The necktie manufacturing trade association has closed its doors, because there are no longer enough necktie manufacturers to support it. While I doubt the demise of the association has caused much mourning outside the fashion industry… it does concern me, and not because I always wear a tie. I don’t, except to conventions and other appropriate business and social occasions. But it does concern me because of what it represents. The decline of the necktie might well be likened to the canary expiring in the social coal mine, so to speak.

Fashion is not just the presentation of one’s self through attire. It’s also a form of acknowledgment that there are duties to society which include appropriate clothing. Or put another way, wearing a tee-shirt to church or to a wedding or a tank-top to a restaurant, even McDonalds, is a form of disrespect to those in either place. It’s an attitude best described as “in your face, I’ll wear what I want.”

Interestingly enough, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he forced a crackdown on minor offenses, which initially was met with ridicule. But… the results of this type of policing in New York and elsewhere, not surprisingly to me, have shown that it also decreases other types of crime. That may well be because it reinforces societal expectations on behavior.

My late father-in-law was a trucker at a time when truckers were expected to wear uniforms of the company for which they drove [imagine that!], and frankly, in those days, truckers were a great deal more polite, both in person and in the way in which they handled their rigs. I can’t prove it, but I believe those uniforms reinforced their image and their sense of responsibility.

Dressing in an inappropriately sloppy fashion and just for one’s self when going out in public is another form of self-indulgence, the visual equivalent of bad manners. Bad manners lead to bad behavior. Bad behavior tends to undermine societies and social structures, because all successful and enduring societies are based on a degree of mutual respect between individuals within a society, and bad manners are a form of direct and personal disrespect.

Throughout human history, there have been periods where manners and standards of attire declined. Almost invariably, thereafter so did the society. So, if as a writer, you want to portray a collapsing society, just show one where personal sloppiness and bad manners are abundant, and you won’t be far wrong.

And that’s why I worry about the demise of the necktie and the necktie manufacturing trade association.

Last week, like many other travelers, my wife went on a business trip. Also, like many other travelers, she experienced the trip from hell. After three hours en route, her first flight was put in a holding pattern over west of Charlotte, N.C., for another two hours, because of thunderstorms, then landed at Greensboro, where it sat on the tarmac for an hour until a gate that could refuel the plane was available — except the gate where the plane was parked didn’t have that capability, and the plane had to wait for yet another gate. Some four hours later, she finally arrived in Charlotte at 2 a.m, for a connecting flight that had left four hours earlier. The next available flight left at 7:15. She was there, two hours early for security, only to be told that, because the same crew that had flown them in late was the crew to take them to Nashville, the flight would be delayed three hours to meet federal turn-around-time standards. And, oh yes, even though she’d called the hotel and asked them to hold her room — and that she’d pay for it, the hotel canceled her reservation, and she had to commute to the conference from another hotel. The return after her conference in Nashville wasn’t much better. First, because she had picked up some scholarly materials at the academic conference, her suitcase was ten pounds overweight — an additional $50 fee. Then, without the excuse of weather, her flight to Dulles, for a connection to Las Vegas [which is a 3 1/2 hour drive from our house] was an hour and a half late, causing her to miss her connecting flight. She was rebooked through Los Angeles, some 200 plus miles west of Las Vegas, and arrived in Las Vegas five hours late — and her luggage didn’t make it, even though it made it to L.A. and there was a two hour layover in L.A. So it had to be sent to our house arriving another day later. She finally arrived home some 24 hours after she first left for the airport after being up all night, twice in a week.

Now… first of all, her experiences are far from unique. They’re not even rare. At least half a dozen other academics at the conference who arrived on different flights had similar tales, and certainly the several hundred other passengers on these flights were also greatly inconvenienced. And it’s easy to blame the airlines, most of which are either slightly badly mismanaged or horribly mismanaged, but the reason for this mismanagement lies deeply imbedded in our society, and it’s very simple. Simple, but profound.

While there are exceptions, in the vast majority of cases, as a society, we seek the cheapest prices for everything, no matter what the long-term costs may be. We reward short-term greed and refuse to consider the long term societal and personal costs of such short-term thinking. The airline mess is a perfect example of what can happen.

Now, it’s not exactly a secret that oil supplies are tight, nor has it been unexpected that oil prices would rise over the long-term. Some few airlines, such as Southwest, locked in lower fuel prices through hedging and long-term contracts. Most did not, because they didn’t want to pay the short-term associated costs of such hedging. So… now they’re slapping fees on everything because fuel costs are up, and the prices they charged for tickets bought months ago don’t cover operating costs.

When weather conditions are bad, congestion gets far worse than it would have to be because the United States has a terribly antiquated air-traffic control system, again because no one wants to pay the price for a modern system, not the airlines, and not the federal government. So delays and messes such as those experienced by my wife become even greater and cost small businesses and individuals millions. Larger businesses charter jets, and that increases congestion and costs in a different way.

Then, there are the other costs. Although Southwest flies only one type of aircraft [the 737], most airlines not only fly differing aircraft, but differing models from different manufacturers. This has the effect of increasing maintenance costs, and that’s exacerbated by the fact that even different model aircraft from the same manufacturer aren’t always exactly engineered for parts and maintenance compatibility. Seeking the “best deal” every time one upgrades one’s fleet may reduce procurement costs, but it also increases maintenance costs and may actually require purchasing more aircraft because maintenance delays result in aircraft being out of service.

In the interests of short-term profitability, the major airlines, again except for Southwest, developed the hub and spoke system where their flights and feeder regional aircraft congregate at regional hubs. This not only increases regional air congestion, but also ensures that any time there is a major weather problem, entire sections of the country suffer loss or significant reduction in air travel capacity. In addition, the combination of deregulation and the hub-and-spoke routing encourages “specialty” lower-cost carriers to “cherry-pick” the more highly traveled routes, forcing prices down on those routes and redistributing higher costs to routes where there’s less competition. This is out-and-out geographic discrimination, and it’s largely not based on the costs of providing service, but the degree of competition, which is limited by the fact that commercial air travel can never be a free market.

Airline deregulation was adopted in the ostensible interests of reducing airfares, but those pushing and supporting it seemed unable or unwilling to accept that so-called free market competition has extremely high indirect costs to everyone when the market isn’t truly free. In the case of the airlines, the available routes are limited and controlled by the government. The major airports located near population centers are also limited, both in numbers and in their ability to handle more than a certain number of aircraft. The barriers to entering the industry are extremely high, because passenger aircraft each cost hundreds of millions, and trained pilots and crew are not inexpensive, not to mention the costs of leasing or buying terminals, reservation systems, etc., and, of course, fuel. This is not a classical free market in any sense of the word, but everyone jumped on board because deregulation promised cheaper fares “now.”

It’s also not a traditional free market because there’s often a tremendous lag time between when the service is purchased and when the cost of supplying it is incurred. If costs increase, such as has happened in the case of rapidly rising fuel costs, the supplier can’t pass on the costs to the consumer, and, in fact, will probably never totally recover them, which is why virtually all the major airlines who cannot or will not hedge their fuel costs risk bankruptcy… because fuel costs will continue to rise.

In a nutshell, the airline mess is exactly what we as a high-tech society can expect with ever-increasing frequency and with ever-increasing costs and frustrations so long as we continue to focus on the “cheapest price,” this quarter’s balance sheet, and the idea that “free competition” solves everything. Total regulation doesn’t, either, but that’s another story for another time.

All too often, sometimes more often than not, those who make the innovations or who create something new aren’t the ones recognized for it. Robert Fulton, for example, didn’t build the first steamboat; Robert Fitch did, but he went bankrupt, while Fulton made money. Galileo certainly wasn’t the first scientist to propose the heliocentric solar system, nor was Guttenberg the first one to come up with the idea of moveable type and the printing press. The listing of those recognized as “firsts” who weren’t is long, and, given human nature, that’s probably not surprising, because, for someone to be recognized as a “first achiever,” it’s necessary that the knowledge of that achievement be disseminated, both about the action, and with some supporting information explaining why the act or achievement is worthy of recognition. Sometimes, explanation isn’t all that necessary, but knowledge of the act is vital for societal recognition.

In addition, sometimes a figure well-known for popular achievements never receives his or her true due for other substantial accomplishments. Benjamin Franklin certainly falls into this category. With all the notice about his political successes, his scientific career is reduced to the story of the key, the Leiden jar, and the kite. Yet Franklin also invented bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, a flexible urinary catheter, not to mention the armonica [glass harmonica], and, with his cousin, was the first to name and to chart the Gulf Stream. He was the first to document and write up many of the basics of electrical behavior, and the first to document the principles of evaporative cooling.

These examples suggest that often what we “know” about innovation or about people happens all too often to be incomplete, or sometimes close to a complete lie.

In the field of fantasy and science fiction, this is also true. Popular recognition of “innovation” often has not coincided with reality. As I wrote almost a year ago, Fred Saberhagen was a very innovative writer, but one who never truly received his due for all the innovation and uniqueness in his work, perhaps because he accomplished it without bells and whistles, without overwhelming self-promotion and rhetorical excesses.

Although “alternative history” dates back to the Roman writer and historian Livy, H. Beam Piper was one of the first twentieth century SF writers to create more than one or two works of alternate history, beginning with “He Walked Around the Horses” in 1948, but comparatively few readers today would recognize his name, and most of those would likely do so because of the tributes of current writers to his legacy.

Even with popular and well-known writers, at times, works of a high caliber are overlooked or lost behind the clamor about popular works. Examples of this include, in my opinion, Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, Michael Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain, David Drake’s The Forlorn Hope, George R.R. Martin’s The Dying of the Light, and Gordon R. Dickson’s The Way of the Pilgrim. Of course, in accord with the trend noted in a recent blog, these are all stand-alone works unrelated to the more popular series of these writers.

So… on a day of remembrance, some remembrance for works and achievement forgotten or not remembered as they should be, including all those I haven’t cited.

Science fiction in particular has tended to mix a combination of elements — a sense of transition from where we’ve been as a society, a commentary on the present, and an extrapolation depicting one of any number of possible futures. Given the current popularity and market place domination of the F&SF genres by fantasy, it’s often hard, especially for new readers, to realize that for almost a century, science fiction was certainly far more prevalent and dominant than fantasy.

How did it come to be that in a comparatively short period of time, fantasy has literally swamped science fiction?

First, let’s take a look at Jane Austen. Over the past few years, there’s been a resurgence in the popularity of Jane Austen, manifested especially in endless cinematic and video remakes of her books, as well as the continued popularity of more than a few romance take-offs on her “world.”

I can certainly understand the Austen period fascination. The clothes were fashionable and elegant, and people didn’t board their carriages in tank tops and flip-flops. The conversation was well-mannered, even when vicious. The dances were truly dances and not frenzied athletic competitions or public pseudo-orgies. Dinners were a time for dining and not gulping fast food after a rushed trip through a drive-in service window. Even revenge was thoughtfully and carefully planned in a way that makes most current “pay-backs” seem crude and boorish. The music had melodies, and young men and women were pleased to master difficult instruments, and not just bang out repetitive chords on an electrically amplified, yet simplified guitar.

By comparison, we live in a world of cheap pleasures and cheaper thrills, gulped down like fast food, time after time, because, somehow, they never satisfy. Americans in particular have more “toys” than ever before, and yet surveys show that they’re not any happier, and in fact may be less so.

And what does all this have to do with science fiction and fantasy?

Among the chief attractions of the genre are inspiration and, frankly escapism, and it’s clear that a growing number of readers want to escape the ugliness of the present, but, from what I’ve seen and read, comparatively little science fiction offers hopeful escapism. Most of it’s pretty grim. Twenty years ago, there were more well-written SF books like Walter Jon Williams’s House of Shards, which deftly mixed SF with manners. I still write books in which the future still has culture, and so do a handful of others, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, but, in general, those tend to be the exception, whereas fantasy tends to offer, if not exclusively, more hopeful endings, or at least endings where there is a glimmer of light. In passing, I would also note that even Devention, the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in early August, is featuring a “Summerfair Reception in Barrayar” and a Dowager Duchess of Denver’s Regency Dance.. and both are based on “mannered” societies, if fictional ones.

And we could all use more manners, more culture, and more inspiration toward excellence and beauty… especially in our fiction.

A number of years ago, a singer named Rick Nelson had a hit song entitled “Garden Party.” A portion of the lyrics follows:

When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name.

No one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

Played them all the old songs, thought that’s why they came.

No one heard the music, we didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck

But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck…

…it’s all right now, learned my lesson well

You see, ya can’t please everyone, you got to please yourself.

Nelson wrote the song after appearing in a “rock revival” concert at Madison Square Garden, where he was booed when he played and sang songs that weren’t his “golden oldies,” because, apparently, that was all they wanted to hear. Some days, I feel like I really understand what Nelson was driving at.

Now…while singers — or writers — clearly can’t please everyone, it is fairly clear from the bestseller trends and sales figures that the closer a writer, and a singer, I suppose, sticks to a single type of fiction, or song, the higher the sales numbers. Robert Jordan’s other books don’t sell a fraction of what those in the Wheel of Time series do, and I doubt that anything J.K. Rowling writes besides Harry Potter will approach the Potter books in popularity, either. The same is true of popular authors in other fields. Writers who produce series, or “type” books, outsell those who don’t. In my own work, the individual books in a fantasy series outsell the stand-alones by better than three to one. Doubtless, there are some exceptions to the success of literary “type-casting,” but given the overall trends and numbers, there aren’t many. That’s why it’s extremely hard for an author to produce and get published a body of work that’s diverse, let alone do so and be commercially successful.

At the same time, Nelson’s line about not pleasing everyone also rings true. Going through reader comments and critical reviews on my books last week, I came across such comments as “writes fantasy for Republicans”… “libertarian bias”… “left wing tripe”… “ecological leftist”… “solid Republican, as to be expected from a former Reagan appointee”… “always tells the same story, young man going out into the world”… “wish he’d stay away from the arthouse fiction”… Obviously, each one of those comments and many others I haven’t quoted reflect more about the reader than my work, because, after all, I couldn’t always tell the same story, for example, and have so many readers complain in so many different ways.

Although Nelson toured widely for another 12 years after “Garden Party” was released before he was killed in a plane crash, “Garden Party” was his last hit record. I wonder why.

I dislike rap. That, if anything, is an understatement. It’s not because I’m biased against the culture from which it comes, and it’s not because I’m an old curmudgeon — which I may well be — or because it’s “modern,” and I’m not up with the times. It’s because I do indeed understand both rap’s source, its structure, and its implications… and none of them represent the best in human culture.

First, rap does indeed represent modern society — the worst of it. Words are jammed into an insistent forced beat against a set of background sounds so close to monotone that they can scarcely be termed music. Any beauty the words might have is destroyed by the framework in which they are embedded. What rap does best is, in fact, the shock value, the ugly, the “in-your-face” confrontation. In a sense, it’s the musical equivalent of the worst excesses of Fox News on the right and CNN on the left, with a soundtrack having the artistic sense of a jackhammer during rush hour.

One of the key elements of music is something called a melody line, and it’s essential — except to rap and the atonal so-called modernist composers, whose work I dislike possibly even more than that of the rappers, because the modernists had a real education in music and should know better.

Some have called rap merely modern poetry, or the modern urban equivalent to bardic minstrels. I’m sorry; it’s not. In poetry, in comparison to rap, the use and choice of words determines the rhythm… or the metre requires the poet to choose particular words, but, in either approach, they’re fitted together, not forced into a structure with the jack-hammer of an electric bass and the sonic wire mesh of a full drum ensemble.

The fact that the recent Tony awards gave the “best new musical award” to what amounted to a “rap music showcase” in which there was little music, and where much of what were intended as lyrics were unintelligible, suggests that the artistic world has come to point where no one dares to suggest that “the emperor has no clothes,” but then, I doubt that many who voted for the award would even understand that allusion, much less what lies behind it.

As Kipling suggested in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” nearly a century ago, worshipping the “Gods of the Marketplace” and the current fad, whatever it may be, instead of striving for excellence based on experience, inevitably leads to disaster, as when “the lights had gone out in Rome.”

But who am I to stand against the thunderous applause for “music” that has no grace and no melody? Or to suggest that art should inspire men and women to strive for excellence, rather than graphically describe degradation in all its sordid forms?

With each passing day of the on-going and seemingly endless presidential election campaign, I get more and more distressed by the way in which the candidates and the media deal with the issue of “wealth.” In thinking about this, I also realized that all too many writers have similar problems, but that the writers are more adept at avoiding the issue and concealing either their ignorance or their biases… if not both.

Those on the left tend to claim that any family that earns more than somewhere in the $200,000-$250,000 range is wealthy. Now, I’d be the first to admit that such families are not poor… but to claim that they’re wealthy?

Somehow, I don’t think most doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists and other professionals in that income range, many of whom make that income only by dint of hard work by two parents, think of themselves as “wealthy,” particularly when compared to those who truly are, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, or like the millionaire athletic figures such as Tiger Woods, Shaquille O’Neal, or Peyton Manning.

Then, too, when you use a flat number for defining who is wealthy, that number doesn’t reflect the cost-of-living. A family income of $100,000 in New York City, which has a cost-of-living more than twice the national average of all U.S. cities, has the same purchasing power as $30,000 in Laredo or McAllen, Texas, or other small towns across the United States. So… an income of $100,000 is less than mid-middle-class in New York, but signifies being well-off in, say, small towns in the mid-west or mountain states [provided they’re not resort towns inhabited by the truly wealthy]. Some 20 years ago, the Washingtonian magazine published an article entitled “How to Go Bankrupt on $100,000 A Year.” The article detailed how difficult it was for a family to make ends meet in our nation’s capital on that income, merely by attempting to hold to what one might have called a middle-class lifestyle. Given inflation and devaluation of the dollar, the income cited in that article would probably have to be well over $200,000 today. Families that earn $250,000 in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, and the like aren’t poor by any means, but claiming that they’re “wealthy” is absurd.

Again… I am not claiming families who make such incomes are poor; I am claiming that anyone who thinks they’re rich is either deluded or a demagogue. Why are such claims being made? Because the politicians know that there aren’t enough “truly rich” to pay for the debts already incurred and the programs they think their constituents want, and by defining the upper end of the middle class as wealthy, they can claim that they’re not taxing the middle-class, but the “undeserving” wealthy, rather than hard-working professionals, with mortgages and children in college and the like

Just as the politicians and the media don’t seem to know what wealth is, or want to discuss it factually, so do more than a few SF writers have problems understanding and in dealing with wealth. Over the years, we’ve seen “millionaire” heroes with their own spacecraft, their own extensive private laboratories, and the like. Currently, a single high-tech atmospheric fighter seating just two pilots for a few hours of flight time costs over $200 million, and the industrial complex required to build it represents a number of entities representing more than $100 billion in assets. All that for a craft that flies at speeds a fraction of those required for interplanetary travel and without all the other additional systems necessary. Currently, according to Forbes, there are roughly 500 billionaires in the entire world, and most of them are worth less than $15 billion, with the wealthiest worth considerably less than $100 billion.

I’ve read very few books that even suggest the records and expertise necessary to handle vast wealth, or the limitations that such wealth imposes. Steven King, for heaven’s sake, hardly in the wealth class of Bill Gates, had to give up attending events such as World Fantasy Convention, and these days most companies spend millions of dollars in various ways to protect their CEOs.

So why do we have this strange dichotomy in our culture and our fiction where people who are merely affluent are considered rich, and where no one seems to understand how few really are truly rich and how isolated those comparative few are?

Last week, I found myself suddenly without internet service. After contacting my “local” telephone carrier and internet provider and close to half an hour of wading through various voice mail screens which asked me to answer scripted questions having nothing to do with my problem and waiting for a “technical support” person who sounded suspiciously Indian and then waiting for her to check, I was told that I was suffering an “outage.” I knew that. She also noted that it might take 24 hours to restore service. It took 48 hours before I had full service back. I never did get a full answer from the provider, but from the local newspaper, three days later. Apparently, a backhoe operator severed the only fiber optic cable serving the 150,000 plus people of southwestern Utah. The backhoe operator claimed that the line was not marked; the telephone company claims that he had a responsibility to check before digging.

Either way, the simple fact is that one man and a machine interrupted all internet service and much, but not all, telephone service for a large geographic area. While this confirms my skepticism about such “conveniences” as internet bill paying and banking, stock trading, and the like, it also illustrates the underlying fragility of our high-tech/lowest-possible-cost society. Over the past few years, I’ve seen entire malls paralyzed because of power outages. There’s no provision for selling without power to the computerized sales terminals. So much of our society relies on the interface of electrical power and computer-stored information, and yet, access to that information can be so easily disrupted.

All this would seem inconceivable to a businessman or almost anyone less than a century ago. Along these lines, I was thinking about addressing a high school class on the subject of my experiences as a pilot during the Vietnam era, and I realized that, if a former pilot who was the same age as I am now had made an address to me and my high school, he would have been talking about primitive biplanes with fabric wings. Yet there is surprisingly little difference in propulsion, aerodynamics, or even aircraft structure and function today, as opposed to when I was a student. In short, we saw radical change in aircraft and mechanical technology in less than a fifty year period, and we haven’t seen the like since… and I doubt that we will. This slow-down in applied technological advancement isn’t restricted to aircraft; it’s taken place across all areas of society, although it’s largely unrecognized. Why? And what does this have to do with society, culture, and science fiction?

All this has to do with limits.

Human beings and Americans in particular hate limits. They sneak across or under or around borders, tear down fences, trample across private property, exceed speed limits, protest, often violently, the limitations on where snowmobiles and ATVs can travel. And the problem with predicting limits is that most of those who predicted them have turned out to be wrong. Malthus is one example, and so are all those who predicted people would die if they traveled faster than a hundred miles an hour. On the other hand, so far, at least, Einstein’s limitation of travel to less than the speed of light is holding up fairly well — except possibly for tiny distances at the subatomic level.

All that said, the real world does have limits. And so does technology. That doesn’t mean that many accomplishments once perceived as impossible could not be achieved. They just couldn’t exceed certain limitations with the technology of that time. Skyscrapers were impractical, if not impossible, without elevators and higher technology structural steel. Even higher buildings depend on more advanced materials, engineering, and technology, but the taller the building, the greater dependence on technology, and certainly at the moment, at least, a structure extending ten miles above the ground is not possible.

All this technology tends to conflict with the human desire to obtain goods and services at the lowest possible price — and that’s why there’s only one fiber optic cable in southwestern Utah, and doubtless many other places. Despite the fragility of our current system, incorporating redundancy and greater reliability is expensive and often energy intensive, and that’s another form of limitation. Those sorts of limitations are why our entire electric power generation network is literally cobbled together, as is much of our communications system.

Then add to that the fact that, for now, so many more recent scientific discoveries are in the area of discovering limitations and explanations for those limitations. All this makes realistically predicting the future and writing about that future in an intriguing fashion harder and harder with each passing year, because economic and technological limits do in fact exist, and readers want to see characters exceed those limits. Yet it becomes harder and harder for a writer to have his or her characters do so plausibly with each new discovery and each passing year.

Might all this explain the comparative decline in eye-opening science fiction, the resurgence of “space opera,” and the continuing growth and popularity of fantasy?

As do at least some writers, I do have the very bad habit of reading reviews, even reader reviews. For years, other writers and editors have cautioned me against doing this very often, and yet… I still do. The good side of this is that I do understand what those readers want. That, unfortunately, is also the bad side.

I recently read a reader review of Adiamante, which has generally gotten overwhelmingly favorable reviews from both readers and critics, in which the reader, after saying that he had thoroughly enjoyed some 15 of my books, thoroughly lambasted me for writing what he suggested was a left-wing diatribe. He went on to write that, after reading this one book, he was sorry he’d bought the first fifteen.

While I wish I could say that I was surprised… I wasn’t. Saddened a bit, resigned, but scarcely surprised. Just as people vary in their tastes in food, music, in types of entertainment, readers also vary in what they enjoy. That shouldn’t surprise any writer.

What saddens me as a writer is not that a reader takes issue with what I write or how I write it. Since I do not write sexual scenes [with one exception more than twenty years ago] and I do not write graphic violence, most reader disagreements come from philosophical viewpoint differences. Even so, it’s still disturbing when I explore a different point of view or a fact or an issue that conflicts with that reader’s prejudices so violently that the reader must reject everything I have written or will write — even those books with which the reader would agree. This is the all-too-common human mindset of “If you are not 100% in agreement with me, then you are the devil’s spawn [or some other suitable epithet].”

To my way of thinking, reading provides an arena where readers can explore new or different ideas, where they can see how they might work out, or might not, and where they can look at what an author presents and either decide that the scenario, assumptions, and results are plausible — or that they’re not. It’s certainly a great deal less costly, both in terms of resources and in terms of human misery, to explore such possibilities on the printed page. Unfortunately, there are still those people whose minds are so closed that any exploration is regarded as an assault upon their dearly held prejudices… and I use the term prejudices here advisedly, because those who cannot even read or listen to another viewpoint [assuming it’s well-written, of course] in order to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses before accepting or rejecting it, are not thinking beings, but merely creatures of thoughtless bias.

Yet… as the percentage of adults who read for pleasure has decreased, so has the polarization of political and social viewpoints increased, to the point where tens of millions of Americans are unwilling to listen to contrary views, unwilling to accept social and political compromise, and unwilling to hammer out solutions that work for all Americans… and not just for them.

Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so, but I also don’t think that decreased reading has caused increased social and political polarization. Rather, my own suspicion is that a society that demands instant everything effectively stifles debate and discussion, not to mention thoughtful consideration… because thought… and reading… do, in fact, take time and reflection. Add to that the fact that our media and our politics are structured along the same lines… and even some evangelical religions are to some degree, where instantly “accepting Jesus” seems to count more than a lifetime of measured goodness, and it’s not difficult to see the various contributing factors to “values absolutism.”

And that’s how we writers get readers who like 93.75% of our work, but who will never read another book of ours because of something we put down in one single volume.

The term “instant change” is in fact, so far as societies are concerned, an oxymoron, because meaningful change in any society is anything but instant, and is almost always agonizingly painful for significant segments, if not for all, of that society. Yet here in the United States, we’ve just witnessed five months of political primary election contests where all the candidates have promised “change,” and where the apparent winner of the Democratic presidential primary is the one who promised the most radical, and yet, the most painless change.

Needless to say, I’m skeptical. Not about the need for change, but about all the rhetoric and implications that suggest radical changes will be comparatively easy and painless. Now… let’s consider that John Adams and others among the Founding Fathers insisted [and failed] on radical change in abolishing slavery in 1776. Some eighty-four years later, the United States was ripped apart by Civil War, at least in part, if not in large part, over the issue of slavery. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that ensued, full legal civil rights were effectively denied to blacks until the Supreme Court outlawed the worst of discriminatory measures in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. That proved insufficient, and in 1964 a more far-reaching Civil Rights Act was passed, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And more riots followed. Admittedly, we have changed radically in respect to legal rights for blacks since the United States was founded — but such radical change was anything but swift or painless.

Some change in any society is good, but the lessons of history suggested to the founding fathers that most change, especially popularly-based change whipped up by demagogues and political opportunists, was not. They felt that order was more conducive to liberty than the ability to change societal structures quickly. So our government was designed with all fashion of checks and balances, primarily to ensure that no change could be instantly railroaded through. Some of those checks and balances have been changed, and while some people would claim “eroded” is a better term, the fact remains that radical change cannot be implemented legally and quickly.

Some would also claim, not without reason, that the current Administration has made radical changes in personal liberties, but the legality of many of those changes remains untested, and some have been curtailed. That said, would a new Administration really wish to employ similar methods to force change? If so, such an Administration would not be changing anything, but merely using the same structure for differing ends, and maintaining a loss of liberty to obtain its goals. If not, then radical change will be time-consuming and expensive, as it always has been.

In the meantime, what of all those voters who endorsed quick and painless change? Will they be so enthusiastic as time passes, as endless votes and amendments pile up, as the costs for implementing those changes further increase their taxes or decrease services in other areas?

Of course, the quick and simple [and wrong] answer to those questions is that all we have to do is decrease government waste. The problem is: One person’s “waste” is another person’s livelihood. For example, we pay what I believe are excessive farm subsidies, but cutting those subsidies will be painful to those who receive them, and they will protest and harass their representatives and present all manner of arguments to prove that the subsidies are good programs. Bridges and roads to small communities are expensive, and many are certainly not “cost-effective,” but those communities often cannot pay for such improvements, and a bridge described as “one to nowhere” in Washington is certainly one to somewhere out in the state that wants it built. Requiring national health care is a goal that’s been cited repeatedly, but exactly who will pay for the services to the 47 million uninsured Americans? Even a rock-bottom [and unrealistically low] premium of $200 a month and health care expenditures averaging a mere $1,000 a year for each of those uninsured Americans would require either taxpayers or employers or some combination of each to come up with an additional $160 billion annually. If we’re talking about a government program, that works out to over $1,000 more in income or payroll taxes per taxpaying family per year. That’s unless we cut some other government programs by the same amount. If the program is supposed to be funded by employers, how many more jobs will vanish, the way they have in the auto industry, over just that issue? And if the program is funded by increasing taxes on the “rich,” that won’t work unless the “rich” are defined as any couple that makes over $150,000 — and that number takes in millions of people who definitely believe they’re anything but rich.

As I indicated earlier, I’m not against change, but I am against rhetoric and hype that suggests change is automatically wonderful, painless, and free. Change is always more expensive than anyone realizes, especially to those who fail to understand that point. Just look at the changes in the USA today as a result of quick and easy promises to fight terror… and the fact that we’ve spent over a trillion dollars, lost civil liberties and thousands of lives, and still haven’t succeeded.

Change — do you really think it’s ever quick, easy, cheap, and painless? Or do you assume that someone else will end up paying for it?

There’s been an overwhelming amount of material written about how people today, especially in the United States, live in the “Information Age.” And we do… but the vast majority of that information is anything but what it seems on its face, and, often, lacks significant facts that might change the entire meaning of what was initially presented. Now, some cynics will ask, “And what else is new?”

The answer to that question is: The volume, complexity, and increased power of information are what’s new, and those aspects of information make all the difference.

While it shouldn’t be any great surprise to anyone who follows political news, the recent book by a former press secretary of President Bush describes in detail how the current administration manipulated the news by the use of inaccurate, slanted, and misleading information. The official White House response seems to be that the President will try to forgive his former aide. Forgive the man? That suggests that Bush believes it was wrong to reveal the White House’s informational shenanigans, and that personal loyalty is far more important than truth. This viewpoint isn’t new to the Presidency, but the degree to which it’s being carried appears to be.

One of the aspects of the mortgage banking and housing sector melt-down that’s also been downplayed is the incredible amount of false, misleading, and inaccurate information at all levels. Large numbers of homeowners were lied to and misled, and many were simply unable to wade through the paperwork to discover what was buried there in the legalese. The mortgage securitization firms misled the securities underwriters. The information issued by the underwriters misled the securities traders, and in the end, with all the misinformation, it appears that almost no one understood the magnitude of the problem before the meltdown.

We’re seeing, or not seeing, the same problem with recent economic statistics, particularly those measuring inflation. Until 2000, the most common indicator of the rate of inflation was the amount of change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measured price fluctuations in a market-basket of goods. In 2000, however, the Administration decided to remove food and energy from that market basket on the grounds that changes in food and energy were “too volatile,” and the “new” index was named the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, or PCE, which was described as better able to measure “core inflation.” That means that, although the price of crude oil has more than tripled in the past seven years, and food prices are rising significantly, neither affects the PCE… and the government is telling us that inflation is only a bit over two percent, while, measured by the old CPI, it’s at least four percent, which works out to 40% higher than the “official” figures.

Misleading or restricted information certainly isn’t limited to the federal government, either. One of the Salt Lake City papers noted that a local public health teacher was suspended for discussing sex education material not in the approved curriculum. Her offense? She factually answered student questions about such topics as homosexuality and masturbation, which angered a group of parents. Interestingly enough, the students protested her suspension with a rally and signs with such statements as “We’re the Guilty Ones. We Asked the Questions.” In the good old USA, we still have school boards restricting what can be taught or read based not on what is factual or accurate, but based on religious beliefs.

The multibillion dollar advertising industry consistently manipulates images and facts to create misleading impressions about various products, as do the majority of politicians and political parties, not to mention the plethora of interest groups ranging from the far right to the far left, each of which tends to state that its facts are the correct ones. Needless to say, those with resources and money are the ones whose facts tend to get seen and used the most.

Years ago, the psycholinguist Deborah Tannen observed that there is a gender difference in the use of information. According to her work, in general, men tend to use information to amass and maintain power, while women use it to built networks and draw people to them. That’s one reason why many men refuse to ask for directions — it’s an admission of failure and powerlessness.

Could it be that one reason why the United States so abuses information is that information has become the principal tool for obtaining power in a still-patriarchal and masculine dominated society? I may be stretching matters a bit, but I’m not so certain that I’m all that far off when information is so critical to almost every aspect of American society.

The underlying problem is that, in a mass media culture, even one with theoretical First Amendment protections, the “truth” doesn’t always come out. It often only appears when someone either has enough money and influence to get it on the various airways or when some diligent individual spends hours digging for it.

And then, how can the average individual, even one who is highly educated, determine the accuracy of such “counter-information,” particularly when such a large proportion of the information available to Americans has come to be false, slanted, inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete?

The ancient Romans had a saying — Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — that asked, “Who watches the watchmen?” Perhaps we should consider asking, “Who scrutinizes the information on which we act?”

Or are we already too late? Were H. G. Wells and Orwell all too accurate in their prophecies?

The past half-year’s round of presidential political primary contests in the United States has raised cries of sexism, racism, and even ageism, hardly surprising when the three leading candidates are, respectively, a woman, a black man, and the oldest man ever to seek the presidency for a first term. My wife and I were discussing this when she made the observation that all three “isms” are really just different forms of “placeism.”

By that, she meant that sexism against women is really just a manifestation of the idea that a woman’s place is, variously, in the home, raising children, or even just plain barefoot and pregnant… and that a woman who aspires to be president, or a corporate CEO, or a noted surgeon is, heaven forbid, leaving her culture-required or God-decreed “place.”

Likewise, a black man who aspires to be president is also out of place, because, for many people, whether they will admit it or not, a black’s place is one of subservience to Caucasians. And, of course, an older man’s place is in a rocking chair, on a golf course, or doing some sort of volunteer good works.

Such “places,” while certainly tacitly accepted and reinforced to some degree in most cultures across the globe, don’t have a basis in fact, but in custom. For generations, if not centuries, bias against people “of color” [and this also refers to Asian prejudices against Caucasians, Bantu prejudices against Bushmen, Chinese biases against all outsiders, as well as Caucasian prejudices against blacks or American Indians] has been based on the assumption that whoever was defined as being “of color” was genetically “inferior.” Now that the human genome has been largely sequenced, it’s more than clear that, not only is there no overriding genetic difference in terms of “race,” but the variations between people of similar “races” are often greater than the differences between those of one skin color and another.

The same argument applies to age. Senator McCain is far younger than a great number of world leaders who accomplished significant deeds at ages far older than the senator presently is. But in our youth-oriented society, someone who is old is regarded as out-of-place, with values and views at variance with popular culture, as well they may be, for with age can come a perspective lacking in the young. And, yes, with age for some people comes infirmity, but that infirmity is based on individual factors and not on a physical absolute that, at a “pre-set” age, one is automatically old and unable to function. As with all the other “place-isms,” ageism is effectively an attempt to dismiss someone who is older as out of place with the unspoken implication that the oldster is somehow unsuitable because he or she refuses to accept the “customary” place.

All such placeisms are rooted in prejudicial customs and flower into full distastefulness and unfairness when people hide behind the unspoken prejudice of tradition, religion, or custom and remain either unwilling or unable to judge people as individuals.

The results of a study published in the May 31st issue of The Economist also shed a new light on “placeism” with regard to women. The study surveyed the tested abilities of older male and female students in mathematical and verbal skills across a range of countries and cultures. The researchers concluded that, in those cultures where women had the greatest level of social, economic, and political equality, women’s test scores in math were equal to those of men, and their verbal skills were far greater — even greater than the current gap in countries such as the United States, where women already outshine men. In short, if men and women are treated as true equals with regard to rights and opportunity, on average the women will outperform the men in all mental areas. Could it just be that men understand that, and that instinctive understanding is why in most cultures men want to keep women “in their place?”

Heavens no! It couldn’t be that, could it? It must be that women are just so much better suited to the home or, if in the public arena, supporting men, just as black are far better in athletic endeavors because their genes make them better in sports and less able in politics and business, and just as all old people have lost all judgment the moment they’re eligible to join AARP or collect Social Security checks.

That’s right, isn’t it? After all, there’s a place for everything, and everyone has his — or her — place, and we know just where that should be, don’t we?

Literary critics like to write about the importance of an author and his/her work, but many of them seldom put it quite that way. They write about themes and styles and relationships and relevance, but, most of the time, when they write about an author, they’re only guessing as to whether an author will really have a lasting influence over readers and culture and whether anything written by that author will resonate or last beyond the author’s lifespan.

Because critics seldom seem to consider history, although they’ve doubtless read about it, readers tend to forget little things like the fact that Shakespeare was NOT the pre-eminent playwright of his time, and that Beaumont and Fletcher ended up interred in Westminster Abbey long before the Bard did. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature, but few today read anything of what he wrote anymore, except for The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and a handful of poems.

Publishers and booksellers tend not to care as much about potential influence, but about sales — or popularity. And, of course, our current media culture is all about instant-popularity. So… in the field of fantasy and science fiction, the media tends to focus on the mega-sellers like Harry Potter or The Wheel of Time. Certainly, both series have sold well and inspired many imitators, but how well will they fare over time in influencing readers and overall culture?

Will either approach J.R.R. Tolkien? Or for that matter, Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley?

Tolkien was both popular and influential, to the point that a great many of today’s popular fantasy writers are not influential at all. They’re merely imitators, using pale similarities, that include trolls, orcs, faerie, variations on European feudalism, and the same kind of vaguely defined magic as Tolkien employed. These writers have sold a great number of books, but exactly what is their influence, except as extensions of the approach that Tolkien pioneered?

Poe could be said to have pioneered the horror genre, with a relevance and an influence great enough that movies have been made and re-made more than a century after his death. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has long outlasted her considerable output of scholarly and other works and is perhaps the model for the nurture/nature conflict horror story.

What works of today’s F&SF writers will outlive them?

As has been the case with all cultures, while all of us who write would like to think that it will be our works that survive, in almost all cases, that won’t be so. That realization may well be, in fact, why I intend to keep writing so long as I can do so at a professional level. That way, if my works fall out of favor, I won’t be around to see it. And if they don’t, well, that would be an added bonus, even if I wouldn’t know it.

Still… what factors are likely to keep a book alive?

Some of them are obvious, such as an appeal to basic human feelings with which readers can instantly identify. Other factors, such as style, are far more transient. Shakespeare’s work, with its comparative linguistic directness, has fared far better than those writers whose style was considered more “erudite.” And with our mass-media-simplifying culture, I have great doubts that the work of writers whose appeal to critics is primarily stylistic will long endure. Works which explore ideas and ideals and how they apply to people are more likely to last, but whose works… I certainly couldn’t say.

For all that the critics write, with their [sometimes] crystal prose, I have to wonder just how many of them have accurately predicted or will be able to determine which works of today’s authors will still be around — and influential — in fifty years… or a century.

Recently, I was asked, as I am occasionally, very occasionally, to judge a writing contest. It was an extremely painful experience. Now, in past years, one of the more agonizing aspects of going through manuscripts was dealing with the rather deplorable grammar and spelling. Clearly, spell-checkers and grammar checkers have had an impact, because the absolutely worst grammatical errors have largely vanished. The less obvious errors of grammatical and syntactical misuse remain, as do errors in referential pronouns, among others.

What struck me the most, however, was the almost total lack of story-telling. In years past, I read awfully-written and ungrammatical work, but a large percentage of the submissions were actual stories.

This, of course, leads to the question — what is a story? For most people, trying to define a story is like the reputed reply given by an elder statesman when he was asked to define pornography. “I can’t define it, but when I see it, I know it.” That sort of definition isn’t much help to a would-be writer. So I went back to my now-ancient Handbook to Literature and checked the definition:

…any narrative of events in a sequential arrangement. The one merit of a story is its ability to make us want to know what happened next… Plot takes a story, selects its materials not in terms of time but causality; gives it a beginning, a middle, and an end; and makes it serve to elucidate character, express an idea, or incite to an action.

Robert Heinlein once defined a story this way: “A story is an account which is not necessarily true but which is interesting to read.”

Put more directly, in a story, the writer has to express events so that they progress in a way that makes sense, while hanging together and making the reader want to continue reading.

Almost all of the stories I read were anything but interesting to read, and not just to me, but to a jury of first readers, none of whom could recommend any. So the first readers thought they weren’t seeing something and passed all of them on to me. Unhappily, they were right. But why?

In considering these stories, I realized they all shared several faults. First, while almost all had a series of events, there was no real rationale for those events, except that the writer had written them. In real life, there is, as the definition above notes, a certain causality. It may be the result of our actions or the actions of others, or even of nature, but events do follow causes, notwithstanding the views of some quantum physicists. A story, at least occasionally, should give a nod to causality, either through background or the words or actions of the characters. After a reader finishes the story, he or she should be able to say why things happened, or at least feel that how they happened was “right” for the story.

Second, all too many of the stories shifted viewpoints, even verb tenses, almost from sentence to sentence. This is a trend that has been growing with younger writers over the years, and I think it’s probably the result of our video culture, with its rapid camera cuts, and multiple plot lines, but what works, if imperfectly, on a video screen, doesn’t translate to the printed page because a reader doesn’t have all the visual and tonal cues provided by video. The words have to carry the action and the emotions, and when those words are absent or scattered among a number of characters, the reader is going to have trouble following and identifying with anyone.

Third, almost none of the stories showed any real understanding of human character and motivation, yet one of the unspoken reasons why most readers read is because of the characters or the glimpses of characters. Again, I suspect that this lack of understanding stems in large part from a video entertainment culture that focuses on action to the exclusion of character. I’ve noticed this change in other ways, as well, because many younger readers have great difficulty in picking up on subtle written clues to character in novels. I’ve seen more than a few comments about books, my own as well as that of other authors, decrying the lack of characterization, while older and more experienced readers often praise the same books for their depth of characterization. Because I’m not of the younger generation, I can only guess, but it appears to me that when they write, while they may imagine such characteristics, they neglect to write them down, believing that other readers will imagine as they do, even without any written clues. Needless to say, each of us imagines differently, and without cues, many readers may not imagine at all, which leads to a lack of interest.

In the end, a story has to contain all the words, phrases, description, and causality necessary to carry the reader along. Or, as one man put it years ago, “If it doesn’t say it in black and white, it doesn’t say it.”

Science fiction and fantasy have always dealt, at least ostensibly, with change, about how the future might be with technology, aliens, biotech, or whatever, or how our world or others might be if some form of workable magic existed. In a world where change is ongoing and seemingly accelerating, we tend to forget that for much of human history change was either slow or non-existent. And it wasn’t just a question of technology. The Ptolemaic Egyptians had a rather interesting array of technological gadgets. And they were nothing compared to what had already been developed in China. The Roman Empire implemented Greek technology, but added little, except concrete, central heating, and plumbing, despite conquering a large section of the “known” world. So why did technology lead to change and ever more change in post-Renaissance Europe and virtually none in earlier prosperous societies?

Africa is clearly the cradle of homo sapiens, and where tool-making began, yet after the Egyptians, the Nubians, and perhaps the Carthaginians, in a sense, nothing changed, and societies in Africa declined, both in cultural and technological terms. Why?

Today, after several centuries of comparatively rapid change, despite outward appearances, the pace of change is again slowing. About the only significant change in space exploration and travel over the last forty years has been the advances in communications and video areas so that we can see more of the solar system and the universe in far greater clarity. We still can’t get anywhere significantly any faster, and, in fact, we’ve really done less human traveling in space. Do better pretty pictures of space represent a real change, or just an illusion of change?

Despite Einstein and atomic power, essentially we’re still using an improved model of the first atomic power plant. That’s after fifty years of accelerators, totamaks, and other gadgets designed to discover more about the nature of matter and energy, and we don’t seem much closer to practical fusion power than a generation ago. The fastest commercial air travel is slower than it was two decades ago. We have a better understanding of medicine and better medical procedures, but much of our own population and most of the rest of the world can’t afford the costs of availing themselves of such medical improvements. Will such costs eventually choke off real change in the medical procedures available to most people?

According to some test scores, American students are smarter and improving in their knowledge of various subjects, and certainly there are more students in both absolute and percentage terms who are completing high school and college. Yet the high-level functional literacy rate of college graduates and post-graduate degree holders continues to decrease, and the absolute performance of males is declining relative to women. The United States, despite a century or more of effort to eliminate sexual discrimination, is one of the few western industrial nations that has never had a female head of state, and, unless matters shift dramatically, has never even had a major party candidate who was female. The U.S. is also the most overtly religious of the major western industrial nations. Does that religious background mitigate against significant real change in the gender power balance? And perhaps in other aspects of society?

Both Democratic Party candidates have called for “change,” but for what sort of change? I don’t see a call for re-invigorating our space program, or more more research in basic science, or for real and fundamental change in our approach to education, or anything approximating real change. What I see is an emphasis on changing who controls government and resources and who benefits from them, and that’s not the same thing… is it? Really?

Those of us who write science fiction and fantasy are often considered to be people who enable escapism through our writing. Certainly, I’d dispute that, particularly given what I write. But…even if the charge happened to be true, which it’s not, we writers would hardly be the only ones in U.S. society institutionalizing escapism.

The other day a husband and wife who are acquaintances told me how upset they were by the university commencement address given by a Nobel laureate because the scientist had laid out rather directly and bluntly some of the challenges that the next generation would have to face, in particular those involving energy supplies and global warming. They both felt that a commencement address should be inspiring and uplifting, and “not a real downer.”

On the one hand, I can see their point. Hitting bright young graduates between the eyes with the cold water of realism is not exactly encouraging, when commencement is considered “their” day.

On the other hand, times have changed. Many long years ago, when I was in high school, educators made a practice of pointing out one’s short-comings in more than graphic detail, day after day, while suggesting that major improvements in attitude, effort, and skills were the only way to avoid a life of failure and lack of accomplishment. And when one got to college, the “standard” entry address to college freshmen was: “Look to your left; look to your right. By the end of the year, one of you won’t be here.” In those days, there was a draft and a war in Vietnam, and for young men, at least, not being there meant a good chance of being somewhere else — a place distant, hot, damp and dangerous. And more than a few students didn’t make it through the curriculum. Those that did finally got to hear an excessively optimistic speech about how they would go forth to conquer the world… or at least their chosen profession.

Today, except in a comparative handful of institutions, education tends to be all about encouragement and reward for often negligible accomplishments. For all the talk about tightening standards, and the like, the functional literacy of American university graduates continues to decline, even while the grades given — and received with little gratitude — has continued to inflate. Given the recent financial crises, it’s also clear that fewer Americans seem to know enough basic mathematics to understand how to calculate the impact of a mortgage payment on their monthly budget… or even what a budget might be.

So… we’ve moved from a more realistic system of education, where the commencement addresses were always falsely encouraging, to an educational regime that tends to exude false hope and low standards, but where commencement addresses are occasionally sobering. Personally, as a curmudgeon and cautious optimist, I think the old system prepared more students for the real world… and back then false hope was limited to an occasional commencement address and not dispensed throughout an entire course of studies.

Recently, especially in dealing with subjects like near-earth-objects or global warming, I’ve come across more and more people whose reaction to these subjects is conditioned by or based on what I’d call the “vastness illusion.” I’m not talking about unintelligent individuals, either, but people who have been highly successful in business, academia, and in other fields requiring education, skills, and experience.

Put simply, the vastness illusion is the belief that the earth, and especially our solar system, is so vast that nothing we as human beings do could possibly affect it in any measurable fashion.

Like many illusory beliefs held by humans over history, there’s a grain of truth behind the vastness illusion. In fact, there’s nothing that a given individual — unaided by technology and the efforts of others — can do that will make a measurable impact on our world. For better or worse, however, there are six billion humans now living on the face of the planet, and those six billion people and their technology, both high and low, do have a significant impact on the world and, in particular, on its climate.

Those six billion people rely on 3.3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats for milk, meat, wool, and other products, and those billions of head of livestock require food, most of it derived from grazing. Presently, over half the grass and rangelands are at least moderately degraded as a result of the more than doubling of livestock production over the past century. Human activities, mainly those associated with agriculture, have increased annual methane emissions from less than 80 million tons in 1860 to over 500 million metric tons a year at present, and those emissions remain in the atmosphere for an average of 12 years, and they are a greenhouse gas that helps warm the atmosphere.

The six billion people and their activities are also adding 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere every year, and the majority of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for close to a century. Both these greenhouse gases have feedback effects on the water vapor that is and has always been the largest greenhouse gas in terms of impact. Even a slight increase in global temperature results in more water vapor. So while the advocates of the “vastness” theory point out that CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are “marginal” in their direct contribution to global warming, they tend to ignore their considerable feedback impact on water vapor, which is anything but marginal.

Admittedly, the earth’s atmosphere is indeed vast, but human technology and human numbers multiply our effects on the world, in a real fashion analogous to compound interest. A percentage point here and another one there, and millions have trouble making their house payments. Well… the same is true about human impacts on our planet… except that if we lose a climate conducive to maintaining our present human cultures, we lose a great deal more than a few million houses, and it’s a different kind of arrogance to insist that our activities have no impact.

The earth is over four billion years old, and yet, in the last few centuries we’ve managed to consume between a third and half the fossil fuels created over that long span… and the earth is too vast for us to have any impact? We’ve hunted scores of species out of existence, and we can make no difference? The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the highest in more than 650,000 years, and that’s been with no large or sustained unusual natural occurrences; the last eleven years have been the among the 13 warmest over the past century and a half… and possibly the longest “warm streak” in thousands of years, if not longer; the northern polar ice cap has been shrinking steadily for forty years, and now is at the smallest extent and thickness in thousands of years, if not longer.

Yet, there are those who insist that the earth is too vast for us to have any measurable impact. What sort of impact do they want before they’re convinced? All of Florida under water? Starvation of billions because of climate shifts? Or would anything matter, because they believe that we’re essentially helpless to affect matters one way or the other?

I suppose that’s comforting, in a way, because it means we can do anything we want without having to be held accountable. Just claim that earth is too vast for us to be responsible, as well as being so vast that we can’t change or affect any major challenge that nature hurls at us. And, of course, that means admitting that, as a species, we’re merely hostages to fate, unable to direct our destiny, poor lost souls, depending on chance or deities to rescue us from disaster. But then, since neither chance nor deities have had a very good record in that department, if the majority of homo sapiens cast their lot with those who claim earth is too vast for us to affect matters, they’re essentially condemning the rest of us to great privation and possibly even marginalization or extinction as a species — and sooner, rather than later.

Not only does that make for lousy government and cultural direction, it’s also a terrible plot for either science fiction or fantasy.

We of the species homo sapiens may not exactly deserve the “sapiens” label, since the terminology homo anecdotus or something similar might be more accurate. We react to what we see and what we hear, and tend to believe stories others tell, rather than facts, mathematics, or statistics.

When I was with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there was such a furor over hazardous waste sites that, effectively, almost the entire political staff of the Agency was canned, including the Administrator, as well as the Secretary of the Interior. While I thought then, and still do, that the issue was badly bungled by the Administration, and that’s putting it mildly, they did have a certain point in believing that people were overreacting. That was because people could see the hazardous waste sites and the handful of children and others who suffered damaged health, as well as the contaminated neighborhoods.

HOWEVER… in perspective, as shown by a later series of studies, the “Superfund” hazardous waste sites were far from the most dangerous environment concerns. Yearly deaths from exposure to household radon were far more dangerous, by five to twenty times, as was asbestos exposure, which has resulted in more than 10,000 deaths annually. Cancer deaths from smoking exceed 300,000 annually, and automobile accidents account for some 45,000. Yet the Superfund political upheaval resulted in Congressional action headed toward impeaching the head of EPA and resulted in the resignations of both the Interior Secretary and the EPA Administrator, and the conviction of an assistant administrator for perjury before Congress.

Another example of this anecdotalism is exemplified by people who refuse to fly because they feel driving is safer. For them, the anecdotal example of the infrequent air crash where 300 people die has a greater impact that the fact that most people are ten thousand times more likely to die in an automobile accident than in a plane crash.

On a far larger scale, take the issue of cometary or asteroidal impacts on the earth. Based on what was seen, i.e., anecdotal evidence, scientists originally estimated that the chance of a “space rock” large enough to create a catastrophic impact on earth, such as the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs, was roughly once every million years. Then, more digging and satellite photography analysis discovered more craters, and the odds were increased to something like once every 100,000 years. Then, several years ago, several scientists made the rather obvious observation that the craters that had been discovered were all where we could see them — on land — but that the earth’s surface is something like seventy percent water. More investigation and correlation with historical and climate records revealed several more near-catastrophic water impacts over the past 10,000 years.

Then, recent astronomic discoveries have revealed that the population of near-earth objects [NEOs] big enough to wipe out cities or larger sections of the planet is approaching more than a thousand, and that their orbits aren’t nearly so stable as was originally surmised. Yet NASA, the U.S. space agency that might be considered to have a certain concern about space-related potential disasters, blithely informed Congress several years ago that any really reliable survey of NEOs would cost $1 billion, about seven percent of its annual budget — or one percent if spread over seven years — and that NASA had no intention of spending money on what is clearly a real threat, nor did it even have a draft contingency plan of what it might do if one of those objects was discovered to be on a collision course with earth, even though some respected astronomers have now estimated that the chances of a city-destroying [or worse] object hitting earth in any given century are about one in ten. In short, since we haven’t seen anything like this recently, except maybe something did explode above Siberia a century ago that we still can’t explain fully, it can’t be as real as the need to pinch pennies for other projects that don’t bear on the survival of our entire species, as well as a few thousand others.

The anecdotal mind-set may function adequately in a hunter-gatherer society, but just as we’ve given up, largely, chipped flint hammers for better tools, isn’t it time to go beyond the anecdotal mind-set, one that’s clearly limited to what we can see, and use a wider and deeper perspective?

Because, over time, if we don’t, earth will see the end of our anecdotal species.

I happened to come across a reader’s comments about the Spellsong Cycle, most of which boiled down to the fact that he liked all my books — except those, because they were “trite.” I mean, after all, writing about sexism and stereotypes is just so old and trite, and the idea of magic being wielded through song in a logical and technical basis is almost as trite, as well. Except… outside of Alan Dean Foster and Louise Marley, I haven’t seen any other decent, in depth, and logical treatments of vocal music as the basis of magic. It’s very rare, as Louise Marley herself has said upon occasion, and as both a noted novelist and a professional opera singer, she does have a bit of expertise in those fields.

That leaves the issue of novels dealing with sexism as perpetuating “trite” stereotypes and something that is so old and last-century, or even so nineteenth century. If anyone thinks that sexism is that out-of-date, then you’re living in a greater fantasy than anything I’ve ever written. A few examples follow. A highly-qualified gynecological oncologist [female] who runs the a division at a top medical school is paid less than a younger colleague [male] with far less academic and occupational qualifications, publications, or surgical expertise. Female full professors at any number of colleges and universities — with equivalent or greater time in rank and professional qualifications — are on average paid more on the level of male associate professors in the same disciplines. A similar discrepancy occurs in the ranks of business executives [when one can even find senior female executives who have managed to break through the glass ceiling]. What is interesting about all this is that these days, if you look at university graduates and post-graduates, women are winning a wide majority of the academic honors, with the exception of a few areas of science.

I’d also note the large number of political pundits who are calling for Senator Clinton to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a long-time Republican, if of the Teddy Roosevelt stripe, I can claim a certain distance… but I would note that in my own twenty-odd years of political involvement I never saw anyone even broach that sort of suggestion to a male candidate. After all, it’s only right that a real man fights it out to the last, isn’t it?

Obviously, with six daughters and a wife all in professional fields, I have a wealth of insights and information from which I can draw, in addition to the statistics that are available to all — and which are largely ignored and minimized.

Now… one of the roles that F&SF fills in our society is to explore ideas and issues and problems, and it’s one of the few writing fields that does so consistently. I’d be the first to agree that readers certainly don’t have to read what they don’t like… and they don’t. Some readers have indicated that they stay away from my work that deals too directly with real-world issues. I can understand that. There are times when I certainly don’t want to deal with them. But issues tend to keep coming up until they are addressed.

After all, some of the Founding Fathers, among them John Adams, suggested that the slavery issue wasn’t going away — and it didn’t. Nor did the civil rights issues that followed. Nor will the issues raised by the current Administration in instigating a war and in suppressing civil liberties in the name of “security.” Nor will the problems raised in a society where almost any working woman has to do more and do it better than her male peers in order to even come close to them in terms of compensation.

Is sexism a long and enduring problem? Absolutely. Does that make it “trite?” Not in the slightest.

A reader can certainly complain about anything, and an author has to take complaints with enough grains of salt to fill all the shakers in my house. But… don’t tell me or anyone else that a real social problem is “trite.” You can tell me that the plot’s lousy, that you don’t want to read about women and their problems, or that the kind of fantasy you really want to read has to have more testosterone in it. You can claim my style’s weak, that the book’s too long or too short, or that the song lyrics should have been better. But when a reader claims that a real and unsolved social issue is trite… that’s a pretty good explanation in itself why that issue hasn’t been resolved… and why I’ll continue to raise the issue at least periodically.

The April 28th issue of the Wall Street Journal carried an article that would have been considered science fiction some thirty years ago — and James Gunn was one of the writers who addressed it then. Now it’s reality. Major non-profit hospitals are demanding payment up-front for expensive treatments when significant portions of the cost of treatment aren’t covered by insurance.

I suspect that the initial reaction of most people will be along the line of “that’s uncaring and cruel.” The problem isn’t uncaring health professionals or even heartless insurance companies, although I have my doubts that the accountants and actuaries operating most insurance operations have anything remotely resembling heart or compassion. The problem is that to deal with life-threatening diseases and conditions that were an automatic death sentence fifty years ago, medicine has become high-tech and expensive, even when pared down to cut-rate costs. Another problem is the cost of malpractice insurance, because in some specialties, malpractice insurance is the largest single expense for a physician, sometimes costing more than the doctor takes home for himself or herself.

Several years ago, my wife shattered her leg and ankle in a freak hiking accident on a very moderate trail. For a complicated, but relatively common surgery and a plate and screws in her leg, the total cost was almost as much as the average annual American worker’s yearly income. That was for something that is comparatively simple in medical terms. Other medical procedures that deal with life-threatening conditions are far more expensive. Cancer surgery and treatments appear to start at over $100,000 and climb rapidly. When somewhere over 40 million Americans don’t have any form of health insurance, wide-spread use of “pay-before-treatment” is effectively a death sentence for those who cannot find a hospital willing to treat them without a healthy deposit, and the numbers of hospitals who will do so — or that can afford to — is rapidly shrinking.

Non-profit hospitals have seen their unpaid bills pile up. Some have unpaid bills totaling $30 million to $50 million annually, up from a tenth of that two or three years ago. They’ve also discovered that collecting on such bills is often impossible. After all, if you don’t make the house payment or the car payment, the lender can foreclose and take them back. What sort of threat can a hospital make? They can refuse future treatment, but they can’t take back their treatment.

If they don’t collect on these bills, then people who can pay their bills — and their insurance companies — will pay more. That has already raised insurance costs and out-of-pocket costs for the financially able, and is likely to fuel future cost increases as well as make health insurance more expensive and less affordable for working Americans. If the government ends up picking up the losses, taxpayers end up paying the bill. All of the increased costs aren’t going to the doctors, nurses, and technicians, but also fund research, more and more elaborate equipment, and insurance.

There’s another fact that complicates matters more. Statistics released last week show that, for the first time, life expectancies are declining in the poorer U.S. counties. While statistics are not readily available, I suspect that in metropolitan areas, the group that may suffer the most is not necessarily those labeled as poor who receive government assistance and Medicaid, but those who earn just enough not to receive health care. For the past half-century, most Americans have taken health care as fairly much a given, but now, for a growing number, it’s not a given, and, equally to the point, regardless of all the political rhetoric, there not only isn’t a simple solution, there may not be one that allows more than basic health care for most Americans — and that may well result in the kind of future that Joe Haldeman suggested in one version of The Forever War — where virtually no medical care was available for the extreme elderly. Given the nature of advanced medical treatments and the resources required, it appears more and more likely that the most advanced medical care will only be universally available to the affluent, just as Gunn forecast over forty years ago… unthinkable as that was then, and certainly still is.