For more than a decade, at least some of the more “realistic” or “mundane” among the science fiction crowd — including various proportions of readers, writers, and critics — have been suggesting that the idea of interstellar travel is somewhere between unlikely and totally impossible in a practical sense. So I happened to be very pleased when I read in the November 26^th edition of New Scientist that two new approaches to interstellar travel had been trotted out — one of which essentially revisits the idea of the Bussard interstellar ramjet… except the propellant would be dark matter, which is far more plentiful in interstellar space than the comparatively few atoms of hydrogen that made the original Bussard concept unlikely to be successful in significantly reducing travel time to even nearby stars. The other involves the creation of an artificial black hole that radiates Hawking radiation for propulsion.

Coming up with a theoretical model for either approach is, of course, a far cry from even an engineering design, let alone a prototype, especially when the composition of dark matter has not even been determined and when we don’t yet have the engineering know-how to create anything close to a black hole, but these theoretical approaches do bring some hope to the idea that we humans may yet escape the confines of a single solar system in some fashion other than massive asteroid-sized generation ships that no government or corporate entity will ever commit the resources to build.

One of the aspects of interstellar travel that fascinates me, and more than a few others, is the hope that it might at least give a jolt to the political and cultural emphasis on limitations and upon the glorification of the small — from ever-smaller and ever more necessary electronic gadgets that tie people into self-selected and socially and culturally limited peer groups to a lack of understanding about just how immense, wide, wonderful — and awful — the universe is… and how unlikely what lies out there can be conveniently catalogued into neat and small packages designed just for human use and understanding.

Will we ever understand it all?

Who knows? But we certainly won’t if we don’t keep looking outward and striving for more than a way to use science and new knowledge for a quick buck in the next fiscal year… or quarter.

I’d certainly rather have either a black hole starship or a dark-matter-ramjet than the new and improved pocket iPhone and its sure-to-be innumerable successors.

In the last few days, several stories have popped up in various newspapers about the Barnes & Noble decision to close its B. Dalton outlet in Laredo, Texas, leaving the small city [population 220,000] with no bookstore at all, neither a chain store, nor an independent. That will make Laredo the largest town or city in the United States without a full-service bookstore, an absolutely “wonderful” Christmas present for the book-lovers of Laredo.

In past blogs I’ve pointed out the rather numerous short-comings of Borders. Now it’s the turn of Barnes & Noble. The B&N decision comes as part of its strategy to close all the remaining B. Dalton outlets in 2010, a decision from on corporate high to close high-cost, low-profit small mall outlet stores. Frankly, in the case of B&N, it makes far more sense than it did for Borders to downsize the number of Waldenbooks outlets, since from my industry sources, the word has always been that Waldenbooks was profitable until Borders started fiddling with their operations, while the Dalton outlets were, as a whole, marginal.

Even so, the B&N decision in the case of Laredo, and perhaps in other individual cases as well, is stupid. They have a local monopoly that is in the black, if not necessarily highly profitable, and B&N has been quoted as saying that Laredo will support a small but full-sized B&N — but that B&N won’t be able to open such a store for at least 18 months. Generally speaking, a city with a population of over 100,000 is profitable for the chain bookstores, and even with Laredo’s high level of Spanish-speakers, a store there should be profitable, especially with no competition.

Let’s get this straight. For bookkeeping and corporate decision-making reasons, B&N will close a profitable local outlet well before a successor B&N can be opened. In other words, they’ll destroy or at least erode their customer base…and then have to rebuild it, if they can, a year later.

All right, they have to close all the B. Daltons for whatever reasons. Then why not simply re-label the Dalton store in Laredo as a B&N Express or some such with signs saying that there will be a full-sized B&N coming before long, and add the Laredo store to the B&N supply system. Surely, it can’t be that hard. Then B&N can still claim it’s closed down all the Daltons in order to keep the stockholders or creditors or whoever happy and not anger an entire reading community.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of where pre-determined decisions are trading short-term profit considerations for longer-term profitability — and undermining the future customer base by literally chasing away readers. Exactly how much sense does this make in terms of future operations? Not to mention that it makes little sense at all from a societal point of view when reading levels among younger Americans are dropping.

We’ve all met them, the seemingly well-intentioned people who raise questions about this and that in the workplace. “Why is George doing it that way?” “Why do you think Suzanne changed the production schedule without telling accounting… or advertising?”

And if you’ve noticed, or watched carefully, you’ll have discovered that each of these seemingly innocent questions is asked in a public forum from which George or Suzanne is absent. Further, if you just happen to ask the questioner why they raised the question, the answer is almost invariably a variant of “I was just thinking of the good of… [fill in the blank with the appropriate word, such as “the staff,” “the customers,” “the students”].

Just as Lenin and Stalin, Hitler. Mussolini, and all-too-many tyrants in modern times have justified their actions on the basis of being for “the good of the people,” so too are these work-place questioners not at all interested in the good of whomever they cite. They seldom bring up their questions in any situation where the “accused” has a chance to explain; they almost never go to the accused and ask for an explanation. And the bottom line is that they’re not really interesting in solving the “problem.” They’re interested in causing trouble for another individual, preferably without leaving too obvious a set of fingerprints and without ever confronting the individual in question, always looking innocent and professing their altruism in raising such questions.

So… when you hear one of these kinds of questions, and especially if you get an explanation that the questioner is “only looking out for everyone’s good,” start asking exactly what the questioner really has in mind. Does he or she want to discredit the subject of the questions, or covet their job, or get back at the other person?

History and experience suggest that people who are interested in doing good do just that. They do; they accomplish; they work at make things better. Trouble-makers ask questions that stir everyone up without ever pointing toward a solution. There’s a very fine line between an honest question and one designed to incite trouble, but asking who benefits personally from a question and who is harmed is a good start to sorting out one from the other.

Even so… be on your guard when anyone cites “for the good of…”

Last Friday, students at the University of California staged a protest and pelted the house of the university chancellor with rocks and other projectiles, breaking windows and causing not-insignificant damage. According to various reports, the students were protesting teacher layoffs and furloughs, canceled classes, and high tuition and fees. The latest protest followed earlier occupations of halls on the Berkeley campus designed to call attention to the student grievances.

While I happen to agree with the anger and concern about the cutbacks in higher education, these protests, as with so many student protests over the years, are aimed at the wrong people. No state college or university administration has that much control over the rising costs of education. Nationally, over the past three decades, the percentage of college costs at state institutions of higher education paid for by state governments has dropped, often precipitously, from a national average of around 40% to far, far, less — in some states dropping below ten percent. During the same period, various additional requirements and mandates have been imposed on state institutions by both federal and state governments, and governments at all levels have pressed for more and more students to attend college. In general, the increased costs do not come from significantly higher faculty and staff salaries. While the salaries of football coaches have soared, so have administration salaries and costs, largely in response to all the mandates and administrative paperwork and “accountability.” On the other hand, faculty and staff salaries, in general, have not kept pace. Over the last 15 years, for example, faculty salaries at my wife’s university have been frozen four times, and the average raise in the years when they were not frozen has been around three percent. Similar figures apply to other state universities in the region. With the contribution from state governments dropping yearly, and legislative mandates to “do more,” the only way state institutions can meet their budgets is by increasing tuition and fees — or by cutting faculty and part-time or student instructors.

Blaming the administration, whatever the faults of those administrators may be, doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. Those students would be better served by asking their parents and their friends’ parents, “Why don’t you support more state taxes to fund higher education?” Or… they could accept the fact that, if they don’t want to pay for education through taxes, they’ll have to pay higher tuition and fees… or allow the universities and colleges to raise the bar for admission and reduce the number of students.

Destructive rioting in front of a chancellor’s house isn’t going to do anything except make already intransigent legislators even less willing to grant funds to a state university… and all too many of them don’t like finding higher education anyway.

The other day, I went to the store to buy some hundred watt light-bulbs. Guess what? I found I had a choice of either 90 watt standard soft-whites, or reduced “natural” illumination 100 watt bulbs. I’d been hearing about the future phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, but this isn’t “future.” It’s now, and there’s clearly a great push to replace the once-standard 100 watt bulb with compact fluorescents or, apparently, with lower wattage bulbs.

It doesn’t stop there, either. I have track lights in my kitchen. We installed the track lighting some ten years ago to replace the fluorescent lights that always seemed dim, and never directed enough light to specific areas. The track lights solved the problems. Except now… I can’t find the 75 watt halogen bulbs the track lighting was designed for. All I can find are 70 watt bulbs that seem to produce less light than 60 watt bulbs, and the kitchen is getting noticeably dimmer as the 75 watt halogen bulbs expire. Some people may find cooking and eating in dimness romantic, but we’d prefer that it be a choice and not a requirement.

Then, too, we have ceiling lights in several hallways and rooms, and the fixtures were designed to provide adequate light based on incandescent bulb sizes, and they don’t take compact fluorescents. Oh… and by the way, the “natural light” incandescents burn out in a couple of days in ceiling fixtures.

I’m presuming that all of these dimming down light bulb initiatives are in the service of energy efficiency and designed to “replace” the inefficiency of the incandescent light bulb. I don’t have a problem with replacing less efficient lights with more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly lights, but I have a huge problem with a forced reduction in light levels. Frankly, even with glasses that correct my once-perfect vision back to theoretically perfect vision, I have trouble reading fine print in dim light. So do millions of other Americans, most of us past 50.

I have a lower level office [i.e., walkout basement] which has overhead fluorescents. With them alone, the office light level is that of a medieval monastery in midwinter. So I have a desk lamp that has a three way bulb, and it does make everything light enough in the work area — but it’s getting harder and harder to find the three-ways with the 250 watt bulbs.

Now… I suppose I could install more lighting with lower wattage compact fluorescents and modified incandescent bulbs… and the way things are going I may have to… but why should I have to? If compact fluorescents are so good, and so efficient, why can’t someone manufacture one that delivers the lumen levels I need? So far as I can see, all these initiatives and changes are merely semi-mandatory light-reduction measures, not a replacement of current light levels attained with inefficient technology with the same lighting levels obtained more efficiently.

Or am I missing something? Is this another part of the sinister plot to do away with reading? Is it a way to make seniors stumble and fall and increase their mortality to reduce Medicare outlays? Or is it another form of age-discrimination against those of us who don’t operate by the light of blackberries or palm pilots or the like? Perhaps it’s a way to keep light from shining into the way government operates? Or is it a hidden subsidy to the lighting manufacturers as we all have to buy new and redesigned lighting in order to be able to see in our own homes?

Whatever it is… it’s not efficiency.

Just last week, one reader made the observation that, in the case of “instant communications,” people were the ones who decided the use of tools in the fashion I decried, and that it wasn’t the question of the tools, but that the problem lay with people, “as usual.” I have to say that, while I’ve always been a supporter of “not blaming the tools,” something about this view bothered me, and I think the issue boils down to a question.

Are there “tools” or institutions that influence people toward “bad” or “uncivil” or “unethical” or even “unproductive” behavior, by their superficial attractiveness or other attributes?

Moreover, do we tend to minimize the negative impacts of these tools because their other attributes overshadow in our minds –or emotions — their true costs to both individuals and society?

I’d certainly submit that this may well be the case with modern communications technology. Psychologists have already determined that computer/games/cellphone type equipment is highly addictive to certain personalities, and, as I noted earlier, instant communications seem to foster a rather wide range of behaviors that are either impolite, unethical, counter-productive, or just plain illegal. Obviously, the technology, as that reader noted, is not at fault, but, nonetheless, with the wide-spread use of that technology, we’re seeing problems we didn’t see before, or at least not on the wide-scale scope and severity as at present.

Another tool that has engendered incivility and an extremely high number of fatalities is the automobile. Because of its convenience, its utility, and its versatility, we don’t want to do without them, and certainly there’s nothing inherently “evil” about cars, except perhaps in the eyes of greenhouse extremists. Yet… what is there about a car that provokes human behavior that ranges from merely stupid to downright lethal? Vehicle deaths in the United States are something like three times homicides, and for the last 60 years have totaled two and half times the wartime combat deaths of U.S. service members. What persuades theoretically rational adults to drive a car when they’re so intoxicated or high that they can barely walk, or to cruise the highways at speeds more suited to the Indianapolis 500? Why do normally sane individuals become maniacs when cut off by another vehicle in rush-hour or other traffic? Why, when studies show that cellphone use, and especially texting, while driving impairs drivers more than drinking, do so many people persist in combining these lethal behaviors? Certainly, the car didn’t beg them to do it.

Firearms are another case in point. Like it or not, they’re implicated in nearly 30,000 deaths a year, roughly 47% being suicides and 48% being homicides. While guns don’t pull their own triggers, a prevalence of firearms does result in higher death rates. This may be simply because they’re more effective than other weapons, but that effectiveness combines with human nature to result in a rather high body count… particularly in the U.S.

Another area is electronic music. While seldom fatal, the ability of amplified music to penetrate thick walls and sealed vehicles is resulting in increasing hearing losses among listeners, usually younger people. And, of course, hearing losses must be compensated for by higher volume levels… causing greater hearing loss… and none of them ever seem to consider turning down the volume.

Likewise, the institution of ubiquitous fast food and other forms of “instant nourishment” has resulted in an epidemic of obesity in the United States. Again… the food didn’t drag people into McDonald’s or whatever instant cuisine establishment might be an individual’s choice, but the prevalence of such establishments clearly biases people toward eating habits that mitigate against good health.

So… while such tools and institutions do not in themselves require unfortunate results, does their presence and ease of utilization result in an influence that is biased toward less than optimal human behavior? If so, can and should we ignore that influence by arguing that such less than optimal human behaviors are solely personal decisions?

No… it’s not the tools, not exactly, but… I have to wonder whether the tools are somehow stronger than some people’s common sense and willpower…or whether an awful lot of people are “intelligence impaired.”

The other day, my wife had a local singing engagement for a community event, one of those things she and other members of the university community do gratis. Before she started teaching for the day, she checked her email and saw nothing urgent. Because she teaches straight through for eight hours on Tuesdays, as she does on most days, she did not have a chance to check her email again until after five o’clock. At that point, she discovered that the community event organizer had now asked her to sing an additional song — one not even mentioned previously — that was printed in the program… and she was singing that evening. Fortunately, my wife knew the song, but she never had a chance even to rehearse the song with her accompanist. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased about the situation, because it’s hard to perform as well as one can without some advance preparation, and refusing to sing doesn’t set well with the audience or the local organizers. She said nothing, sang well, and everyone seemed pleased… but it still bothered her… and me.

The day before, she had a senior student email her a request for a faculty recommendation for a graduate school application — less than a day before the application and recommendation deadline. Routinely, incoming freshmen think nothing of putting off doing assignments until hours, if not minutes, before they are due — and many keep doing this for weeks and months. While this has historically always been an academic problem for some students, it’s now endemic with the vast, vast majority of incoming college students. Some never learn, and usually flunk out, despite test scores and grades that indicate that they have the intellectual ability to do the work. Every year, students applying for jobs or graduate schools wait longer and longer before they contact faculty, clearly never thinking that, first, the faculty member may have other commitments, even other recommendations to write, or, second, that it does take time to write a decent recommendation.

More than infrequently — and with distressingly increasing frequency over the past year — I’ve had people request information, wanting it “now,” for deadlines, etc., even when they’ve known of the need for weeks or months. I’ve checked with offspring who are in various positions in business, and they report the same phenomenon. Almost no one seems able to: (1) plan ahead and (2) realize that accurate information and/or work products can’t be reliably produced “instantly.”

Yet with “instant” communications, from email to Twitter to cellphones, more and more people are equating instant access to instant results. There seems to be a subconscious process whereby people think, “If I can get to you instantly, why can’t you get back to me instantly, and with what I want/need?” The additional problem with all the instant access is that if you don’t reply, you get more emails and messages wanting to know why you haven’t replied to the point that less and less real work tends to get done, or people have to work longer to get the same amount of work done, because they have to keep responding. Now… it’s easy for someone like me to say, “Just ignore them until you have time to get to them.” The problem is that too many of the instant communications come from superiors, and ignoring insistent superiors is a quick way to end up where you don’t have to respond because you no longer have a job. Even if you can quickly delete the non-important messages, that takes additional time. In my wife’s case, despite a spam filter, she routinely receives two hundred plus emails daily. Most are junk, but she still has to wade through them and delete them, or her system starts rejecting all email because her inbox is too full, and then she misses the important ones.

More telling is that this instant access mindset ignores the fact that most requests or orders or requirements that are conveyed can’t be addressed instantly — and especially not accurately. This pressure for providing things now is already leading to inaccuracies in everything from news reports to the information on which business and political decisions are being made. It also ends up delaying production and creating unnecessary stress from education to the work-place.

Then, to top it all off, electronic media are perfect for exhibiting passive-aggressive tendencies. When you really need information, especially from someone who doesn’t report to you, the failure to reply, even after days, or weeks, can be incredibly irritating… and non-productive.

Now… tell me again why instant communications are so wonderful.

A number of pundits have talked about the need for accountability in our society, but in practice most of this talk has led nowhere.

Despite years of rhetoric, testing, and all sorts of initiatives in education, all the way from primary schooling through universities, the actual outcomes of American education have declined. I’m not talking test scores. I’m talking about the ability of American students to read, write logical and coherent paragraphs and papers without coaching, and to be able to think and make and understand logical arguments. Initiative after initiative has demanded greater accountability on the part of teachers. I’m not against teacher accountability, but it’s only half the accountability problem in education. Like it or not, students have to be held accountable for their learning — and they’re not. Instead, teachers must spoon feed, must inspire, must somehow get the students to learn. Why doesn’t anyone want to admit that, until students are also held accountable, the “education situation” won’t ever be improved?

Our financial system offers other cases in point. Little more than a year after the melt-down of the financial system and the near-collapse of the stock market, the investment banks and hedge funds and all-too-many of the other high fliers are at it again, paying enormous bonuses to executives, generally for those who can multiply profits to an obscene degree. Simply put, there is a risk-reward trade-off. The riskier the venture, the higher the reward, but the greater the probability of failure. The problem here is that the individual trader, hedge fund manager, etc., doesn’t face personally the magnitude of the downside. I have great doubts if many of them would be quite so interested in such jobs if they — and their CEOs and superiors — had to repay the money and then spend the rest of their life either in jail or working at a minimum wage job to repay what they’d already spent because they lost billions for other people. While the corporate structure was initially designed to limit liability, so that corporate failures didn’t destroy individuals, what everyone who designed the structure failed to foresee was that the structure effectively destroys accountability, and the larger the corporation, the greater the destruction of personal accountability. When a trader can walk away with hundreds of millions, does it really matter that much if he or she will never work in the field again?

The banks have jacked up consumer credit card rates, on average, to over 20%, partly because the federal government is trying to take away some of their least ethical and most profitable “charges,” such as $35 fees for $3 dollar ATM overdrafts. A major reason for the higher interest rates is because, first, the banks never priced their ATM/credit card services at their cost level and were using fees to cover costs and profits, and, second, because far too many consumers were less than accountable for paying when they ran up huge credit card bills — prompted by media advertising that further undermined accountability by encouraging people to buy, buy, buy…

Politics offers another lesson in accountability, if from the other side. Because of the intense media scrutiny of politicians, virtually all officials elected on a federal level are indeed held accountable — but they’re held accountable for what their constituents want… not for wise decisions. That was one of the reasons why the founding fathers designed a different system with various checks and balances that we’ve destroyed in the name of greater democracy… and that has led to less real accountability.

Our electronic communications and purchasing systems further undermine accountability. A thug who mugs someone for $50 has a far greater chance of being arrested and imprisoned than does a scammer or a phisher who uses the internet to con hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars — and we’ve set up the system in such a way that it’s effectively impossible to find such con artists, let alone to hold them accountable.

Given the way in which we’ve undermined accountability, the real wonder is not that the instances I’ve mentioned have occurred, but that there haven’t been far, far more than what we’ve experienced.

Recently, there have been a number of articles about the failure of economics and its metrics in predicting and reflecting on the “health” of the United States. Much of the criticism has focused on the use of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] as a leading indicator. Unfortunately, such criticisms, while having statistical and economic validity, have the result, whether intended or not, of shifting debate from the larger problem.

The larger debate has been around for a very long time, but with the growth and power of the “market economy” and those who benefit directly, and often excessively, from it, those earlier misgivings tend to be buried in the detritus of history. There was a reason why William Jennings Bryan rallied millions behind his presidential campaign in 1896 when he campaigned against what he saw as the Republican plutocrats with his slogan that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” Although technically a speech for bimetallism, the slogan reverberated though the west, the laboring class, and poor farmers. In his poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling pointed out exactly what happens when the “gods of the marketplace” become paramount. The Russian revolution, while it might have been directed by goons and disaffected intellectuals, was paid for by the blood of the poor and disadvantaged, as was the more recent Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro. The current American rage against investment bankers and the “market” also reflects a gut-level feeling on the part of most Americans that valuing everything in dollar terms is somehow wrong, even as we react to commercial after commercial that insists happiness and success come from acquiring this and that, and more in general.

Yet the reaction of the financial, economic, and political leaders has been to address the shortcomings of the “market system.” Too many of these leaders and too many of both the critics and those who feel that the “GDP Problem” is resolvable are ignoring the critical assumptions that lie behind the use of economic statistics to define, for want of a better term, “national prosperity.” The first assumption is simply that, given modern methods, anything of value is commercial and can and should be able to be valued and quantified accurately. The second is that, in economic terms, those things that cannot be valued and quantified in hard and measurable terms are of lesser or no value. Now, I’m well aware that my statement of the second assumption will scarcely go unchallenged, but in economic and public policy terms, there shouldn’t be any dispute. For example, almost no business or corporation put an economic value on their acts that degraded the environment until governments stepped in and assigned values, essentially by fiat, in the form of fines and regulations. At that point, and only at that point, did the environment become valued in economic terms. The same sort of reaction occurred with regulations on child labor and wages.

Before going on, for those who may think that I am being excessively “liberal,” I want to make several basic points. First, like it or not, every working nation or region needs to maintain over time a viable market-based economy. You cannot trade, purchase, or sell goods or services without a societal mechanism for doing so, although there are many variations on “market economies,” some better and some worse. Second, market systems work best for goods and services that can be easily quantified and valued, and the harder and more removed such quantification and valuation are from the day-to-day ebb and flow of commerce, the less accurate and the less reliable any valuation is. Third, because market systems are imperfect, large systems need various restraints or rules. Too few restrictions, and one has the worst excesses of the American robber barons or the current Russian commercial oligarchs. Too many restrictions, and one eventually has no market system at all, but a government-run and badly administered [because it cannot be administered well by anyone, given the complexity involved] command-and-control system, which usually results in a black market, if not several.

The rush to find better quantification of everything in life effectively presupposes that everything can be quantified absolutely. But can everything of value and worth really be quantified in economic terms? By adopting a market-based approach to everything in society, as we seem well on the way to doing, we seem to have forgotten, at least in terms of laws and national policy, that when we try to place a dollar [or euro or yuan or yen] value on everything, that which cannot be quantified accurately, or quantified at all, tends to be undervalued or not valued at all.

Recently, I’ve been seeing ads on television citing the fact that the United States has one hundred years worth of undeveloped natural gas — with the implication that this is some vast enormous reserve that should be immediately exploited. The question that comes to my mind is: “And then what?” What energy sources will be available to my children’s grandchildren? This ad points out, effectively by example, that there is little or no value to preserving resources for future generations. It ignores the costs to future generations of having to use more expensive fuel sources — or perhaps having none at all.

What few policy-makers seem willing to admit is that there are whole sectors of life and the world that the market system cannot value accurately, nor will ever be able to do so in cold economic terms. Some of these are: the value of an individual life; the value of the survival of the human species; the value of an integrated and functioning world eco-system; the good health of an individual; the pursuit of happiness; freedom; freedom from hunger… That list is far longer than any policy-maker wants to consider in realistic political or legal terms — and none of them can be valued accurately in economic terms.

For example, how does one value a human life? Some economists will say that we have established a de facto value for human life by the terms of either life insurance or the health and safety regulations we have put in place over the past century or so. But consider the terms of those regulations, or of life insurance. In life insurance, the death benefit is based strictly on the level of premium one is willing to pay. In government regulations, the value of a human life is determined by comparing the cost of implementing the regulation and dividing those costs by the total estimate of “lives saved” by the regulation. In addition to the very real difficulty in estimating the number of people who might have died, there is also the problem of, if you will, quality control. Are all lives the same? Are all lives of people of the same age even the same? Will a child grow up to be a drug addict who is a drain on society or a Nobel prize-winning scientist? If all lives are valued the same, then the process says that human accomplishment means nothing. If they are not, how does one determine what makes one life more valuable than another?

Geology and science suggest rather emphatically that at some time in the future, a rather large or moderate chunk of rock or other cosmic debris will slam into our lovely planet, and millions, or billions, or all of our species will die. It’s not a question of if, but only of when, or whether we do ourselves in before that occurs. We have yet to come up with the comparatively few millions of dollars necessary to scan our solar system to see everything that might be headed our way. And why is the value of species survival quantified at less than the cost of a few bridges to nowhere?

As a culture, we seem unable not only to grasp, but to act in realization of the fact that there are real values, perhaps greater values, to aspects of life that cannot be quantified than to those to which a dollar value can be firmly pinned. Yet dollar certitude remains what we as a society hold to. Is that because Madison Avenue has told us so… or because the majority of us are unable to say that some things are more important than the no-longer-so-mighty dollar?

Have you noticed that very few teenagers actually “date” any more? Instead, they just “hang-out” with their friends. From what I can tell, the “consensus” is that this is more “natural.” Well… it’s more in line with the patterns of our simian relations and ancestors, but “natural,” contrary to current pop culture, isn’t always better. Dating, as practiced by previous generations, required the male to request that a particular female accompany him to a predetermined event, such as a movie or a dance or dinner, for a limited period of time. This required advance planning, preparation by both parties, conversation between both, or an attempt by both, and an expenditure of time by both parties, as well as resources on the part of the male. While some women contend that the expenditure of resources by the male was an attempt to gain sexual favors, that attempt did cost the male resources. “Hanging out” achieves the same results, perhaps even more easily for males, from what I can see, without any commitment of anything on the part of the male. It also dispenses with advance thought, planning, and similar other activities required of adults in society.

Along a similar line, the “consensus” appears to be, in general, that the single-sex college dorms of the past are outmoded, and that college students are better prepared for life by co-ed dorms. While this view has not been universally adopted by all universities, most appear to have given in to providing at least some co-ed dorms. Yet a study published last week indicates that co-ed dorms result in nearly twice the rate of binge drinking among their inhabitants.

Then, there’s clothing. The teen-aged consensus, in recent years, appears to have been to minimize personal appeal and maximize bad features. Low-slung pants too tight above exposed midsections create an impression of corpulence for all but the anorexic woman. Baggy trousers drooping to the back of the knees give even the most trim of young men the impression of bad personal sanitation and slovenliness. Backwards baseball caps not only don’t shade the face, but they also heighten the vacantness of expression in the eyes of all too many young men. Watching the results of teen-aged girls’ consensus decisions on what to wear is frightening, because so very few of them ever choose clothing that is either attractive and tasteful or maximizes their attributes and features. Yet… they talk about what “looks good” when they really mean that they want to wear what everyone else is wearing, no matter how awful it appears on them. It reminds me of an ancient SF story where the men come out of the latest “fashion show” green and nauseated, unable to even approach the women wearing the latest “high fashion” — later revealed to have been designed by aliens to stop human reproduction.

Bad consensus-driven decisions aren’t limited to teenagers, by any means. Wall Street exemplified that with its thoughtless consensus agreements to leverage capital to the hilt through excessive reliance on financial derivatives and similar Ponzi-like devices, and the heads of all too many firms embraced devices they didn’t understand because everyone else on Wall Street was doing the same thing, another form of consensus.

Another consensus is the American idea that every teenager should get a college education. The problem is that possibly as many as half of those young adults either aren’t capable of doing true college level work or aren’t interested enough to do so. Rather than debunk this “consensus” idea, American society has pressured public institutions to water down higher education, although they don’t call it that. The terms that are used include making education “more accessible” or “more relevant” or “more appealing” or “adapted to individual learning styles,” etc. The result is that something like half of entering college freshmen cannot write a coherent and logical essay totally on their own and that to obtain a true higher education now requires additional years of post-graduate study. The other result is that society wastes an incredible amount of resources on individuals who benefit little — except in getting a paper credential that has become increasingly devalued.

The consensus problem isn’t new to society, although it’s more pervasive in the U.S. today. There is a famous line in Handel’s Messiah — “we, like sheep, are gone astray.” Those words were penned in 1741, but they’re even truer today because consensus is based on comfort and agreement, just as in a herd of sheep, and in difficult times, the best decisions are seldom developed through consensus. There’s a tremendous difference between forging consensus and deciding through consensus. The consensus of the British people in 1938 was that appeasement was the best way to handle Hitler and that Winston Churchill was a warmongering firebrand. The consensus of the American people in 1940 was that the United States could avoid war. The consensus in the U.S. in 2006 was that prosperity would continue indefinitely.

In these cases, consensus was wrong, with disastrous results.

Obviously, every society needs to reach consensus on its laws, customs, and political practices and decisions, but that doesn’t mean that sheep-like group-think is the way to reach that consensus. In the past, hard issues were debated, legislated, modified, to a large degree by those who had some considerable knowledge of the subject. Today, in all too many groups and organizations, for all the talk of innovation, ideas that are unpopular are too often dismissed as unworkable.

The problem here is a failure to distinguish between workable ideas, which are unpopular because they have a cost to those of the group, and popular ideas that are technically unworkable. “Taxing the rich” is always popular because few in any society or group are rich; it’s also generally less effective in practice because the truly rich have enough resources to avoid taxation or leave the society, and the practice is almost always detrimental to society because the tax burden falls most heavily on the productive upper middle class or lower upper class [depending on definition] who are the group that determines the course and success of a society. Taxing everyone at a lower rate works better in raising revenue and in allocating resources, and is actually “fairer” because taxes fund general services used more intensively by the non-rich. Unfortunately, flatter tax rates are highly unpopular, and so the general compromise consensus is to keep tax rates at a point where the upper middle class doesn’t scream too much, while not taxing the majority of the populace enough to adequately support the services that they demand. The result is that government barely squeaks by in times of prosperity and faces either ruinous deficits or drastically reduced services, if not both, in economically hard times.

Then, add in our modern communications technology, as I’ve previously discussed, with niche marketing and self-identification, and we’re getting massive societal polarization as various group consensuses harden into total intractability, in effect creating social and political group anarchy without even the benefit of individual creativity.

All those for “natural” consensus…?

Recently, I was asked, as part of a profile article that will appear in a “genre” magazine in February, to name my five favorite F&SF books. Usually, I resist the “top five” syndrome, but the article writer and her editor insisted that they weren’t asking for my rating as to the “best” five books, but my favorite five books. So I gave them a list, but when I looked at the list a day later, I discovered that the “newest” book was something like ten years old. However, in my defense, I must add that I didn’t read it until three years ago. So it’s not just that I’m stuck in the past, or not entirely. And no, I’m not going to reveal the list, at least not until the article is published, out of courtesy to the publication, but I will discuss the entire business of favorites.

Are “favorites” something that strike us when we’re younger and more impressionable and never let go? That’s a simple and easy answer… and like all simple and easy answers, I don’t think it’s accurate, although there may be a tiny grain of partial truth buried there. Why do I think that? Well… first off, I’m not one of the younger readers or writers in this field. Without totally giving away my age, I will point out that I read my first “real” SF book, at least the first I remember reading, in 1955 [and for those who want to know, the book was A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan and it wasn’t one of my listed “favorites” because it has too many impossibilities and improbabilities]. After that, I read science fiction and then fantasy fairly voraciously for the next 20-25 years, not that I didn’t also read mysteries, history, poetry, and other works avidly as well. Now, while three of my F&SF favorites were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t read them then, because I happened to be occupied in other endeavors in Southeast Asia, until a good ten years later, when I was a political staffer in Washington. D.C., already cynical, and anything but an impressionable young reader.

Still… I don’t find that many books published in recent years resonate the way those favorites do. Occasionally, one does, as did the “newest” one on my list, and as do others that I find good and enjoyable, but not quite in the top five. Part of that is clearly that I’m a curmudgeon of sorts who doesn’t much care for action for the sake of action, shock for the sake of shock, newness for the sake of newness, but part of it is that, in my personal opinion, for too many current writers in the field story-telling trumps writing. By that, I mean, for me, a truly memorable book is one where the style and the story-telling are both good — and seamless. That’s certainly what I strive for as a writer, and what I look for as a reader. But it’s also clear to me, particularly in reading the reader reviews thrown up [and I use that term advisedly] by many younger people, anything that resembles grace, style, and depth is unwanted if it slows down the action or the sex or the bloodshed. This viewpoint reflects a society that values degrees, credentials, prestige, and money over education, actual accomplishment, and understanding, and while I certainly can’t change a changing society, except perhaps through my writing, which reaches only a comparatively limited number of readers, and generally the more educated ones at that, I don’t find the superficial values rewarding, and there are comparatively fewer books written that exemplify the values I do find rewarding.

So… I’m left to conclude that favorites reflect values, and that’s often why the favorite books, movies, and the like of older people are reflected in a disproportionate weighting of older works, and not merely because they read or saw them when they were young and “impressionable.”

The divisive debate over the health care bill reveals a certain culturally inherited and continually propagated commonality that most Americans refuse to acknowledge.

What exactly is that “commonality”? Nothing other than a burning desire for “more.”

To begin with, in the current American culture, “better health care” really translates into “more health care,” but the way in which the partisans on both sides of the debate are arguing sheds an unpleasant light on a certain aspect of our “national character,” in so far as any country has a “national character.”

From what I can discern, those who might be characterized as “haves” are attacking the recently unveiled versions of the health care bill as adding to the national deficit, reducing individual choice of doctors, penalizing those who don’t buy adequate insurance, failing to rein in the depredations of the ambulance-chasing trial lawyers, raising taxes on those who already pay the vast majority of federal and state income taxes, and in general penalizing those who’ve been successful through hard work. All this amounts to a statement that government is going to “take” from them, or, if you will, reduce their share of “more.”

On the other hand, those who would not generally consider themselves as “haves,” and their supporters, are insisting that health insurance is essentially a “right” for all Americans, that every American should have affordable [i.e., cheap] health insurance, that the insurance companies have padded their profits by practices that disenfranchise tens of millions of working Americans from health care through denial of care and coverage by every legal [and sometimes not so legal] means possible, that the cost of health insurance and medical procedures should not drive people into bankruptcy, and that doctors and health care providers reap enormous profits while failing to improve the overall health care systems.

All of these points on both sides have some degree of validity, and I’m not about to assess the comparative merits of each point. I will note, however, that almost all of them bear on the issue of who gets “more.”

Now… whether Americans like it or not, the current nation is based on immigrants who traveled here in order to get more, whether they were failed aristocrats or second or third sons of old world nobility, crafters who saw no hope of advancement, Irish and other ethnic immigrants fleeing starvation or worse, debtors, or those leaving behind a myriad of other problems, the vast majority came seeking “more,” whether it was more freedom, greater prosperity, more land, better opportunities for children…

The endless and continual striving for more has its good and its not-so-good sides. The good that has resulted from this drive for “more” is considerable, including a political system that over time has managed to offer a wide range of political freedoms and to transfer power with less disruption than most advanced nations, a level of technology and prosperity for the majority of Americans that is unprecedented in world history, an openness to social and technological change, and a culture that allows those with great abilities to prosper, usually without regard to their social and economic position at birth.

Unfortunately, the evil is also significant, if less obvious, and less talked about, even by so-called liberals. We have spawned a culture of consumption that equates well-being with possession and use of an ever-higher level of goods, possessions, services, and personal space in housing. We have come to measure success almost entirely in terms of the material. We have increasingly come to devalue those who are less able or less fortunate, to the point where we have the greatest discrepancy in income between the poor and the wealthy of any industrialized and technically advanced nation on the planet. We have increased the debt that must be paid by our children and their children to unbelievable levels. We have equated excellence with popularity and material prosperity.

But… the furor over the current health legislation underscores what might be called a sea change for the culture of “more.” In the past, the culture of “more” was based largely on “undeveloped” and cheap land, advances in technology, in means of production, and in the greater and greater use of energy, almost exclusively of fossil fuels. All of these are now running into the inexorable law of diminishing returns. For example, we communicate instantly; and there’s nothing faster than instantly. The energy and technology costs of traveling faster seem to preclude much improvement in current speed of transport. Production efficiencies result in fewer jobs required for reach unit of output, and this has certainly contributed to an economy that economists claim is recovering, even as unemployment increases.

As for the health care issue, we now possess the technology and knowledge to allow “more” in terms of health — more procedures to extend and improve life, but what we lack is the resources, under our current socio-political customs and procedures, to apply those procedures to a population of over 300 million people.

For the first time in U.S. history, it appears that we have reached a point where we can’t have “more” of everything, where technology and energy cannot meet all the needs and wants we as a society demand be fulfilled — and the health care legislation represents the first political presentation of this conflict… or the first one that clearly impacts every single American in some way… and almost none of us like the options.

So… which “more” will prevail — that of better health care and life-style or that of bigger and better consumerism? Will we find some sort of compromise? Or will the struggle deteriorate into an undeclared conflict between the haves and have-nots? Or will the result be a stand-off that amounts to a collective burying of heads in the sand?

Where exactly is the human species headed? How will we get there? Is any great improvement in human culture and technology really possible… or are we close to the end of the line? Throughout history, various authorities and pundits have suggested such, most recently at the end of the nineteenth century, when some suggested closing the U.S. patent office because significant new discoveries would be impossible. We all know how accurate that prediction was. And yet… are there limits to what we as a species can do?

A perhaps apocryphal statement attributed variously to either General Hoyt Vandenberg or Senator Arthur Vandenberg supposedly doubted the feasibility of developing the atomic bomb because such a project would require doubling the electrical power generation capacity of the United States in wartime. In fact, such a doubling was required and did take place, largely based on the TVA Project. Whether or not either man did make such a statement, the underlying truth is that large advances in technology have always resulted in or required, if not both, an increase in the use of power. The industrial revolution was effectively supported by the widespread coal mining; the technological developments of the twentieth century by massive use of oil and natural gas.

Currently, the United States with roughly five percent of the world’s population, employs/consumes/uses more than a quarter of all the world’s energy and resources, yet most experts in the fossil fuels field believe that any significant increases in oil and gas production are not possible and that sustaining current production levels for more than a century at the outside is highly unlikely. Given the fact that world population shows no signs of rapid decreases and that major powers such as China and India are becoming increasingly industrialized and technology-driven, with increasing demand for energy and goods, it doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that the human species either has to become far more efficient in energy usage and production or face increasing conflicts over energy supplies… OR develop new science and technology to utilize far vaster energy sources. The problem here is that renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, do not provide energy that is easily concentrated — and concentrated energy is necessary for high technology and our current society — not to mention mass and long distance transport.

Yet each advance in power sources has required a greater energy input. It takes more energy to mine coal than to gather or and cut wood, more energy to drill oil wells, especially now, and refine the product than to burn coal. Fission power plants cost far more than natural gas, coal, or oil-fired power plants. The next apparent step in concentrated energy production is fusion power, but even the research into developing fusion power is hideously expensive… so expensive that there are only a comparative handful of research projects pressing forward.

The next related problem is that, without something like fusion power, and with the current world population levels, maintaining a standard of living even remotely close to the present level of industrialized nations will not be possible for longer than a few generations, if that. Over the long term, the prognosis is even less rosy.

With all our species’ eggs, so to speak, in the basket that is Earth, we’re not only vulnerable to energy depletion, but to species extinction, sooner or later. But there are no other habitable planets in our solar system, not without massive terraforming — and that also requires huge amounts of technology and energy. So… what about interstellar travel?

At the moment, with what we know now, travel to even the nearest star systems will effectively take generations, because current physics doesn’t provide any ways around the apparent limitations of the speed of light in terms of attaining speeds conducive to what one might call real-time interstellar travel. The one possible loophole might be the creation of something along the lines of a Hawking wormhole, but preliminary calculations suggest that the energy necessary to create such a tunnel through space/time would approximate that used/radiated by a black hole. And that leads us back to the energy problem once more… and to the question that no one seems to want to ask.

Given what lies before us, why aren’t we devoting more research resources to high-energy power generation possibilities?

I’ve heard or read innumerable times, including at least once in the comments to this blog, that younger Americans don’t need to learn as much as older generations did because the young folks can find information quickly on the web. I’m certain that they can find “information” quickly, but that argument ignores a number of basic points.

The first is the assumption that these younger Americans will always have instant access to the web, via their Iphones or Blackberries or whatever. Perhaps, but there are many times and places where accessing those devices is difficult, if not dangerous, or impossible. It can also be time-consuming, particularly if the young American in question doesn’t know very much, especially since, in more complex areas of learning and life, a wider knowledge base is necessary in order to know what to look up and how to apply such information. My wife has watched scores of supposedly intelligent students — they tested well — have great difficulty in “looking up” simple quotations about musical subjects. Why? Because their subject matter vocabularies didn’t contain enough synonyms and similar terms, and because computers only search for what you ask for, not everything that you should have asked for, had you known more. The more complex the subject, the greater this problem becomes.

The second problem is that trying to evaluate a mass of newly acquired information leads to greater mistakes than if the acquirer already has a knowledge base and is merely updating that knowledge.

Third is the fact that operating on an “I can look it up basis” tends to postpone dealing with problems until the last moment. In turn, planning skills atrophy, a fact to which all too many college professors and supervisors of recent graduates can testify.

Fourth, the “look it up attitude” does not distinguish between discrete bits of information and knowledge. For example, one blog commenter made the point that much of the information handed out by teachers and much of the required reading was “useless.” In the context of the comment, “useless” translated into “it wasn’t on the test.” Speaking as a former college instructor, I have to point out that only a fraction of the material that should be learned in a college-level course could ever be tested for, even if every class period were devoted solely to testing. These days, all too many college professors are either giving up or over-testing in response to a student — and societal — attitude that seems all too often to say, “It’s not important to learn anything except to pass tests.” In addition, tests that merely require regurgitation of information or the plugging of values into formulae do nothing to enhance thinking and real-life problem solving. In short, what’s overlooked by all those who rely on tests is that test results do not equate to education, nor do they build a wider professional knowledge base for the student.

Fifth, without a personal knowledge base, how can you evaluate the accuracy of the information you’re seeking? With every day the amount of information available increases, and with wider access the amount of misinformation increases — to the point where a substantial amount of erroneous information is being promulgated on subjects where the accuracy has been scientifically established without any doubt — such as in the case of vaccinations, as I noted earlier. Without a personal knowledge base, either a greater amount of cross-checking is required, which takes time, or more errors will likely result.

Sixth, as noted in earlier blogs, continual reliance on instant information access dulls memory skills, and there are many, many occupations where reliance on instant “outside” information is not feasible and could be fatal. Pilots have to remember air controller instructions and procedures. Paramedics need to know emergency medical procedures cold. While rote memorization is not usually required in such occupations, a good memory is vital if one is to learn the skills to be highly professional… and looking up everything doesn’t help develop memory or skills.

Finally, lack of a broad knowledge and information base, one firmly anchored within one’s own skull, leads to narrow-mindedness and contributes to the ongoing societal fragmentation already being accelerated by our “bias-reinforcing” electronic technology.

But… of course, you can always ignore these points and look “it” up — if you can figure out how to get the precise information you need and whether it’s accurate, if you have the time to assimilate it… and if you can remember it long enough to use it — but then, you can just plug it into the Iphone… and hope you’ve got access and sufficient battery power.

Recently, there’s been a fair amount of resentment expressed in the media and elsewhere, if in a scattered manner, about the “bonuses” still being paid to the already high-paid and most likely overpaid senior executives in the financial industry. Here in Utah, one state agency dealing with trust lands paid bonuses to senior personnel early, just in order to avoid the legislature’s pending ban on such bonuses. I not only understand, but also share, a certain amount of the public outrage at monies above and beyond salaries going to those who have created the financial catastrophe the world is trying to muddle through, as well as at all sorts of maneuvers to keep such extravagant pseudo-compensation.

But… very few of those professing the outrage are looking beyond the obvious sins of the financial, real estate, and other malefactors to the even larger underlying problem. Exactly how rational is a society that pays — or allows to be paid — tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to a relative handful of people who manipulate paper, while underpaying and laying off those who are the backbone of a functioning society?

Everyone professes that education is essential to an information/high tech society. So why are legislators and their constituents allowing teacher layoffs, salary freezes for educators on all levels at a time when school enrollments are growing — particularly college enrollments? Again, here in Utah, college enrollments increased almost ten percent this year, and the higher education budget was cut something like 15%. Next year, enrollments are projected to increase another 15%, and more budget cuts are already before the legislature, while faculty numbers are declining, and, as a result, because many students cannot get into already overcrowded required classes, some may take as long as six or seven years to graduate. Some faculty are so overloaded that they literally have neither time nor space to take on more classes and students. This problem isn’t confined to Utah. Similar problems face other localities, including states like Virginia and California.

Order and law are also another support of society, and more than a few police forces have laid off personnel or stopped hiring and let attrition reduce their numbers. Prisons are so overcrowded in state after state that even dangerous felons are being released early.

Over the past several decades, governments on the federal, state, and local level have neglected infrastructure maintenance, to the point that we’ve had bridges and highways collapse. While a few of these problems are being addressed, most are not… and, by the way, such maintenance problems resulted in the closure of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco for nearly a week — because five thousand pounds of metal dropped out of the bridge and onto the roadway.

On the other hand, the federal government can hand out billions so that Americans can buy new cars — another bailout for the incompetent automakers.

As the retired senior corporate vice president of a large high tech firm once put it, “You can tell how people are valued by what they’re paid.”

So… why, exactly, are we as a society continuing to pay excessive millions to those who’ve already endangered us while underpaying and laying off those who support our society? By what logic do we rationalize the irrational?

The other day, my exhausted wife the professor came home from the university, late again, and collapsed into a chair. After sipping some liquid — and not non-alcoholic — refreshment, she asked, “Why can’t they remember anything? Why can’t they remember to open their mouths?” Now… my wife is a professor of voice and opera, and she teaches singers. One of the very basic rules behind singing is very simple: open your your mouth. It’s difficult to project sound with your mouth closed or barely open, especially if you’re trying to sing opera.

It’s a basic, very fundamental, point. And it’s not just my wife. Last week, I heard another voice instructor complaining about the same thing. So why is it that these young students, who love nothing more than to open their mouths to use their cellphones, won’t do so when they’re supposed to? And this is after months, if not years, of instruction.

Unfortunately, it goes beyond that. A good third of the students in her literature and diction class tend to forget when assignments are due… or ask in class, “When is that due?” Of course, they got a syllabus with all their assignments on the first day of class, and one page even listed the “important dates.” So… not only can they not remember, but apparently many of them can’t read, either, or they can’t remember what they read. My own suspicion is that they can’t remember because they can’t concentrate and weren’t really listening. Or they immediately lost their syllabus.

There’s been much debate over the past year about the problems of so-called multi-tasking and how all tasks are done poorly when people attempt to do more than one at a time. Ask any good voice teacher about it. They can testify to the problem. Most undergraduate students can’t handle remembering words, music, and keeping their mouth open at the same time until they’ve had several years of training… if then. Given this, why, exactly, do we as a society think that these same individuals are able to handle automobiles and cellphones simultaneously?

For several years, I taught writing and literature courses on the college level. I occasionally still do, and I learned early on that a considerable proportion of students don’t truly listen unless threatened with pain, i.e., tests, lowered grades, or embarrassment. Even then, the results are mixed. They all want good grades, and the better jobs that tend to follow higher education, but it’s apparently a real chore to remember the little things that comprise good grammar, such as the fact that adverbs aren’t conjunctions, or that independent clauses can’t be joined just by commas, or that spell-checkers don’t pick out wrong word choices spelled correctly… or that plagiarism has some very nasty consequences.

But they don’t have much trouble remembering idiotic lyrics sung off-key by models pretending to be singers… or the rules and strategies for a dozen video games. And why is it that so many teenagers and young adults, when corrected, immediately say, “I know.” If they know so much, why are so much repetition and reminding required?

And this is the generation that so many pundits have claimed will save the world from the sins of the baby-boomers?

Over the end of September and the beginning of October, at the behest and expense of my publisher, I traveled to several regional book shows hosted by associations of independent booksellers. For all the hype about the demise of such bookstores, there are still a considerable number of such stores in business and ordering books. It’s also clear that the majority of such bookstore owners and employees do love books.

My tasks at such shows are relatively straight-forward — to sign books for booksellers in the hopes that they’ll order more, to participate in whatever activities the show and my publisher have lined up for me, and to stand somewhere in the publisher’s booth that is out of the way of the sales reps and yet located where I can talk about my books to booksellers. Fortunately, Macmillan had large enough booths to make this possible, and very professional sales reps who were very accommodating.

I’ve done this, on and off, for years, but it’s an experience that every author should have for a number of reasons. First, when you walk past the rows and rows of booths from publishers large and small, it brings home just how many publishers there are and how many books are published every year. What’s more amazing is what isn’t there. Tor is a division of Macmillan, and Tor publishes over two hundred F&SF titles a year, over half of which are new hardcover titles. At each show, the Macmillan booth displayed, at my best estimation, no more than 200 titles — and those were titles from close to 20 Macmillan subsidiaries, of which Tor is only one. There were display copies of less than ten Tor/Forge titles and advance reading copies. Ten… out of two hundred, and the same general ratio doubtless applied to the titles of other Macmillan subsidiaries. And, remember, the majority of books displayed represented less than half a year’s titles. Now… I can’t say what ratios applied to other publishers, but I’d wager that none of the larger publishing firms were displaying all their current titles or even a significant fraction of those titles.

This didn’t mean that the sales reps weren’t selling the other titles. They were. They often went over long, long title lists with bookstore buyers, but there are thousands of titles, and even the best rep can only mention so many.

Why do I bring up this perhaps obvious point? Because too many authors seldom understand why their publishers don’t “do more” for them and their books. Given the low margin in bookselling, publishers have to focus the majority of their efforts and resources on the blockbuster books, and then on a comparatively small number of best-sellers. The rest are sold through the publisher’s seasonal catalogue and through booksellers who ask for certain titles because their customers want them — call it the end product of word-of-mouth and past sales figures.

For all the logic behind the process, for an author, or at least for me, such shows are always a very sobering reminder that even those of us authors who have enjoyed some moderate success are still very small fish in a very large ocean of books.

NOTE: Because I’m headed to World Fantasy Convention, the next post won’t be until November 3rd..

Like it or not, the distant ancestors of our species were simians — monkeys, apes, what-have-you. For better or worse, many of those traits remain with us today, no matter how much we’d like to disavow them, either by claiming we’re beyond that or denying it totally through a wholehearted espousal of some miraculous divine world-creation mere thousands of years ago.

If we’re so far beyond that ancestry, why are so many behaviors so simian-like? Why do we listen to the loudest and most vociferous chatterers, rather than the most thoughtful? Why, in general, do we follow the tallest males and select them as leaders? And when they’re close to the same height, why do we select the most persuasive, regardless of the facts? Think otherwise? Just look at the history of presidential campaigns since the founding of the United States.

Like all simians — except perhaps the bonobos — we form groups and ostracize those who don’t play by the rules, while attacking all outsiders who intrude. Some of us do treat sex the way the bonobos do — indiscriminately with anyone — but most follow the simian model of faithfulness when convenient or required, but with a large modicum of cheating or serial monogamy, if not both.

Human social dynamics follow many simian patterns, such as male gifts of delicacies, grooming, and food in order to obtain sexual favors. Or females playing up to dominant males for special privileges and status. American male teenagers, as well as those in many other human cultures, form often rowdy gangs, just like many simian pre-adults, who can only be brought into line by social pressure and adult authority.

We’ve taken tool using farther than have our simian relations, but the earliest tools were predominantly weapons, and we’ve certainly carried through on that line, and like our ancestors, who used trees and high places for refuge, so do we, except we build higher than any tree to create such refuges.

Then there’s our vaunted communications technology, which through emails, cellphones, PCs, internet, twitter, Facebook YouTube, MySpace, is predominantly used, not for conveying information, but for the electronic equivalent of social grooming and posturing. Even the majority of face-to-face conversation contains a minimum of information and a maximization of chattering and “grooming.” And as in most simian cultures, most of the time most people don’t listen because they’re too busy chattering or thinking about what they’re going to chatter.

Now… for a bunch of intelligent and sometimes educated apes, we haven’t done too badly… so far, but whether we survive anywhere close to as long as the dinosaurs did is going to require some transcendence of some of our simian characteristics. More chattering and posturing isn’t going to do much to solve energy problems, global warming, terrorism, and an overpopulation of one small planet — and that’s just for starters.

One of the biggest problems my wife and I keep coming across in this supposedly ultra-communicative world is… lack of real communication. How can this be in a world filled with cellphones, IMs, Twitter, email, and even old-fashioned telephones? Actually, it’s very predictable. In effect, all this modern technology increases the noise to signal ratio while increasing the demands on personal time and decreasing the real and productive time for communication, while making live, real-time, person-to-person contact, especially in commerce and business, more and more difficult.

For example, because my wife suffers from asthma, she wanted to see if she could get a swine flu vaccination. Both the state health website and the local newspaper reported that vaccinations were available at certain hours from the hospital, a local pharmacy, and the health department. After getting periodic blood work at the hospital, she attempted to discover about getting a vaccination. After waiting some fifteen minutes to get an answer from a real live person, she was told that, contrary to published information, the hospital didn’t have the vaccine and that she would have to get it from a pharmacy or her private doctor. On her way home she stopped by the pharmacy, where, after waiting, she was told that they only gave “regular” flu vaccinations [which she already had]. Once at home, she made calls over an hour to the doctor’s office [calls necessitated by a continually busy line], only to discover that the only source of vaccine in the city was at the health department. Calls to various functionaries in the health department were rewarded with voice message after voice message, none of which answered her question, until some time later, she got a real person, who informed her that, first no one over 49 could get a vaccination, regardless of health conditions, and that, in fact, there was so little vaccine that only small children were being vaccinated. All in all, that process took close to two hours.

A month or so ago, I ordered a present for my brother from a company I’ve patronized for years. I attempted to order by telephone, but never could get through. So I tried the website and placed the order. Within minutes I had an order confirmation. Except… after a week, I had no shipment confirmation. So I tried to telephone…and again, after listening to various voice mail messages and punching buttons and waiting ten minutes… I was disconnected. I sent an email asking for an order status, and got no response, even after two days. I left a telephone message, since no real person would answer, and another two days passed with no response. I tried again, and after close to fifteen minutes waiting, a real person answered — and I stated the problem. She promised to look into it. Seven hours later, she called back, apologizing because it had taken six hours to get through to her own warehouse, but stating that the order had been sidetracked, but was now being packed and sent on its way. That was six days ago, and it hasn’t arrived at my brother’s house yet.

I could follow these examples with at least a half-dozen more, all of events in the past year and all involving similar problems. But what I want to know is why anyone in his or her right mind thinks that technology actually improves communications. Oh…it’s great for sending things to people… but for actually communicating… it seems to me that the inundation factor has effectively reduced two-way communications. I’m sure all the voice mail screens and messages reduce manufacturer and office costs… but they certainly increase my costs and waste more of my time, and that’s not so much cost-savings as cost-shifting.

Modern communications have many advantages, but when there’s a problem to be solved… the systems aren’t up to it… and don’t tell me that they’re saving me time. My computer saves me time; company voice response systems and voice menus and endless options waste that time.

The problem with “stars” and stellar performers in any field is that the description includes three categories, not one. The first and most obvious is the individual who is indeed stellar and recognized as such. The second is the individual who is recognized as stellar, but who is only competent, or even less. The third is the individual who consistently performs at a stellar level and is never recognized as such.

In some areas, particularly those where “popularity” comprises a large part of what determines “stardom,” which often includes not just cinema and entertainment, but many corporate CEOs, there’s often little distinction between the first and second category, especially when one of the factors that determines such stardom is appearance and “presence,” rather than performance.

In areas of what one might call more concrete achievement, or in the arts, recognition of stellar achievement is often either ignored or overlooked, at least until the achiever is safely dead. Caesar Augustus was the first ruler of the Roman Empire, but his success was largely founded on the technical support of Marcus Agrippa, who designed the weapons and built the fleets Augustus needed, not to mention masterminding the battle of Actium that destroyed Antony’s fleet… and building the original Pantheon and rebuilding and modernizing much of the city of Rome. Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life-time [except to his brother].

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was considered a gifted and highly competent composer during his lifetime, but others, such as Salieri, were the stars. Bach was thought to be a very good organist who wrote so much competent music that few in his lifetime recognized his genius. Jane Austin sold literally only a few thousand books in her lifetime — less than ten thousand, but today her works have sold in the millions and have spawned cinematic success after success.

In the corporate and political worlds, both in the past and today, image determines “stellar performers” more often than actual performance, as noted in a number of financial publications about a year ago where they documented that, on average, those CEOs who were less visible and less highly compensated tended to consistently outperform the “stars.” During his lifetime, Warren Harding was greatly beloved and popular, despite being possibly the worst president of the United States, and John F. Kennedy remains beloved to this day, despite a lack of any significant achievement, except perhaps avoiding war with the USSR, and in spite of his extravagant, if concealed, wide-spread philandering.

Then there are the stellar performers who are seldom if never recognized. Often these are teachers who produce outstanding student after outstanding student, students who achieve great success but seldom mention, or only mention in passing, the teacher who launched them. Some, such as Nadia Boulanger, are noted, but most are not. Sometimes, they’re authors who produce good or great book after great book, but who never catch the “critical” eyes of reviewers or scholars. At times, they’re in unlikely fields, such as Bob Lee of Colorado, who understood politics better than any man I ever encountered in twenty years in the political arena, and who mentored an entire generation of politicians and political operatives, and who died almost forgotten by so many whose careers he had made possible.

From what I’ve seen, the unrecognized stellar performers far outnumber the ones who are lauded and praised, and in many, many cases, the performance of the unrecognized stars is superior to those recognized. So why do we as a society tend to over-reward image, even when such images are so often based on little or no substance?