “corruption,” and as the economic stakes get higher and higher, so does the level of violence.  Thus, given the increasing lack of safety in Mexico, the ever-increasing number of deaths and kidnappings, not to mention the lack of economic opportunity, is it any wonder that people want to leave?  And since the problems exist to some degree or another in all too many Latin America countries, what destination is the logical choice?

“Merely” building a wall won’t solve the problems.  Nor will ignoring the fact that one of the driving factors behind all this is the apparently insatiable appetite of Americans for illegal drugs.  The United States imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation in the world, the vast majority these days for drug-related offenses, and all that imprisonment doesn’t seem to have put more than a small dent in the drug trade.

So… in a very real sense, our own “drug corruption” is fueling the chaos and fighting over drug market share in Mexico and the American Southwest… which in turn fuels the pressures for immigration to the United States.  [To be continued]

For several years now, various prophets have predicted that e-books would be the wave of the future, and… lo and behold, Amazon.com has just recently announced that for the first time ever for some period, e-books outsold hardcovers.  It’s to be expected that Amazon would be the first outlet to report such news, given Amazon’s emphasis on e-books and its own Kindle, and given Amazon’s appeal to the tech-savvy readers. But what exactly does this mean?

Is it the great revolution in publishing… or a sign of the end of culture in the United States and the rest of the western world?  Of course, the obvious reply to such an absurd question would be neither… but I’m not so sure that the rise of e-books doesn’t contain some elements of each.

The rise in e-book sales, especially given the marketing models and patterns in the publishing industry, is going to have a very hefty impact on true professional full-time authors, and by that I mean those authors who make their living solely by writing.  That impact is already being felt, and it’s anything but positive.  Moreover, the e-book impact is being exacerbated by other social trends, most notably the marked decrease in paperback book sales.  According to my sources in the publishing industry, initial paperback book print runs in the F&SF are averaging 40-60% fewer copies being printed than was the case for comparable books ten years ago.  Even noted “mainstream authors” who sell millions of paperback books are seeing significant drops in paperback book sales numbers.

Now that e-books are being made available, at least in my case and that of other authors, on the same day as hardcovers, any e-book sale that replaces a hard-cover sale results in a direct drop in income for the author.  Depending on the author’s royalty rates and sales numbers, that drop in income could be as little as 10 cents per copy or as high as $2.60 per copy.  As for paperback books, the impact varies by when the e-book is sold, because the agency model has a declining price for the e-book over time.  In general, however, authors will theoretically make more money by selling e-books than paperback books.  That’s because for the first year or so, when paperback sales are generally the highest, the e-book royalty rate may result in a higher per copy return to the author than from a paperback.  The problem here, though, lies in three unanswered questions.  First, how much will piracy reduce paying hardcover, paperback, and e-book sales?  Second, will all retailers report accurately “straight” download sales?  In the case of paperbacks, there is inventory control because the retailer either has to pay for the book or return the stripped cover for a return refund.  Physical items provide for a check against intentional undercounting.  What checks exist for an electronic item with no physical presence?  Third, what happens after several years when the e-book price drops to essentially nothing?  At that point, the author’s backlist sales revenues plummet, and the so-called “long-tail” provides far less revenue than would a paperback.

The other problem is the proliferation of “reader” platforms.  Until or unless this situation is rectified and standardized formats compatible across readers are instituted, there will be very few independent electronic “small presses.”

Based on what I’ve seen so far, although it’s likely to take several years to sort itself out, the combination of e-books and existing reading/publishing trends is going to result in an increasing decline in the number of midlist authors who are able to support themselves by writing, as well as a decline in the income of A-list writers.

As for the impact on reading and cultural trends… that’s an area where there are far fewer hard facts, but I speculate, and it’s purely speculation at this point, that the results will be mixed.  The screen readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook and all the others, are already a boon to older readers because they can enlarge the type, and more and more older readers are finding this greatly increases what is available for them to read.  Since these readers are more interested, in general, in reading than in whipping through stripped-down action novels and the like, they will support to some degree continuation of more traditional books.  On the other hand, a considerable number of the younger generations, who are more likely to be involved in screen-multi-tasking, already have manifested a certain impatience with novelistic complexity that isn’t reflected in “action” magic or technology.  Whether this will result in even greater pressure for action-oriented simplicity in the e-book market remains to be seen, but the vampire/supernatural crazes in bookselling suggests strongly that may well be the case.

As with most revolutions, a lot of innocents are going to be affected, and not necessarily positively, from readers to writers to small publishers… and I’ve probably only touched the surface here.

Years ago, there was a story in ANALOG about a “political engineer” who, despite his engineering degree, knew little about engineering and who had reached a position of power in his organization because of his “political” and “administrative” expertise – who dies when his undersea dome implodes on him because he didn’t understand that there are indeed times when subject matter expertise is vital.  I was reminded of this when reading Sunday’s New York Times education section, which documented the growth of professional administrative staff members in U.S. colleges and universities.  During the time period from 1976 to 2008, the number of professional administrative employees has doubled – from 42 such employees for every 1,000 students to 84, while the number of full-time faculty has dropped from 65 to 55 professors for every thousand students.  Put another way, more than 60% of college employees are not involved in actually teaching students, and the numbers often exceed 70% at private colleges and universities, whereas thirty years ago, those percentages were reversed.

Now… I’m probably very old-school, but I do have the belief that higher education ought to focus on educating students, imparting both knowledge and understanding, and for all the lengthy and considerable rationalizations for the need of more administrative personnel, I think such rationalizations are largely just that – a way of justifying positions and excessive administrative salaries.  At the colleges and universities with which I’m somewhat familiar, the majority of “administrative” personnel above the clerical level – and that number is considerable – make salaries well in excess of actual professors of similar age and experience [except for business department professors, who apparently live in a la-la land of their own, despite the rather dubious record of this discipline in the real world in recent years].

One critical point seems to be continually overlooked – all that administration isn’t what teaches students.  In fact, all those administrators create more non-teaching workloads on faculty rather than easing faculty workloads.  The number of reports, assessments, committee assignments, etc., placed on college and university faculty has possibly quintupled over the past generation – and those reports and assessments not only haven’t improved the quality of teaching, but have decreased it, because they reward faculty who are politically and administratively adept over those who are most adept at teaching and they take time away from actually pursuing greater scholarship and improving teaching skills by requiring more and more forms and assessments for the administrators.

So… while recent reports have surfaced showing that, despite all the advertising, British Petroleum has collected something like 97% of all the “severe” violations for shortcomings in offshore drilling, their political and administrative experts have been busy trying to convince the world that their engineering shortcomings are merely “unavoidable risks” of drilling.  All hail the political engineers!

Likewise… despite study after study that shows the single key factor in effective education is the level of subject matter expertise and the capability of the individual professor, colleges and universities have consistently short-changed the teaching faculties to support an ever-increasing administrative structure.  All hail the administrative educators!

And… when, exactly, if ever, will we stop rewarding excessive administrative growth and get back to rewarding actual skill and accomplishment in doing rather than administrating?

The other day I happened to catch a few minutes of the disaster mega-epic 2012.  A few minutes were all it took to remind me why I don’t, and shouldn’t, watch such cinematic giant-buttered-popcorn features.  I may not have all the details precisely correct, but that shouldn’t matter much because those details are so hugely and absurdly wrong in the first place – and, yes, there will be a point to all this, but after I first present those absurdities.

From what the section of the movie I did watch showed, Earth is doomed to disaster in the year 2012 because the Earth’s crust will shift, but around China as a pivot point [no, I don’t know why China was used, except that it seems to further the plot] so that great arks can be built for select humans in China and in great secrecy — and underground as well.  These two points alone are beyond merely dubious.

Taking the second one first… we can’t even spend enough to restart the space program or rebuild our highway bridges and infrastructure…and we’re going to be able to build something that no one outside of China knows about costing tens of hundreds of billions of dollars?  And the Chinese will cooperate when all they have to do is nothing to end up, literally, on top of the world?  I won’t mention, except in passing, the scenes where helicopters ferry elephants and giraffes dangling beneath them over frozen mountains in the last hour before disaster hits China or driving Bentleys out of the cargo hatches of aircraft landing in icy mountain valleys.

The first point is the one that truly frightens me, because it reveals how little either Hollywood or most people understand about the world, and plate tectonics in particular is just one example.  There are continuing references to the Earth’s crust shifting something like 23 degrees and thousands of miles, and I suspect this part of the movie had its genesis in a pseudo-scientific thriller of more than 20 years ago entitled The HAB Theory.  Such a gigantic shift in hours is not only technically impossible, but if it did occur, there wouldn’t be much life left anywhere above the microscopic or very small cellular level.  There certainly wouldn’t be mere huge fissures running alongside McCaran Airport in Las Vegas, and the earthquakes wouldn’t be a “mere” 9.4 on the Richter scale.

A “mere” tectonic plate shift of a few yards in the right place can generate an earthquake of over 7.0.  It’s estimated that the earthquake that dropped the land around Seattle some twenty plus yards some 800 years ago[as I recall reading] might have been over 8.0, and if a similar quake occurred today, there would likely be nothing of size or significance left standing within fifty miles of MicroSoft headquarters.  Comparatively TINY shifts in the earth’s crust and continental plates, resulting from shifts over years, if not centuries, result in massive damage.  You certainly wouldn’t need even a single degree of shifting of the Earth’s crust to level everything and destroy any vestige of culture and civilization.

But, of course, a shift of a single degree just doesn’t sound cataclysmic enough for Hollywood or the consumers of giant-hot-buttered-popcorn cinema.  Is it any wonder that no one gets upset over the prospect of a few degrees of global warming… or that they can’t understand that those mere few degrees of increased temperature would result in inundating every major port city in the world?

Or… put another way… little things do mean a lot, something that’s so hard to get across in a world obsessed with the titanic… or the apparently titanic.

This past weekend, my wife and I watched Local Color, a movie presented as a true-to- life story of a summer in the early life of artist John Talia, when he was mentored by the Russian-born impressionist artist Nikoli Seroff – except that it’s not… exactly.  It took a while to track down the story behind the story, and it turns out that “John Talia” is actually George Gallo, the director of the movie, who did begin as an art student, but not of “Seroff,” but of the Lithuanian-born impressionist George Cherepov.  The use of the name Seroff was also confusing, because there was also a Viktor Seroff who was a scholar of the relationship between impressionism in art and in music.  Like “Talia,” director Gallo believes in representational art, and like the fictionalized “Talia,” after stints in Hollywood as a director, he was recognized as good enough to have his artwork featured in well-known New York City galleries.

The movie was shot on a literal shoestring, with most of the actors doing it for love and little else.  It never got wide distribution and received very mixed reviews, ranging from five stars downward.  While I enjoyed and appreciated it, in some ways the discovery that it was “fictionalized” bothered me far more than any short-comings it may have had, although I didn’t find many.  On the one hand, I can see why Gallo may have wanted to fictionalize the names, particularly his own, but by doing so, in essence, what could have been, and should have been, a tribute to Cherepov was lost in the process of creating an “image” of sorts.

I tend to be disturbed by the entire “image-making” process anyway, because the process of image-making obscures, if not totally distorts, the facts behind the “image.”  Certainly, such image-making is hardly new to human society and culture, although the power of modern technology makes it far, far easier.  Still, even in American culture, the images have run rampant over the truth, and in the process, often make heroes out of one man while ignoring the greater accomplishments of another in the same situation.  In “A Sacred Poet,” an article published more than thirty years ago in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov noted that, because of the popular poem, written in 1863 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, most people believe that Paul Revere was the hero who warned the America colonists of the imminent British attack on Concord.  While that warning did indeed result in a colonial victory, it wasn’t delivered by Revere at all, because he was caught by a British patrol, but by Dr. Samuel Prescott.  Yet Longfellow’s poem about the “ride of Paul Revere” created a lasting image of Revere as the heroic rider who warned the Americans, and that image has effectively trumped history for more than a century.

Every American presidential campaign is an exercise in image-making, and generally, the more successful the campaign, the more distorted the image… and the greater the potential for loss of popular and political support when facts to the contrary eventually leak out and become widely-known.

Perhaps George Cherepov was even less likeable than “Nikoli Seroff,” and George Gallo didn’t want to misrepresent the real artist. Or perhaps… who knows?  But it still bothers me, I have to say.

Recently, I’ve read more and more on both sides of the “debate” about whether the internet/world-wide-web is a “good” thing.  One ardent advocate dragged out the old
“Greek” argument that even writing was “bad” because memory would atrophy… and, of course, look how far we’ve come from the time of the Greeks, how much knowledge we’ve amassed since then.

And… in a cultural and societal sense, that accumulation of knowledge has, in fact, occurred, but I’m not so certain that we now don’t stand at the edge of a precipice, where, if we choose incorrectly as a society, we will slide down the slippery slope into ignorance and anarchy, if not worse. Some people already believe we’ve started to slide so much that we’ll never recover.  While I’m not that pessimistic, not yet, at least, I would like to point out a fatal flaw in the idea that technology results in a more knowledgeable society.

To begin with, let us consider the very meaning of “knowledge.” Various dictionary definitions begin with:  (1) a product of understanding acquired through experience, practical ability or skill and (2) deep and extensive learning.  The key terms here are understanding and learning.  The problem with the web and electronic technology in general is that most users fail to understand that access to information or facts is not at all the same as understanding those facts, their use, or, especially, their significance.  True understanding is impossible without a personally learned internal database.  Being able to net-search things is not the same as knowing them, and very few individuals can retain facts looked up unless they have a personal internal knowledge base to which they can relate such facts.

All too many educational “reformers” either tend to equate the learning of specific, often unrelated facts, processes, and discrete skills with education or knowledge, or, at the other extreme, they emphasize “process” and inter-relations without ever requiring students to learn basic structures and facts.  Put another way, information access is not knowing or knowledge, nor is learning processes and systems ungrounded in hard facts. Both the understanding of process and systems and a personal integrated factual “database” are necessary for an individual to be educated and knowledgeable, and far too few graduates today possess both.

The often-too-maligned educational system of the early and mid-twentieth century had a laudable objective:  to give students the basic knowledge of their society and the basic skills needed to survive and prosper in that society.  Did it often fail?  It did, and in many places, and far too frequently.  But that didn’t mean that the objective was wrong; it meant that all too often the techniques and means used were not suited to various types of students.

What followed that system is certainly no better, and possibly much worse. When something like 40% of high school graduates cannot explain against whom the American Revolution was fought and why it was important, those students cannot be classed as knowledgeable.  Nor can the 60% who cannot write coherent complex sentences or understand them be considered educated.

A culture that exalts the ability to use technology over the ability to understand it and over the ability to explain even what society is, why it exists, and what forms of government benefit who and why is in deep trouble.  So is one where the process of accessing information is elevated over understanding what that information means and how to use it. That, by the way, is also known as thinking.

And yet, every day, and in every way, our society is encouraging an ever-increasing percentage of our young people to communicate, communicate, communicate with less and less real knowledge… and without even being able to understand truly how little that they know about the basis and structure of the world in which they live.

And concerning knowledge… that is the greatest illusion of all.

Several weeks ago, an article appeared in the local newspaper, an interview with the new artistic director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.  He’s a product of the local university, where he learned his craft from, among others, Fred Adams, the legendary professor who established and ran for decades the Festival [which has won, among other honors, a Tony for being one of the best regional theatres in the United States].  The new director is an accomplished and effective actor, and there’s no doubt about that.  But what bothered me about the interview was that not a single word appeared about those who mentored, taught, inspired, and hired him, including Fred Adams.  Everything was about the new director, his talents, and his aspirations.  I can’t honestly say whether this was because he never mentioned those who had helped him every step of the way or because the interviewer left any such remarks out of the final story.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter, because, as the story ran, it’s all too symbolic of American culture today.  No one owes anything to anyone.  In fact, it’s even worse than that. Part of this change lies in an attitude that everything important exists only in the here and now, a change in what was once a core American value.  Southern Utah University, for example, exists only because, more than a century ago, a handful of local citizens mortgaged everything they had to come up with the funds to build the first building of the school – the building being required by the state legislature.  They did so because they felt that would offer a better future to their children and their community.  None of them ever received any financial reward, and their act is largely buried in history… except for a few older residents of the town and some university faculty.

Another symptom indicative of this change in public attitudes is reflected in the content of those largely useless student evaluations.  As a senior faculty member, my wife serves on the committee that reviews tenure and promotion applications for faculty. Since faculty members are now required to include all student evaluations and comments, she sees the comments from students across all disciplines in the university, and what is so incredibly disheartening is that there is virtually no real appreciation for professors at any level. The overwhelming majority of the comments – even of professors who have demonstrated incredible teaching effectiveness and who have gone out of their way to help students for years – deal with complaints, often insanely petty.

Part of this trend may be because all too many students don’t seem to know what’s important.  One student praised a professor because he once brought in soft drinks for the class!  Another faculty member was praised for bringing donuts. Exactly what does this have to do with education? Over the years, my wife and other members of her department have done such quiet deeds as paid student medical bills out of their own pockets, created student scholarships with their own funds, and personally helped students financially, offered hundreds of unpaid hours of additional instruction – the list is endless.  Once, say fifteen years ago, students seemed to appreciate such efforts.  Today, they complain if faculty members don’t smile when the students perform [yes… this actually happened.  Twice!].

In the interests of full disclosure, as the saying goes, I probably haven’t offered enough gratitude to those who helped me – but I have offered it, in speeches, in book dedications, and in interviews… and I didn’t forget them, visiting and writing them over the years.  And certainly there are notable exceptions, some very public.  One noted Broadway singer and actress, in giving a concert last week, paid clearly heart-felt tribute upon several occasions to her undergraduate singing teacher.  The problem is that these are exceptions… and becoming more and more infrequent every year.

The noted Isaac Newton once said that he had accomplished so much because he stood “on the shoulders of Giants,” but all of us owe debts to those who preceded us.  We didn’t do it alone, and far too many people who should know this fail, time and time again, to know that, to appreciate it, and to acknowledge it, both privately and publicly.

A little over a week ago, I did something – unintentionally – that I truly wish I could undo, and for which I’m very sorry. I was taking my morning walk with the over-energetic Aussie-Saluki when a car pulled over, and a strange man with a delightful and precise English accent asked me for directions to the Catholic Church.  I was glad to oblige, and promptly stated, “Just go to the end of the road; turn right, and it’s two blocks up.”

Simple enough.

Except… I’m one of those people who have no innate sense of left and right.  I’m not directionally impaired in the sense of getting lost; I almost always know where I am, and have enough sense [acquired painfully from my wife] to ask directions when I don’t.  I’m also very good at providing written directions to others.  But when I’m caught off-guard as I was on that morning, with my thoughts more on other matters, from the plotting of the newest book to what a beautiful morning it was, I often speak before full consideration of my words.

The road used to end where I meant for him to turn, but it hasn’t for more than a year, since the city extended it a half-mile downhill through a winding canyon to meet up with the Cross Hollows Parkway.  Instead, there’s only a stop sign there now.  And… as a result of my left-right confusion, I told the English gentleman to turn right, rather than the correct direction, which was left.

But I didn’t.  About twenty seconds after he drove off, I realized what I had done and started waving and running after the car, Aussie-Saluki delighted that we were running.  Alas, he never looked back… and by the time I got home and went looking for him in the car… he was nowhere to be found.  I just hope he found the right church.

Now… the other side of the story is…  Equally inadvertently, the directions I had given him were precisely correct in taking him to the nearest LDS Stake [church], if almost three-quarters of a mile away, rather than the four blocks to the Catholic Church.

So… either way… I’m either regarded as a directional idiot, theologically challenged in not even knowing which church was which, or determined to steer the poor man away from his church of choice to another faith [even though I’m not a member of either faith].

As so many people have often probably said, I just wish I’d thought through what I’d said a little more carefully…. And because I never knew who he was, this is the only apology I can offer.

The other day I came across a series of articles, seemingly unrelated – except they weren’t.  The first was about why Vietnam is now producing perhaps the majority of great young chess players in the world.  The second was a news report on the Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, and the third was a table of the average salaries of U.S. university professors by area of specialty.

The Vietnamese are producing chess champions and prodigies, it seems, because [gasp!] they pay them.  Gifted young players are paid from $300 to $500 a month to learn and play chess, and the best get all expenses paid to play in tournaments world-wide.  These are substantial incentives in a country where the average monthly family earnings are around $100.  Of course, American teenagers spend more than that monthly on what the Vietnamese would likely consider luxuries, and in the United States young chess players must count on the support of family or charitable organizations… and despite being one of the largest and most prosperous nations in the world, we have comparatively very few international class chess masters.

The finals of the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition were held in Salt Lake City last week, and of the eight finalists, one was Russian, one was Ukrainian, and the other six were Asian. This pattern has been ongoing for close to a decade, if not longer.  We haven’t produced a true giant in piano performance in decades, but then, the top prize is a mere $30,000, hardly worth it for Americans, apparently, not when it takes 15 plus years of study and hours upon hours of daily practice – all for a career in which the top-flight pianists generally make less money than whoever is 150^th on the PGA money list.

All this might just tie in to the salaries of university professors.  The three areas in which university professors’ salaries are the lowest are, respectfully, from the bottom: theology/religion; performing and visual arts; and English.

I’m cynical, I know, but I don’t think that this is coincidental.  In the United States, mainstream religions [who generally require some intensive theological training] are losing members left and right.  The highest-paid performing and visual artists are those who can provide the most spectacular show, not the most technically sound performance, and most “professional” pop singers could not even match the training or technical ability of the average graduate student in voice, but technical ability doesn’t matter, just popularity, as witness American Idol.  As for English, when 60% of all college graduates aren’t fully technically competent in their own language, this does suggest a lack of interest.

The other factor in common in these areas is that the average semi-educated American believes that he or she knows as much as anyone about religion, singing, dancing, acting, and English as anyone.  And that’s reflected in both what professors are paid and in what experts in those fields are paid. The problem is that popular perceptions aren’t always right, regardless of all the mantras about the “wisdom of the crowd.”  The highest paid professors – and professionals – in the United States today are in the field of business and finance.  That’s right – those quant geniuses who brought you all the greatest financial melt-down since the Great Depression, not to mention the “Flash Crash” of a month or so ago when technical glitches resulted in the largest fastest one-day decline in the market ever.  Oh… and just as a matter of national pride, if you will, why do professors of foreign languages get paid 8-10% more than professors of English? Especially when the mastery of English is at a decades-low point?

More to the point, it’s not just about singers, writers, English professors, but about all of society.  We may complain about the financiers and their excesses, but we still allow those excesses.  We may talk about the importance of teachers, police, firefighters, and others who hold society together, but we don’t truly support them where it counts.

As a society, we may not always get what we pay for, but you can bet we won’t get what we don’t pay for.

I noted some time back that the scholar Jacques Barzun had documented in his book From Dawn to Decadence what he believed was the decline of western culture and civilization and predicted its eventual fall.  One of his key indicators was the elevation of credentials and the devaluation of achievement. Along these lines, the June 27^th edition of The New York Times [brought to my attention by an alert reader] carried an article noting the emergence and recognition of multiple high school valedictorians. One high school had 94, and another even had 100!

While many factors have contributed to this kind of absurdity, two factors stand out: (1) rampant grade inflation based on an unwillingness of educators and parents to apply stringent standards that measure true achievement and (2) a society-wide unwillingness to recognize that true excellence is rare – except perhaps in professional sports.

So many problems arise from this tendency to over-praise and over-reward the younger generation that I can’t possibly go into all of them in a blog.  But I do want to address some of those of greater import, not necessarily in order of societal impact, but as I see them.  First of which is the fact that, beyond high school and certainly beyond college, there can’t be multiple “winners.”  There will only be one position at the hospital for a new surgeon, one or two vacancies for new teachers each year at the local school or a handful at most.  Graduate schools only take a limited number of applicants from the overall pool, and they do make choices.  Sometimes, the choices or the grounds on which they’re made may not be fair, just as a bad grade in freshman PE may keep a high school student from becoming valedictorian [if only one is chosen, the way it used to be], but the plain fact is that, in life, economics and need limit what is available, and students need to learn that not everyone gets to be top dog, even if the differences between the contenders seem minuscule,

Second, by recognizing multiple students as “valedictorians,” schools and parents are both devaluing the honor and simultaneously over-emphasizing it as a credential.  As a result, more and more colleges are ignoring whether students are “valedictorians” and relying on other factors, such as, perhaps regrettably, standardized test scores.

Third, like it or not, as former President Jimmy Carter once stated [and for which he was roundly criticized], “Life isn’t fair.”  It may not be “fair” that one teacher somewhere in the past didn’t like this or that student’s performance and gave them an A- rather than an A, and that kept them from being valedictorian.  It’s not “fair” that Ivy League schools now require better grades from their female applicants than from their male applicants because more female students work harder and the schools don’t want to overbalance their student bodies with women.  Unfortunately, what society can do in “legislating” fairness is not only limited, but impossible to produce anything close to absolute fairness in real terms.  All society can do is set legal parameters to prohibit the worst cases.  We, as individuals, then have to do our best to act fairly and learn to work around or live with the instances where “life isn’t fair,” because it isn’t and never will be.

Fourth, frankly, in cases of similar or identical grades, other factors should be weighed.  They certainly are in all other occupational situations in life, because they have to be. When there are limited spaces, decisions will be made to determine who gets the position.  Not observing this practical factor in high school is just another aspect of giving students an inflated view of their own “specialness,” or, if you will, the continuation of the “trophies for everyone” philosophy.

But… is anyone listening?  Apparently not, because there’s more and more grade inflation, more and more valedictorians, and more and more emphasis on how “wonderful” every student is.

Recently, Brad Torgersen made a lengthy comment about why he believed that F&SF, and particularly science fiction, needs to “popularize” itself, because the older “target market” is… well… old and getting older, and the younger readers tend to come to SF through such venues as media tie-in novels, graphic novels, and “popular” fiction.  While he’s absolutely correct in the sense that any vital genre has to attract to new readers in order to continue, he unfortunately is under one major misapprehension – that publishers can “market” fiction the way Harley-Davidson marketed motorcycles.  Like it or not, publishing – and readers – don’t work quite that way.

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s quite a bit of successful marketing in the field, but one reason why there are always opportunities for new authors is that it’s very rare that a publisher can actually “create” a successful book or author.  I know of one such case, and it was enabled by a smart publisher and a fluke set of circumstances that occurred exactly once in the last two decades.  Historically, and practically, what happens far more often is that, of all the new authors published, one or two, if that, each year appeal widely or, if you will, popularly.  Once that happens, a savvy publisher immediately brings all possible marketing tools and expertise to publicize and expand that reading base and highlight what makes that author’s work popular.

In short, there has to be a larger than “usual” reader base to begin with, and the work in question has to be “popularizable.”  I do have, I think it’s fair to say, such a reader base, but, barring some strange circumstances, that reader base isn’t likely to expand wildly to the millions because what and how I write require a certain amount of thought for the fullest appreciation of readers, and the readers who flock to each new multi-million selling new novelistic sensation are looking primarily for either (1) entertainment, (2) a world with the same characters that promises that they can identify with it for years, or (3) a “fast” read, preferably all three, but certainly two out of three.

All this doesn’t mean that publishers can’t do more to expand their readership, but it does mean that such expansion has to begin by considering and publishing books that are likely to appeal to readers beyond those of the traditional audience, without alienating the majority of those traditional readers. And in fact, one way that publishers have been trying to reach beyond the existing audience is by putting out more and more “supernatural” fantasy dealing with vampires, werewolves, and books with more explicit sexual content.  The problem with this approach is that, first, such books tend not to appeal to those who like science fiction and/or tech-oriented publications, as well as also tending to alienate a significant percentage of older readers, as opposed to, as Brad pointed out, media tie-in novels, which appeal across a wider range of ages and backgrounds. Another problem is that writing science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, takes more and more technical experience and education, and fewer and fewer writers have that background.  That’s one reason why SF media tie-in novels are easier to write – most of the technical trappings have been worked out, one way or another.

I don’t have an easy answer, except to say that trying to expand readership by extending the series of authors with “popular” appeal or by copying or trying to latch on to the current fads has limited effectiveness. Personally, I tend to believe that just looking for good books, whether or not they fit into current popularity fads, is the best remedy, but that may just be a reflection of my views and mark me as “dated.”

In any case, Brad has pointed out a real problem facing science fiction, in particular, and one that needs more insight and investigation by editors and publishers in the field.

Several weeks ago, I attended a science fiction convention where the guest of honor was a writer who spent some 20 years as what one might call a “high mid-list author,” someone able to work full-time as a writer and pay the bills.  Except… several years ago, this came to an end for the writer.  Oh… the writer in question still publishes two books a year, but they aren’t selling as well as earlier books, although those who read the books claim they’re as good, if not better, than earlier work, and now to make ends meet requires outside additional work as a consultant and educator.  To make matters worse, at least from my point of view, this writer produces work that is more than mere entertainment and mental cotton-candy.

Interestingly enough, more and more of the books cited by “critical” reviewers in the F&SF field [with whom I have, as most know, certain “concerns”] seem to come from smaller presses.  This is creating, I believe, an almost vicious cycle in F&SF publishing. The more the books praised by reviewer come from small presses, the more larger publishers get the message that “good” or “edgy” or “thoughtful” books don’t sell as well, and the greater the almost subconscious pressure to opt for “fiction-fun” or “fiction-light.”  To their credit, certain publishers, including mine, thankfully, are resisting this trend, but I’m still seeing more of those novels that are gaming and media tie-ins or endless series.  And yes, the Recluce Saga is long, but… as I keep pointing out, no character has more than two books.  I don’t have eight or ten or fifteen books endlessly spinning improbable stories and extensions about the same character or characters.

With the drastic changes in wholesale distribution over the past decade or so, virtually no mid-list books receive such distribution, except perhaps lower-selling titles of big-name authors.  As a result of these trends, the midlists of at least some large publishers that were once the home of “thoughtful” books are shrinking. Some such midlist writers have found homes with the smaller presses, but small press distribution systems often are not as extensive. That has resulted in lower sales for the authors who wrote those books, and lower sales means lower incomes, and either cutting back on writing or holding down more other jobs… or… trying to re-invent one’s self with another form of “fiction-light.”

I’ve heard many who believe that e-book sales can help here, but the sales figures I’ve seen suggest that e-books do more for those books that have high sales levels and wide distribution in hardcover and paperback – and those aren’t the midlist books.

It almost appears that the midlist F&SF titles are going to become a ghetto within a genre… and that concerns me, and it’s certainly affecting all authors, but particularly those who once wrote good midlist books and made a living at it… and now can’t.

Even with spam “protection,” the amount of junk email that my wife and I receive is astronomical – less than one in fifty emails is legitimate.  The rest are spam and solicitations.  Now I’m getting close to a hundred attempted “spam” comments on the website daily, all of them with embedded links to sell or promote something. That’s just one facet of the problem.  Another facet is the continual proliferation of attempts at phishing and identity theft.  It makes one want to ask – have there always been so many people trying to make a buck, rupee, ruble, Euro, or whatever by freeloading or preying on others?

I know that con artists have been around since the beginning of history, but never have such numbers been so obvious and so intrusive to so many.  Is this the inevitable result of an electronic technology that makes theft, fraud, and blatant self-promotion at the expense and effort of others a matter of keyboarding at a distance?  At one time, these types of offenses had to be carried out in person and embodied a certain amount of risk and a probability of detection and usually criminal punishment.  Now that they can be accomplished via virtually untraceable [for practical purposes] computer/internet access, they’ve proliferated to the point where virtually every computer connected to the net runs the risk of some sort of loss or damage – a form of computer Russian roulette.

But what I find the most disheartening about this is the fact that so many people, once the risk and criminal penalty factors were so dramatically reduced by technology, set out to exploit and fleece others.  Even those of us not yet fleeced or exploited have to take time, effort, and additional software to deal with these intrusions.  I have to sort through the potential comments quarantined by the system several times a day, because a few are legitimate, and deserve to be posted, and I still have to take time to delete all the unwanted email.  I have to pay for protective software, and so forth.  In effect, every computer user is being taxed in terms of time, money, and risk by this radical expansion of the unscrupulous.

Now… those who are extreme technophiles will claim that the downsides of our technologically based communications/computing systems are negligible… or at least that the benefits far outweigh the downsides.  But the problem here is that most of the benefits, especially in terms of costs, go to large institutions and the unscrupulous, while the downsides fall on the rest of us.  I don’t see that, for example, that the internet enables more good writers; it enables writers who are better self-promoters, and some good writers are, and a great many aren’t.  In trying to evaluate honestly what I do on the net, I suspect that my internet presence is similar to treading water.  I’m not losing much ground to the blatant self-promoters, but for all the effort it requires, I’m not gaining either, and it’s time spent when I can’t be writing.  Yet if I don’t do it, especially with, I have to admit after looking at recent sales figures [and yes, some of you were right] the recent spurt in the growth of e-books, my sales will suffer.

I don’t see that the internet is that useful in enabling small businesses, because there are so many, and the effort and ingenuity require to attract customers is considerable, but it certainly allows large ones to contact everyone.  And it certainly allows every variety of cyber-criminal potential access to a huge variety of victims with almost no chance of getting detected, let alone prosecuted and punished.  The idea of privacy has become almost laughable, even for those of us who don’t patronize social networking sites.

Cynical as I may be, my hopes have always been that technology would be employed to enable the best to be better, and the rest to improve who and what they are.  Yet… I have this nagging feeling that, more and more, technology, particularly communications technology, is dragging down far more people than it is improving, especially ethically… and, even if it isn’t, it’s creating a tremendous diversion of time from actual productive work.  That diversion may be worthwhile in manufacturing-based industries, but it’s a definite negative force in areas such as writing and other creative efforts.  In a society that is becoming ever more dependent on technology, unless matters change, this foreshadows a future in which marketing and hype become ever more present and dominant, even as the technophiles are claiming communications technology makes life better and better.

Better and better for whom?  And what?

The other day, when reading a blogger’s review of The Soprano Sorceress, I came across an interesting question, clearly meant to be rhetorical – what point was there to reading a fantasy if the reader didn’t like the fantasy world created by the author?  It’s a good question, but not necessarily in the way that the reviewer meant, because his attitude was more along the lines of wanting to avoid reading about worlds he didn’t like, particularly because he asked another question along the lines of what fun was there in reading about such a world.

Yet… I have to confess that there are authors I probably won’t read again because I don’t care that much for their worlds, just as there are authors I won’t read again because I don’t care for their characters.  In particular, I don’t care for characters who make mistakes and errors that would prove fatal in any “realistic” world situation, yet who survive for book after book [I presume, because the series continues, even if I’m no longer reading them].  Obviously, those kinds of books have great appeal, because millions upon millions of them sell, and maybe that’s the “fun” in reading them.

But there’s a distinction between “good” and “fun,” and often one between “entertaining” and “thought-provoking,” and there are readers who prefer each type, although sales figures suggest that “fun” and “entertaining” are the categories that tend to outsell others significantly, often by orders of magnitude.

The question the blogger reviewer asked, however, holds within it an assumption that all too many of us have – that “our” view is the only reasonable way of looking at a particular book… and that, I think, is why I tend to be reluctant in reading reviews, either those considered “professional” or those less so, because the vast majority of reviewers start from the unconscious presupposition that theirs is the only “reasonable” way of looking at a given book.  The more “professional” the reviewer is, the less likely this presupposition occurs, but there are still well-known reviewers and review publications that fall regularly into this mind-set.  The problem lies in not only in the expectations of the reviewer, but also in the knowledge base – or the lack of knowledge – that the reviewer possesses.  A novel that uses allusions heavily to disclose character will seem shallow to the reader or reviewer who does not understand those referents.  A reader unfamiliar with various “sub-cultures,” such as the corporate or legal worlds, politics, the military, academia, is likely to miss many subtleties of the type where explanation would destroy the effect.  Because of this “sub-culture” blindness, certain books, or parts of certain books, tend to be less entertaining – or even boring – to those unfamiliar with the subculture, whereas a reader who understands those subcultures may be smiling or even howling with laughter.

As a side note, despite the impression that some bloggers have apparently gained from this site, I do read blog reviews of my work and that of other authors on a continuing basis, if sometimes reluctantly.  Why reluctantly?  Because it’s more often painful than not.  As a writer, for me such blogs often raise the question of why the reader didn’t understand certain matters that appear so obvious to me.  Could I have done something better, or was the matter presented well and the reader didn’t get it?  Half and half?  Such questions and second-guessing, I feel, are necessary if any writer wants to improve, no matter how long he or she has been writing… but I suspect any author who claims the process is enjoyable or entertaining is either lying or a closet masochist.  As part of being a professional, an author should know, I personally believe, the range of reactions to his or her work, as well as the reasons behind those reactions, but, please, let’s not have commentators suggest that we’re somehow outdated, out of touch, or unreasonable when we suggest that the process isn’t always as pleasurable to us as it apparently is to those who take great delight in complaining about what they perceive as deficiencies in what we write.  Sometimes, indeed, the deficiencies are the writer’s, but many times the deficiencies lie in the reviewer, and where the deficiencies may lie, or even if there are such deficiencies, isn’t always obvious to most readers of either blog or professional reviews… or even of professional blog reviews.

Way back in 1958, in the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction, Jack Vance wrote a book called The Languages of Pao, in which he postulated that language drastically affects human thought patterns and, thus, the entire structure of a culture or civilization.  A more scholarly statement of this is the linguistic relativity principle, otherwise known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of which there are two versions.  One states that language limits and determines cognitive categories. A weaker version merely suggests that language  influences thought and certain non-linguistic behaviours.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was thought to be discredited by color-related experiments in the 1960s, because researchers  found that language differentials did not seem to affect color perception or usage.

Recent studies of human brain patterns and linguistic development, reported in the June 1^st edition of New Scientist, strongly suggest that, first, there is not, as previously thought, a  genetically-determined “universal” human instinct/hard-wired pattern for language that is common to all human beings, but that languages are in fact learned and used in often totally different ways by those speaking different tongues.  Thus, as speculated by Vance, languages do in fact shape the way we not only think, but the very way in which we see the world.  And, as occasionally happens, but not so much as we science fiction writers would like to think or claim, one of us has actually anticipated a fundamental discovery, and one that has profound implications for human civilization, implications that I don’t think most people have fully considered.

If this research is accurate, then, for example, intractible cultural differences may well lie in the linguistic patterns of a culture.  A language that offers many ways in which to accurately express the same concept or thought would likely promote more openness of thought than a language in which there is literally only one correct way in which that thought can be expressed.  A language/culture that allows rapid linguistic innovation may promote change and development… but it might well have the downside of undermining standards, because standards, as represented by language, are not seen as fixed or immutable.   We already know that words expressing concepts, such as “freedom”  or “equality,” do not “translate” into the exact same meanings in different cultures, and this research offers insights into why the differences go beyond mere semantics.

These possibilities have certainly been considered in human history, if only instinctively or subconsciously.  For centuries, the Roman Catholic church resisted the translation of the Bible into any other language, insisting it be read and taught only in Latin.  Since 1635, with a few years in abeyance during the French Revolution, L’Academie Francaise has policed usage and linguistic development in France, attempting to restrict or eliminate the use of Frenchified Anglicisms.  And languages do affect other aspects of human behavior.  Recent studies have shown that speakers of tonally-inflected languages have far, far, higher rates of perfect pitch than do speakers of languages that are not tonally inflected.  Not entirely coincidentally, it seems to me, speakers of such languages also appear to have more successful classical musicians.

A more disturbing aspect of the research is the possibility that linguistic differences may well create cultural “understanding” divides that are difficult, if not impossible, to bridge, simply because the languages create antithetical patterns of thought, so that a speaker of one language cannot literally comprehend emotionally the concepts and values behind the words of a speaker of another language.  The initial research suggests that the magnitude of variances in languistic learning patterns ranges from very slight to quite significant… and it will be interesting to see if such differences can ever be quantified.  But it does appear that speaking another language goes far beyond the words.

And a science fiction writer pointed out the cultural implications and ramifications for societies first.

As both individuals and as a species, human beings have always had a tendency to press the limits, both of their societies and their technologies.  This tendency has good points and bad points… good because as a species we wouldn’t have developed and life would still be in the “natural state,” or “nasty, brutish, and short,” a pithy observation attributed to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan.  The “bad” side of pressing the limits has been minimized, because the advantages have been so much greater over time than the drawbacks.

Except… the costs and the consequences of pushing technology to the limit may now in some cases be reaching the point where they outweigh the overall benefits, and not just in military areas.

The latest and most dramatic evidence of this change is, of course, the current Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the subsequent oil blowout.  Deep-sea drilling and production platforms are required to have in place redundant blow-out protectors… as did the BP rig.  But the blow-out protector failed.  Such failures are exceeding rare.  Repeated tests show these work over 99% of the time, but something like 60 have failed in tests of the equipment.  The Gulf oil disaster just happens to be one of the few times it’s happened in actuality and represents the largest such failure in terms of crude oil releases.  What’s being overlooked, except by the environmentalists, who, so far as I can tell, are operating more on a dislike of off-shore drilling than a reasoned technical analysis, is the fact the number of offshore drilling platforms is around 6,000 in service world-wide in some form or another, and increasing.  That number will increase whether the U.S. bans more offshore drilling or not.  From 1992 to 2006, the Interior Department reported 39 blow-outs at platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and although none were as serious as the latest, that’s more than two a year, yet that represents a safety record of 99.93%.  In short, there’s not a lot of margin for error.  What makes the issue more pressing is that drilling technology is able to drill deeper and deeper – and the pressures involved at ever greater depths put increasing stress on the equipment to the point where, as is apparent with the BP disaster, stopping the flow of oil in the case of a failure becomes extraordinarily difficult and exceedingly expensive, as well as time-consuming.  Because crude oil is devastating to the environment, the follow-on damage to the ecosystems and the economy of the surrounding area will create far greater costs than capping the well.

Pushing technology beyond safe limits is nothing new to human beings.  When steam engines were first introduced, the desire for power and speed led to scores, if not hundreds, of boiler explosions.  Occasionally, disasters led to changes, such as the phasing out of hydrogen dirigibles after the Hindenburg fire and crash, but that change was also made easier by the improvements in aircraft, which were also far faster than dirigibles. The costs of other disasters are still with us – and we tend to overlook them.  The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has largely been abandoned because the coal seams in the mostly worked out mines beneath the town caught fire and have been smoldering away for more than forty years, causing the ground above to collapse and continually releasing toxic gases.  In Pennsylvania alone, there are more than 30 such subterranean fires.  World-wide there are more than 3,000 such fires, some of which release more greenhouse gases and other toxic fumes than some coal-fired power plants.  Yet few of these fires are more than watched, because the technology does not exist that can extinguish them in any fashion close to cost-efficient and in some cases, not at all because the fires burn so deep.

Pushing electronic technology to the limits, without regard for the implications, costs, and other downsides, has resulted in a world linked together in such a haphazard fashion that a massive solar flare – or a determined set of professional hackers – could conceivably bring down an entire nation’s communications and power distribution network – and that doesn’t even take into account the vast increase in the types and the amounts of exceedingly toxic wastes created on a world-wide scale, most of which is still not handled as it should be.  Another area where technology is being pressed to the limits is that of bio-tech, where scientists have reported creating the first synthetic cell.  While they engineered in considerable safeguards, once that technology is more available, will everyone?

As illustrated by the BP disaster, we when, as a society, push technology to its limits on a large scale, for whatever reason, the implications of a technological or systems failure are getting to the point where we require absolute safety in operation of those systems – and obtaining such assurance is never inexpensive… and sometimes not even possible.

But then again… if we tweaked existing technology just a bit more so that we could get even more out of it…. get more oil, more bandwidth, make more profit…