On Self-Publishing

For the last dozen years, I have self-published about ten of my novels, in addition to having been traditionally published through Baen Books in New York. So, I would like to offer you all some of my experiences. But note that I have also worked in two publishing houses—for a university press and a trade book publisher—so I have specialized expertise in copy editing, text conventions, book design, and formatting that other authors may lack.

To self-publish means to sell your books directly to readers through Amazon’s Kindle program, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and/or Apple’s iTunes, rather than submitting a manuscript to a publishing house, generally through an agent, in order to have your book edited, produced, marketed, and sold. The costs of self-publishing are minimal if you are prepared to do a lot of the work yourself, but they can be quite steep if you rely on the new marketplace of professionals ready to help the self-publisher for a fee.

There is an alternative, of course, the old “vanity press.” In this scenario, a firm would represent itself as a publisher and employ editors, designers, and printers, offering to produce finished copies of your book—for an up-front fee. You would then get a truckload of 3,000 or 5,000 books that you would have to market and distribute yourself. That might take less work on your part—and “acceptance” of your manuscript would be guaranteed—except that you would have to work doubly hard on the distribution end to get rid of all those copies. But traditional publishers are becoming a lot more like a vanity press in that they generally don’t make much effort to market your book. Gone are the days when they would pay to send an author—and certainly never a new author or one with a one-off book—on a “book tour” to market their book with press appearances and radio and television interviews. There’s a whole story about why traditional publishing is dying, but that’s not what you want to hear.

The first step in self-publishing is that you need a manuscript. Unless you are a former book editor, like me, or very good with grammar, punctuation, and style as represented in the Chicago Manual of Style (the bible of the publishing industry), you will need to hire a book editor. Having done the job for several years, I do my own editing, usually as I write, although I rely on a circle of “beta readers” to backstop me on plot holes, inconsistencies, and the occasional typo that gets through re-reading the text a dozen times.¹

Book editors may offer structural and substantial advice—things like those plot holes and inconsistencies—or they may just do “period-and-comma” or copy editing. Or sometimes they do both. You can expect to pay a fee per number of words or per page for this service—I’ve heard $10 per page quoted, but that was years ago in another economic time. Prices will vary, as does the quality of the editor’s contribution. But you will probably need an editor, as readers are averse to and give bad reviews to books with obvious holes, errors of fact, inconsistencies, and too-numerous typos.

Once your manuscript is in shape, you need to decide how you will want to publish. In times past (the last ten years or so) self-publishing has meant producing an ebook for online, digital distribution. This involves coding the manuscript in HTML format, dividing it into chapters and other book parts in formal .html file formats, and knitting the whole thing together with a “cascading style sheet” (CSS), a table-of-contents and navigation control file (toc.ncx), and a “manifest” (identifying all those pieces and parts in the folder) into an ePub format. I learned HTML coding, acquired the blank .html file form, learned about ePubs and their parts, and got the small programs that compress the folder accurately and validate the ePub for distribution. And then, about ten years ago, I started making my own ebooks. The software application of choice for producing HTML files is Adobe DreamWeaver—which I only use after I put the basic HTML text treatments (smart quotes, italics, boldface, etc.) into the Word file.²

If you don’t want to do all this, then you can hire a programmer to do it for you—and again, costs and quality vary. I do it myself because I’m finicky, and I control the book’s content and appearance at all times. Also, I can go back and rework the ePub files anytime I find an error without having to apply to a third-party contractor. There are also mechanical means of producing ePubs: some online programs will take your MS Word document or other text and turn it into HTML. But without specifying your embedded formats in a CSS file, they tend to turn every paragraph into a block of text that includes every bit of formatting from Word or other word-processing format in the first 200 to 400 or so characters. That can be extremely confusing to try to go into and edit yourself. And automatic programs sometimes make stupid mistakes. Besides, the formatting you’ve chosen for your manuscript in Word may not be the format and look you want in a published book. Again, I like control.

But that’s for producing ebooks. Kindle and Nook now also offer to produce print-on-demand (POD) paperbacks for you. (I tend to stay away from Apple’s iBooks, because they want you to use their own book formatter, and the end user agreement grants them ownership of the contents—Ewww!) PODs are printed books in the format as “quality” or “trade” paperbacks, with better type and paper than in what we used to call “pulp.” But instead of being printed on a press in a run of 10,000 or more, they are laser-printed and perfect-bound to order when the customer buys the book.

To prepare for POD, you need to create two .pdf (portable document format) files that are sized to your chosen page size. One file is for the internal text, which might be produced on plain white or natural beige or even glossy finished paper; the other is for the cover with front, spine, and back in one file to wrap around the interior pages, and this will be on heavier, shiny or matte finished stock. The software application of choice for producing these .pdf files is Adobe InDesign. To do this yourself, you should be familiar with the mechanics of book design: page numbering, running heads and footers, bastard title, title page, copyright page, etc. (For example, if a verso page is blank following a recto section break, do you give it a running head or do you leave it blank? And do you include the verso page’s putative page number in the numbering of book pages or skip over it?) If you’re not experienced with all this, you need to hire a book designer, which may be different from your HTML programmer and text editor. Or some people may now offer combined services, in one person or as a team.

Having a cover implies cover art. You’ll need a cover image for both the ePub and the POD and for use in displaying your book on the Amazon, B&N, or other distributors’ web pages. I generally find an image I like through istockphoto.com, buy the editorial rights (generally a couple of bucks off my credit account), and work up a title treatment, spine, back blurb, etc. myself. The application of choice for this is Adobe Photoshop. If you’re not skilled at cover design—and I don’t say I’m a skilled artist, just that I do it—then you might hire an artist or see if your preparation team includes this work. Again, quality and costs vary, and hiring someone to paint or compose a unique image for your cover can be quite expensive. In any case, make note of the artwork’s provenance, because you will want to cite it on the copyright page.

Okay, you’ve got all the parts of the ePub and POD together, what comes next? Two things—copyright and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Authors can self-publish without them, but these protect your rights to the product. The ISBN is issued by Bowker, who used to catalogue every U.S. book in print and has now become the country’s repository of ISBNs through myidentifiers.com. You become the publisher when you register with them, and you buy your blank ISBNs singly or in groups (I get ten at a time for $250). You need a separate ISBN for the ePub and the POD versions because the identifier applies to the book’s format and “edition” (also when a later significant revision—not just fixing a type—or version is issued), even if they all include the same text. Bowker will require you to fill out various information choices on the book’s format, publication date, and general audience details for each version.

Copyright is issued by the U.S. Library of Congress, which works mostly online these days at copyright.gov. Filing copyright for a book online costs $35 (more if you work through mail-in application), and you do this once for all versions, because you are establishing that you own the words and, if applicable, the cover art but not the book design or format. You will then be required to submit the “best” copy of the work, which means two copies of the POD in actual paper, if you are making one, and otherwise the electronic ePub.

Then you publish—and this part is actually “free.” Kindle, Nook, and iTunes don’t charge up-front for their services, but they will require you to register with them and sign a distribution agreement. You are the publisher, not them, and you are liable for actions against the work like defamation and copyright infringement. Your distributors are just making available the book content that you have supplied. Generally, the agreement also states that you will not sell the book for less on another platform, although Kindle Direct Publishing has programs to temporarily reduce the list price by offering specials. You can also install choices, such as digital rights management (DRM) that keep buyers of your ePub from trading the file around with their friends, although some of these services also support limited sharing and some will even let the reader “rent” the book and then return it (Ewww!).

With all of these distributors, you submit the ePub and PDF files (if you are making a POD), along with cover art, blurb, author’s bio, details about the intended market and audience, and keywords to help people find your book.³ In each case, the distributor holds your book electronically and only sends it—or makes a one-off laser print and perfect-bound copy of your POD—when the reader purchases your book. By not holding an inventory of printed books, like traditional publishing, these services get around the inventory taxes that, subsequent to a case called Thor Power Tools in U.S. tax court, have eaten the traditional publishing business alive. They also get around the issue of shipping loads of books to stores on consignment and taking back “returns” or declaring them as “remainders” if the books don’t sell.

The payment you get with publishing through Kindle, Nook, and iTunes is a “royalty” on each sale that might be as much as 65% or 70% or more of the cover price. You can name any price you like, but I prefer to keep mine small. I price my ePubs at $2.99—about what we used to pay for a paperback, back when. My PODs I price at a buck or two above the distributor’s cost to produce, which can be quite high depending on page length and choice of paper. My novels cost about $12 to $15 per copy to produce, compared to just pennies on a printing press doing a run of 10,000 to 20,000 copies. All of these costs are stated when you set up your book, and the price is automatically adjusted for sales to foreign markets, including VATs and other taxes. I’m happy getting a buck or two per book sold, which is better than getting the 5% royalties I received from traditional paperback publishing. But, as in traditional publishing, you still have to do your own promotion and marketing.

Promoting your books is another cost—more in terms of time than money. I maintain this site, www.thomastthomas.com, as my author’s website, which I keep active with blogging, formerly every week and now a couple of times a month. I copy the blogs to a blogging service, www.blogspot.com, to which people can subscribe, and advertise them with images and blurbs on my Goodreads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook pages. That’s all pretty standard. I probably should be angling for podcasts and book reviews, but I don’t. What the secret may be to successfully marketing your book to a wider audience to win fame, fortune, and acclaim, nobody knows for sure. It generally helps if you are already a celebrity, but who among us is that?

Self-publishing is a process that requires almost as much skill as writing a good book in the first place. You can also find good editors, programmers, page formatters, and artists—or services that offer all four in one package—but they will cost you. And you can also find a number of less-than-good services that prey on the huge market of people who want to get their book published and won’t know the difference.

Since I am basically a one-man-band of self-publishing, I sometimes offer to my friends the option of having me edit and prepare their books for free, because I’m interested in helping them. Or because I’m interested in the project. But I’d rather write my own books than set up in business to do this for a fee.

1. And don’t get me started on autocorrect and the grammar and spelling checks incorporated in most word-processing software like MS Word. They have a limited and mostly obtuse sense of vocabulary and the grammatical and punctuational instincts of a mean-spirited third-grade teacher. Yes, there are rules for these things—and a professional author knows when to break them.

2. Before this, in the decades between my last traditionally published novel and my first ebook, I would turn the MS Word manuscript into a large, Adobe Acrobat .pdf file and offer it for free (“I supply the text, you supply the paper”) on my author’s website.

3. I’ve seen Kindle offer to make an ePub out of a submitted word-processing text or POD files, but I’ve never tried it. Again, mechanical conversions can make mistakes, and I’m picky.

Muckers

Last time, I wrote about John Brunner’s prophetic vision of a society saturated with digital technology in The Shockwave Rider. Now, I want to address his even scarier vision of social crowding in Stand on Zanzibar. The title refers to the fact that, at the start of the novel, the Earth’s population could be accommodated by standing shoulder to shoulder on the African island of Zanzibar; at the end of the novel, those along the shoreline would be pushed into the water.

One of the background motifs of the novel is the phenomenon of random “muckers.” The term comes from the word “amok” and describes the state of mind of people who commit terrible massacres, not as agents of the state but as unpredictable acts of social violence. In the United States, these would be people shooting up schools or firing into crowds with rifles or pistols; in the rest of the world, they wade in with knives or swords and start hacking and slashing. The carnage continues until someone manages to put down the mucker.

The reason for this running amok is simple: these people have been pushed too far by social pressures, by the complexity of living in a technological world to which they are no longer attached, by the frustration of not getting their most basic needs met, and by growing anger and confusion.

Does this sound familiar?

It isn’t necessarily the guns in America that cause mass shootings—although it is easier to pick up a loaded weapon and pull the trigger than to unsheathe and swing a sword again and again. Still, the will that raises the sword against unaware human flesh or pulls the trigger to tear it apart is different from the mindset of a soldier defeating an enemy or defending his homeland. In either case, the mucker wielding the weapon is fighting demons that don’t exist within the people they are killing. And these are demons that, apparently, existed only in potential form fifty or more years ago when Brunner wrote his book.

I grew up on the East Coast: born in New Jersey, started grammar school on Long Island, then finished and went on to junior high in a suburb of Boston—genteel, urbanized places full of sheltered, middle-class kids. But my grandfather was judge in a small town in central Pennsylvania, and he was also a gun collector. My mother had been a member of her high-school rifle team and a crack shot. The judge taught my brother and me about firearms and gun etiquette by shooting a bee-bee gun in his basement target range. When I started high school myself, after my father was promoted and transferred to Western Pennsylvania, I entered a different world—different from suburban Boston and from anything that exists today.

On a Monday in October—if I remember correctly—I showed up at school, and all the other boys and half the girls were missing from class. When I asked about this, I learned they were out “getting their buck,” because it was the first day of deer season. And that afternoon they started drifting in. The boys would be driving their pickup trucks with rifles visible in the gun rack against the rear window—or they would bring their weapons into the school and stow them in their lockers. And yes, in the mid-’60s, the school still had a rifle team and a range in the basement under the administrative corridor.

These weren’t pellet guns, either, but the .30-06, scoped and accurate to about a quarter mile. This was the civilian version of the military’s M-1 Garand rifle, standard issue for riflemen in World War II. And most of the boys would also have had access to their father’s old service pistols or to souvenir pistols from the European or Pacific theaters in that war. It would have been so easy for any one of them to go up into the woods behind the football field and plink the entire scrimmage line during practice—and take out a couple of cheerleaders, too, before anyone could figure out what was going on.¹

They didn’t, of course. They wouldn’t have, because everyone was trained in gun etiquette and took their weapon seriously.² And they knew their fathers would have tanned their hides if they even joked about it. Besides, much as we were all teenagers, subject to the usual hormonal winds, tantrums, and moods of adolescents, none of us was so angry as to do such an unspeakable thing.

So, what has changed today? Maybe it’s access to weapons by teenagers in urbanized settings who were never taught a gun’s purpose for hunting or defense at need. Maybe it’s the social isolation of looking at screens all day rather than interacting with real, live people, the sort who have feelings and express them in person and in your face. Maybe it’s social crowding, being around too many people with too many demands, but still strangers because they, too, are looking at their screens. Maybe it’s because we’re slipping off the edges of Zanzibar. But I don’t think banning guns and ammunition is the answer. Then the angry people will just drive their cars into a crowd—or pick up a sword.

1. Of course, many of the kids in the suburban schools around Boston and New York would also have had access to souvenir pistols from the war. They didn’t shoot up their schools, either.

2. I remember our classmates ridiculing a young hunter who tried to shoot his deer with a “pumpkin ball,” a hollow lead slug fired from a shotgun. It makes a fist-sized hole on entry and blows out the carcass on exit, destroying the value of the meat. And it’s cruel and stupid. This was a sign of the boy’s bad attitude that encompassed both crazy and mean.

Shockwave Riders

John Brunner (1934-95) was a science fiction writer who came, I think, the closest to predicting our current future. He excelled in foretelling the role of the individual in relation to the mass psychosis of crowds. And today we seem to be living in the world of The Shockwave Rider.

In that novel, the main character is a savant with databases, able to use his phone to hack in, write himself a new identity, and move on—usually after a serial catastrophe he has created for himself. He also uses, or manipulates, the people around him to his benefit. In the novel’s opening sequence, he is a preacher running an old-fashioned tent revival with a digital presence. One of his side gigs is operating a Delphi Poll—a concept that I think the current digital world is ready for.

The Delphi Poll is based on the old country-store bean-counting raffle. The clerk would fill a glass jar with dried beans and charge people a certain sum, say a dollar, to guess the number of beans. When the time limit was up, the clerk would open the jar and count the beans, and the person who guessed closest to the actual number would win the pool. In the story, Brunner’s premise is that if you averaged all the guesses of all the players, you would come to the number almost immediately, without having to count the beans. Some fools would guess “two,” and some would guess “a million.” But the majority would instinctively home in on the actual number. In Brunner’s words, applying this tendency of large groups of people in answering online questions, “While nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.”

I’ve often wondered why somebody hasn’t started—and made a fortune at—conducting their own Delphi Poll about both esoteric and everyday questions. But I guess the work of political pollsters comes close.

Which brings us to the “work” of today’s online influencers.

I recently read an article about the “Keithadilla.” Apparently, someone on social media proposed making a Chipotle quesadilla with a few extra ingredients. For a lark, the cooks at a local Chipotle franchise bought the ingredients, made the concoction, and sold it to customers. And those who bought it liked it well enough to spread the word. Soon customers all over the country were asking for the Keithadilla and giving their local restaurants one-star reviews if they couldn’t supply it. Soon, Chipotle was forced to make and sell the Keithadilla nationwide and add it to their corporate menu.

Online democracy, or the work of a clever manipulator? You tell me. But John Brunner would have loved it. We are all shockwave riders now.

The Subjunctive Mood

One of the reasons I love the English language is its use—at least for those of us old enough to have been taught proper grammar—of the subjunctive mood. Subjunctive is a step back from reality. It’s a way of speaking about things that are not cold, hard facts but possibilities, potentials, or doubtful conditions. It’s the world of maybe and of if-then clauses.

When I say “I can go to the store,” I am stating a definite capability. The store exists, I exist, and my ability to move from here—wherever “here” might be—to there is a demonstrated fact. I am also signaling my willingness to go. But if I say, “I could go to the store,” we are in a whole ’nother reality. Then my ability to go to the store is contingent upon some yet-to-be revealed conditional clause. Maybe I am prevented from going by a prior commitment. Maybe the way is blocked. Maybe I don’t want to go in the first place. The situation is doubtful. If … and perhaps then.

This is a world we all inhabit. That is, we adult humans inhabit it but, generally, young children, babies, and dogs do not. For them, the world is concrete. A child wants his candy or a particular toy now, with no irritating prior conditions. The dog wants a walk or a treat without any doubtful circumstances. Acceptance of conditionals is a point of view that comes with age and, generally, with the experience of repeated disappointment.

The subjunctive is one of three grammatical moods in English—and in several other Indo-European-based languages as well. The other moods are the indicative, heard in that initial “I can go to the store” or “I am walking,” and the imperative, heard in “Go to the store!” or “Walk!”

Use of the subjunctive has fallen into disregard these days. Students are no longer taught formal grammar or even the basics of alphabet and sounds, called “phonics.” Instead, starting sometime in the 1980s with a burst of pedagogical inspiration, they are taught to read by something called “whole language.” I have never learned exactly what “whole language” entails, but I gather that it involves looking at words in the context of the current sentence and paragraph, recognizing word shapes from the letter forms, and intuiting their meaning from surrounding words. This would be opposed to the “A, ah, apple,” “B, buh, ball,” “C, kuh, cat” approach, which most of us Boomers learned in grammar school, sounding out the words, followed by learning and memorizing their meanings, and then passing spelling tests.¹

One point of confusion is that the subjunctive uses recognizable verb forms in what looks like an ungrammatical way. For example, “I suggest you be quiet” looks odd, with the “be” harkening back to an antique, countrified English, like “Argh! We be pirates!” Or people want to add “to” and make it an infinitive: “I suggest you to be quiet.” Or for another example, “If he go to the store …” rather than “goes,” which would be the indicative present, sounds like an error in matching subject and verb in number (“go” in the indicative works with the plural “they,” not the singular “he”). Ultimately, most people just give up and use the familiar indicative, living forever in the concrete present.

Or, in the latter example, they might add an unnecessary “helping verb” like should, would, or might to make it conditional, as in “If he should go to the store …” This preserves the sense of tentative intention, the subjunctive mood, but is excess verbiage for those who know their grammar.

The subjunctive being in the realm of possibility and probability reminds me of quantum mechanics. There, every event is only in the realm of possibility or probability until it is actually observed. A subatomic particle has no particular place or trajectory, no spin state or charge, until you bounce another particle off it or apply some other detection system to observe what is really going on. And for many observations, like position and trajectory, the act of observing itself changes the subsequent state. So most of the statements in quantum mechanics, if rendered into English instead of mathematics, would be in the subjunctive mood.

Quantum mechanics renders this element of probability as a “wave function.” Mathematically, this is a way of saying that a specific property of a particle is either one thing or another, based on the probabilities of each instance occurring, and held in suspension until an observation assigns the actual property, and the wave function collapses into one state or the other. It’s called a “wave function” because it originally applied to the phase, direction, and amplitude of the wave motions exhibited by a vibrating, moving particle, based on its energy. But the mathematical wave function can apply to other unobserved states, like charge and spin. In the thought experiment involving Schrödinger’s cat, the cat’s experience of being either alive or dead inside the box would be expressed as a wave function based on the half-life of the atomic nucleus triggering the release of the poison. And the wave function collapses into one state or the other when the box is opened and the cat is observed.

In the world of the very small, the quantum world, a language that encompasses hypotheticals is necessary because our knowledge of what’s going on is dependent on interruptive observations. In the world of the everyday, we can trust that the things we observe by perceiving, say, sunlight bouncing off their surfaces does not change their nature or position. But in the world of the very large, such as astronomical observations of distant stars and galaxies, we are back to hypotheticals. The stars beyond our local neighborhood are shown to us only in light waves (and now in gravity waves, too) that may have been propagated some hundreds or thousands of years ago—or millions and billions in the case of distant galaxies. This ancient light is a look back in time. And when it finally reaches Earth and our telescopes and eyes, it may no longer represent a true occurrence. We can only speak probabilistically about what might be occurring now at great distances.² So the stars we see in the night sky live in the subjunctive mood until they one day visibly flicker and die.

The subjunctive mood should actually be the preferred language of science: hypothetical and probabilistic until proven by experiment.

1. “Whole language” reminds me of the scene in The Music Man where Professor Harold Hill urges his beginning band students to “think Brahms.”

2. Einstein would say that, given the distortions that gravity places on space and time, it is meaningless to talk of “now” in any universal sense.

Clownface, Masquerades, and Assumed Identities

This is my brain following a random path toward a real thought. So bear with me. What is a clown?

I mean really, what do the full image, aspect, and persona of a clown represent? Are clowns a distinct race of mythical beings? Certainly, they are always a human person dressed up in a particular style. But are clowns representations of imaginary figures, like the black-robed, hooded figure of the Grim Reaper with his scythe? (And why is Death always a male?) Are they like the kachina spirits of the Native Americans? Clown makeup and costumes are varied—in the professional circus, a performer’s face painting is even registered and protected—but the genus or type is always recognized. If I mention a red bulb nose, orange string wig, and absurdly long shoes, you know that I’m speaking about some kind of clown.

The actual presentation of the modern circus and rodeo clowns goes back to the Italian Commedia dell’arte of the 1500s. The theater companies back then employed eight to ten stock characters, each with specific features of face and costume, so that the audience would know what to expect. Not all all of the characters were meant to be funny, but all had their place in familiar human situations that were always played for a laugh. And the servant characters—Pierrot, Harlequin, and Pulcinella—were generally the perpetrators of madness. That is, clowns.

Still, over time, and with the aid of the traveling circus in both Europe and North America, the clown itself has become a stock figure. Under the Big Top, clowns provide comic relief between the more daring and dangerous acts like the lion tamers and acrobats. On the rodeo circuit, clowns rush into the action to distract a loose horse or bull and protect the riders. Clowns are now physical actors with no actual speaking parts. They are visually funny while other comedians make jokes with their words and facial expressions.

And for some people, clowns are scary. Clowns are made up to be exotic and absurd. They pantomime humor but with a subtle edge of intent, sometimes of meanness—as all humor can be used meanly, to ridicule and to hurt. To some sensibilities, the exaggerated lines and shapes drawn on an otherwise human face, the essence of a mask to hide the underlying identity, are disturbing. Perhaps the best representation of this feeling of dread is the evil smile of Pennywise the Clown—not really a clown or a human being at all—in Stephen King’s novel It.

What makes us feel uneasy about clowns is also what makes us uneasy at a masquerade ball or a Halloween party. Or, let’s face it, with the whole concept of actors and acting, and why they have been disrespected as a profession—praised but not generally trusted—by polite society. We are accustomed in our daily lives to seeing a person’s face and believing we can tell what that person is thinking and feeling, who they are, and what they will do. We believe that the eyes are the “windows of the soul” and that we can read meaning there. We also believe we can trust smiles and laughs in the people we meet. Acting hides this. Masks hide this. Masks not only conceal identity but they also remove humanity. And a clown’s heavy and exaggerated makeup is more of a mask than the powder, eye shadow, and lipstick that many women put on in the morning.

And there, for many of us, is the difficulty when we encounter a transgender person, a transvestite or a drag queen,¹ or even a markedly effeminate man or masculine woman. Our sense that we can tell a person’s true being just by looking at him or her is skewed.

We generally take a person’s sex—male or female, pick one—to be an essential part of their character. We consider it the base, ground-level, first-order characteristic of a person’s makeup. Check this box first: man or woman? And a man made up and dressed to look like a woman, or who acts like and believes he is a woman, befuddles this sense. Even if he has had hormone changes and surgeries so that in some physical dimensions he matches a female body type—or a woman who has undergone similar changes to emulate a male body—we still feel that something is amiss. The width of the hips, the ratio of body fat, some subtle missing part of the whole presentation cues us to the fact that what we are looking at is not what we were led to expect.

When we see a clown, we know that we are not looking at a separate species of being, but a human person who has put on grease paint, string wig, and floppy shoes. We accept the change as striving for a particular type of presentation. But when we see a man sculpted and painted like a woman, or a woman pared and groomed like a man, the presentation strikes deeper into our awareness.

It doesn’t just confuse and disturb us. It makes us feel that our sense of basic human nature has been betrayed. It makes us feel threatened.

1. And are not drag queens sometimes played for comic effect? Certainly, their heavy makeup and exaggerated characteristics are generally played for laughs.

Not All That Intelligent

I have been writing fiction about artificial intelligence (AI) for most of my adult life.¹ In all cases, my intelligences—whether a viral computer spy or a robot pilot from the 11th millennium—are what one science fiction author calls “a little man with a machine hat.” That is, they are multi-capable, self-aware programs able to function like a human being, carry on conversations, have thoughts and opinions, and occasionally tell jokes. The only difference is they aren’t made out of gooey carbon compounds. That is, they’re just another set of fictional characters.

With all the talk and all the hype about AI these days, it is useful to understand what the current crop of programs is and is not. They are not Skynet, “deciding our fate in a microsecond.” They are not functionally equivalent to human intelligence: that is, they are not thought processors capable of thinking through complicated, real-life situations, perceiving implications, and making distinctions and decisions. They do not have a lifetime of experience or what we humans would call “common sense.” They are ambitious children. And they are not all that intelligent. They are also designed—at least for now—for a single function and not the generalized array of capabilities we think of as comprising human-scale intelligence.

I recently heard an interview with Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna of IBM. He said that programming the Watson computer that became a Jeopardy champion took six months. That was a lot of work for a machine to compete in the complicated but essentiallyt trivial task of becoming a game show contestant. IBM is now selling the Watson model as a way for corporations to analyze their vast amounts of data, like aircraft maintenance records or banking operations. Artificial intelligence in these applications will excel, because computers have superhuman scales of memory, analytical capability, and attention span. But Krishn cautioned that in programming an artificial intelligence for corporate use, the operators must be careful about the extent and quality of the database it is fed. In other words, the programmer’s maxim still holds true: “garbage in/garbage out.”

I can imagine that AI systems will take on large sets of data for corporate and eventually for personal use. They will manage budgets, inventories, supply chains, operating schedules, contract formation and execution, and other functions where the data allow for only a limited number of interpretations. They will be very good at finding patterns and anomalies. They will do things that human minds would find repetitive, complicated, boring, and tiresome. They will be useful adjuncts in making business decisions. But they will not replace human creativity, judgment, and intelligence. Anyone who trusts a computer more than an experienced human manager is taking a huge risk, because the AI is still a bright but ambitious child—at least until that particular program has twenty or thirty years of real-world experience under its belt.

Of recent concern to some creative and commercial writers is the emergence of the language processor ChatGPT, licensed by OpenAI, whose investors include Microsoft. Some people are saying that this program will replace functions like story, novel, and script writers, advertising copywriters, documentation and technical writers, and other “content creators.” Other people are saying, more pointedly, that such programs are automated plagiarism machines. People who have actually used the programs note that, while they can create plausible and readable material, they are not always to be trusted. They sometimes make stuff up when they can’t find a factual reference or a model to copy, being free to hallucinate in order to complete a sentence. They freely exercise the gift of gab. However, I expect that this tendency can be curbed with express commands to remain truthful to real-world information—if any such thing exists on an internet saturated with misinformation, disinformation, and free association.²

The reality is that ChatGPT and its cohort of language processors were created to pass the Turing Test. This was a proposal by early computer genius Alan Turing that if a machine could respond to a human interlocutor for a certain length of time in such a way that the human could not tell whether the responses were coming from another human being or a computer, then the machine would be ipso facto intelligent. That’s a conclusion I would challenge, because human intelligence represents a lot more than the ability to converse convincingly. Human brains were adapted to confront clues from the world of our senses, including sight, sound, balance (or sense of gravity and acceleration), tactile and temperature information, as well as the words spoken by other humans. Being able to integrate all this material, draw inferences, create internal patterns of thought and models of information, project consequences, and make decisions from them is a survival mechanism. We developed big brains because we could hear a rustle in the grass and imagine it was a snake or a tiger—not just to spin yarns around the campfire at night.

The Turing model of intelligence—language processing—has shaped the development of these chat programs. They analyze words and their meanings, grammar and syntax, and patterns of composition found in the universe of fiction, movie scripts, and other popular culture. They are language processors and emulators, not thought processors. And, as such, they can only copy. They cannot create anything really new, because they have no subconscious and no imaginative or projective element.

In the same way, AI develped for image processing, voice recognition, or music processing can only take a given input—a command prompt or a sample—and scan it against a database of known fields, whether photographs and graphic art, already interpreted human speech, or analyzed music samples. Again, these programs can only compare and copy. They cannot create anything new.

In every incidence to date, these AI programs are specialty machines. The language processors can only handle language, not images or music. The Watson engines must be programmed and trained in the particular kinds of data they will encounter. None of the artificial intelligences to date are multi-functional or cross-functional. They cannot work in more than one or two fields of recognizable data. They cannot encounter the world. They cannot hear a tiger in the grass. And they cannot tell a joke they haven’t heard before.

1. See, for example, my ME and The Children of Possibility series of novels.

2. The language processors also have to be prompted with commnands in order to create text. As someone who has written procedural documentation for pharmaceutical batches and genetic analysis consumables, I can tell you that it’s probably faster to observe the process steps and write them up yourself than try to describe them for an AI to put into language. And then you would have to proofread its text most carefully.

Class in America

In my novel Revolt on the Iron Planet I describe a transport ship that travels a continuous loop between Earth, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter. The ship has three concentric rings of passenger cabins, with the apparent centrifugal gravity increasing as the passenger moves outward from the ship’s core. And these rings are graded and sold as First, Second, and Third Class, just like a 20th century transatlantic passenger ship.

I thought hard about this in the writing. Class separation based on the comfort levels of different gravity effects seemed appropriate, but what was the justification? Why would you have passenger classes on a spaceship traveling in the 22nd century? Why do we have First Class, Business Class, and Coach on airliners today? Why is there this distinction among classes of people in a supposedly egalitarian society?

For one thing, these are not classes in the traditional European sense, where the best is reserved for the noble born, and the rest goes to the upcoming merchant class and the lowly peasants. These are classes where the level of service is based on who can—or is willing to—pay. And why not? If an airline can get a thousand dollars or more per ticket for a seat at the front of the plane with a few inches more leg room—leg room that would hardly accommodate a second row of seats back in Coach—why wouldn’t they? That surcharge on the basic flying fare helps defray the costs of running the jet and perhaps makes the seats in back a little less expensive and more attractive to the infrequent flyers. And kicking in a few extra bucks for a glass or two of complementary, cut-rate champagne and a dollop of indifferent caviar doesn’t make up the price differential.

Why wouldn’t a cruise-ship line charge more for cabins on the outside perimeter of the deck, port and starboard, with a view of the ocean or the waterfront when the ship docks? And the added cost of providing a better table in the lounge or a few entertainment perks doesn’t make a dent in the return on the ticket.

And when those tickets are sold, no one is looking into the buyer’s pedigree or class standing—just his or her ability to pay. Yes, those tickets are usually bought by the wealthy, the famous, and those for whom an extra thousand or two on a flight to Paris means nothing. But they can also be bought by those of limited means who for once want a little luxury in their lives.

I stand just over six-foot-four and would benefit from those extra inches in First Class, although I can do without the champagne and fish eggs. I could actually, somewhat afford the two or three thousand extra dollars on the overall cost of my vacation. But I can put up with the discomfort of a small seat and crowded conditions for three, eight, or twelve hours because I have better things to do with that money than have one easy day out of the rest of my life. And, as they say, First Class passengers don’t get to their destination any faster than the rest of us, although they usually have the perk of deplaning first.

So class in America is not about distinctions of birth and family but about ability to pay. Each of us values our time, our comfort, and our visible status differently. And if the airline or the cruise line, the hotel or the restaurant, can make a few extra dollars by selling more space and a few amenities to those who think they matter, why not? It makes the experience less costly for the rest of us. And no one has to tug their forelock—except the waiters and cabin stewards up front there, and they are well paid for the gesture.

Human Agency II

Recently I wrote about human freedoms in the form of a commandment, about not denying the agency of a human being.¹ And that makes good sense when dealing with the average person in the average political or social situation. But is there ever a time when someone or a society may—in fact must—deny another person their right to act?

I think we can agree that a human being always has the right to think and to speak as a free agent. This right includes the unfettered ability to perceive one’s environment, interpret to the best of their ability what is going on, and make judgements about what they see and hear. And it includes the right of the rest of us to hear what that person is saying or to ignore it, interpret their meaning if we choose to, and judge it as proper and useful or not.

But the right to act as a free agent may be circumscribed under certain conditions. I can think of at least two.

Questions of Competence

Let’s start with the lowest form of competence. A person who is brain dead cannot be granted the benefit of human agency. They will at best be unconscious and under intensive care, lest their body die for lack of nourishment or other necessary functions. Beyond that, brain dead equals dead, and the dead have no agency.

A person who has lost their conscious reason, their ability to perceive and interpret, to remember and function in even the simplest, least demanding setting, whether through stroke or a cognitive disease like Alzheimer’s, will be gravely disabled. They may not be able to feed, bathe, and clothe themselves. They may be under periodic or constant supervision. In these cases, society has ruled that the person may be placed in an environment where care can be given. And, for their own protection, that environment may be locked against their leaving, because they may not understand that they cannot survive on their own in the outside world. If such a person was formerly deemed competent but now is demonstrably not so, then the courts or other societal function may assign a conservator to inventory the person’s assets and distribute them for the person’s benefit. This is a humane denial of a person’s agency.

Higher up the competence scale is the person whose actions intermittently reflect a loss of what the rest of society considers “conscious reason.” Such a person may have ideas that others do not share, or they may see and hear sounds, people, or influences in their environment that other, more “normal” people do not perceive. They may, in the language of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code 5150, become a “danger to self or others.”² In California and eight other states, such a person may be taken into custody and involuntarily held for observation. In California, the initial observation period is 72 hours, after which the person must be brought before an administrative law judge, and the custodial authority must show why the person may be held for a longer period. That longer period is for a total of 14 days, after which another hearing may be held, and the involuntary hold may then be extended for a further 14 days. After that, the person must be released, regardless of his or her mental condition.³

Whether people who are mentally different from the rest of society—delusional, hallucinating, psychotic, or even violent—should be restrained against their will is a question that is currently under debate. We used to “institutionalize” them, locking them away in hospitals where they might or might not get appropriate care but would certainly be given heavy medication to keep them docile and quiet. That is now considered a form of abuse. But many people with a severe mental illness, a brain disorder that distorts their thinking and leads to inappropriate actions, usually also have a condition called “anosognosia,” which leads them to think that they are not ill and do not need help. And many civil rights organizations defend the human agency of mentally ill people and protest against their involuntary treatment, even under a court order, and even if that means they will be homeless and scavenge for food, clothing, and shelter.

And at the top of the competence scale, at least in my view, is the person who abuses alcohol and/or mind-altering drugs so that they are temporarily impaired and, perhaps over a long period of continuous use, permanently mentally damaged. Such a person may have the ability to resist the temptation to use their drug of choice, to control their usage, or even wean themselves into a state of continued sobriety. Whether they chose not to exercise that ability—being granted complete human agency—and so decline into disability, or they choose to exercise it and so become a consistently rational and dependable human being, is a question of will and intent.

Questions of Hostile Action

An unimpaired person may still act in ways that the rest of society deems unacceptable. They may have the use of their conscious reason, but they choose to violate the rules that the larger society has put in place. They defraud people, they abuse others in their care, they steal, they murder, and they disobey the driving laws with harmful consequences. It would be nice if the rest of us could have a frank discussion with them and show why such actions are not to everyone’s benefit—including theirs. But such people, whom we call “criminals,” have a different sense of themselves and their own rights, usually against the rights of others.

It is proper to examine their allegedly criminal actions in a court of law, to give them a chance to explain themselves and show why they should not have been charged or should not be convicted: they didn’t do it, didn’t have complete competency, were under some compulsion, or have other reasons. Our laws are designed to give such people the benefit of doubt. And it is human to give them a chance to make amends and not continue in their previous course of action.

But once a person has proven that giving them complete autonomy and granting them unfettered human agency will only lead to further infractions, then society may be required—indeed must be required—to remove them from commingling with the rest of us. Exile to another country that might be willing to take them—where they will have continued freedom and agency to pursue their interests—is one possible course. Incarceration under punitive conditions, where agency is curtailed and leaving is not an option, is another option.

Whether a person is gravely incompetent or intentionally hostile, restricting their freedom of action and so denying their human agency in whole or in part would not then be a violation of the commandment to preserve human agency. Every rule has its exceptions, and that is what makes human beings the species that has conscious reason in the first place.

1. See Human Agency from January 29, 2023.

2. WIC 5150 also includes the state of being gravely disabled, which has been interpreted as a person being “unable to provide for his or her basic personal needs for food, clothing, or shelter” due to a mental health disorder or impairment. However, this condition is sometimes subject to interpretation, whereby a homeless person who scavenges in a garbage can or eats roadkill is considered able to provide for his or her food and so is not disabled.

3. This total of 28 days is the basis for most court-ordered drug and alcohol rehabilitation processes under involuntary conditions. To involuntarily hold a person for longer would require a criminal prosecution—and that’s a whole ‘nother court case.

Slightly Aspergic

Most human conditions—a person’s physical construction and endowments, their enzymatic and chemical orientation, their innate nature, their reactions and tendencies—are on a spectrum. One person may be mildly reactive to an allergen, which merely causes itching or discomfort. Another can be severely reactive, which causes the windpipe to close down, the autonomic nervous system to pause, and the person to go into shock that can lead to death. And at the same time many of us, maybe most of us, are not affected at all. Almost everything in life is on a spectrum.

True confessions time, I am mildly, slightly aspergic. That means I have—by self-diagnosis, based on my preferences for and reactions to most social interactions—a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome. I sometimes don’t understand what people might want or need, or “where they’re coming from.” I don’t feel anxiety when I have to spend the day alone, cut off from the signals of human companionship. On the other hand, I don’t feel all that comfortable in large parties full of people I hardly know, and I will not willingly walk into a crowd of total strangers.

I remember one of my first experiences of a large-group dynamic. In junior high, which in my town was a mixed junior and senior high school, I was sent along with everyone else into a pep rally for an upcoming varsity game. It was about a thousand kids sitting in bleachers and, prompted by the beat of the marching band and calisthenics of the cheerleaders, screaming their heads off. I was looking around, trying to take it all in. One of my friends sitting next to me noticed this, grabbed me by the shirt front, and yelled in my face, “Scream, Thomas!” And I looked at him in puzzlement and asked, “Why?”

Whatever group dynamic was driving those young people, age about thirteen to eighteen, into a form of hysteria—I wasn’t feeling it. I might have been an anthropologist at a tribal dance—interested in the experience, but not standing up to participate.

This does not mean I don’t understand human nature or the emotions and biases that drive human behavior. I can see things from another person’s point of view—or at least what I think is their point of view, as I may be wrong. But I am not always mindful of their needs and intentions. You might think that this would be a handicap for someone who wants to write fiction about human beings, but the reality is quite the opposite. When I am writing from a character’s point of view, I am simultaneously experiencing and creating something that is totally inside my head. A lot of writers are slightly aspergic: we’re wired into our own thinking. We can also be good communicators, because we can examine a thought process for ourselves, try it out on the imaginary people inside our heads,¹ and then spread it to the world.

Asperger’s syndrome used to be thought of as a separate diagnosis from autism. Current psychological thinking places Asperger’s at the higher, more functional, more “normal”—if you will, and if you are one of those “habitually normal” people—end of a spectrum. And that spectrum runs from the deep end, which marks a debilitating isolation from human touch and communication, such that the child or adult lives totally inside his or her own head and doesn’t even see other human beings as animate, sensing, let alone like-minded creatures, up through various levels of misunderstanding and discomfort, to the shallower end, where we who are “slightly aspergic” fail to pick up on certain social cues, sometimes fail to get a joke, and don’t feel comfortable in crowds full of screaming people.

The point of this mediation is that, unlike certain skills and practices, a more sociable nature or a better tolerance for social situations cannot be trained or taught. This is that innate physical and chemical structure, hard-wired into the brain and not the result of an improper or incompetent upbringing. Being perfectly in tune with social situations is like having perfect pitch. Some people can hear a note and say, “Oh, that’s a D-flat,” or “That’s a C-minor chord.” I can only tell you that one note is higher than another, or that one combination of notes is “a little weirder or more discordant” than another. But no amount of listening, paying attention, or really trying will get me to identify the notes on a piano or violin by their sound alone. I am not wired that way.

Similarly, being mildly autistic or deeply aspergic is a case of brain wiring. An autistic person is not uncaring or unfeeling, or simply not paying attention, or has failed to learn human expression as a baby. They don’t have the wiring to pick up on, or sometimes even be aware of, social cues. They can understand intellectually that other people might have this ability, but they don’t have it themselves. In the same way I can understand intellectually that some people have the skill and coordination to dribble a basketball. But when I try it, my hand gets either ahead of or behind the bounce, and the ball gets away. My brain has a built-in stutter reaction to certain repetitive motions, and that’s hard-wired.²

What the rest of us—and I’m speaking to you “normies” here—have to understand is that the mildly aspergic, and those who are more deeply positioned on the spectrum, are not the way we are for lack of trying, or lack of caring, or because we are stupid. For those of us with full-on, diagnosed autism, it’s like we were born into a world where everyone else is speaking Chinese or Japanese, and we simply don’t know the language. Social interaction is difficult, exasperating, takes a lot of energy, and is terribly exhausting. But even then, if reading human social cues and facial expressions were simply a language that we could learn, we would do so. Instead, they are something hard-wired into the brain, like musical pitch. And on the deeper end of the spectrum, we who are afflicted are simply deaf: we don’t even know that other people are speaking a language at all!

Sometimes autism and the people who are born with it are curiously gifted. Think of the person who has no sense of human interaction but has a phenomenal memory or an ability with numbers—like the main character in the movie Rain Man. It may be that a brain not otherwise occupied with interpreting human social cues is left open to, or has the spare capacity for, pursuits that most people can’t even understand. But it’s not a gift that most of us would want.

As I said, we are all on a spectrum. And “normal” is a very slippery term.

1. This imaginary person is what the writer thinks of as the “general reader” or “educated reader”—an imagined synthesis of what the writer believes other people reading his or her words will likely think, react to, and understand. But it’s all in the writer’s head.

2. I tried to join a dragon-boat team once, as part of a corporate exercise. I could stay on the beat with the other paddlers for about five strokes. Then my mind and hands would stutter, hesitate, and miss the beat. I will never be a drummer in a rock band or any kind of performer where staying on the beat is necessary. And yes, because I am six-foot-six, I broke the high school basketball coach’s heart. But there it is.

Human Agency

For those of us enamored of the Dune ethos,¹ I have a new commandment to add to the Butlerian Jihad: “Thou shalt not deny the agency of a human being.” This goes along with the broader and more restrictive, “Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” My addition, though apocryphal, completes the thought.

What do I mean by agency? First, it is the ability of a human being to act in all parts of life and includes by implication free will. Humans are free and unrestrained in what they may think, say, and do. This does not mean unbridled. The process of education and socialization that every human child undergoes includes lessons in what is right, proper, and true in thinking—which may vary from culture to culture. It includes lessons, sometimes painful lessons, in what is proper or discreet to say, and in what is right and proper to do. And again, these may vary from culture to culture and from setting to setting.

This commandment also does not imply that other humans may not take exception to the expressed thoughts, spoken words, and actions of other human beings. If one person’s free will and agency leads him to insult another, to break the posted speed limit, or to commit murder, there may be—sometimes must be—consequences. And the intelligent mind will weigh the probability of their occurrence and their outcome in the thinking that goes into speaking and acting.

Things that infringe upon and are an affront to human agency are enslavement and the narrow strictures that may be imposed by church, party, society, and state.

We resent enslavement because our will and our scope of action are denied to us: we can be punished, even killed, if we refuse to follow the orders of others in every aspect of life, even to valuing and caring for our families. Some humans may accept the orders and conventions imposed by the slave master as if they were laws to be obeyed. Sometimes they are laws, written into the statutes of the society that keeps slaves and protects slave owners. But those would then be laws against human liberty and agency, and so in violation of this commandment.

We may chafe under the strictures of a confining religious precept, the bounds of party loyalty, the adherence to social norms, or the laws and regulations of an administrative state that bind us with both demands to speak and perform in certain ways and injunctions on speech and action that we might want to take. With these restrictions of religion, party, society, and government, the threat against free agency is the consequence of being shunned by our co-religionists, removed from the party rolls, outcast from our family and friends, or losing our citizenship and in some cases receiving probation and jail time. We may understand the reasons and the reckoning in these cases, but the limits on our actions still chafe. Ultimately the individual must decide, as above, if the benefits of membership or citizenship are worth complying with the strictures. These conditions would not, however, be a violation of the commandment unless the penalty in all cases was imprisonment or death.

And yet … the religion, political party, social convention, or government statute that imposes too strict a set of conditions for membership must be aware of and weigh the risks it runs: internal revolt, structural revision, or mass renunciation by those who will not put up with the burdens of compliance. Every leader in every situation involving large numbers of human beings must calculate the risks and rewards of trying to impose too precise, complex, or complete a set of requirements on the people he or she intends to lead. Human beings are not puppets. They have eyes, ears, and minds, and those minds make decisions based both on the rules and promises they are given and on the consequences they can determine on their own. That is the fulcrum upon which human agency balances.

Recognition of and respect for individual human agency is the foundation of the principles of free thought, free speech, and free action. Without the one, you cannot have the others.

1. See my blog The Dune Ethos, from October 30, 2011.

Wiggle My Fingers

Have you ever thought about what a complex motion that is, wiggling your fingers?

The fingers don’t actually have any muscles to wiggle with. All the action is through tendons that pass across the palm and back of the hand, through the wrist, and up to small muscles, a pair for each finger—one for retraction, one for extension—in the forearm. And each of those muscles needs its own separate neural group in the brain’s motor strip, one for each hand in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.

That’s quite a lot of mechanism, and we use it in exquisite ways: typing on a keyboard, playing the piano, producing chords on the frets of a guitar and similar instruments, or finding just the right notes on a violin’s fingerboard, and drumming our fingers on the tabletop or arm of a chair when we are bored or nervous. We fiddle with our hair, and we wind or unwind a piece of floss or string. We use our fingers in a lot of ways.

But sometimes the nerves get crossed up. I noticed this recently when performing the third, or Naihanchin, kata in my karate practice. During this kata, there is a move where the practitioner steps across the body to the right and left sides while throwing an underhanded nukite, or open “spear hand,” palm-up across the body. To be performed correctly, the spear hand must have the fingers pressed together side-by-side and lead with the middle and two outside fingers, like the point of a spear or knife. But lately, when I do this move to the left, those three fingers twitch almost uncontrollably. Almost, because if I think about it, I can hold them steady. But if I don’t think, then they wiggle like eels.

I have also noticed that this almost uncontrolled twitching does not happen when I move to the right, or when I perform the spear hand in a forward thrust with the palm oriented vertically. It also doesn’t occur when I perform the same underhand move in the three opening side stances of the second kata, Seiuchin. Then my fingers remain pressed together and rigid, as they should, or sometimes slightly splayed apart—as the should not—but still stiff. It is only when bringing the hand across my body with the palm up in the third kata, stepping to the left, that the wiggle sets in.

This makes me think there must be something about the underhand move across the body while stepping to the left side that interferes with the nerves controlling those muscles in the forearm. It might be a binding in the neck, shoulder, or elbow. It might be a slight deterioration in the brain. If it were uncontrolled—that is, no effort on my part could keep them from wiggling—I would begin to worry. But for now I will accept that I need to focus my attention on that body part to keep it in line.

As I complete my 75th year—three quarters of a century, wow!—I begin to take note of such things. For about a decade, I haven’t been able to drop down onto one knee and pop back up, as required by several of the katas. I can no longer jump straight up from the floor and simultaneously fake with the right foot low, followed by a high kick with the left foot, before coming back down—as distinctly required in the fifth and sixth katas. (Truth to tell, that move became a hop-skip across the floor more than ten years ago.) Similarly, I keep track of the times I must grope for a word or a name, or the exact details of a memory—which doesn’t happen too often but is distressing when it does. And I sometimes have to take a step to the side, to regain my balance, when walking around a piece of furniture. Small lapses, bits of deterioration, but concerning.

Like all of us, I know that one day this marvelous “meat robot” that I am operating will finally cease moving. The heart will stop pumping, the lungs will no longer expand, and the nerves will begin to go silent. What happens then, I don’t know. Nothing, I expect. The same nothing that occupied this space and this mind before I was born. We are all ephemeral, all mortal, and that has been the human condition since we acquired conscious thought: our minds conceive of infinity and eternity; our body is fragile and finite. And that gives color to our existence.¹

And we are none of us the deacon’s “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem: made in such a particular way that it lasted one hundred years and a day—and then disintegrated into dust. No, through the wonders of evolution, stem cells, and a functioning immune system, we grow and build substance from the beginning and up until a certain period of our lives, and then that substance is gradually eroded; the pieces no longer fit; the center releases its hold; and whole thing wears away to nothingness.

Hell, it’s a job.

1. I recall a sign I saw in a Facebook meme, I think from a British tattoo shop: “You are a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust. What do you have to be afraid of?” And another quotation, it might have been from C.S. Lewis: “You are not a body that has a soul. You are a spirit that has a body.” And then again, from the Puppeteer explaining their racial cowardice to Louis Wu in one of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” novels about the Ringworld: “We know that we have no undying part.” I am neural-networked software driving electro-molecular and mechanical hardware—and all three phases are extinguishable.

The Beam in Your Eye

I was reading about the James Webb Telescope, which was launched into orbit last year at the L2 LaGrange point—a stable orbital position on the other side of the Moon—and began producing stunning images of the farthest stars as well as our own system’s more distant planets. The interesting thing about the JWT is that it views the universe not in “visible light” but in lower and longer wavelengths—called “infrared,” or “below the red”—which we normally feel as heat.

And that got me thinking about what we call the visible spectrum, electromagnetic pulses or photons vibrating with a wavelength between 380 and 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter, abbreviated “nm”). These are the wavelengths that virtually all animals perceive, although some—such as the pit viper—can see or sense in the infrared, and many animals and insects can see a bit into the ultraviolet—or “beyond the violet.” But 380 to 700, going from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo, seems to be the animal standard. After all, most of us walking on or using four limbs on land are related by an evolution that extends back to the stump-finned fishes who first crawled out of the swamps.

But why those particular wavelengths? Why can’t we perceive the world in the longer radio waves and microwaves, or in heat like the JWT, or in the much shorter x-rays and gamma rays? It would be useful to see in x-rays, because then we could look through doors and see who was on the other side.

Then I started to think about the nature of our bodies. Our cells, the components that make up all of our different tissues, are sized between 10 and about 120 micrometers (millionths of a meter, abbreviated “µm”). Just for reference, there are a thousand nanometers in a micrometer. And the rod cells in our retinas are about 2 µm in diameter. Taking about the middle of the visible spectrum, say 500 nm, somewhere deep in the shades of green, that means the cells in our eyes that perceive light are about four times wider than the wavelengths they are encountering.

That seems about right. If the cells were much smaller than the wavelength, they would likely miss parts of it. If they were much bigger, their exposed area would be redundant, and so their resolution—the ability to pack individual light-sensing cells into a given area of the eye’s retina—would be reduced. Smaller light-receiving points equals greater ability to see details, in the same way that smaller pixels in a photograph or on a monitor screen means sharper images.

In evolutionary terms, it is an advantage to be able to see in the same wavelengths as your prey or your nearest predator. Everyone is playing in the same field, so to speak, and no one—except maybe the pit viper or the bee, who are able to see in those outside wavelengths—has a clear superiority.

But the relationship of cell size to perceived wavelength tells me something else. If we eventually meet extraterrestrials, and they are approximately our size and have about the same cellular complexity, they will likely see mostly in what to us is the visible spectrum. If they are very large or very tiny, then all bets are off. But if they are sized about like us, then they will probably see in the same way we do.

And our size has everything to do with the internal composition and radius of our home planet—that is, the acceleration of our particular gravity. Creatures from much larger, rocky, and iron-filled planets with stronger gravity will likely be much larger. Their bigger structure would stand up to the greater pull. Or, conversely, they might be much smaller, flatter, less upstanding, more like starfish than bipedal creatures. Similarly, creatures from smaller, less dense planets with weaker gravity might be much smaller. Or, conversely, they might be larger, taller, and more willowy than sturdy, more like waving grasses.

But if they are about our size, with about our cellular complexity—which in humans numbers about 37 trillion cells of various sizes, but none larger than about 130 µm in diameter, the human egg cell—then they will likely be seeing the same landscape as we do.

And if the extraterrestrials are much larger than us—say, the size of an Ultrasaurus of the early Cretaceous—or much smaller—say, with the size and organization of a swarm of gnats—then again all bets are off. They might still perceive the world in the visible spectrum, but we would likely perceive them as some kind of animal.

The End of Locality

The Covid-19(20, 21 …) pandemic did it. The industrial world’s response did it. The internet and cloud computing did it. Zoom and other meeting apps did it. And we’re not going back.

And what is “it”? The notion that you have to live in a particular place, travel conveniently to a particular place, and meet in the flesh in order to get anything done.

Many social groups—think of book clubs, discussion groups, and online gaming—have already migrated to the internet. As a result, members can move away from an area and still participate, and they can do everything except share snacks and a glass of wine together. My own wargaming group, which used to meet in person around a table in somebody’s spare room, now includes members in Connecticut, Wyoming, Texas, and New Zealand. And every game has a Zoom component with an overhead camera and an open laptop for extra-local participation.

The internet and cloud computing showed that a knowledge worker—think of accountants, customer service representatives, programmers, technical writers, corporate lawyers, and all kinds of middle managers—can work from anyplace in the country, not just within commute distance of the corporate or local office. The old desire of bosses to see people at their desks to know they were working is now thoroughly eroded. We have measures, other than observing heads and hands positioned over keyboards, to show a person’s productivity.

Even jobs with high-level customer contact, like consultants and big-ticket sales reps, will eventually be done with a minimum of travel and facetime (lowercase, to distinguish it from the Apple communication app of the same name) and maximum delivery by internet connection and online meeting. Soon enough, even the most prosaic of information jobs, like those at the point-of-sale, such as cashiers and checkout operators, will either be performed online—or automated entirely. Right now, checkout in many grocery and warehouse stores is supplemented if not replaced by self-checkout stations. And much of retail has already moved online to services like Amazon.com and to a flurry of web-enabled sellers and supplements to brick-and-mortar retail stores.

In time, the only jobs that cannot be done through telepresence will be those that require a person’s hands to be placed directly on the actual, physical customer—such as radiologists, physical therapists, and dentists. Routine doctor’s visits, tests other than showing up somewhere to give blood or a biological sample (many of which can be sent through the mail), consultations, and almost all forms of psychotherapy can now be done online. Even surgery can be performed remotely using robotics and laparoscopy. And remote robotics paired with artificially intelligent expert systems may eventually take over some of the hands-on work. When that capability is fully developed, even the human knowledge worker may drop out of the system entirely.

Many of the customer-service jobs, especially in finance and insurance, are already handled by artificial intelligences, either as a chatbot on a website or an automated voice on the telephone. The expert system usually works by a combination of menu choices and pre-recorded, spoken commands, and the system only routes to an online human agent when it meets a response it cannot either interpret or fulfill.

One of the many things that will surely change in this future is the way we vote, especially after the claims and lingering suspicions about errors and confusion (and the possibility of fraud) in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As we learned from the lawsuit brought in 2022 by Kari Lake about the election process in Maricopa County, Arizona, local law there allows citizens to cast their ballots at any precinct voting station in the county, not just in their own hometown. Since every district has a slightly different ballot—accounting for choices among city offices and school boards—each voting station had to stand ready to print out hundreds of different ballot forms to meet the walk-in demand. And on election day, some of the electronic ballots were sized for a different length of paper than what was actually loaded in the printer, so those ballots could not be read by the tabulating machines at the polling station. The result was confusion, photocopying of the voter’s ballot, chain-of-custody issues, and the suspicion of fraudulent intent.

Come on, people! We’re still using paper? And we’re relying on paper information being scanned into to electronic machines? What is this—the 20th century? We’re well beyond that!

When I do important transactions with an institution over the internet, I have a login protocol with a unique password that I have previously established. They still often require me to give the number of my mobile phone—which is personal to me and protected by a passcode or facial recognition software—and then they send me a one-time numeric code to key into the required box. Only then can we proceed with the transaction. If that system is secure enough for banking and insurance business, it should be secure enough for voting.

If we could securely vote over the internet, it would be another blow to the concept of showing up at a particular time in a particular locality. The voting system would recognize you, ensure your identity, provide you with the appropriate ballot based on your primary residence, tabulate your vote, and then lock you out of the system to prevent multiple voting attempts. (Eventually, voice recognition from a previously submitted and verified sample will replace the more complicated passing back and forth of phone numbers and numeric codes.) The voting process will then be accessible from anywhere on the planet and not require you to be present in your home district on a particular day. It would ensure that everyone voted just once. And it would allow the voting period to be extended for, say, a whole month and still have the results tabulated and counted instantly.

By now in the cycle of development, you have probably already met and worked with robots and intelligent systems in a variety of settings, with good results or sometimes not. The process of moving information transfer from face-to-face to face-to-bot will only accelerate in the coming years, as artificial intelligence and expert systems expand. It’s a new world out there, with new protocols for the way we work and interact.

Another Doorway

Another trip around the Sun. Another race that’s just begun. And so we pass through another doorway.¹

The past year was pretty good for me. I published one book, Revolt on the Iron Planet, and started two more. Those new novels are progressing slowly, and the pace of my blog postings has also slowed down. I don’t know if this is age creeping up on me or distraction with other events, but it is so.

I dropped, dumped, tipped over—whatever—two motorcycles in the fall, with significant reparable damage to each but no significant injury. I then sold out of my bikes entirely—and almost immediately bought one of them back. So my mind, for better or worse, remains changeable if not malleable. I have come to accept that my continued riding will be a test of my skills, judgment, reflexes, balance, and endurance. And it’s just fun: I come back from each ride relaxed and exhilarated.

I continued to exercise and try to manage my weight. I had no significant health issues, except for a molar with some “resorption,” which means a breakdown in the root dentine that usually calls for root canal. This tooth couldn’t be saved, however; so I had it extracted right before New Year’s Eve and am in line for an implant.

I had no significant attachments or detachments in my personal life. And after my fifth year alone, I still miss my late wife Irene. So I do have some human feeling left, I guess.

What will 2023 bring? And am I ready for it?

The good news is that California seems to be in for a wet winter, and we need the water after several years of drought. The bad news is that my condo complex is coming up on fifty years old, and we have to deal with a number of leaks, both externally because of the rain and internally because of the aging plumbing. But the structure is sound.

The bad news internationally is that, from this perspective, Russia seems determined to continue its war of attrition, destruction, and death against Ukraine. With the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children and indiscriminate murder of adults, the Russian goal seems to be depopulation in favor of occupying a barren land as a buffer against the West. That’s old-style thinking and, also, inhuman. But that seems to be the whisper inside Vladimir Putin’s head. Either Ukraine will disappear, or he will.

The further bad news is that Chairman-for-Life Xi Jinping seems also to be listening to bad whispers. First, he locked down his country to fight a weakened virus—and also to punish economic areas that might defy him. Then, after a spate of protests that did not look to topple his regime, he removed all precautions and opened the borders. The trouble with any system that returns all thought and inspiration to one great leader is that you have no checks and balances if he’s wrong, or delusional, or just plain out of touch. And the correction mechanisms include a lot of bystander deaths. Either Xi will disappear, or China will.

At home, the country remains fairly evenly divided between conservative, populist, traditionalist homebodies and progressive, centrist, daring radicals. Each side of the aisle appears to hold less than 51% or 52% of the seats in the House and Senate and governorships across the nation. Such division can be a useful thing, because neither side can effect crushing change against the other. It is also useful if it forces negotiation and compromise to get anything done. And it can be useful, at least to the traditionalist side, if it keeps the government from undertaking radical changes that half the population doesn’t want. But then, spinning your wheels and hurling invectives that will change nobody’s mind are exercises in wasted energy.

On the economy, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on. We have persistent inflation and a Federal Reserve that is pledging to fight it with the tools at hand—interest rates. But we also have a constrained supply system, chaos in international trade and shipping, a tight labor market, and collapsing retail, housing, and infrastructure sectors … all while the federal government spends more and more of the money it does not have, hampering the Fed’s moves. The stock market, which I watch daily, gyrates between hope and fear, and experts are predicting a deep recession, a “soft landing,” and a bull market in 2023. Nobody knows. And all the adults seem to have left the room.

The failure of one crypto trader, who may have been attempting a Ponzi scheme and might just be a moron, demonstrated to most financial experts that a currency backed by nothing, except perhaps a large and indecipherable number, is actually backed by nothing—and worth every penny. I’ll try a lot of new things in the name of technical advancement; cryptocurrency and day trading are not among them.

The pandemic seems to have morphed into a more transmissible but less severe form. That is the way of all successful viruses: infect as many people as possible, in order to increase the presence of viral particles; cripple or kill as few people as possible, because an incapacitated or dead person cannot spread those particles; and mutate constantly to overcome the tenacious human immune system. This is evolution in action, and the winners of all time are a subset of coronaviruses and the rhinoviruses, both responsible for the common cold: easily transmitted, no more than an inconvenience, and present in everyone’s nose. But we still have some unsettling, lingering effects of Covid-19, including brain fogs and systemic weaknesses. So the story is not written yet.

The whole experience of the pandemic disrupted many of our systems—economic, social, cultural, and political. It closed down vulnerable businesses and advanced the cause of work from home for those whose functions allowed it—think of well-paid knowledge workers as opposed to low-paid service workers. It made people hesitant to gather in large groups, and so changed our habits for meeting in forums and clubs, going to movies, and other social encounters. It ended a bias toward locality: with internet connections and Zoom calls, groups and organizations can now entertain national and even international participants. And the pandemic pretty well changed the voting process, from a single day to show up and mark your ballot in the booth, to a month-long affair of mail-in ballots, chain-of-custody surveillance, and endless squabbles about counting. Some things will go back to normal in 2023 after the pandemic, and some things will remain forever changed.

So the drama continues. Cheers!

1. See my blog from last year at this time: Janus, God of Doorways from January 2, 2022.