Thoughts from Thomas T. Thomas

Take a Deep Breath

2012-03-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

For everyone who’s a writer, or a reader, or just interested in the business of book creation, book publishing, and the Gutenberg legacy over the past 500 years: Take a deep breath.

The book business (or more correctly, the story business) is now changing even more rapidly than the record business (or more correctly, the song business) changed since the heyday of compact disks. But this time Apple and iTunes aren’t in the driver’s seat. The publishers aren’t either. Amazon, with 60% of the market for digital books, would seem to be, but looks are deceiving. We are all going over the falls, and no one knows how high the falls really are or how many rocks there are at the bottom.

Some people see this as a great loss, because they believe that the print-based publishers have functioned as gatekeepers, maintaining the quality of the books available to the marketplace.¹ Without them, it’s said, more drivel and dreck will be published. This is the view that holds self-published ebooks as simply an extension of the “vanity press”: writers who can’t make it in the real world styling themselves as authors by printing their own books.

But these days many established authors—myself among them, being generous with that word “established”—have chosen to epublish our own books because it gives us (A) more freedom of expression, (B) a better royalty deal, and (C) a shorter lead time to market. The downsides are (D) no advance payment—the whole book has to be written “on spec,” and (E) we have to learn to do our own editing, book coding, cover art, and marketing—or find and pay professionals who will do these things for us. This is really nothing new: in the book market of the past decade or two, publishers have been spending precious little money on good, dynamic editing, and aside from the big-name authors with their prepaid book tours, most authors have always been responsible for marketing their own brand and their books.

It would be a mistake, I think, to assume that publishers have the built-in ability to find and reward quality books. A friend of mine, Pat Larkin,² and I recently had a long discussion about this. Paper publishers aren’t actually looking for a beautifully written manuscript with a great and moving story. Their hearts don’t leap when they find a story that really works in clever, inventive language. Ours do. The hearts of readers do. But publishers look at the numbers and their hearts leap only when they see that a certain kind of book has sold in large numbers. Right now, it’s vampires and zombies. And there’s a lot of dreck and drivel in the pile of vampire books out there. Ten years ago it was teenage wizards with glasses.

If any new author ever managed to get a facetime interview with an agent—or, even more unlikely, an acquisitions editor—and presented a novel of literary fiction as a potential project, these representatives of the quality market would hem and haw, then ask if maybe one of the characters couldn’t be a vampire, or become a zombie? Just an idea … In science fiction, this answers the age-old question, “Why is there a dragon on the cover of my novel of space adventure?”

We are all going over the falls. Right now, with print book sales in steep decline, a lot of the publishers are sensing they will not make it. A lot of the agents who follow them like little fish after the sharks, are also running scared. Barnes & Noble looks at the bankruptcy of the Borders chain and shrieks in fright—and thanks God they had the sense to launch the Nook, and that it was, for a while, a nicer product than the Kindle. Even Amazon looks around and knows that sales figures are just a monthly thing. Yeah, two million books this month, but a year from now somebody else—maybe Google (Google! the search engine people, f'r gosh sake!)—might be eating Amazon’s lunch the way they ate up Waldenbooks and B. Dalton.

We are all going over the falls. Amazon would seem to have started it all by bringing out the Kindle and igniting ebooks. But really, ebooks were already out in the marketplace with the Sony reader and Gutenberg and other first-run experiments. The Kindle was just a way to insure against Amazon’s warehouse full of mail-order books becoming a warehouse full of inert paper sometime down the road. B&N’s Nook was a me-too play. Google wants to be everything to everybody and eventually become the last app standing. None of them knows where this thing will end.

I have a few ideas. Or rather, call them articles of faith.

First, there will always be print books, just as photography didn’t do away with oil paintings, and movies and television didn’t destroy the urge to see live actors in a stage play. But books will become treasured classics and gift items. Andrew Hoyem’s Arion Press—fine printing of highly styled artifacts—will become the model for book publishing. It will be a small and financially impractical business, in the same way that staging a play is now a labor of love more than a commercial exercise.

Certain types of non-fiction, especially books with large-format graphics, will linger for a while, but they will eventually fade as the mixed-media capability of tablets and online links does away with the static book. For the compulsive readers of novels, mass market paperbacks will disappear first, then trade paperbacks, then first-run hardcover novels with a price tag above $20. I know this because readers want words and stories, not paper. And the economics of printing, inventorying, shipping, displaying, and remaindering wads of paper simply cannot stand up to the ereader with its always-open storefront, wireless delivery, and near-endless carrying capacity.

Second, all of the current schemes for cornering the ebook market—for example, Apple's iBook formatter, with its licensing clause making the formatted book the property of Apple, Inc., or the Kindle Selects sales prize, for which authors compete so long as they distribute exclusively through Amazon—are just that. Schemes, experiments, trials. Kindle is big this year, iPad has staying power, but who knows what will happen in another five or ten years? Unlike bricks and mortar and warehouses, these things can change with the next new idea in software or the next expansion in telecommunications (4G, 5G, gee-whiz!). That’s why I don't advocate authors (or readers) getting locked into one reading device and distribution system or another. The company behind that ereader can change the rules—the terms and conditions, the royalty percentages, the formatting requirements, the distribution method—or whatever they like in the space of one breath and the next. But, if the rules become something we as readers and authors don’t like, we’re all prepared to jump ship, change loyalties, and try something else.³ That’s why, with my ebooks, I’m specializing in a standardized format—HTML and epubs—with files and coding that I can understand, control, and eventually expand and change as the market changes.

Third, everybody gets banged up in going over the falls, but big boats do worse than little canoes, barrels, and free swimmers. Right now, the megapublishers are trying to fight the ebook wave by pricing their ebooks just a dollar or two under the print version. Readers hate that. Authors hate it because it hurts their sales in a medium which everyone senses is the wave of the future. Book publishers will fail in that. More authors are bailing on a scheme that gets them a 10% or 15% royalty on a price no one wants to pay, when they can get 35% or 70% on a much more reasonable price. No reader wants to pay $27 for just a couple of hours of entertainment. Ebooks are putting the price of a story, one way or another, back to the $3 to $5 per book that most of us long-time readers remember. That’s the new market price for a one-time, first-through read of a new author. By trying to stamp out ebooks with high pricing, the publishers are trying to swim upstream. We all know how well that works at Niagara or Iguaçu Falls.

Fourth, readers are going to get a lot closer to the authors they like. The days of the bestseller (a marketing phenomenon of the megacorporation book business) are going away. The market and its focus on genres will fragment. It will no longer be a herd of readers crazed for the latest marketing phenomenon, but readers finding and celebrating authors whom they really like. We’ve already seen the start of this with book clubs, who share ideas and find authors who might not be the latest media darlings but satisfy the likes of their members. Word of mouth and recommendation are still the strongest marketing. These readers like books with rich content and reader guides that are springboards for discussion.

In this environment, the author had better not be sitting in Connecticut and communing with the world only through the marketing department of a New York publisher. Facebook, online chat groups, and all the other social media put the author just a click away from his or her interested readers. Which means that if a reader has a question or a criticism, the author should hear it, reply, be courteous and—to an extent never dreamed of before—let readers participate to some extent in the writing process. We’re already seeing the start of that closeness with the few authors who have tried publishing a chapter at a time through social media and taking immediate feedback.⁴

The business models and marketplace shenanigans of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes really do not matter. Authors are—and have always been—their own franchise and their own brand. That’s what will stand the test of time in the reader’s mind as the whirl of distribution devices, cloud services, and schemes passes on down the road. Can I get a good read out of this author? Can he or she work the magic? Maybe, one day soon, readers will be getting the book as a hologram with a background selection of images and a mix tape soundtrack on a 3D device.⁵ But the reader still wants an author who can make people and stories come alive.

This whole business is going over the falls. We’re all going to get soaking wet and a bit battered. Some of us will not survive. … Take a deep breath.

1. See my blog The Future of Publishing: Through the Eye of the Needle from August 28, 2011.

2. Patrick Larkin specializes in historical, military, and espionage thrillers. His novel The Tribune is the first of a series set in imperial Rome at the time of Christ, with a sequel now under way. He wrote two novels in Robert Ludlum’s bestselling Covert-One series, The Lazarus Vendetta and The Moscow Vector. And earlier he coauthored with Larry Bond five novels of military fiction, including Red Phoenix, Vortex, Cauldron, The Enemy Within, and Day of Wrath.

3. How many computers, cell phones, tablets, and ereaders have you owned in your life? I have come a long way over the years, from my first computer, an Apple II, to a CompuPro S-100 system, an IBM PC with DOS and then OS/2, then Windows, and now a Mac. I’ve had half a dozen different cell phones, now an iPhone. I read from both a Kindle and a Nook, think about getting the iPad but can still read everything just fine on my iPhone. I’m not bragging here but showing that we are all platform-independent and will churn with the market. The days of having the same Motorola radio or Philco television in the living room for twenty years are long gone.

4. Do you know how brave that is? When I write a book, I’m constantly revising, going front to back and back to front, as new ideas and twists in the story occur to me. In order to produce a chapter a week for a Dickens-like serialization in social media, I would want to have the complete novel finished and polished—this is my special form of OCD speaking—and then dole out the chapters over time. I have no trouble making the finished book available to a few select readers for a reality check, and then going back and dealing with their comments and questions as a whole, because a patch here always reveals a crack over there which needs fixing. But to serialize a novel on the fly, and then honestly take reader feedback on each chapter, would put the whole story constantly into play. It might be a better story in the end, but as comments ignite fixes and changes, I would have no way to ensure that the early chapters—with which the serial readers are already familiar—would have any relevance to the later chapters those readers would be receiving. Madness! … But an intriguing author problem … Hmmm.

5. I’ve already had a taste of this in selecting the pictures and music for my book trailer for The Children of Possibility. It was fun.

Self-Control and Commitment

2012-03-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

True confessions time. I’ve experienced two great changes in my personal life—or perhaps I should say “physical life,” because each change had nothing to do with the “personal” or “spiritual” me, were nothing to do with love, work, philosophy, or politics, but rather involved personal habits and health. The changes are instructive, I think, because they involve habits with which many educated and enlightened people are now wrestling.

I started smoking as a freshman at the university. I chose a pipe because, as a bookish lad, I believed it fit a certain scholarly, thoughtful, British-tweedy, semi-aristocratic image I rather admired.¹ My parents, both lifetime heavy cigarette smokers, could not really object (except when I occasionally lit up a cigar in the house), but I knew they were disappointed. I continued smoking after graduation and through my first couple of jobs. As an avid reader, aspiring writer, and then a copy and technical editor, tobacco helped my body relax (“narcotized” is the word, I think) and focused my mind for long stints—often hours at a time—of juggling words in one form or another.

Note that I started smoking about three years after the first of the Surgeon General’s reports on smoking and health in 1964. I was aware of the report and its warnings, but I was young and immortal: cancer, disease, and death were bogeymen of the distant future, after many pleasant years of contented smoking. But in the early 1970s, and after moving to health-conscious California, I began to find my smoking habit a bit inconvenient: not so many of my co-workers smoked, more public places were putting restrictions on smoking, people I respected were turning up their noses.²

All the beliefs about pipe smoking being less harmful than cigarettes are false. By then I wasn’t just puffing but actually inhaling, and it was a far richer, denser, more tar-laden smoke. I was also consuming about an ounce of tobacco a day, which I reckoned as somewhere between one and two packs. And, truth to tell, I was feeling poisoned. My body knew this habit was not good for me, even if my brain still liked the stuff.

I tried several times to cut down if not quit. I could stop for a week or so, then find an excuse in a moment of work pressure or anxiety to start back up. Note that at the time there were fewer organized cessation classes available, and weaning aids like nicotine patches were still in their infancy.

During college and for a few years after I had neglected my teeth, as young people away from the organized lives and gentle reminders of parents often do. By then I was also finding the tar buildup inside my mouth, which no amount of brushing could touch, distasteful. I made an appointment with a local dentist and went for a cleaning and checkup. He spent an hour with pick, probe, and scraper removing the tar, all the time muttering under his breath. And it hurt. But I walked out of the office figuring I had another seven or eight years of relatively clean teeth before the tar built up again.

I did go back for a checkup six months later, and it was the same routine: scrape and mutter. “Does that hurt?” “Well, yes …” “Good!” When I walked out of the office that day, I thought, “I’ll show him. I’ll stop cold and, the next time I come back, my mouth will be clean.” Silly damn thought, based on my peevishness toward a medical professional who was only doing his job.

Somehow, making a silent commitment—about which the doctor never knew until many years later—worked for me. It became a commitment to myself. I stopped smoking cold that day and never picked up a pipe again. In a few days’ time I noticed that the brown rime around my nostrils from the inhaled smoke went away. I no longer had little burn holes in my shirts from falling ash. The air smelled better both outdoors and in my apartment.

About a week after quitting, I was assigned to edit a mammoth project at work: a multi-volume engineering report on an iron ore mine that involved many revisions, huge stress, and hours of overtime. I never once used the workload as an excuse to light up. After surviving six months of that stress without smoke, I figured nothing else in my life would work as an excuse. Then I met Irene and the war was over.³

My second bad habit was drinking. Again, my parents were regular drinkers, each consuming a couple of martinis before dinner. I didn’t drink at all while still under age,⁴ but when I turned 21 (legal age at the time in our state) I went to a favorite bar with friends for beer. Later, as I established my working life, I kept alcohol—a six pack of beer, bottles of whiskey and vodka, two or three kinds of wine—in the apartment to drink in the evenings. Although my wife was not a smoker, she too enjoyed a beer in the evening and didn’t object.

As with smoking, the dangers—delirium tremens, liver damage, disease, death—were far down the road and of no concern. I had learned how to dose myself in the evening before bed with aspirin, vitamin C, and plenty of water, so the hangover in the morning was manageable, other than a certain lurching unsteadiness until I’d had coffee and breakfast.

This habit continued for a dozen years longer than the smoking. In time I was regularly consuming a bottle of red wine each evening, or the equivalent in beer or—sometimes, rarely—shots of a brand-name hard liquor. I was always able to function at work and never drank during the day. But still, I was feeling poisoned, and my body knew better than my brain. I was thinking about quitting, and one time I managed to stop drinking for a whole six months. But then I sold my first novel and had a glass of wine—two glasses, actually—to celebrate. By the end of that week I was back to my bottle a night.

This continued until I went in to the doctor for a minor medical problem—a nothing, a sebaceous cyst—but as it had been several years since my last visit,⁵ I had to fill out a medical history form. One of the questions was “How many drinks do you consume per week?” It gave the standard equivalencies among beer, wine, and hard liquor.⁶ Still, I had to count on my fingers to tot up all that wine. Even giving myself a free night, when I didn’t drink the whole bottle, the total came to 28 glasses.

The doctor asked, “How long have you had a drinking problem?” I started to say, “I don’t consider it a problem”—and stopped. That kind of denial was one of the warning signs I had been brooding about. It was a moment of insight, like the dentist scraping away at my teeth. The doctor also tested my feet with a huge tuning fork and described “peripheral neuropathy.” Here was a danger—not being able to feel where my feet were and when they struck the pavement, an embarrassment for someone who prided himself on his karate skills—which wasn’t reserved for the distant end of life but looming in my face right now.

I left the doctor’s office and decided to surprise him by never drinking again. Unlike smoking—which is a “do it” or “don’t” proposition—drinking involves daily choices and temptations. What goes well with this food or that? What to sip in the evening after dinner? I discovered nonalcoholic beer, sometimes even nonalcoholic wine, but mostly consumed (and still do) oceans of Diet 7-Up. I quickly adopted a rule: “Don’t put it in your mouth.” I could have desserts with denatured alcohol, like plum pudding and rum sauce, but if a liquid, any liquid, contained alcohol and came in a glass, spit it out.⁷ I’ve been sober ever since. In fact, sobriety has become precious to me.

Although I greatly respect Alcoholics Anonymous and the good work they do, the twelve-step program was never for me. I’ve been a convinced atheist since I was a teenager. Surrendering my will to a “higher power”—however I wished to conceive of Him/Her/It—was inconsistent with the universe I knew. The human mind is the most advanced and evolved system within a couple of parsecs of this place, so my worldview requires me to rely on it. And since I’ve never been very good with authority figures, I had to rely on myself.⁸

Much as I respect the mind, I also learned a valuable lesson from both episodes of quitting: “The mind is a monkey, and the body wants its candy.” Tobacco and alcohol reach parts of the nervous system that are far below thought and memory, actually down at the chemical and somatic level. The craving is a hunger, like the desire for food or sex. When the body is accustomed to its daily or hourly dose of nicotine and alcohol, it responds with an unreasoned craving. And in this case, the mind is quite willing to go along and invent excuses.

“You’ve had a really hard day—you deserve a drink!” “You had a really good day—let’s celebrate with a drink!” “There’s a half bottle of wine in the fridge—shame to let it go to waste!” “There’s still a glassful left in that bottle—shame to put it in the fridge!” “It’s my birthday … my wife’s birthday … somebody’s birthday …”

The patter, the urgings, the excuses go on and on unless the mind has already made a decision, an override, a Rule That Cannot Be Broken: “Don’t put it in your mouth. And if it somehow gets in there, spit it out.” Reaching that decision, making it final and not just a preliminary Good Idea I Really Should Try, is the life change. After years of false starts, of trying to cut down, and making short-term—almost trial—efforts, a person really must get serious, dig in, and make a rule. After that, quitting is actually easy.

I still have one more mountain range to cross. After years of eating as I liked, eating everything I wanted, eating according to patterns I established in my twenties and thirties—and watching my weight rise by 10 to 15 pounds per decade—I now have to do something. Twenty years and thirty pounds ago, I tried Weight Watchers for a couple of months. But that turned out to be a roomful of people sitting around for an hour each week talking about food—healthy, nutritious, lower-calorie food, yes, but still an obsession. That looked to me like a dead end.

Over the years I’ve kept up—more or less, now and then, on a journey covering hills, plateaus, and valleys—with the same Isshinryu karate katas that I learned way back at the university. Karate has become my built-in, default-level form of cardio exercise. The only trouble has been that, on the days I do a workout, I’ve been rewarding myself with extra food and treats. So while my heart is strong and I’m relatively limber, the pounds don’t go away. But the karate exercises are something to build on.

I need it, because my body mass index has now gone into dangerous territory. In the past year or two I’ve been experiencing minor troubles with foot and ankle swelling, which recently became to a condition that involved clotting in my surface veins, which led to a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. So, “someday” is now here. Immortality is now out of reach. And I have to start taking seriously everything I put into my mouth, not just the tobacco smoke and the intoxicating beverages.⁹

I can do it. I did it before. The mind may be a monkey, but it’s the only thing I’ve got to work with.

1. Mostly from the movies coming out of the World War II era that preceded mine and seemed very adult, including Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. And yes, at one time I owned a calabash—dreadfully heavy thing, poor draw, and no way to set it down once lit.

2. And the woman I was eventually to meet and marry was a dedicated non/never-smoker. If I had shown up at her door with my dirty habit (“Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray”), we never would have finished our first date.

3. Oddly enough, for years afterward I occasionally had what I call “smoking dreams.” In the dreams, which might involve any kind of activity, I would be smoking again. I would feel bad about it, but there it was. Only as I started to wake up would I realize, “No, that’s wrong. I did quit . I don’t smoke. I didn’t go back to smoking.”

4. Unlike some students I knew, who finagled a false driver’s license to go drinking even as freshmen. This seemed like too much work and risk to me—but I hadn’t acquired the taste as yet.

5. Remember, I was still relatively young and immortal.

6. For the record: 12 ounces of beer equal 5 ounces of wine equal 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor.

7. Once, at a social function, I picked up a glass of champagne by mistake, thinking it was my usual sparkling cider, drew in a sip, spit it back into the glass, and put the glass behind a fern on a side table. Life is full of little victories.

8. However, I will admit the irony that in giving up first smoking and then drinking, I was relying on the implied authority of medical professionals. But they were the catalyst that led to the decision to stop, not the actual strength behind making that decision a permanent part of my life.

9. As a woman I know who struggles with her weight once pointed out, if smoking is a “do it” or “don’t” proposition, and alcohol is something you can choose to drink or not, food is a basic need, and it all has calories. Every day is a struggle for the weight-challenged. There’s a decision to be made about every donut in the coffee shop display, every piece of candy being offered on a co-worker’s desk, every item on the restaurant menu. This is the fight that goes on and on. The “Rule” must hold for the rest of your life.

Ebooks and Time

2012-03-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

For me, the choice to go independent and publish my earlier novels and now my new ones as ebooks on Kindle, Nook, and iBooks was not that hard. It was a case of “self-publish or perish.”

My early career with Baen Books in science fiction was launched in the mid-1980s, which was an interesting time for writers. A change to the tax law on treatment of inventories¹ was already putting pressure on the book business—which put pressure on writers who did not already have an established following or were making big sales. It was also a time when more books than ever were being printed and sold, which meant more competition among this crop of new writers. My sales for eight books over about the same number of years were adequate to keep the publisher interested in my ideas, but I never made much more than pin money for myself and never saw a title sell through its advance to start earning actual royalties.

When I tried to reignite my career in the mid-2000s with new novels that were more thrillers than science fiction, I trolled The Literary Marketplace trying to attract an agent who would get my work before a suitable publisher. A few thousand letters and emails later—which garnered all of about 20 responses, expressing polite interest and then ultimate regret—told me that the literary world was full of new authors looking to make a name, established agents with too many hungry authors to service, and a reduced number of ever more selective publishers struggling to find a marketing success.² For me, the lure of self-publishing electronically meant that at least some readers would have a chance to find and enjoy my work—and I wouldn’t be filling a storage locker with a press run of physical books, which I would then have to flog through the local bookstores.

In the 18 months since I started epublishing, I’ve learned that time is a completely different commodity in the electronic world.

First, the act of bringing out a new book no longer has to be a big splashy event. This is not because there is no publisher with an advertising budget able to host a party and invite the literary world. I can hold a party and invite my friends, if I want. But my ebook does not have to make a big impact with press releases, a tight schedule of author interviews and public readings, and a flurry of favorable reviews in prominent newspapers and magazines, followed by its closely watched entry onto bestseller lists and a climb up to some terminal position—with an eventual fall off and fade away.

Conventional paper books are under such pressure to make a big hit—all in hopes of interesting as many readers as possible in buying the book as quickly as possible—because time is chasing the inventory. The publisher has a large press run to sell off before holding unsold books incurs too much tax expense and it becomes more economical to remainder the book and pulp the copies. In contrast, the ebook has no inventory, no tax on inventory, no cost of holding inventory. It’s simply a string of digits on a server somewhere and has no physical cost to the author/publisher (except the time invested in writing, editing, and coding, plus something for acquiring cover art) or to the bookseller (except the business costs of maintaining some disk space and adding a line or two to the accounting software).

Of course, I want potential readers to know about my new book. I will post a notice on my author’s website, put a video trailer on YouTube, have a full-page description available with pricing and links to my ebooksellers, post updates on social media, send notices to friends and acquaintances, and float out other “soft” marketing.³ But the time pressure is simply not there.

Why? Because I do not have to build up a standing wave of enthusiasm in the book business among store owners, chain store buyers, and marketers, all of whom have their own inventory and shelf-space issues to contend with.⁴ My appeal is directly to the readers. It does not really matter (well, except in terms of my ego fulfillment right now) whether a reader finds and buys my work this week or next—or next year, or the year after.

A second consequence of epublishing is that no book is ever really old. The grand ta-dah! of publishing a new book means that last year’s book and all that went before it are suddenly ancient history. Of course, bookstores are filled with novels that have stood the test of time—those by once-prominent authors whose publishers are going back for a second dip, usually in connection with a new movie release—and a new generation of readers will find them and love them. So long as a novel isn’t too horribly dated (without the intention of becoming “historical”), it can be new and exciting to the readers who have not yet discovered it.⁵ But for less than big-name authors, early works are lost in the dust of crumbling paperbacks, never to be resurrected.

Epublishing now enables every author to make his or her backlist permanently available. There is no investment decision to reprint the physical books and undertake new inventory costs. Converting a printed book to digits and then proofing and coding it as an ebook can be relatively cheap. In bulk and done by professionals, the cost is about $300 to $500 per title. The more titles an author has available, the more chances for a reader to find the one work that seems interesting, like it, and then go look for another.

The great secret is that a habitual reader is not only interested in finding something new and exciting—that wave of “buzz” in the literary world and among like-minded friends. A reader with a nightstand full of books will also look for, and reward with purchases, any author who writes just the sort of books that reader likes. I think of the mother in Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, who showed her children the moon rising just as the sun was setting, and they exclaimed, “Oh, Mama, do it again!” Every one of us who finishes a book we have come to love sighs, “Oh, Mama, do it again!”

In an emarket where an author’s books are continuously available, without the tyranny of inventories and press runs to take them out of the public reach on a regular basis,⁶ producing a new book is not so much an astounding literary event as the slow and steady building of a name and a body of work.

For the habitual reader, it means that every book ever written, and every author you’ve ever loved, is potentially available for browsing and download at three o’clock in the morning. These are literary riches beyond the dreams of Gutenberg!

Time is on the ebook author’s side. We don’t have to make our reputation among a literary marketplace of publishers, reviewers, and chain store buyers with a big and costly marketing splash. We reach our readers one at a time, often on a hunch or a whim. Then we spread a full hand of cards and let them pick. And if they honor us by liking our work, they can come back and take another, and another. The shop is always open and fully stocked.

1. See Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s excellent discussion of this in How Thor Power Hammered Publishing.

2. See my previous blog Traditional Publishing: Through the Eye of the Needle.

3. I call this “soft” marketing because the secret to selling on the internet and through social media is to be a gentle presence, to be inviting and entertaining, and not to scream. An author’s website is meant to attract readers through entertaining and ever-changing content (like these blogs) about the author’s active and interesting life and ideas. Social media are meant to share thoughts and experiences among friends and their acquaintances, with an occasional reference to an author’s book activities. Potential readers must always choose to click on and read these links. No one goes to a site hoping to get an advertisement.

4. And standing waves eventually crash.

5. There are any number of thrift and consignment shops with the name “New to You,” and they sell old clothes on the same terms I invite readers to try my earlier books. One of the broadcast channels used to advertised its summer reruns with the same thought: if you didn’t see this episode last year, then it’s “New to You.” Repackaging and selling established books is similarly a big part of the book business.

6. Yes, there is the local library, and many people feed their reading habit with books from its shelves. But libraries are usually as selective about what fiction they will carry as any bookstore, and not all of an author’s works are available on the local library’s shelves.

Literature as Immortality

2012-02-26T11:09:00.000-08:00

“Writing,” as a friend of mine wrote recently,¹ “is a beggarly business.”

The impression of most people among the unthinking public is that many writers can support themselves with their writing and often do so very handsomely. This may be true of some nonfiction writers who have acquired expertise in an area of general public interest (e.g., political affairs, diet and weight loss, home improvement, business success), are skilled at marketing, and supplement their book and article sales with speaking engagements, videos and podcasts, T-shirts and ball caps, and other collateral. But for the fiction writer, regardless of genre, the reality is less rosy. Except for a handful who are exceptionally talented and exceptionally lucky, are still good at marketing, and write novels that happen to tease the zeitgeist, most writers see only modest sales and never quit their day jobs.

So why do we do it? If it’s not the money, is it for recognition? But, in this business, there’s not much fame where there is no hope of fortune. Then what drives us to devote our free time, which most normal people spend with family, friends, and hobbies, to sitting hunched over a keyboard, reeling out lines of prose, agonizing over it, polishing it, and walking the gauntlet of rejection to see it published?

For some of us, it’s just an itch. Our brains—my brain, at least—are structured so that we live through tinkering with language. We have a thought and immediately put it into a formula of words, then pause, repeat it to ourselves, change a word here and there for better fit, repeat the whole thing again, fix another phrase … continuing until it works with neat economy and subtle elegance. We walk through life hammering out epigrams, soliloquies, and declamations.² We visit a new city or historic site and immediately think how to encapsulate and phrase it as background for a scene. We read an unusual name and savor it for a new character. And this is just when we have no book in hand.

When we do have a book on the front burner, it nags us like a spoiled child. The story wants to get out. The characters live as shadows to our everyday thoughts. Bits of action, bits of dialogue float up at the most inopportune times and demand to be written down. And after a day’s writing task, words come back to haunt us: the awkward word in a passage that needs to be fixed, the appropriate word that springs up to fix it. Writing a novel is like living a second, fantasy life in parallel with the mundane lives that everyone else leads. The itch.

But aside from this mental condition, which borders on a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, why do we do it? We could tell ourselves that the book isn’t going to be marketable, that there’s no future in the effort it will require, and that with sufficient self-control we can go out and have a life. We can put soothing lotion on the itch instead of scratching it. … So why don’t we?

Because, deep down, each one of us wants to be immortal. Even if the novel we’re working on isn’t likely to be marketable in this economy at this time, we have faith in its power to someday find readers. Deep down, we believe we’re really pretty good at this writing thing. It’s not exactly vanity, not the “me, me, see me” that may afflict a popular singer or leading actor. It’s not our persons who will be celebrated long after we’re dead and buried, but the story that we’ve loved, worked to shape as something separate from us, breathed life into, and brought to the world.³

When the world that faces you every day seems cold and indifferent, when the rejection letters pile up, when friends and family start shaking their heads, we retreat into another fantasy: that we are a Cervantes or Shakespeare in hiding. Posterity will seek us out and celebrate us. Okay, it’s a dream. But it has a kernel of truth.

What, in this world, really lasts? A month after we’re dead, our medals and trophies may end up on EBay. A bronze plaque in our honor will be stolen for scrap value. Our names cut an inch deep on a granite slab will weather away in a few hundred years. Even the Pyramids are crumbling grain by grain.

Good works seldom outlast the memory of friends. Children grow up, go their own ways, and stop telling stories about mothers and fathers, let alone their grandparents. Memories of great-grandparents disappear entirely.

Even works of art eventually disappear. Statues are defaced and buried. Paint fades while canvas rots. Book paper disintegrates with time or burns at the whim of politics and religion.

Stories abide and live on—not in the printer’s impression or the pen strokes, but in the essence, the tale, the character in action, the fascination we all have with people who live only in our imaginations. The stories told by Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare—we remember them even though the original manuscripts have long since turned to dust. And now there is hope that digital bits, simply because they are so portable and copyable, will kick around on hard drives and bubble memories and storage systems yet undreamed for at least as long and perhaps longer.

The work of philosophers goes in and out of fashion, becoming a subject for academics to study more than for the average reader to enjoy. Who really expects to read Aristotle to understand natural history or Plato to understand ethics? We read them as background, as part of our cultural history. We read them to understand the evolution of our society. We read them because to be ignorant of them would be shameful. But we don’t—or most of us don’t—read them with the excitement of discovery, with delight at the intellectual secrets they reveal.

The work of earlier historians and scientists is not read as revelation so much as source material. Their observations and conclusions become picked over, compared, annotated, and adjusted by later scholars. History is a moving target, and every age creates its own image of the past according to the dictates of culture. Again, the average person might read Suetonius or Gibbon, Galileo or Pepys because they had first-hand knowledge and because to be ignorant of them would be shameful. But we moderns always check their reporting against other, perhaps conflicting, perhaps better situated sources.

Stories simply live on, and a young person can pick up and read Homer’s tales with as much enthusiasm as any reader of the last 2,700 years. The text may go through multiple translations, but unlike the surgical work of historical scholars, the work of translators is an act of love, trying to give the story new life in a faithful rendition in a new language. Think of Robert Fagles’s excellent translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey: Fagles stands back, and Homer speaks clearly in the best modern English.

Stories are the only things that last. And that’s why we writers spend so much time on them. Not because of the money, but because of the magic. The story may sit on a bookshelf in the living room unread for twenty, thirty, perhaps a hundred years. Then, one day, a child will wander in and pull the book down, open it, and fall in love. The story will be just as alive and vital as the day it was written.⁴

This ability to speak across time, to become a real time traveler, is part of the fascination. We know that our own books may be languishing as paperbacks slowly turning brown on the bottom shelf at the used bookstore, or dawdling along as the 2,304,558th most popular seller on Amazon.com. But they’re not dead yet. The magic might still happen.

That thought is probably silly. It’s probably just a sad fantasy. But it’s a stronger grasp on immortality than most people will get.

1. Kate Campbell, who blogs at Kate Campbell’s Word Garden, in an email during our editing of her debut novel Adrift in the Sound. Our email collection will soon be published as a Kindle Single titled “Between the Sheets: An Intimate Exchange About Writing, Editing, and Publishing.”

2. Yes, you’re reading one right now.

3. And really, it’s the same for the best of the singers and actors. They want to fade into the background and let the song or the performance stand as a piece of art. But it’s easier for them to be dazzled by the bright lights.

4. That’s how I discovered much of the fiction of the 1930s and ’40s, by trying the books in my father’s den—almost always without first asking for a recommendation.

Freedom or Security?

2012-02-19T09:01:00.001-08:00

I am becoming vastly uneasy about the current state of American politics. As noted elsewhere,¹ the two parties have drawn far apart, staking positions at what used to be the fringes of liberal or progressive views on one side, and of conservative or libertarian views on the other. The middle ground has become a killing zone of withering contempt. The mainstream media and comedians heap scorn on Republicans. Every morning I open my Facebook page to find a cast of friends engaging in an Orwell-style “Two Minutes Hate” against Republicans. On the other side, talk radio and conservative websites openly despise and despair of Democrats.

Courtesy is long gone. We’re now at the stage of open verbal war and take no prisoners. The opposition is insane, witless, evil, disgusting. No word is too vile to use. … My fear is that, if these passions continue to run unchecked, eventually we’ll be at open physical war, a true civil war, and after that will come peremptory jailings, deportations, and ultimately executions of the party on the outside.² That’s the stuff of inquisitions and fanatic republics.

As a thinker and a sometime rhetorician, I look for what I call “cleavage” issues. These are the planes of argument along which, like a diamond cutter cleaving a stone, the questions fall neatly on one side of a divide or the other. If nothing else, such issues help us understand what we are taking about. Eventually, they may help people examine the issues that divide them and work toward common understanding.

I believe one such divide that’s driving our current politics is the choice between freedom and security.

In the progressive view, the higher good is security. They see people as essentially weak and helpless against the forces of adversity fueled by unfettered capitalism. People need to come together and share collectively in order to reach a common goal. People need to be protected by a benevolent government that will shield them against the effects of natural disasters, market forces, depredations of the rich and powerful, and other rude shocks of the human existence. Progressives can see benefit in economies of scale and so favor a larger, more inclusive governmental organization—usually at the federal level—that can better fulfill this function. Uncertainty is also a form of adversity, and so the government or some nongovernmental organization must provide insurance against loss of life, health, and livelihood, against changing conditions that might upset the established order, and even against progress itself—if progress might lead to an unknowable and unplanned future.

In the conservative view, the higher good is freedom. They see people as essentially robust and capable, able to fight back against, adapt to, or even profit from adversity. People work best when exercising individual initiative and pursuing individually chosen goals. Conservatives place reliance on small, personal units—family, company, church—to decide how to deal with adversity and danger. But more than protection from adversity, they value the freedom to see and take advantage of opportunity. Uncertainty is the fertile ground upon which inventors, investors, and individuals with varied skills and prepared minds can create something new and meaningful. If the future is unknowable and unplanned, that means people still have the ability to shape it and make something of it.

Of course, these views are not entirely exclusive. Conservatives can see value in some functions of a large and powerful government: enabling national defense and international diplomacy, pursuing massive projects like the interstate highway system, and setting national standards for activities like finance and commerce. Progressives can see the virtues of personal choice and action in areas like self-expression, personal associations, reproductive health issues, controversial beliefs, and unpopular choices . But in general, I believe, if you describe an impending situation of unknown effect, the progressive will look for ways to mitigate it, and the conservative to exploit it.

The progressive looks for freedom from: from want, from danger, from exploitation, from injustice, from envy engendered by inequality, from embarrassment engendered by eccentricity. The conservative looks for freedom to: to make decisions, to create a better life, to build something new, to be tested, to overcome, to surpass.

Given these perceptions of which is the higher good, either side is likely to devalue and discount the opposing choice. The progressive will accept more laws and restrictions on personal freedom and initiative if that will reduce the odds of mischance leading to harm. The conservative will accept the risks of failure and loss through hostile action if that will offer the potential for gain, growth, and advancement. The progressive will accept limitations on speech if it means reducing the possibility of giving offense. The conservative will discount the harm done through offense if it will ensure the ability to speak one’s mind.

Again, these views are not exclusive. In pursuit of their dream of freeing women from the necessities of their own biology, the progressive wants no restrictions on abortion, even if it means harm to a potential life. And out of concern for that hypothetical life, the conservative is willing to put restrictions on the freedom of women. Politics is never simple.

Sometimes adherence to the stated choice, freedom or security, requires the partisan to overlook certain obvious complications. For example, in the area of gun control, the progressive is willing to restrict the freedom of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and instead require them to rely on government counterforce. This flies in the face of two obvious facts. First, the police themselves insist their job is to keep the peace and not to provide personal protection, because they cannot be everywhere at once and cannot guarantee such service. Second, even if all law-abiding citizens could be effectively disarmed, the criminal class would still have access to millions of guns through the black market. Disarming the citizenry only makes it easier for evildoers to prosper. But allowing free access to weapons for a self-sufficient population just feels wrong to the progressive mind.

For another example, conservatives value the “creative destruction” of free-market capitalism. And yes, ultimately, in the long run, on a societal scale, it makes sense to let inefficient companies with out-of-date approaches and processes and lagging technologies fail and die away so that new, nimbler, more energetic, more aggressive companies embracing new approaches, processes, and technologies can thrive. From the consumer’s point of view, this promises the possibility of the best products in the widest possible choices at the lowest prices. From the entrepreneur’s point of view, this offers the greatest potential for monetary gain. And employees in those dying companies are presumed able to retrain themselves in the new technologies and find paying positions in the new companies. This flies in the face of the fact that most people have ongoing, day-to-day obligations—to feed their family, pay the mortgage, put the kids through school—and the disruption of not just losing a job but losing an entire industry is a huge hurdle to overcome. Rapid economic turnover lowers the standard of living for many while creating opportunities for others. In the long run, however, the newer technologies are rapidly replacing people with machines.³

As I said, the battle lines along the freedom-vs.-security divide are not always clear, predictable, or consistent. And yet the cleavage is there.

These differences are instinctual and perceptual, the bedrock of deep-founded belief. That makes them effectively immune to analysis and compromise. For the progressive, the proposition that the freedom of the individual is more important than the safety and orderly functioning of society seems … just … wrong. For the conservative, the proposition that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”⁴ feels static, smothering, claustrophobic.

In this debate, which side will win is less important to me than the notion that neither side should win. As our political environment careens toward armed warfare, I believe it’s important for both sides to recognize that a society is held together by dynamic tension among opposite values and beliefs in the same way that the universe is held together by the attraction of dark matter and the repulsion of dark energy. Freedom and security are competing values that do not have to be resolved in favor of one or the other, but should be held as equal goods to be applied on a case-by-case basis according to common sense.

When one wins in triumph over the other, then the game is lost.

1. See most recently You Say You Want a Revolution from February 5, 2012.

2. Some would say we’re already there, with the Guantanamo detention of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners without due process, and the violent reaction of various local police departments to various Occupy movements. But these are, so far, exceptions to the general rule of constitutional order. The turnover will come when simple belief and opinion, rather than past action, are held to be equal to treason, with punishment to follow.

3. See The Coming Robotics Age from January 8, 2012.

4. To quote an axiom from Star Trek that paraphrases the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Taxing the Wealthy

2012-02-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

It has become clear to everyone on the Democrat/liberal/progressive side of the aisle that the only way to pay for the Federal government’s obligations to Social Security, Medicare, and other safety net and health care entitlements, as well as for government programs in support of defense, education, and the rest of the cabinet list, and still pay down the Federal debt, is to raise taxes on the wealthy.¹ These fortunate individuals must pay their “fair share” of the government’s burden.

The only problem with this, aside from the usual Republican/conservative/libertarian objections,² is that extremely wealthy individuals usually don’t have much of what’s considered traditional income to tax. As we’ve seen recently with the tax disclosures by billionaire Warren Buffett and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the extremely wealthy in this country don’t make much in “wages, salaries, and tips”—the substance of everyone else’s tax return. The wealthy make most of their money through capital gains, earnings from the investment of money and assets they already have.

While the tax rate on investments held for less than a year is equal to the individual’s ordinary income tax rate, taxes on long-term investments (i.e., held for more than a year) are lower.³ This encourages people to invest their money in things like savings accounts to support bank lending, and company stocks and corporate bonds to provide a source of capital to build the economy.⁴

As an effort to get the wealthy to pay their “fair share,” the tax on long-term capital gains might be raised to the individual income rate, as if these earnings were the same as short-term gains and wages. Or the long-term rate could be set even higher, as a way of taking more from the wealthy. Of course, this would have a hugely depressive effect on investment and the capital available to build our infrastructure and industry. If earning money through investment is going to be punished, why not put your dollars in Swiss chalets, fancy yachts, sports cars, and artworks?

All of these tax rates apply to money earned or gained during the tax year. If you take last year’s earnings and put them under the mattress this year—or buy land, gold bars, or a yacht with them—that value disappears from the tax rolls. It doesn’t reappear as taxable income until you start investing the mattress money or sell the fixed assets and realize an increase in their value.⁵ The government has no method for taxing a person’s wealth directly or the assets on which he or she spends it.⁶ The money and goods that you have—as opposed to what you earn during the year—is yours forever … or at least until the inheritance tax kicks in.

That little quirk of fate is spelled out—at least by omission—in the U.S. Constitution.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, in describing congressional powers, states up front: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States …”⁷ An “impost” is a tax or duty, such as upon imported goods. An “excise” is a tax on the manufacture, sale, or consumption of goods.⁸ One would think that all this allowed the Federal government to tax personal wealth itself, but clearly legislators and jurists of the early 20th century thought otherwise. That is why they went to the trouble of proposing and ratifying with a majority of states the 16th Amendment to provide for a tax on personal income.

Amendment 16 to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, states: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” The two clauses about “apportionment” and “census or enumeration” mean that the tax falls directly on individuals and is not adjusted based on the size or population of the state where they live.

So, even with the 16th Amendment, the Federal power to tax is limited to taxing income received during the year, not the total wealth of the individual. Generally, the states follow the lead of the Federal government in terms of taxation. Individual states may tax income, and some tax certain kinds of property such as automobiles, but none so far has a tax on existing net worth, or wealth.

On January 9 in The Wall Street Journal, Ronald McKinnon, a Stanford University professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institution for Economic Policy, wrote an opinion piece titled “The Conservative Case for a Wealth Tax.” His thesis was that “a modest levy on the overall wealth of the very rich would allow lower incentive-distorting income tax rates for them and everyone else.” His proposal was an annual 3% tax on personal wealth in excess of $3 million. The tax would include all domestic and foreign assets, not just cash on hand and savings accounts; so the wealth tax would require an annual listing and evaluation of a person’s stock portfolios, bond holdings, homes, art collections, and anything else of value he or she might possess.

This would raise several problems. First, it would probably require a separate constitutional amendment, because the 16th Amendment addresses only income, not net worth or assets.

Second, absent any effort to build up new wealth through investment, the tax would erode the value of the assets and the resulting tax revenue over time. For example, a net worth of $1 million, taxed at 3% per year, yields $30,000 in taxes in the first year and a remaining wealth of $970,000. In the second year, the tax take is $29,100 on that $970,000, and the remaining wealth is only $940,900. By the 24th year, half the wealth is gone, and the take is only $14,889. After two centuries, the individual is a pauper with a net worth of $2,332 and a tax burden of $70—but, of course, long before this the inheritance tax will have taken the lion’s share of that initial wealth.

Third, if determining the amount that an individual owes in income taxes and capital gains during the year is an accounting nightmare, consider the process of identifying and valuing all of a person’s assets. While annual income can be checked against mandated Internal Revenue Service filings by employers and institutions using forms such as W-2s and 1099s, what body exists to notify the IRS about ownership of a second home, a luxury sports car, or artwork? Certainly, local property taxes can be dragooned for this purpose in the case of land, and bills of sale can be requisitioned for the year of purchase and original valuation of other assets. But over the long term, the individual will be asked to register and provide a narrative history for every asset he or she possesses: Still owned, and at what estimated depreciation or appreciation in value? Sold, and if so when and at what price? Acquired, and if so when and at what price? The bureaucracy required to establish and track each purchase and sale would make current IRS operations seem … simple.

Fourth, if such a wealth tax is initially aimed at the “truly wealthy”—as in McKinnon’s choice of a $3 million cutoff—over time, inflation will bring a larger and larger percentage of the population into the process. This happened with the Alternative Minimum Tax, which started in 1969 as a tax on about 150 high-income households that had managed to shield their income through deductions and writeoffs. The AMT now falls due on more and more middle class taxpayers every year. Over time, a wealth tax—no matter how well intentioned—would be eroding the assets of any individual or family that had any assets or savings. And, in this case, those assets would include college funds, retirement plans, and other individual hedges against future uncertainty.

Fifth, by its nature, a wealth tax would force the sale of assets to pay the percentage owed in taxes. This would merely be a drain on liquid assets such as bank accounts and stocks. For illiquid assets like homes, cars, and artworks, the tax would either accelerate the drain on ready cash or force a sale. And if the asset was a private business or farm, the tax would cut heavily into operational funds and capital, force a sale of business assets, or liquidate the business altogether.

A wealth tax might sound like a way to make the “truly wealthy” pay their “fair share.” It might even start that way. But over the long term it would become a way to impoverish families and small businesses. Over time, the average citizen would be encouraged to own nothing, save nothing, have no plan for the future. The wealth tax would create a nation of paupers and clients of an even larger welfare state. It would, de facto, impose a limit on the amount and kind of property a person could own, similar to the restrictions in the old Soviet Union.

In short, a wealth tax would change the face of American society—and not for the better.

1. Certainly, cutting spending is off the table. For one thing, these are entitlements, which means that someone somewhere is, by law, owed the benefit and will suffer and complain if the benefit is denied. For another, cutting any other part of the Federal budget—from the Pentagon to any of the cabinet departments and the institutions they support and the grants they award—means putting someone somewhere out of work and adding to the unemployment rolls. Raising revenue by actually lowering taxes and thereby encouraging taxable economic activity is, to the Democrat/liberal/progressive mindset, an obviously blown economic theory that is no longer worth the time and effort to refute.

2. Briefly, that the top 1% of taxpayers already pay more than 36% of the Federal income tax revenues, and the top 10% pay more than 70% of those revenues, while the bottom 50% pay just 2.3% (source: Tax Foundation as of 2009). So the income tax rates are already steeply progressive. Add to this the conservative belief that government spending, left unchecked, will always outpace government revenues (or, in a corollary to Parkinson’s law, the appetite for benefits and programs increases to consume the resources available). And finally, that increasing economic activity will increase the wealth available to a society, which means more jobs, more goods and services available to people, and more tax revenues for government (i.e., the theory of raising revenue by increasing economic activity ain’t dead by a long shot).

3. Through 2012, the long-term capital gains rate on individuals in the 10% and 15% income brackets is 0%, while for higher brackets it’s 15%. In 2013, the rate rises to 10% for individuals in the 15% bracket, and to 20% for all higher brackets.

4. Usually, investment in municipal bonds is free of Federal and State taxes, to encourage investment in local infrastructure.

5. Of course, if you sell your yacht or artwork at a loss, there’s no tax to be paid on the transaction and you may even use that loss to lower taxes owed on other investment income.

6. With the exceptions that local governments usually impose annual taxes on property like houses and land to pay for local infrastructure and services like education; some states tax assets like automobiles to pay for road building and maintenance; and many local governments and states—but not so far the Federal government—impose a sales tax on various categories of spending.

7. See U.S. Constitution Online.

8. The Federal government—so far—has apparently only dabbled in excise taxes, such as the tax on tires. While the Federal government doesn’t have a sales tax, many on the Democrat/liberal/progressive side would like to impose a European-style value added tax (VAT)—kind of a super sales tax on every step in production and distribution—which would be a massive money-raiser. It would essentially tax on production and consumption in parallel with existing taxes on investment and income. This article of the Constitution would appear to support such a move.

You Say You Want a Revolution

2012-02-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Politics has always been a serious business in the United States, as in most of the world. I believe that’s a good thing. People should air their different beliefs and preferred policies, discuss them, analyze them, and try to find a compromise, a middle path, a solution that will work for—if not everybody—as least for most people. That was the original intention of democracy: messy and less than satisfying, but still more congenial than life under a monarchy or dictatorship. That’s the way it has worked for about 200 years in this country.

Apparently, not anymore. It seems that in the last decade the two political parties have drawn fixed lines and dug deep trenches, not unlike the battlefields of World War I. The center of gravity on each side has moved from somewhere near the middle and amenable to compromise, out to fringe positions and extreme statements that border on obsession and blindness. The Democrats are now firmly and openly hostile to the private sector, personal wealth, and religion; firmly and openly in favor of government control of the economy, redistribution of personal assets, and a behaviorist view of human nature. The Republicans are now firmly and openly hostile to government regulation, taxation, and social engineering; firmly and openly in favor of unfettered market forces, capitalism’s penchant for “creative destruction” come what may, and a hierarchical view of human nature.

Positions are so solid that any move toward compromise is viewed as treacherous and shameful, a complete loss of faith. Our side is the earthly beacon of light and sanity. The other side is the original author of all stupidity and wrongheadedness. Anyone who lifts his head above the trench line will get it shot off, and the middle ground is a no-man’s land with death in the crossfire.¹

In the last year or so I’ve heard the words “civil war” used by bloggers and people I tend to respect. They are usually referring to these battle lines of social and economic difference, and they imply we’re in the middle of such a war already.² But to my mind, we’re still at the talking stage: airing differences and seeking solutions. It’s not a real war, yet.

If the people of right and left were homogenously intermingled, so that neighbor was talking to and arguing with neighbor, I wouldn’t be so worried. People who have to rake leaves and shovel snow together usually have a hard time imagining each other as “the enemy” at the working end of a gun—especially if they’ve held a few block parties over the years. But there is that map of the red and blue states. Colloquially, people talk about the two coasts as being more liberal or progressive, while the heartland, or “flyover country,” is more conservative or libertarian. However, if you look at the map, the East Coast is true blue only in the Northeast, and the Midwest is deep red only below Illinois.

If our differences become irreconcilable, if the policies of the party in power become intolerable to the party on the outs, and especially if the economy is crippled or collapses because of the federal debt burden or the demands imposed by our foreign lenders—then this is the strategic map for secession and civil war.

I wrote fancifully about a second civil war in America in my novel First Citizen. Of course, before the country fell apart in that story, it had suffered some serious insults: a decapitating nuclear strike on Washington, DC, by forces unknown, and a series of constitutional amendments that repudiated the federal debt and limited the federal power to raise revenue through taxes. In our current situation—with a robust and expanding federal government—any move toward secession would face almost insurmountable hurdles. Here are some examples.

Social Programs Almost every American citizen, except those covered under alternative government programs, has paid into Social Security and Medicare. Financial advisors routinely incorporate expected payouts under these programs into people’s retirement planning. Any state that secedes from the Union must expect to supplement this support or face opposition from its older, more established citizens. Medical facilities and personnel are also heavily dependent on federal payments under Medicare. Seceding states will be hard pressed to manage health care on their own.

Infrastructure Support Roads and highways, waterways, water supply systems, airports, public schools and universities, and urban development all draw heavily on funds provided by the federal government. Any state that secedes will have to support itself in terms of infrastructure. Yes, the state government will be able to absorb the taxes its citizens formerly paid into the federal treasury. But many states—particularly those among the less populous red states—usually get back more from the federal government than their citizens pay in taxes. Making up the difference will be hard.

Military Systems Any state that secedes can appropriate the military bases inside its borders, but that will yield only the land and buildings. Certainly, the U.S. military will fly its aircraft out, remove its heavy weapons like tanks, artillery, and personnel carriers, and sail its ships away. If the state should happen to appropriate any of these assets—so what? These days, weapons are not the planes or ships but the systems of appropriations and contracts that allow them to be maintained, fueled, armed, and prepared for battle. Individual states won’t have access to these systems. Any assets they do claim will become inert within about eighteen months. And while nuclear weapons are hard to remove on short notice, they too are inert without the launch codes. All of this is going to be bad news if the federal government opens hostilities to recover the seceding states.

Commercial and Financial Systems The economy of the United States is remarkably cohesive, knit together by interlocking systems of commercial exchange, credit, and finance. Your bank accounts, credit cards, and mortgage loan are possibly managed by banks in one or more other states. The bread, meat, produce, and all the processed foods in your local grocery store probably came from several states away, carried in by train and truck. The natural gas you burn in your furnace and stove and the gasoline in your car probably come from wells and refineries in other states. Your cell phone and internet connections are managed through switching and routing systems that may be managed by firms in other states. In the midst of secession, access to these necessities may not cease but certainly will be slowed by a new set of rules and regulations. If secession leads to civil war, access will almost certainly stop. Look for a much lower standard of living.

In 1860, the South could secede from the Union because most states were self-sufficient.³ Foods, fuels, finance, and other necessities were usually produced and consumed locally. The federal government was small and relatively weak. A cannon or a musket was just a metal tube that could fire a variety of ammunition, and anyone could make black powder. A horse was a horse on either side of the border, ready for saddling and riding. Being a part of the Union was more a matter of politics and pride than necessity. And when pride overrode reason, well, a gentleman could opt to leave the club.

The world of the 21st century is much more connected—and more fragile. Close the borders to interstate trucking, and your grocery store empties out within 48 hours. Cancel the credit cards and close the accounts of out-of-state banking customers, and people become paupers in 24 hours. Close the switches on interstate electric transmission and the valves on interstate gas pipelines, and cities go dark and cold by sundown.

If you don’t get your way in politics, you may consider secession. But you’d better hope there’s not another Lincoln around, refusing to let you go in peace. It’s always daring and dramatic to talk about civil war. But the reality will be the collapse of a society it has taken us a century of technological advances to knit together.

Faced with that, politics and pride hardly matter at all.

1. As someone who lives mostly in the middle ground—fiscally conservative to a point, socially progressive to a point, falling about “center right” on the political scale—I find all this distressing. The two parties are drawing to the right and left of the spectrum so quickly that I feel like an astronomer of the far future, when dark energy has expanded the edges of the universe into a thin, cool emptiness. Where have all the galaxies gone? Where have all the stars gone?

2. President Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform” the country seems to have kicked off some of this angst and anger on both sides. The politics of gradualism, winning a position step by step, is easier for most people to accept than sudden and irreversible transformations—which can cause major and irreversible dislocations.

3. Although, as Rhett Butler pointed out, the South was remarkably deficient in cannon foundries.

On Hating Humanity

2012-01-29T12:34:00.000-08:00

Western thought, both conservative and liberal, has a long tradition of viewing human beings, individually and collectively, as a scourge that must be contained. I think it goes back to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian acceptance of Original Sin. In Genesis, Adam and Eve listen to the Serpent’s twisted counsel, disobey God’s commands about touching certain fruits, and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In consequence, they are banished from Eden before they can also eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal—essentially becoming gods themselves.

In the myth, this disobedience was the root of all human wrongdoing. Humans became differentiated from the other animals of creation which, lacking such knowledge, retained their innocence. The tiger might eat a lamb, a ram, or a human being and yet remain innocent because savage predation is the tiger’s nature. The tiger simply knows no better. But a human who lies, steals, murders, or does other harm is condemned because he or she now has understanding of moral choices and their consequences and knows right from wrong.

This ought to be an advanced state. The human perceives and understands more deeply than the tiger. The human is capable of self-awareness and self-examination, can know about cause and effect, can predict consequences, and can choose a proper course of action. The wise human will of course choose moral actions leading to a good life, but he or she is also aware of other possible, less desirable actions. The tiger simply kills whatever crosses its path that is warm-blooded and looks like prey.

Presumably, if Adam and Eve had closed their ears to the Serpent, obeyed God’s injunction, and not eaten from the Tree, then they and their progeny—the whole human race—would still be innocent. We would live according to God’s rules but not know why. We would obey without thought or conscious choice. We would not need to examine or think about our actions. It might even be argued that, like the innocent creatures, we would have no need of self-awareness, no need to identify ourselves as beings separate from the world around us and operating in the context of our own actions.¹

From a religious viewpoint, where obedience to God is the highest good, this would seem to be an ideal state. Unfallen humans could not disobey. God would obtain obedience from his creatures without the troublesome effort of monitoring human actions, judging them, and disposing of the operators upon their deaths to a place of either punishment or reward. The world would function in perfect harmony: humans eating fruit, hawks eating sparrows, tigers eating lambs, and nothing to mar the peace except the occasional stricken cries from sparrows and lambs.

In such a world, there would be no distinction between humans and the other animals. Humans would roam forest and savannah eating roots and berries and now and then scavenging the bones left over from a lion’s kill. Society would be limited to the family and an extended kinship of uncles, aunts, and cousins that approached the definition of a tribe. Gorillas and chimps live this way in the wild. Perhaps Australopithecus lived this way. If one chimp or hominid happened to kill another—well, accidents do happen, and male bears have also been known to innocently kill and eat their own cubs.

Certainly, such a world would be free of organized society and its preferences for class and ethnic distinctions, ownership, trade, warfare, and hierarchical religion. That means there would be no inequality, no possessions or greed, no massacres or genocides, no climate of fear, no courts or inquisitions. There would also be no stories or plays about personal or societal conflict and choice. There could be no heroes or villains, no one to look up to or down upon, no context of action, no reason and no way to dedicate one’s life to something greater than roaming and picking berries.²

Several authors who shaped some of my early reading and whom I still greatly respect—among them C. S. Lewis in the Perelandra series and James Blish in his novel A Case of Conscience—have viewed human space travel as a potential disaster for planets with races that still lived in innocence without moral distinctions. Humans would infect them with our original sin and destroy them.

Other authors and thinkers whom I do not so much respect—among them John Muir and most of today’s radical environmentalists—apply this thinking to our own planet. Because humans have developed technologies that draw metals and fuels from the ground, cut trees for their wood, change the course of rivers, and expunge natural habitats, we have destroyed Eden. We are a scourge upon the planet, like a microbe that will consume all the nourishment in its petri dish and drown in its own wastes.³ Their view of humans—at least in the aggregate—is that we are a beast of the belly who doom both ourselves and our planet.

Like most humanists, I believe that human beings, both individually and in groups, are capable of self-knowledge, understanding of consequences, and choice of action. We are capable not only of astounding evil and depravity but also of astounding good and nobility. Further, I believe that it is only through the possibility and example of evil that the possibility and example of good can be known.

Like the ancient Greeks, I believe that human beings belong in, and function best in, the polis—the city, where strangers may meet and interact in cooperation or competition—rather than in the wilderness. The wilderness is the place of instinct and sudden violence, while the city is the place of reflection, order, reasonable debate, and reasoned action.

This is not to say that I don’t marvel at life in nature. I am fascinated by the interplay of environmental forces on established genomes to foster the development of new, unexpected traits and species to exploit previously unknown environmental niches. I look upon the energy-conserving lope of the kangaroo in pure astonishment. I am also fascinated by the physical world of stars and their origins and proper motions, of planets and their complex tectonics and geology. I look upon earthquakes and volcanoes in pure awe. But I am also reminded that the ability to know and study and respect these natural forces and their outcomes is based on a human activity—science. A human mind has experienced a mystery, applied the processes of observation and logic, tested its understanding of consequences, and used the languages of words and numbers to communicate this understanding to other human minds. Life, the Earth, and the stars do not know themselves—they are understood only by humans.

I am fascinated by technology: machines and engines that move of their own accord, circuits and software that manipulate data, structures and processes that control and oppose natural forces like gravity with bridges and dams. I am fascinated by the inventiveness of the human mind, which can conceive of a wheel and piston driven by steam, enhance and compact that engine through internal combustion, and optimize it with cams and valves and fuel injection. Here is a complete history of human thought written not in brushstrokes on papyrus but in linkages of steel.

Far from being a scourge on the Earth, I believe we humans are the best thing happening within a sphere of open space approximately four light years across—the distance to the nearest star—and perhaps in a much larger space. We may meet like minds out in the galaxy, or minds that are very different. But if they are the innocent minds of animals, lacking self-awareness and the capacity for good and evil, then they will be of little interest. We should treasure them for their oddity, as we treasure tigers and lambs and hawks and sparrows for their unique qualities. But we won’t have much to say to them.⁴

Various thinkers have looked on this human capacity, to know good from evil and then choose to do either good or evil, and despaired. They would create a different kind of human through education or indoctrination or breeding pressure. Utopian societies dream of forcing a new, benevolent, unquestioning lifestyle that knows only good and cannot conceive of evil. The Russian communists hoped to breed or bully their people into becoming a new race, Homo sovieticus, imbued with egalitarianism and selflessness. You can achieve much the same effect—quieting the human impulse to know and plan for the future, trace the possible course of events, and make informed choices—with an ice pick and a prefrontal lobotomy.⁵ But the result will always be something less than human, or at least lacking in human potential.

I don’t believe we are fallen angels. We are not outcasts from some mythical garden of peace and harmony. And we are not perfectible, except through the exercise of individual and group choices from among courses that we are free to evaluate as good or evil. That process is always going to be uncertain, messy, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally disastrous. The lobotomy or its social equivalent is certain, clean, predictable, and beneficial to religious reformers and social planners. … But it just ain’t human.

1. Presumably, we would also be vegetarians. Fruit-picking seems to have been the dominant occupation of Adam and Even while they lived in Eden. But possibly we would share the tiger’s innocence and kill among the sheep and cows of paradise in order to put mutton and beef on the menu. Certainly, as omnivores made in God’s image, our metabolism was designed to ingest and derive nourishment from meat as well as from fruits and grains.

2. This is a trend of thought in western civilization that probably started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Discourses.

3. Of course, microbes are innocent creatures that respond only to their biological imperatives. They have no brains to evaluate resources and see consequences. They cannot choose other than to suck all the good out of the petri dish and contaminate it with their wastes. Nature itself imposes consequences and limits the spread of microbes so that land and water are not inches deep in slime.

4. In fact, I would be very surprised if creatures that lack self-awareness could even attain language—anything more complex that the warning cry of the monkey troupe or the howl of the wolf. Whether whales’ songs and dolphins’ clicks and squeaks are communication or simple echo location is still to be proven.

5. The front part of the brain’s cerebral cortex is where humans perceive future courses, plan complex behaviors, make decisions, adapt personal expression to socially correct behavior, and coordinate thoughts and actions with internal goals. The prefrontal lobotomy was supposed to make aggressive and anxious mental patients become docile and pliable. Of course, if you can’t think ahead and perceive outcomes, if you don’t have a mechanism that lets you test the future and your place in it, then you don’t have much to care or worry about, come what may.

On Being a Romantic

2012-01-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

In the matter of music I am vaguely eclectic. I like most of the Rock’n’Roll of the last century, some New Age,¹ most Celtic music and ballads, and of course Classical music. And in the latter area, I tend to lose my heart to the composers of the mid-19th to early 20th century: Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saens, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and Wagner² among others.

In reading, I like stories with high stakes and involved plots that test the characters’ ingenuity and endurance. I like characters who know themselves, understand their place in the universe, battle against adversity with honor, grace, and humor, and are prepared to die gallantly. I find a lot of this underlying attitude in science fiction and lose my heart to writers like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Tim Powers, John Varley, and many more.

With such tastes, I have finally come to realize that I am, against all appearances, a romantic.³ The word—especially in the context of “romantic sensibility”—conjures images of a delicate spirit. Romantics supposedly live by their hearts, their feelings and intuition, rather than their heads, their foresight and calculation. Romantics are supposed to weep easily, fall fainting, blush at the hard realities of life, and draw back from pressing an attack with cold steel.

Well, that’s not me. But I’m invoking a more robust definition of romanticism.

I believe a romantic is someone who believes that human life has purpose and meaning. That humans collectively are not an accident on this planet. And that each human individually has a purpose in life, a destiny, to follow and fulfill. Whether that purpose is assigned by God, or chosen freely and consciously, or thrust upon one by circumstances, is not all that important. (I personally believe that part of growing up is to determine your own meaning, but not all may share that view.) Each person has something they are here on Earth to do.⁴

That view has a number of implications. If you have a purpose to your life, a particular meaning, a mission, then you are susceptible to success and failure. You are constantly either moving toward fulfillment (success) or moving away from it, or not moving at all (failure). With the possibility of success or failure, you have the possibilities of struggle, of ennoblement, and of tragedy. Thus each person’s life follows a path, a plot, a story arc.

I cannot imagine a novelist who does not share this romantic viewpoint. Stories might be written without it—many modern stories are, such as the works of Samuel Beckett—but they are clearly dismal, sad, and unsatisfying. To have real possibility of greatness, and emotional fulfillment, you must have purpose and the chance of failure and loss. The greatness is measured against the purpose. For reference, see the sad little aims of a movie like Sideways.

This sense of purpose also supplies the groundwork for a code of personal honor. Without a conscious sense of purpose and mission, it’s hard to have a stance that says, “I will always do this. I will never do that.” Again, some people can hold to those rules without the purpose, but then they are just routines, tics, empty strictures. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

What the purpose one chooses may be great or small, from helping others, to saving the rainforest, to finding the white whale, to finding the perfect glass of Cabernet. For each person the mission is different, but the emotional background, the suspense, the fulfillment are all similar. In a way, this sense of purpose and the possibility of failure are what makes war such a rich source of satisfying stories—because people engaged in battle are risking their lives for a purpose that lies beyond their own satisfaction. In fact, I would say the only thing that makes death meaningful—satisfying, ennobling, worth contemplating—is when it occurs in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal, or at the end of a life filled with meaning. Otherwise, death itself is an accident.

Sometimes that purpose is wrapped up in a person, someone to love, to be together with, to strive and suffer with, to raise children with, to grow old with. A person can have more than one purpose—to love one special person, and also to hunt the white whale—and then you have the bittersweet challenge of making choices and seeing the inevitable disappointment of one or the other goal.

According to this definition, a romantic is innately and unalterably opposed to certain opinions, philosophies, and attitudes—most of them arising in the 20th century. One is Skinnerian behaviorism, the view that says people are just glorified, more complex lab rats. That all life can be reduced to stimulus and response. See the cheese, learn the maze, run to the cheese. My hostility to this view is immediate and visceral.

Another anti-romantic view is represented by most socialist/communist doctrines, the view that people are just productive units, available to line up in service to the state, cogs in the society. The viewpoint that underlies most sociology and anthropology texts has this cold, calculating view of people as indiscriminate things, and I detest it.

Curiously, most overtly capitalist—or we might say mercantilist—principles are also anti-romantic. This is the view that says every man has a price. I imagine the producers of reality television shows, from the old Beat the Clock to Survivor, crowing, “For a million dollars we can get them to eat their young!” This is also the view that every thing has a price, too, and that if you put the right price and the right advertising spin on a shoddy piece of work, you can make people buy it. Some people, some of the time, maybe, but not those who respond consciously to a purpose and see value in the things they commit themselves to own.

And finally, romantics reject the modern view of love, that people are drawn together only by the attractions of sex and lust, and that they stay together, if they do at all, only through inertia, timorousness, fear, or ennui. That people are basically interchangeable breeding rats, and there is nothing special or important about the object of one’s love. That’s Skinnerian behaviorism in the bedroom.

The romantic believes that people have intrinsic worth, based on the virtues they possess and their potential for action, as well as on the purpose and destiny that they will fulfill. That objects have intrinsic value, based on concepts like beauty, utility, efficiency, design, and other aspects to which people respond. The romantic responds to purpose, is inspired by it, hungers for it.

This view may be wrong. It may be a form of hallucination or self-deception. Life and humanity may indeed be accidents. But, deep down, I just don’t believe it.

Certainly, there are people who try to write plays and books without recognition of this romantic spirit (e.g., Waiting for Godot), make products without it (the Chevy Malibu), live in intimate contact among other people without it (“No strings, just so long as it feels good”), and form societies without it (name your socialist tyranny). But I cannot understand such people. I have no feeling for them. I don’t hate them, but I turn my eyes away in confusion and sadness. They are like men who deny their manhood, or women who deny their femininity. They ignore an essential, informing part of themselves. It is possible to do this—but why would you? How is this better? What do you gain compared with all that you lose?

Now you know why I hate the 20th century. It’s given us such frightfully barren doctrines and attitudes. Many of our wars, certainly WWII and the Cold War, have been a struggle against people who would paint all life with this barrenness, the marching morons of Nazism and Communism. But out of that struggle, for many modern people, has come a kind of despair and a resignation to the sterility of life without purpose. Dada-ism. Inanity. Shostakovich—most of whose work, except for a few bright passages,⁵ I consider organized noise, or prelude to a migraine—instead of Prokofiev.

You may call all this a response to God, that God makes both human and personal meaning possible. I wouldn’t call that wrong, exactly. But certainly there have been people—a whole religion full of them right next door, who worship a black stone in Mecca—who do not recognize this romantic sense of purpose and mission. To them, the purpose of life is to submit to the whim of the divine and obey the laws of their religious theorists. And some people—here I’m thinking of the Calvinists—believe in a type of tyrannical god who treats his creations as mere things to torture and abuse. No romance in either of those views. And while indeed most romantics link their mission to a religious purpose, organized religious belief is not absolutely necessary to a sense of purpose in life.

What I call the romantic sensibility may actually be a striving to define God, to make the divine instruments of beauty, justice, courage, and caring into facets of everyday life. It is the union of heart and head, thought and feeling, into a whole that works.

1. Especially composers who use melody, like Vangelis and Ray Lynch.

2. Yes, yes, I know. “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” But I still like him.

3. The word has many meanings, of course. For the purposes of this essay, I’m using a definition picked up from my reading—but I can’t say where, or whether it’s from one author or a pastiche of several. This is the dreaded gestalt.

4. Note carefully my use of the word “believe” in the first sentence of this paragraph. I am also a Darwinist and understand life on Earth to be a chemical phenomenon, a reversal of entropy, and not directed by the will or thought of a divine intelligence. So as noted above, each person must create, accept, and adopt a purpose in life that fits his or her needs. I believe making such a choice is a noble undertaking. People who don’t—who sink into a life of purposeless lechery, hopeless debauchery, or nihilistic thuggery—are less than fully human.

5. Okay, I like the Symphony No. 10. All the rest is noise.

On Writing Female Characters

2012-01-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

As a fiction writer, I generally create stories that are told from multiple viewpoints, a technique that has recently been picked up by the best of the cable television series.¹ To make this technique work, I have to get inside the character’s head, see with his eyes, and report and comment on only the parts of the story that he knows, using his limited understanding. This imposes limitations, of course; for example, unlike the omniscient narrator, I can’t be on both sides of a door when there’s a knock and let the reader know simultaneously who is knocking and who is responding. And sometimes—about half the time, actually—the viewpoint character is not a he but a she.

So, while not being a woman, I routinely have to adopt the persona and write from the viewpoint of a female character. Some writers on both sides of the gender aisle will insist that no one born into the opposite sex can really understand how a woman thinks and feels, or for that matter how a man perceives and relates to the universe. Personally, I believe this argument puts too low a value on human empathy and imagination. But when I have to write a woman character, I do adopt a particular trick: I accentuate the commonalities of human experience rather than the differences.²

Really, secondary sexual characteristics are the least part of a character’s viewpoint. My male characters don’t go through the story wondering about the orientation of and pressures on their penis or when they will next need to shave their face. So my female characters don’t agonize over the size and weight of their breasts or when they next need to wash and comb their hair. I don’t follow my characters into the bathroom and comment on their sanitary habits. Occasionally, my characters may think with their libidos and feel attraction to persons of the opposite sex. Trying to be an old-fashioned gentleman, and not caring much for eroticism and pornography, I generally keep these encounters brief and tasteful. Actually, most people do not spend their entire day wondering about their next sexual encounter and the attractiveness or availability of every person they meet.³

If writing from the female (or the male) point of view means focusing on the commonalities—then what are they? What makes a character decidedly human? I have a list of human wants and needs that my characters must reflect and project. Here are the basics.

Self-respect. Every character is a serious person and expects to be treated seriously. No one considers his or her own life to be unimportant, unexceptional, frivolous, or comical.⁴ The people and principles they hold dear do matter. They may sacrifice themselves to save another person or to serve an ideal, but they are conscious of the cost. They have a sense of personal honor, which means they hold themselves accountable and responsible for their actions. They hold some thoughts to be shameful, and some actions to be unworthy.

Competence. Every character has something he or she is good at. It may be a specific set of skills, or an attitude of resolve and resourcefulness that lets him or her master many challenges. When confronted with life’s or a story’s difficulties, my characters may be surprised, become fearful, or even hesitate, but they don’t back down.

Self-confidence. The flip side of competence is confidence. My characters know they have mastered their skills, because understanding when you are truly good at something is built into human nature. They are confident of what they have learned and trust they can meet challenges within their chosen field. Aligned with respect, they know they have an innate right to breath the air and walk the earth.

Survival. My characters have something to live for and, when challenged, they will fight. They may occasionally despair, but they do not surrender to existential angst and hopelessness. They see value in life and in the world around them.

Operational space. Every character has freedom of action within the limits imposed by his or her own skills, knowledge, belief, morals, and physical reality. While the character may start in a limited sphere—a prison cell, a confining job, or a smothering relationship—the story must draw the character out into the wider world to explore those limits. The world challenges the character’s competence and confidence.

Goal seeking. Every character has one or more things he or she wants to achieve: a problem to solve, a fight to win, something to prove, someone to save, a relationship to settle.

Some doubt. The flip side of confidence is realization of limitations. Every character knows he or she still has something more to learn, to understand, to become. Characters know there is reason for caution in some situations, particularly situations of impending danger or opportunity. They acknowledge their limits.

Every person reflects some combination of these traits. The conflicts between them—between self-confidence and doubt, between survival and goals, between competence and the challenges of operational space, between self-respect and the challenges of life—establish the choices a character must face and the difficulties he or she must overcome. Life is a matter of complications and choices, and so are the best stories.

There may be people living whose lives and outlooks don’t reflect these traits. Bodhisattvas and Ascended Masters may lack a need for respect or a tendency to doubt. But they don’t usually make good characters in a story. Stories arise from conflict, and conflicts involve real people.

These principles have worked for me in creating characters like Margot and Jane Dobray and Libby Wheelock in The Judge’s Daughter, Janey Pulaski and Rae Howell in Sunflowers, and Ariel Ceram and Grace Porter in The Doomsday Effect. So far, no one has criticized these books because the quality of their women.

On both sides of the gender aisle, we are human beings with human needs and conflicts that come before the demands of sexual differentiation in the zygote.

1. Think of HBO’s Rome, Game of Thrones, and Boardwalk Empire, or FX’s Sons of Anarchy. In each installment, various scenes start with and play through the viewpoint, understanding, and expectations of one or another of a broad cast of characters. For the duration of the scene, the viewer is asked to sympathize with that character and experience the story from his or her viewpoint. In my opinion, this makes for a richer experience than revelation by either an omniscient narrator or from a single-character or first-person viewpoint. Cast in the form of a novel, where the narrative comes from inside each character’s head—a technique I call “first-person narration in third-person voice”—this approach allows the writer to show the reader when certain characters are being wishful or deceitful, following a wrong trail, or being misled. That’s a luxury denied to writers who work only in the first person. And an omniscient narrator exposing other thoughts and viewpoints by hopping from head to head during a scene or piece of action can be clumsy and annoying. The formal, controlled technique of following multiple viewpoints makes for a richer reader experience.

2. Or as Orlando said (at least in the Tilda Swinton movie): “No difference at all.”

3. And, if any character is supposed to have this on the brain, most people would say it’s the male rather than the female.

4. Although, at the end of life, in the last twenty seconds or so, I would hope my characters can reach for the grand jest—the throwaway line—to show they are unafraid and hold lightly to the gift of life.

The Coming Robotics Age

2012-01-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

I keep returning to this topic because I think it’s important.¹ The population of talking heads in this country presumes that the current malaise in our job market has a variety of possible causes, for which politicians of both the left and right are proposing various solutions. Prominent among these causes would be:

1. The Chinese, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Vietnamese, and anyone else in a poor but aspiring country are more productive than U.S. citizens because they live in a lower-cost environment and are willing to work harder for a lower wage.

2. Businessmen are ruthless and mean, constantly seeking to exploit workers willing to take less pay and make less fuss over work rules, and so they are moving their factories to China, India, Mexico, etc.

3. Tax rates and the regulatory environment in the U.S. have dimmed the average businessman’s enthusiasm for building and expanding factories here, and so he is eager to move production to China, India, etc.

4. The recent failure of the financial institutions and pressures on the banking system have dried up loans, so that U.S. businesses cannot obtain the capital needed to build and expand factories—and create the jobs that go with them—in this country.

Causes 1 and 2—which are actually the same situation from two points of view, with a bit of Marxist venom thrown in—would seem to be confirmed by a visit to any Wal-Mart store. And yes, inexpensive consumer goods and electronics are made offshore because (1) the goods are low value and low margin, meaning that (2) at the moment it’s easier to make them with cheap labor. But we still make a huge amount of goods in this country, and many of these domestic products are high-value goods that require precision work and could support high wages.

Cause 3 has some merit, but with any offshore move the businessman faces a whole new set of taxes, work rules, regulations, and restrictions in the host country. In addition, with many countries, the threat of nationalization hovers in the background of every decision. The biggest reason that U.S. businesses move their production to China is not so much cheap labor as the foothold they acquire in the Chinese market, which they believe will be huge in the 21st century. The Chinese government encourages this view, although their stated intention is to obtain technology on their own terms.

Cause 4 also has some merit—except that businesses seem to have the cash to expand overseas, and it’s not all a gift of the host government. And offshore companies—particularly automakers like BMW, Toyota, and Honda—seem to be able to expand their operations and factories in this country.

In my view, these are all temporary situations and transitional states. For now, Chinese or Indian hands are cheaper to employ than U.S. hands. For certain classes of goods and certain services, like customer phone centers, it makes sense—economically if not socially—to employ these offshore workers. Americans as a group have too high a standard of living for anyone to employ them making, say, lawn mowers. A mower made overseas costs $250 to $350. One made by American hands would cost $800 to $900—and the utility value simply is not there. We can also see many classes of jobs right here on American soil that the average established American worker simply won’t do—pick lettuce, clear tables, scrub toilets—and so these jobs provide a foothold for newcomers to the country, who come from lower-wage backgrounds and have not yet adjusted to our pay scales and lifestyles.

For each of these supposed causes of job loss there are proposed government rules and actions: impose tariffs on foreign-made goods and services to raise their effective cost of production and make American labor more competitive; write “made in America” clauses into government contracts, so that companies will move factories back home and hire more American workers;² make emergency government loans and stimulus funds available to banks, so they can loan money, and to companies, so they can start building factories and provide more jobs. These solutions will work for a while, they will reverse a temporary situation—but in the long run they won’t bring the jobs back.

The reality is that any job that requires repetitive movement and simple eye-hand-coordination—other than entertainment activities, like throwing a baseball—can now be done, or very soon will be done, by machine. For example, assembling the case, circuit components, and battery—all modules made elsewhere by machines—into a finished iPhone or iPad is work currently done by Chinese hands. In future generations of these products, these components will either become a single module—a circuit etched on glass—or be assembled faster and more accurately by a machine. No Chinese need apply. (For more such examples, see the references in my blogs in Note 1.)

As a general rule, any job for which you don’t need special training and which your supervisor can teach you in a morning is vulnerable to automation. Automation comes in various forms and is not always through direct replacement of a worker by a machine. Sometimes, automation involves (1) introduction of labor-saving devices and technologies that lower the number of workers doing the task;³ (2) redesign of the work environment to employ more computerization and machine interaction; and (3) redesign of the product or service to allow for more modularization and computerization of production.

For the past twenty or thirty years, computers and machines have made the average American worker more productive and therefore more valuable to the company that employed him or her. But we’re reaching a point where, instead of employing a person who knows how to operate a machine or work with a computer, the machines and computers themselves are becoming sophisticated enough—not to mention costing less, working tirelessly, and making fewer mistakes—that the person can be taken out of the productivity equation entirely.⁴

Outside the factory, the internet has mechanized information transfer and is putting the printing press and the local television station out of business. Computerized logistics using barcodes, Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, and mechanized conveyors and routing have overhauled the processes of inventorying, transporting, and stocking goods and providing services. Computerized money-handling through credit cards, direct deposit, and other accounting systems have overhauled the way we conduct business. Yes, the bank might still employ a few tellers inside a cage, but those people are basically problem solvers; for simple transactions like getting cash and depositing checks, you go to the ATM on the outside wall.

None of these advances has anything to do with the availability or willingness of workers in China and India. When the automation wave that’s now engulfing the U.S., Japan, and Europe reaches their more distant shores, it will simply put a billion people out of work in each of those countries.

The mechanization of industry will not stop. In the meantime, as more and more goods are manufactured and distributed with inputs from fewer and fewer people, the economy has been quietly shifting to provide jobs in support positions in order to maintain the lifestyle of the average middle class person. This accounts for the growth of administrative, regulatory, and compliance-enforcement positions in the federal and local governments. They establish complicated business regulations and requirements for meeting social, environmental, and financial controls and goals. In turn, that leads to the growth of corporate jobs in corresponding support departments like human resources, information technology, environmental health and safety, communications, compliance, and legal. As companies become richer from investing in machines to achieve their production goals rather than paying the salaries of semi-skilled workers, they can better afford to pay for these “information age” jobs that support the enterprise as a whole.

However, these non-productive “information age” jobs will always be less available than the production jobs they replace. So, the biggest source of this country’s malaise is our growing idleness. More people are out of work, exhaust their generous unemployment benefits, then move on to become discouraged workers. At that point, they either apply for disability insurance for non-life-threatening injuries and mental conditions, or move to part-time, temporary, or contract and “consulting” work that meets temporary business needs but has no long-term future.

In response to the temporary rise in information and support jobs, more and more young people are studying non-productive courses in college like sociology, anthropology, gender and ethnic studies, environmental science, and English literature. While these studies have traditionally prepared students for a purely academic career, they believe the knowledge will enable them to move into administrative and compliance positions with business, government, and academia. And perhaps these jobs will endure for another generation—the half-life of the people now studying for them. But if computers are good at handling anything, it’s information. The need for human brains to churn sociological, environmental, or linguistic data will eventually disappear like the need for human hands to manipulate manufactured parts.

This economic situation is not sustainable. Not the mechanization—that can be sustained and grow indefinitely. It makes perfect sense to have machines swiftly and efficiently make society’s goods, both the basic necessities and the entertaining, ephemeral, fun stuff. And now, through the marriage of electronic communications, computerized logistics, electronic banking, and machine programming, the new automated factories can respond to individual choices, making goods in customized styles, sizes, and forms for individual consumers, overwriting the economies of scale entirely.⁵ All of this frees human hands and minds to do the creative work we need done.⁶

What’s not sustainable is the notion—borne of the Calvinist work ethic and the pilgrims’ prosperity—that the man who does not work shall not eat.⁷ That one must be a productive member of society in order to be worthy of receiving the food in his mouth and the clothes on his back. But in the coming age of robotics, you might as well say that a person should not eat bread unless he trod the fields where the wheat was grown, sowed the seeds, and pulled weeds with his own hands. We have seed drills and pesticides to do that work. We have combine harvesters to reap, thresh, and winnow the wheat and mechanized bakeries to turn it into bread. We have computerized inventory systems to say how many loaves the factory should make and the store should stock, and trucks routed by computer to deliver them. We have payment systems based on the electronics of credit and debit cards to help the buyer pay for the bread.

What we don’t have is something for the person to do that lets him or her participate in the economy and have the money to buy the goods on display. Perhaps, since the basis of mechanization is investment of capital rather than hiring of labor, the state should tax more heavily the gains from capital investment to support our growing number of hungry but economically useless people. (It would certainly be better than having them riot in the streets!) The only trouble is, whenever the tax burden increases, the taxed activity goes down. Taxing productive capital to extinction is not a solution in the robotics age, which is solely supported by capital.

Perhaps the government should push all the businessmen aside and simply make the investment in automation itself. That’s the approach favored by socialists. I don’t like it, however, because that sets up a central authority which defines where all investments will be made. Someone in Washington would be deciding what kind of bread I’ll eat and what model car I’ll drive and when I can have it and how much of it I get. I’d prefer some aggressive businessman trying to figure out what I want and supplying it, in competition with others who will also be figuring me out and perhaps investing in different solutions. Capitalism yields better choices for consumers.

If human minds and hands are freed from work—and who really wants to do the routine, mechanical, boring, soul-deadening, put-the-nut-on-the-bolt factory jobs?—we should find something better for them to do. Society certainly has needs that machines do not yet serve, may not serve in our lifetime, and indeed may never serve. Birth a baby, hold a sick person’s hand, comfort the dying, tell a story, sing a song, create a vision, paint a picture, teach someone to dance, carve a statue, teach someone to carve a statue, help someone carve a mountain, design a new perfume, design a new and more comfortable kind of chair, design a desk or cabinet with all sorts of clever little drawers and hiding places, invent a new kind of machine, write the code to run it, bake a really flaky croissant, grow a prize-winning rose. No matter what it is, and that some machine can make really fast, there will always be certain categories of goods and services where someone, somewhere will pay more for work by human hands and minds guided by vision and inspiration.

But we still have to figure out how to pay them. What we need—and sooner rather than later—is a new definition of what it means to be a citizen, a valid member of society, with access to its cornucopia of goods and services showered down from hard-working machines. We should at least solve that puzzle before the robots acquire their own citizenship and start voting against us.

1. For example, see my previous blogs Gutenberg and Automation from February 20 and Automation, Work, and Personal Meaning from February 27, 2011. The Gutenberg blog describes the rise of automation; the Personal Meaning blog describes the response of our economy.

2. If you think imposing government contract rules isn’t a powerful tool, consider that most of this country’s largest companies sell some fraction of their products to the U.S. government. If the rule is written expansively enough, it can change incentives for the company’s entire operation.

3. For example, as recently as about 30 years ago office settings had large numbers of humans, originally called “secretaries,” whose sole function was to answer telephones, type letters, and file documents. These were often employed at a ratio of 1-to-1 with executives and managers and 1-to-2 or 1-to-4 with average employees. Computers, email, voicemail, and other labor-saving technologies have virtually wiped out the job. Now “personal assistants” hold the position but do little that is personal and nothing menial. Instead, they have higher functions like reporting statistics, coordinating meetings, making travel arrangements, and ordering supplies on a department- or division-wide basis.

4. If you don’t believe this, watch any episode of “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel to see machines at work. In many cases, the only human hands in the video are taking semi-finished goods from one machine’s out bin and moving them to storage or to another machine’s loading bin. As soon as technology develops a robot with image-interpreting eyes and flexible manipulators, that job too will go away.

5. If you doubt the ability of automated machinery to provide for individual tastes, consider the modern experience of buying a car. Within each model line, the factory makes available units in dozens or hundreds of combinations from among choices of color, trim level, and optional features. The carmaker distributes these variants throughout the dealer network based upon what each dealer thinks will be locally popular. But if you want some other mix of trim and features, the dealer can locate it at another dealership somewhere in the sales territory and have it delivered within a day or two. If no such car exists, the dealer can order it from the factory. This puts to shame Henry Ford’s original insistence that mass production meant all Model T’s had to be black. If you can have this variation in a machine as large, complicated, and expensive as an automobile, how much easier is it to code for the fabrics, colors, and button treatments on a jacket or shirt?

6. However, even many jobs that we think of as “creative” can be automated these days. For example, where once a computer programmer labored over lines of code, inventing individual operations and then writing and proofing hundreds or thousands of individual code statements, we now have computer assisted software engineering (CASE). The programming language modularizes code fragments for specific tasks and techniques. The programmer has become a kind of design engineer, simply flowcharting what he or she wants the software to achieve, and background processes select the modules and edit them together into the finished product.

7. Actually, it goes back to the Bible, Second Thessalonians 3:10, “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” Or as my mother shortened it, when I would balk at doing chores, “No work, no eat”—although she never actually starved me.

Capitalism and Civics

2011-12-31T16:45:00.000-08:00

The tenor of discourse in American conversation¹ has run so far into the anti-capitalist, anti-free market vein that we seem to have reached a kind of rhetorical dead end. People in the private sector are now generally viewed as some kind of primitive, unteachable, gibbering ape—with apology to all living apes—who cannot be trusted to know right from wrong, refrain from messing in the house, or even recognize their own best interest. If capitalists were driving down a mountain road, they would be laughing maniacally and steering for the cliffs. They are thought to be people really too ridiculous to be believed.

Now, I am the old-fashioned sort who believes that any group is made up of individuals. While groups as a whole may advocate and pursue mad, impulsive, categorically imperative courses,² individuals tend to take actions that seem reasonable and justified in terms of their own worldview. That is, I will credit people with the ability to think, reflect, change their minds, and act accordingly.

So, in this context of individual enlightenment, what is a capitalist? As the concept has developed over time, he or she is anyone with liquid resources—that is, wealth not locked up in a house and land, jewelry, or some class of transportation hardware—available to invest. The time value of money³ suggests that leaving dollars under the mattress, where inflation can gobble them up, is pretty stupid. And putting them in a bank savings account, where they earn about 0.02 percent per year under current Federal Reserve policies, is foolish. Of course, the mattress and the savings account are the most risk-free, thought-free, and care-free ways to treat money. Any other use requires more risk, thought, and personal responsibility. And generally, the more risk and thought required, the greater the return that use of the money will command.⁴

A capitalist invests his or her spare money so as to get the greatest growth, or return, consistent with an acceptable level of risk. Of course, some people see huge returns to be made by guessing into which numbered pocket on a spinning wheel a little ball will bounce, or which horse out of eight or nine can run the fastest, or what string of numbers will come up together in a random drawing. For most of us, however, the risk of losing the principal altogether in these ventures is too great. We prefer a lower level of risk and a more modest return.

Capitalists buy stocks in companies that they think will do well, grow, and tend to increase in value.⁵ Or they buy the bonds of companies that have a good reputation for honoring their debts and will pay back the principal with interest. In this sense, the mass of employed Americans who participate in 401(k) savings plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are capitalists. They look ahead ten, twenty, or forty years to a time when they will not be able or want to work, and they expect their money to grow on the way to meeting them there. Let’s call these passive capitalists, because they are making investment decisions that will ride the coattails of those who manage the companies in which they invest.

Active capitalists, then, are people who take this money that’s borrowed through bonds or raised through stock sales—plus, usually, some of their own money—and invest it actively in a business. They use the money to buy productive and logistical capabilities such as manufacturing equipment and trucks. They hire workers to use the machinery and drive the trucks. They rent or purchase property for their factories and warehouses. And they hire or contract for support in areas like accounting, advertising, or human resources. If it’s a new business, the stock and bonds usually go to paying the costs of starting up. If established, they may pay for an expansion. Eventually, however, the business has to pay its own way plus a bit more—through profits and sales growth—to reward investors in terms of stock growth and dividends or bond yields and interest.

All of this is basic Microeconomics 101. What seems to have gone off the rails in recent discourse is the expectation that active and passive capitalists will act rationally. The presumption seems to be that, without intense government supervision, goal-setting, and micromanagement, capitalism will explode, poison the earth, ravage people, and destroy society. The sum of all the good things that government management is supposed to achieve through regulation and policy setting is usually described as “sustainability.” By that is meant encouraging or forcing capitalists to adopt social, environmental, and governmental goals that stand above and beyond the basics of earning a profit by providing goods and services that people want at a price they will pay—that is, by satisfying a demand in the marketplace.

Now, granted, the focus of business managers has shrunk over the past couple of decades. I can recall from the early years of my career when corporations rewarded employee loyalty and spent extra time cultivating community values. Companies used to see their role as balancing the natural tensions among four groups: customers, shareholders, employees, and community. Then, in the 1980s, a hardball style of stock analysis came into vogue and the words “shareholder value” became the cry. The term usually meant that a company worked to meet “the Street’s” expectations for stock price, earnings per share, and dividends each quarter. It made American managers less inclined to invest in growth and stability over the long haul. But any company that doesn’t keep one eye on the horizon will die in the long term anyway.⁶

It is my view that social goals, environmental goals, and government goals (except those represented by actual laws) are all secondary and pretty much unnecessary. If the intent of a business is to maximize its profits, then you do that by obeying the law (i.e., not paying fines or spending idle time in jail) and operating efficiently (i.e., not losing money to waste). Does it pay to treat your workers fairly? Of course. That way, you attract the best talent and generally avoid losses due to theft, obstruction, negligent damage, and downtime. Does it pay to be a good corporate citizen? Of course. If you do bad and hurtful things—such as ignoring social norms relating to racial equality, ethical and humane treatment, or respect for people and the environment—then someone will observe and report it. Then you'll lose money to competitors with a better name, because you’ll have to lower your prices to attract a less thoughtful class of customer.

As a case in point of operating efficiently, I once worked at a large oil refinery and commented to my supervisor that it didn't smell like the refineries I remembered from afar in the New Jersey of my youth. He said that this was by design. In fact, if I did smell anything, the company would pay me to report it. This wasn't simply a case of conscientious environmentalism. The plant’s chemical technology was tuned to such a degree that any odor meant a leak—“and that means we're losing product,” he said. The management’s self-interest made it a more vigilant environmental watchdog than any EPA investigator dropping in for the annual inspection.

Similarly, modern approaches to systems engineering, operating methods, data management, and people management mean that the modern company will run efficiently and effectively by choice, or suffer negative consequences. The focus of public attention in a transparent and open information environment means that a company will operate ethically by choice, or suffer the consequences of lost sales and lawsuits.

Is this approach—through self-interest—better than trying to write a law that covers all cases? Not always, because people are not uniformly smart or thoughtful, and the outcome is not certain. But with a law, the outcome is not certain, either. Laws must always be enforced through continual observation, routine apprehension, and credible penalties operating as deterrents.

If you doubt this, consider the California highways. With a speed limit of 65 mph, the average speed is usually above 70 and often closer to 80. Drivers go with the flow, and the California Highway Patrol usually cruises right along with them. The officers are more concerned with reckless and aggressive driving than trying to control the actual speed of the flow. This may be supremely sensible, but it’s not strict enforcement of the speed laws.

But making it in the capitalist’s best interest to undertake a course of action is more likely to have results, because capitalists are very good at looking out for their own interests. They are also very good at finding loopholes and workarounds when a law is not in their interest. And any enforcement strategy must obey another economic principle: the law of diminishing returns.

Simply put, pushing too hard on any one factor in a process reaches a point where more emphasis on that factor won’t achieve much. If you try to improve adherence to or compliance with a rule by enforcement alone, without addressing other incentives, you reach a point where a hundred patrol cars—in the example above—are no more effective than ten in reducing traffic speed. That may be why the California Department of Transportation has resorted to speed control by other, passive, physical means—like narrowing lanes, limiting lines of sight, and designing “weaves” between adjacent on and off ramps. When people have to slow down or risk breaking their necks, they usually comply.

Regulations that work through natural processes and the self-interest of the operator simply have a better chance of achieving their goals.

1. By “conversation,” I’m referring to what I hear from the mainstream media, bandied about in the blogosphere, and readily subscribed to by friends in the social media.

2. Think of the sort of fixation on a single principle that turns a zero-tolerance policy toward drugs or weapons into a scavenger hung for baby aspirin and butter knives in school backpacks, or an abortion rights advocate into an enthusiast for infanticide at the moment of birth.

3. Basic economics: everything is moving; everything is changing. Anything that is not growing is dying. The economy is like an ecology, always growing in one area by dying somewhere else. In such a dynamic environment, any asset that isn’t finding a productive use and growing is going to shrink and die. Money over time should grow in value. Otherwise, why did God give you eyes to see and a brain to think?

4. See Risk Free from December 4, 2011.

5. Speculators, day traders, and others who take a temporary position in a stock, believing it will go up or down in the short term, are less like capitalists and more like gamblers.

6. Managers who intentionally ride their companies to the block and chop them up for the current value of the parts are not really managers. They are corporate undertakers, and the business is already in a terminal state.

Formula for a Golden Age

2011-12-24T17:22:00.000-08:00

Since we seem to be so far from having one right now, I think this is the time to pause and consider what makes a Golden Age in any civilization. Is it something you always have to look back on and discover in hindsight? Is it something that’s more satisfying and fun to remember than to experience? Is it possible to engineer the conditions for a Golden Age? And is it possible, however inconceivable, that we are in the midst of one right now?

Certainly, it is easier to identify a Golden Age in the rearview mirror. Think of the times that have been so identified: the Edwardian period, between 1900 and the Great War; the Elizabethan period, between 1558 and 1603; the Augustan period, between 27 BC and 14 AD; and Periclean Athens from roughly 480 to 404 BC.¹ These times have a sentimental glow about them. They make us think of the golden light of late summer afternoons, bountiful harvests, full-bodied vintages, exuberant paintings, epic poetry, and a world at peace—perhaps not least because of the chaos and turmoil that came after them.

Those are image fragments, of course, but they still ring true. For example, the arts were on display in all such periods. The Athenians enjoyed the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, and the wit of Socrates. The Augustans were given Virgil’s epic Aeneid on the founding of Rome. The Elizabethans saw a flowering of the theater and the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The Edwardians inherited the Impressionist painters and the Romantic poets and composers from preceding centuries and made the most of them. These were all arts within the reach of the average literate person and anyone with the time to attend the theater or gallery—say, the upper middle classes. In that sense, the arts of these times extended beyond the wealthy patron and his immediate circle, and could be enjoyed by a wider slice of society.

In these periods, like most times, it was good to belong to the upper tiers of society. The wealthy could eat well, drink well, and play well. What marked these Golden Ages was a surface stability and lack of active war, which is a devourer of the leaders of society as well as the other ranks. Edward—whether by intention or through lack of attention—managed to avoid the wars of Queen Victoria’s reign, such as the Crimea and South Africa. He could jolly along his nephew the Kaiser and celebrate English and German rivalry with yachting displays at summer regattas. Elizabeth ended a religious revolt between Catholic and Protestant factions and extended her father’s and grandfather’s buffer against the dynastic politics of the Wars of the Roses. Augustus ended a hundred years of civil strife between contending leaders and their pledged legions, and initiated the Pax Romana. The Athenians existed in a sliver of peace between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars.

But under the surface? Edwardian England was the center of a technological arms race in Europe that led to the first of two world wars. Elizabeth was in constant struggles with her ministers over the succession and with France and Spain over the future of Europe, and avoided the latter’s invasion only through a fortunate combination of wind and storm. Augustus maintained the peace only by clamping down an army-backed dictatorship as the last man standing from the civil wars, and he also struggled with the succession. The Athenians were in constant conflict with their neighbors and allies. For anyone paying attention, none of these were idyllic, restful periods.

Each of these periods grew wealthy with trade. The Edwardians prospered from the empire Victoria consolidated in the Middle East and India. The Elizabethans stood at the dawn of New World exploitation and picked the first fruits of Spain through piracy. Augustus welded the corn harvest of Egypt and the riches of the eastern Mediterranean onto the Roman sphere. Athens drew masses of tribute from her Delian League in the Aegean and from colonies overseas.

Although it’s never been a good time to be poor, these periods had something for the lower classes as well. The Edwardian period saw the beginnings of a progressive concern for those in need. It was also, in the United States, a period of massive immigration and new beginnings. The wealth of Elizabeth’s reign was beginning to spill over to benefit the merchant classes.² Augustus settled legionary veterans on newly conquered lands, rebuilt the City of Rome and ensured its food supply, and reorganized the tax structure. Fifth-century Athens regularly heard the political voice of the average person—so long as he was born in Athens and not a slave or a woman.

So, what are the ingredients of a Golden Age? One part a period of fragile stability, usually with war and political upheaval as bookends. One part growth in trade and public prosperity. One part a flowering of the arts. One part opportunity for the common man. These conditions generate a spirit of public confidence. People are willing to speak their minds. People look ahead to better things.

But a Golden Age is not just about having a full belly and personal security. That way lies relaxation and a long nap. The spirit of confidence is tinged with just enough insecurity and doubt that people are inspired to scramble. And there must be a promise of improvement, so they know how to direct their steps. In this sense, living through a Golden Age might provoke more anxiety and require more hard work than people are likely to remember later.

Can a ruler or the leaders of society engineer these conditions? They can try. Political stability is well within a ruler’s or society’s grasp. Ironically, this usually requires a projection of strength rather than the cautious desire to avoid conflict: Enemies are more likely to avoid a snarling dog than a cowering one. Elizabeth, Augustus, and Pericles were all rulers who projected confidence and strength; Edward seems to have inherited the reputation from his mother. Trade and opportunity are usually within the control of government—if, that is, its ministers will release their grip a bit and trust in the efforts of entrepreneurs. The arts can always be publicly encouraged.³ Harder yet is to enlist the common people and capture their imagination: The average person is incredibly sensitive to what’s blowing on the wind.⁴

I would maintain that, despite all appearances, we are now living in a Golden Age, one that started with the end of World War II and persists up to the present. Consider these conditions:

War and political unrest: Yes, we have endured a cold war between various ideologies, first between free-market capitalism in the West and totalitarian communism in the East, then between tolerance of religious belief in the West and consolidation of a single belief in the Middle East. And yes, we have experienced numerous small wars at the edges of these greater conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan. But we have not experienced massive invasion into the heartland of either set of beliefs and a final resolution by conquest. Communism collapsed peacefully under its own inadequacies; religious consolidation will eventually do likewise under the onslaught of trade and education. The wars we have experienced are on the scale of the border conflicts of Imperial Rome and the skirmishes of Elizabethan England.

Trade and prosperity: The Second World War left the United States as the last man standing, like Augustus after the civil wars. It also offered the former combatants, Germany and Japan, the chance to rebuild their destroyed, 1930s-era industrial bases with modern, postwar technology.⁵ The U.S. encouraged this and made them trading partners. The fall of communism in Russia and eastern Europe, and its commutation to a form of state capitalism in China, opened up global markets. Advances in computer technology and automation improved productivity and made possible a flood of inexpensive goods and efficiently delivered services. The Green Revolution expanded the global food supply. Countries like China and India ceased being economic failures and became global exporters.

Flowering of the arts: Technology—especially computers and the internet—have opened a floodgate of the arts. Books, music, movies, and the ideas they represent are readily at hand to anyone. More than that, the barriers to producing art have never been lower, because the same technology also allows anyone with a computer, a video camera, a microphone, and internet access to become a writer, musician, or moviemaker. While we may not yet have found the age’s Sophocles, Virgil, or Shakespeare, we still are experiencing a period of tremendous creativity.

Welfare of the common man: In the developed countries of the West, the life experience of the average person has never been better. Yes, there are still poor people,⁶ and yes, we are still in a recession. But most people expect and live a middle-class life. In the developing countries, there is more opportunity for growth and achievement. In the long view, science and technology have enabled levels of education, communication, nutrition, travel, leisure, entertainment, and personal satisfaction once reserved for kings and courtiers.

That looks like a Golden Age to me. Yes, we still have instability and anxiety. Yes, there are reasons for thinking the road ahead might be going over a cliff. But then, the Edwardians had some inkling of the Great War ahead, and the Athenians were already sliding into the war with Sparta by the time Pericles died. But the lights still shine and the music still plays.

The question is, what will people in a hundred, a thousand years, or more be looking back on? The last six decades as a time of relative peace and plenty? Or the quiet before the storm?

1. It’s interesting to note that these periods are all named for monarchs. But then, most of history has been identified with the person nominally in charge, from native American war chiefs to U.S. presidents.

2. Shakespeare’s grandfather was a tenant farmer. His father started a retail trade in wool and corn, took up leather working, and became a glover. By the third generation the family was fully employed in the theater arts.

3. Promotion of the arts may be a necessary but not a sufficient cause of a Golden Age. Certainly, the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s promoted and paid for the arts vigorously, and that wasn’t anyone’s idea of a Golden Age.

4. As one of the smartest people I know—a former journalist—once said, “People ain’t stupid.” That might be the founding stone of democracy. It links to Lincoln’s quip about fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. John Brunner in Shockwave Rider caught the flavor of this with his projection of the Delphi poll: “While nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.” The Germans call it the spirit of the times, Zeitgeist: what everyone knows and recognizes.

5. To cite just one example: in the 1950s, new technologies in steelmaking became readily available, from the Linz-Donawitz (LD) oxygen process to electric-arc furnaces to continuous casting. Germany and Japan rebuilt with these technologies and leapt ahead of U.S. steelmakers, who were still working with open hearth furnaces and rolling mills built in the 1920s and ’30s.

6. Consider that people in America who live below the “poverty line” actually live better than most of India’s or China’s middle classes. We simply cannot conceive of letting our poor live at the level of their poor.

Trust No One

2011-12-18T06:59:00.001-08:00

We’ve recently had revelation 2.0, the second-anniversary outpouring, in the undying story that is “Climategate.” Whether by theft, internal leak, or public request under the Freedom of Information Act, we are getting a look inside the ruminations and not-for-public-consumption exchanges of opinion among the experts in the new field of climate science. Not having read more than the snippets that appear embedded in internet stories, I can’t say that the revelations are damning proof of anything. The consensus about human-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW) may be God’s own truth, or a cynical hoax, or merely misplaced enthusiasm about some worrisome trends.¹ But what the revelations do seem to show is disappointing.

Before I get into that disappointment, some caveats. First, I am thrilled by the internet and the access and transparency it makes available to the average person. The news of the world is no longer the private product of three broadcast networks, two wire services, and half a dozen major metropolitan newspapers. Now everyone can blog and respond online both to the mainstream media’s postings and to other bloggers, expressing personal opinions and beliefs that may or may not always be firmly fixed in the provable facts. The sunshine of the open exchange of ideas and beliefs is really the best disinfectant for private obsessions, hatreds, and manias.

Second, I am depressed by the internet and the access and transparency it makes possible under the rubric that “information wants to be free.”² Everyone needs to have some secrets: the salary figure you’ll really accept in a job interview; your rock-bottom price for that car; what you actually do in the bathroom and the bedroom. Governments and other organizations also need secrets: what wild-guess alternatives they might discuss before deciding on the actions they officially take; how much risk they’re prepared to tolerate in pursuing those courses of action; and when the diplomacy will stop and the war begin. Some secrets and illusions are simply necessary to a functioning society. Total exposure to media and internet attention 24/7 is now burning up every public figure who’s even brushed by the spotlight.³ Public certainty about facts and findings, discoveries and statistics, is disappearing into a raging sea of personal beliefs, manias, and unpublished agendas.

Third, I’ve worked most of my adult life with engineers and scientists as a technical writer and corporate communicator. I have tremendous respect for these people. They are admirable because, in a world of opinion and fantasy, they treat data seriously and scrupulously. They have to, because if an inconvenient fact intrudes on their formula for a new medicine or biological assay, their design for a dam or nuclear reactor, then really bad things can happen, and their signature is on the reports and drawings. They may have opinions about statistical outliers and obvious errors—why some data can be ignored safely because, for example, the instrument or reporting conditions were known to be suspect—but such doubts are always revealed, addressed, footnoted, and explained for all to see and understand.

In the matter of anthropogenic global warming, that level of publicly available scrutiny does not—according to the email fragments I’ve seen—appear to have taken place in reaching the consensus among climate scientists. In order to make clear the picture of human carbon burning as the main cause of rapidly rising planetary temperatures, these scientists seem to have been cavalier about some inconvenient facts and findings. The scientists involved mention these facts privately but, in order to keep the picture clear and simple, they appear to agree among themselves that they will not treat such facts as meaningful.

In this matter, they step beyond the bounds of science and into the realm of science fiction.

The scientist’s job is to make observations, draw preliminary conclusions, make hypotheses about these observations, and devise experiments that will test and prove them—which means trying to falsify them, if possible. The final step is to open the whole question to other scientists, who are then invited to examine the original data, reproduce the experimental work, think of and try other tests, and finally either support or reject the hypothesis.

Only in science fiction does a scientist become the popular hero leaping into the breach. Only in stories does he or she become a partisan for the implications behind his or her test results and rush to a microphone in order to save humanity from disaster.⁴ In fact, to the extent that a scientist becomes a partisan for any particular point of view, his or her credibility declines. The scientist as advocate is distrusted, whether he or she works for a panel that reports to a drug company, a tobacco company, or an agency of the United Nations.

Consider Charles Darwin. If any scientist had ever fashioned a dagger to plunge into the heart of divine creation, he did. Darwin presented a convincing argument for the natural, cause-and-effect changes in environment and opportunity that transform one species into another. This was implicitly a criticism of the idea that each species was created in its perfection by an all-knowing deity. Yet Darwin merely presented his ideas and let them speak for themselves. He did not move on to attack the church or the country’s education system. In fact, he remained a churchman and, apparently, a believer throughout his life. His business was with the science, the knowing, not with changing his society’s attitude toward it.

One would imagine that, in describing a possible global catastrophe, a person of honest and humane intent would naturally include a discussion of variability in the data—what are called “error bars” on a graph—and any possible alternative conclusions to be drawn from the data. And if there is a recommended course of action that is difficult or demanding, then the importance of open and free discussion of the variables rises in direct relation to the difficulty of the task. We all want to be sure we’re right before causing major disruptions.

However, as I understand it, the scientists who report so absolutely on anthropogenic global warming have:

1. Chosen to track the concentration of one gas, carbon dioxide, out of a complex atmospheric mix, including water vapor and methane among other greenhouse gases. The choice was apparently made because CO₂ is the one gas whose concentration has been widely affected by human activity in the last 100 years and it’s also the one that scientists can actually show to be increasing.

2. Tracked regularly and reliably recorded temperature fluctuations from only about the last 100 to 150 years. The rest of the temperature data points are estimates, interpreted from other data series like tree ring patterns, which are themselves susceptible to other influences.

3. Fed these concentrations and temperatures into various models of the planet’s climate. Weather and climate are complicated phenomena, with many variables in play. So the construction of these models, including the assumptions they make and the dependencies they describe, is critical to shaping the results.

4. Come up with a prediction, within a span of degrees and with narrow error bars, of conditions that will exist 100 years into the future.

5. On the basis of this temperature prediction, prophesied a number of possible related effects on conditions like ocean level, rainfall, storm severity, agriculture, and other phenomena of interest to humans.⁵

Making a prediction based on a model is what I would call a conjecture. A conjecture about the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a century from now, based on similar data sets and model types, is not something I’d bet on. A prediction is not a fact, like the tested strength of a steel bar or the measured activity of an enzyme.

The corrective course that these scientists are advocating will be neither easy nor undemanding. They suggest that carbon burning in the developed western world has already caused irreparable damage to the Earth’s climate. They and the politicians, economists, government administrators, and citizens who accept their findings are demanding immediate and rapid changes in our energy infrastructure. They want to replace coal- and oil-based electric generation (currently about half of our installed capacity) with wind and solar (currently just a few percent) over the span of a decade or so—much faster than any economic replacement program.⁶ They also want to increase the prices of motor fuel and electricity so that the average customer will use less. These actions will result in misallocation, deprivation, rationing, lower economic activity, and declining lifestyles.

It won’t be a global catastrophe to ask Americans, Europeans, and upscale Chinese and Indians to accept these hardships. Certainly, a lot of people in less developed parts of the world already live that way. But the sudden collapse of economic activity will be a dislocation approaching within one or two orders of magnitude the projected dislocations that might occur, a century from now, because of a warmer climate.

Now, if all this advocacy is based on scrupulous attention to and treatment of the data—collected, evaluated, annotated, open to discussion and dispute—and based on the operation of models whose variables, source code, dependencies, and assumptions are open to review, criticism, and reproduction, then it would still be advocacy, and so suspect.

But if the advocacy is based on a belief or predilection that comes before the data and the models—that is, if the climate scientists are no better than tobacco company scientists—then who can you trust?

We have a long-standing tradition in our democracy that anyone has the right to scream, wave his arms, and call for massive and immediate societal changes right now! in order to correct some perceived injustice or avoid some prophesied catastrophe, based purely on personal opinion and belief.⁷ But we also have a tradition of letting the average citizen look critically at the screamers and arm-wavers, decide whether or not their arguments are persuasive, and vote accordingly.

If the climate science consensus is based on sincerely held belief and a willingness to trim the data and nudge the model in the direction of that belief, then the public is in danger of accepting a false proposition. The proposition is that the conclusions are the result of good, honest, respect-the-data science—such as has provided us with new views of and advances in biology and medicine, physics and electronics, chemistry and materials over the past two centuries. But the honest intent may not be present in climate science and its predictions. Even if these scientists are pursuing the noblest of motives to avert the direst of catastrophes, the published emails hint at a basic dishonesty in their approach. And anyone who accepts the consensus because it has been couched in the language of science and attested to by scientists is in danger of accepting that false proposition.

Trust no one. If these physical scientists can disrespect the data to prove their point, then who can you trust? Not some politician or social scientist who has joined hands with the physical scientists because he or she shares their viewpoint. Not a government of such people elected by a population of voters who blindly accept whatever a scientist says and writes. And if we can’t trust the scientists on this, a scientific question, then how will we ever know? Anthropogenic global warming may be God’s honest truth, a cynical hoax, or misplaced enthusiasm about some worrisome trends. Who is to say?

Frankly, I’m more afraid of certain economic collapse brought on by massive infrastructure change attempted over the next nine years than I fear possible collapse due to predicted temperature and environmental changes over the next ninety. But then, I’m not a scientist.

1. My personal belief? It doesn’t much matter what humankind does. As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is only one of several atmospheric components regulating heat re-radiation. And greenhouse gases are only one of several factors influencing climate. Solar output is a bigger factor, and we seem to be ending a recent sunspot maximum (where more sunspots yield higher energy output) and heading into some kind of sunspot minimum. Whether that minimum is short-lived or prolonged, no one can predict. But even if we could prove—unequivocally, undeniably, without the slightest doubt—that every shovelful of coal burned serves to dig the grave of an innocent human being, it still wouldn’t change a thing. No society—not ours, nor the Europeans, Chinese, nor Indians—will seriously handicap their economy to prevent a temperature rise of a few degrees over the next century, no matter what the predicted effects. Individuals may be smart and have free will, but societies are like a wave in the ocean: a million water molecules pushing and pulling each other along, all going somewhere—and eventually getting there.

2. I also firmly believe—although it’s off topic for the discussion here—that the information an individual or group has worked to produce must be adequately compensated. Yes, the novelist has used the language’s public-domain words and the society’s publicly discussed themes to create his or her new and exciting story that others want to read, but the novelist’s effort in arranging those words and displaying those themes is a product that should no more be stolen and handed around than the products of Ford and GM should be stolen off the streets and taken for a joyride. The same goes for the work that a scholar does in uncovering old facts and presenting them in support of new conclusions; or a musician does in putting together common notes and song lyrics to create new music; or a photographer does in framing a public sight and capturing it in values of light exposure, contrasts, and shadows to express a new vision. Intellectual property is not theft, and it shouldn’t be forced into surrendering its labors as a gift.

3. For example, as a young man I enjoyed the inspiration of John F. Kennedy’s speeches without having to know he was, apparently, an oversexed, promiscuous cad who routinely cheated on his beautiful and articulate wife.

4. And yes, my characters have done that—most notably the geologist Ariel Ceram in The Doomsday Effect. But that was science fiction.

5. And when they do change—when sea level rises against the shore and the band of arable land moves north and upslope—what will happen to people? They’ll adapt. Will there be dislocations? Disruptions? Hardship? Yes, certainly. But consider that much of the investment we’ve made in sea-level infrastructure and current farming methods did not exist a century ago. Or it existed in more primitive forms, like wooden docks or horses and plows, all of which have since been rebuilt to handle changes in technology like containerization and factory farming. If sea level were going to rise twenty feet in ten months, that would be a screaming catastrophe. But if it rises that much over 100 years, then sea level simply becomes another factor in your investment decision and lifestyle choices: move or stay, put down roots along the shoreline or go live inland? And believe that the climate and sea level will change, one way or another, in the next century. Go ask the Ephesians.

6. Personally, I think coal, oil, and natural gas are all too valuable as chemical feedstocks to be burned for electricity or motor fuel. My preferred energy solution is to take solar power from orbit, where the number of available kilowatts per square meter is about ten times the number that reach the ground. For a possible way to do this—and kick start our entire use of space in the process—see my novel Sunflowers.

7. In fact, we’re seeing some of that behavior in the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

The Great Secret of Time

2011-12-11T11:54:00.001-08:00

Most of us can be focused, creative, and brilliant for an hour or for a day. We can conceive of a burst of energy that would let us, if we had the talent, write and finish a short story or a song lyric, paint a small canvas, or shape a bust in clay. But faced with something much larger—a novel, an opera, a mural, or a Mount Rushmore—we quail. The task is too big, the effort too great. We can’t even get started.

The secret is time. In order to do great works, you have to parcel it and marshal it. That’s easy enough to say, but for most of us nearly impossible. The effort to control our time takes too much discipline and patience. But there are tricks to help anyone attain great things.

1. Do a Little Every Day

If the task is too much to accomplish at one sitting, then the only thing to do is break it up into bite-sized—or sit-sized—chunks. This is how any artist works, by doing a little bit every day. Some artists can do a lot in a day, but that’s not the way to start out. Until you are sure of your energy level, it would be a disaster to commit yourself to an overly ambitious schedule. Commit, instead, to achieve something, then adjust the content and the effort until you find a sustainable level.

Of course, this approach applies to more than creative efforts and works of art. Every paying job is based on doing so much each day. No one would try to process all the orders coming into a company, ship all the products made in a factory, or answer all the customer queries by one superhuman effort for one hour a day, or one day a week or a month. You gauge the flow and keep on top of it.

The same applies to the kind of effort and practice it takes to master a musical instrument or any other skill. Despite the ideal of accelerated training shown in The Matrix, you can’t learn Kung Fu in one fifteen-second blast of neural stimulation and visual imagery. You must practice every day, learn and absorb and perfect new techniques at a regular pace, layer new skills and experiences on top of ones already mastered.¹

2. Have a Plan

It may be possible to write a novel by sitting down at the keyboard every day and writing just whatever comes to mind. To some extent, this is what any novelist actually does, but if the mind is a blank and subject to curious vagaries when you sit down, the novel won’t be much good. It will wander all over the landscape, turn back on itself, and generally bore the reader.

The novelist, the painter, or the team carving the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota all need a plan for the work at hand. The plan might be quite detailed—a run-through of the story, or canvas, or mountain in miniature. Or it might be more like a framework, a generalization of the structure, like the bamboo scaffolds with which Asian builders cocoon a skyscraper in progress.

The outline or framework may be completely finished before the writer or artist undertakes the actual product. Or it may come into being as work-ahead, executed just a few days or months before the actual writing or application of paint, groping toward a final image that’s still relatively plastic in the artist’s mind. Either approach can work.²

There are also traps in either approach. If the plan is too detailed and precious, the daily effort might follow it right out the window without seeing any inherent flaws in the structure. If the plan is too loose, the daily effort might become mired in creative detail. I think of the book outline as planning a road trip on a map, viewed from the 30,000-foot level. You know enough about where you’re going to leave town in the right direction and not wander in circles in the desert, but you don’t have such a hard pencil mark that you follow the state line and drive into a box canyon.

3. Have a Clear Vision

Separate from creating and following an outline, vision is a matter of knowing what your heart and intellect are doing. You can follow the book outline exactly but still wander in tone and be false to intent.

You need to be clear about whether your book or play or symphony is meant lightly or seriously. Some books invite the reader to laugh, make plays on words and inside jokes, and take the comic view of life; some compel the deeper emotions, ask for greater commitment from the reader’s attention, and intend to inspire or frighten. Some music is ebullient and grandiose, some somber and majestic. It’s important to know from the beginning what you are doing and stick with it. Books that start out as great emotional voyages and devolve into a fit of the giggles get thrown across the room with great force.

If you are feeling light and playful when you sit down to write, but the book at hand is a political thriller or a tragedy—or vice versa—then some days you will not be able to honor your commitment and push the word string forward. It’s important to know these times, consciously refrain from writing or painting, and avoid messing up good paper or canvas with work that will only have to be ripped out and done over. And if too many days end up that way, it may be a clue that the book and your heart are following divergent paths.

Of course, some writers and artists can school their emotions and do the necessary work under all conditions. They can turn from an evening of drink and merriment to write or paint the death of a beloved character. Or they can turn from personal tragedy to spin a tale of fun and laughter.³

4. Keep Your Eyes Below the Horizon

As you proceed to do your daily quota of words or paint or bars of music, it’s also important to focus downward and inward. You have to turn your gaze away from the arc of the story, the distant goal, the climax and denouement, the bright sunrise at the heart of the canvas—and write the scene you’re working on today, to paint the patch of shadow that is under your brush.

This may sound like conflicting advice—have a clear vision, but don’t look at it—but the principle is simple enough. If you are hiking on a crest line or climbing a rock face, you must occasionally look up to see where you are going, but you mostly look down at where to put your feet and what your next handhold should be.

The daily task is a particular piece of the work. It must share in the whole, but it still have its own internal logic, emotional context, rhythm, and purpose. The reader might be aware of the entire sweep of the book, but he or she is still reading this one patch of words, this one character’s experience, this one piece of the story at a time. A person listening to a symphony might remember what came before and anticipate what will come after, but he or she is only hearing the musical phrases being presented at this particular instant.

Only the painter, sculptor, or architect—a practitioner of the visual arts—can expect the viewer to take in the entire work as a single pattern, at a glance, as a gestalt. But even so the single glance is made up of disparate parts: light here and shadow there, an arch here and a cornice there. And each of these details has its own being and deserves individual respect and attention.

5. Harness Your Desires

Commitment to maintaining a daily schedule is one thing. Actually attaining it is often something else. What works for a week or a month may not last a year or a decade.

We all would like to be an accomplished musician, a writer with a stack of books behind us, or a painter with a collection of canvases. Thinking and dreaming about this level of accomplishment is one thing, desiring it enough to put down the television remote and go to the daily practice, or writing or painting session, is quite another. That requires a heartfelt desire, a sense of personal destiny, a life decision that lets you see your days and your purpose on this planet become focused on this choice and not others—often at the expense of others.

Fortunately, this is a decision most easily made when we’re young and full of energy and dreams. Then it’s easy to form habits of mind and body, of daily schedule and seriousness of purpose, that carry over into the hectic years of marriage and child-raising and endure through to the quiet years of maturity, attainment, and retirement. This is why so many music and arts programs are directed at the young, to capture their imaginations and their hearts.

6. Live an Orderly Life

The final requirement of meeting the daily commitment is to live an orderly and purposeful—and usually sober—life. To set aside an hour a day for painting or writing or musical practice requires that your days not be chaotic with other events.

This can be easier than it seems. Some people have jobs that require unexpected demands such as on-call periods and frequent travel. But the doctor or medical technician who is on call often has “down” periods of simple waiting. The traveler has empty hours in airports and hotel rooms. These can be filled with work at a keyboard if the passion is writing. Admittedly, it’s a bit harder to fill this time with work at an easel or practice on a musical instrument.

The great danger of making these spare hours work for you is the eventual interruption. To begin working on a chapter or scene while waiting for a flight can be dangerous. Any artistic endeavor is one of immersion, and your flight might be called when you are deep in the story. Then the choice is to break off your thought, or let the gate close and find a later flight.⁴

Notice that in all of this I’ve left out two elements that most people consider vital to creative effort: talent and inspiration.

Talent is, of course, a prerequisite. If your brain cannot generate a word string or the pitch-and-toss of dialogue on command, if your eye and hand cannot draw a fluid line with purpose, then it’s going to be difficult to write or paint. But usually these things can be learned; all it takes is practice and desire. And if you simply are not good at them, you won’t go far and will quickly look for something else to try. The daily task that is the secret of time simply won’t enter into the equation.

Inspiration is overrated. If you have prepared yourself with desire, a plan or outline for the story or painting in hand, clear vision of your purpose in tackling it, and the quiet mind that comes with an orderly life, then inspiration is a matter of sitting down and addressing the task. Inspiration comes from the work itself.⁵

It’s just a matter of putting down the remote and getting busy. And you know there’s nothing worth watching on television anyway, don’t you?

1. This applies not just to artistic endeavors and martial arts training. I know a man who used to quail at the thought of painting his house: doing all those rooms and hallways and moldings and doors in two or three days of backbreaking effort. Instead, he made painting a part of his weekend effort, for an hour or two on Saturday afternoons. He would commit himself to painting one wall of one room, or one side of a hallway, then quit. He probably spent more total time cleaning brushes than if he had tried to do the whole house in two days, but he got it done eventually and relatively painlessly. I also knew a couple who had an iron bedstead that needed to be chipped down to bare metal through several layers of old paint. Rather than try to do it all at once—with consequent hand cramps and blisters—they set the thing up in a back hallway and, every time they passed through, took two or three whacks with a scraper. It took them several months, but they got it clean. A little bit every day.

2. I’ve written books both ways. Ideally, I would like to have the outline complete down to the level of chapter and scene before I start, or shortly after I have the book idea set up with an encouraging first chapter or two. (In the old days, publishers might buy a novel on the basis of sample chapters and a finished outline—but no more. Now they want the entire book finished on spec.) I’ve also written books where I knew generally where the story had to go but worked up the outline in chunks, usually one or two sections ahead of what I call “production writing.”

3. Some people would say this is the sign of a defective character, of someone too emotionally facile or insincere to be trusted. Actually, it’s a matter of practice and discipline. The work lives apart from the artist.

4. One technique I’ve found useful when interrupted right at the critical point in a scene is to space down a couple of lines and do a quick sketch of what comes next: key words, key thoughts, key action steps. This takes perhaps thirty seconds and precedes saving the file and closing down the computer. Having that fragment to work from makes starting back up much easier.

5. Sometimes what looks like inspiration does raise its head. There are times when I am supposed to be working on a story, know more or less what should come next, but can’t make myself write. I can’t even look at the keyboard. Almost always, in this situation, the “what should come next” is wrong. I know at a subconscious level, which I cannot at first put into words, that something is missing or inverted or false. Then I need to stop and rework the outline. But otherwise, let me think of the opening sentence—the phrase, emotion, sensory image, or what have you that starts the scene—and my little word generator kicks in. And then we’re off to the races.

Risk Free

2011-12-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

Ain’t so. Humans have never found a way to live without risk. And our current economic system cannot provide a better than purely miserable return on your money without undertaking some risk. That’s not for want of trying, of course. And these days it seems that financial people, investors, and governments take on huge risks and blow off the possible consequences as if they were living on a permanent cloud. What has happened to sanity?

From my memory of things, as a long-time reader of business magazines and the Wall Street Journal, we started going off track back in the 1980s. Then the smartest, most persuasive of the financial people invented the “high-yield” or “non-investment-grade” or “speculative-grade” bond. This was a way—and still is, to some extent—for the largest, most solid of U.S. corporations to raise more money than would normally be possible in the financial markets.

Credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings exist to study the conditions under which corporations and governments raise money by selling bonds.¹ Based on the stability and strength of the entity borrowing the money, the size of its other obligations, and its history of honoring its debts, the agencies assign a rating to the bond. The scale goes from the highest, AAA, down through AA to A, then through the Bs and Cs, with pluses and minuses, just like a school grade. A rating of D indicates a debt that’s already not being repaid as promised.

These rating systems don’t try to eliminate risk, simply categorize it. If you want minimal risk, buy AAA-rated bonds like U.S. Treasurys. You won’t make much in interest, but your money is secure. The high-yield bonds, in contrast, were and still are offered under conditions and promises to pay that make them about the last thing on the borrower’s mind. If things go badly with the corporation and it has to line up its creditors in the order by which they’ll get paid, the high-yield investor is standing at the end of the line and likely can whistle for his money. The attraction of these bonds, for the buyer, is that they pay really well. With a greater risk that the bond might become just a piece of paper, the buyer expects to earn a whole lot more for taking and holding it. You expect to be paid well to hold a hot potato, too.

The magic trick that financiers in the 1980s pulled off was convincing buyers that, because of the high yield and despite the low rating, these were great deals. After all, the companies floating these bonds were all solid earners, among America’s biggest corporations, and nothing really was going to go wrong. Hey, you can trust these guys! Even though these bonds soon picked up the name “junk,” people forgot about that and snapped them up. It looked like a way to make big money without real risk.

Suddenly corporations had a lot of cash from selling junk promises to pay. Some used it wisely, but many went on buying binges, snapping up smaller companies and undertaking expansions that—in previous times and with less money in play—might not have looked so attractive. But the concepts of “debt” and “obligation” are so Puritan. The smart financial people called it “leverage”—making a little bit of your money and a lot of other people’s do the work of a long stick.²

The trouble with an environment like this is that Gresham’s law, that bad money drives out good, still operates. People who are playing fast and loose with their promises tend—over the short run—to do better than, have an advantage against, and out-compete the dullards who play it safe and won’t jump into the pool. Companies like Enron and WorldCom puffed up and suddenly became as big as, or bigger than, old established companies like Chevron, AT&T, or GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Until the bubbles burst, that is, and they disappeared.

In the mid-1990s, the smart financial people invented another couple of concepts to address risk and keep the party going: the hedge and the derivative. These are simple concepts that became incredibly complex and mysterious.

A hedge is just what it sounds like—hedging your bet. If you undertake a risky gamble on a stock going up or down, then make a simultaneous bet against that happening, or a bet on some other, inversely probable occurrence. This is like betting both red and black on the roulette wheel, or betting on both fighters in a boxing match. The bets are never exactly equal, because that would be pointless. The idea is to recoup some of your loss if the situation goes south. Very smart people work up statistical relationships and use a stunning amount of math to gauge the risks and rewards between the original investment and the hedge. A company called Long Term Capital Management was founded in 1994 to employ these strategies so that money would grow fast and without risk. The tower of complications it constructed collapsed and the company closed in 2000.

A derivative is just a form of bet. Two financial parties agree to pay each other certain sums of money based on the movement of some reference variable like a stock market index, the future value of gold or some other commodity, or any complexly dynamic phenomenon. The derivative is not an investment in the market or the gold or any underlying value; the parties are simply using it as a condition of the bet. This is not very different from betting on the order in which cards will come out of a deck.

Not surprisingly, derivatives are often used as hedges for actual investments in the market for stocks or commodities or real estate.

As noted elsewhere,³ I am not a mathematician, or statistician, or any kind of trained scientist, but I am plagued with a great deal of caution and common sense. I don’t like to jump into a pool until I know how deep it is. I don’t like to undertake an obligation unless I have a clear view to how I’m going to fulfill it. And my guts tell me you can’t avoid all risk over the long term. You can hedge a bet now and then. You can dodge the consequences of risky behavior once or twice. You can build a house of cards up to two or three levels. But sooner or later you have to come back to a ground state with respect to risk. You have to equilibrate⁴ and return to a condition of balance.

While the economy may not be a zero-sum game,⁵ every person and organization operating within it ultimately leads a zero-sum existence. You are born into this world with nothing of your own, and you will leave it the same way.⁶ Electrons absorb energy and rise from one shell level to the next, then release that energy and drop back. A person’s getting and spending ultimately equal out. A company’s stock and debts ultimately equal its assets and profits. Risks and rewards ultimately balance out. And nobody cheats the hangman.

Every speculative fever—from the tulip mania of the 1630s and the stock market boom of the 1920s, to the tech boom of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the 2000s—goes through predictable phases. From being a new thing that only the rich, the smart, and the daring will invest in, the prized commodity—whether bulbs or stocks or houses—becomes something that everyone is willing to borrow to acquire, because there’s really no risk, because the demand is infinite and the price will never go down.⁷ Sooner or later, however, risk catches up, everyone steps in a hole, and the market collapses.

It always has, and it always will. But it is our nature to believe that this time, just this once, things will be different and we can cheat the hangman. … Isn’t hope a beautiful thing?

1. A bond is nothing more than a portable form of loan. It represents a corporation’s or government’s obligation to pay back the money it borrowed. A bond differs from a simple loan in that anyone holding the bond can sell it anytime in an open market to someone else, who will eventually receive from the borrower the principal money plus interest. Depending on how people feel about the bond and its issuer at the time of sale, the price may be a bit more or less than the principal-plus-interest to be paid back. This difference establishes a “yield” for the bond.

2. Among the probably unwise uses was the “leveraged buyout.” The managers of a company would decide they didn’t like being custodians, having shareholders, and obliging themselves to meet the shareholders’ and stock analysts’ quarterly expectations. So the managers floated a lot of unusual debt, bought up shares of the company’s own stock, and ended up owning the company—plus a mountain of owed money that hung over these companies, swinging back and forth and descending over time like Poe’s pendulum.

3. See my blog Fun with Numbers from September 19, 2010.

4. To borrow a word from the sciences.

5. See The Economy as an Ecology from November 14, 2011.

6. Yes, of course, sometimes Mummy and Daddy are rich and can set you up with a lot of advantages, but you yourself are born as naked as any pauper’s child. And yes, you may leave behind a great fortune for the benefit of your heirs, but you die as penniless as any husk on the burning ghats.

7. It didn’t help that, in the latest bubbles, the U.S. Federal Reserve, which manages the country’s money supply and sets the basic rate at which money can be borrowed, has kept that rate low for reasons other than providing easy money for everyone to get drunk on. They thought low interest rates would keep inflation from taking off; instead other things took off. Managing risk is like packing a partially inflated weather balloon into a suitcase: if you push it in here, it pops out somewhere else.

Seduced by Numbers

2011-11-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

I freely admit my addiction as a technophile. I love watching, learning about, using, and owning machines, gadgets, technical and industrial processes, and other creations of the mechanical arts.¹ Since most of these devices are rated quantitatively, with numbers, my affection would seem curious.

For the first thirty years or so of my life, I was basically “innumerant”—allergic to numbers. I did pretty well with simple arithmetic in grade school but started to slip when they introduced the method of extracting square and cube roots, which I could not easily distinguish from long division. I floundered in Algebra I and sank outright in Algebra II. I never could figure out what anyone might do with a phrase like “a²+2ab+b²” in quadratic equations.² So my schooling gravitated away from math, physics, and the higher sciences toward English literature, languages, history, and similar qualitative studies. That was difficult for a science fiction writer, and I had make up a lot of ground when I became serious about technical writing and hard-science novels. But I digress.

The first time I felt the pull of the numbers related to a machine was when I became interested in motorcycles in my late twenties. My first bike was a two-stroke Yamaha, which came in the 250 cc and 350 cc versions. I instinctively plopped for the bigger engine. When I graduated to my dream machine, a BMW, I had the choice of 500 cc, 600 cc, and 750 cc engines and again went for the biggest. In my stupid, English-major head, I couldn’t tell the difference between optimum and maximum,³ although given my six-foot-six frame and corresponding weight, a big motorcycle was the right choice for me.⁴

My second brush with machine ratings was in purchasing my first computer, an Apple II, back in 1979. Up until that time, I knew computers only as massive and unobtainable things: the IBM 360 that was leased by my university and later my corporate employer; it lived in the basement, crunched all the organization’s numbers, and was attended by a priestly class who alone knew how to communicate with the beast. But here was a thing no bigger than a portable typewriter—although married to a television set—that claimed to be a computer. It took a while for the salesman in the store to convince me that this was a real, multi-purpose computer, able to perform any function with the right programming, and not just some single-function device like a calculator or a video game. I had no real use for a computer, of course, but the notion of a machine that responded to written instructions fascinated me.

And suddenly there was the question of numbers. Did I want 32 kilobytes of RAM or the full 48 kilobytes? I naturally plopped for the larger number, thinking that a machine with open-ended capability would benefit from more of whatever a kilobyte might be. Later computers—and I bought my fair share—offered even more numbers: gigahertz of speed, megabytes of disk capacity, baud rates of connection, pixels of screen resolution. It became possible to run wild in so many dimensions.

I discovered that even with that original Apple II, there was a hunger for completeness. The computer’s motherboard⁵ offered eight slot-like connectors across the back for electronic cards that would variously increase memory, add supplementary processors, and coordinate signaling for peripherals like disk drives, printers, and modems. When I had about half of the slots filled with devices for a workable system, the remaining empty slots began preying on my mind. They represented potential capacity that I was not using. I began looking for and buying additional peripherals just to fill in those gaps. A friend of mine, who had to deal with his own peripheral addiction, called this “slot fever.”

I’ve held off buying an Apple iPad, even though I own a Kindle, a Nook, and an iPhone, because I know that I will want—insist upon—the model with the highest possible amounts of memory, connectivity, speed, resolution, and whatever other measures are appropriate to what is, essentially, the electronic analog of a sheet of paper. Full-blown capacity can practically double the price of the basic machine.

When I began handling pistols,⁶ I started with a .357 magnum revolver that my brother owned. But unless you buy the high-power loads, which are much more expensive, you are still shooting the basic .38 cartridge. That’s fun, but the .45 cartridge is bigger, more impressive, and makes a louder noise. Guess which way I progressed?

I don’t think this seduction by the numbers is just my own personal fetish. All around us are people buying cars with the most horsepower, television sets with the largest diagonal dimensions, stereo amplifiers with the highest wattage, trucks with the greatest towing capacity. If some is good, a lot is better, and “Can you get that with the 402 engine?”

You can see the urge not just at a personal level, but organizationally as well. The military is especially susceptible: The next generation of jet fighter has to reach a higher Mach number, have a stealthier radar image, carry a bigger payload, turn quicker, and land on a shorter runway. The missiles get bigger, the payloads larger. Even business organizations, where some consideration of cost versus effect might be expected, can be lured into buying bigger computers and server farms, building larger headquarters and larger factories to achieve even more growth in larger markets.

Did people always react this way? I suspect not, until machines took physical work out of the equation. If a bow with a 65-pound draw weight is right for a person of your size, do you really want one with a 200-pound draw? If four horses can pull your loaded wagon, do you really want to hitch up and try to control a team of twelve or twenty horses?

The closest analogue I can think of from pre-industrial times is the collector. It doesn’t matter what is being collected: statues, stamps, coins, butterflies, German ceramic beer steins, or race horses. More is better, and there is always one more item that will fill out your category and complete the set.⁷ Slot fever.

In the past, only the wealthy, the idle, and those with lots of spare cupboard space could satisfy the passion for collecting. But with modern machinery, you can “complete the set” in one purchase by buying the most horsepower, the biggest screen, the highest wattage. Until, of course, next year’s model comes out with an even bigger engine, larger screen, more RAM, more buttons, more of … everything. And then you just have to trade up.

It’s how we end up deep in debt and still crying for the moon: seduced by the numbers.

1. You might say the interest was bred in my genes: My father was a mechanical engineer and his father a civil engineer. I think it broke my dad’s heart that neither of his sons wanted to follow him into engineering.

2. Not until forty years later, when I began seeing it in the calculations supporting a two-dimensional matrix that combined dominant and recessive genetic traits. I still can’t solve the damned thing.

3. For those of you who are similarly impaired, remember that optimum body temperature is 98.6°F, while maximum body temperature can kill you.

4. BMW now offers its touring machines with a six-cylinder, 1600 cc engine, and I have to speak sternly with myself to keep from rushing out and buying one.

5. Today you can use a computer and never look under the hood; you might not even know what the motherboard is or where to find it. But with the Apple II, you were part-user and part-hobbyist; you popped the top off and went inside for all sorts of user-serviceable conditions.

6. Why? Because I write fiction with occasional military action and people shooting guns. It seemed important to learn a thing or two about them. You can read all the books and articles you want, but half an hour shooting on the range and observing real life, competent gun handlers (rather than actors on television) provides a unique perspective.

7. I’ve always avoided the collecting bug myself. I could see that you start off with an attachment to some class of objects—Chinese porcelains, Amazonian beetles—because you can see them as novel, clever, beautiful, or similarly attractive in some other dimension. You start with an eye for beauty that anyone can appreciate. But soon you learn more about the topic, broaden your interest, and expand the scope of your collecting. Eventually, you are bidding and paying an exorbitant price for an indifferent-looking cup or a really ugly little beetle because you know it to be unique, rare, or otherwise special. That way lies madness.

What is Strength?

2011-11-20T07:24:00.001-08:00

As noted some weeks ago, I’m a longtime fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune books and their guiding principles.¹ I find it compelling that, of all the Imperium’s institutions and social groupings, the series’ most enduring is the Bene Gesserit. They are variously described as witches, engineers of religion, manipulators of the human bloodlines, and inheritors of human purpose from the Great Schools period. While the Fremen, the Bene Tleilax, and even the Imperium itself come and go in the series, the Bene Gesserit endure through the whole impossible history. They are the Greek chorus against which all the action plays.

The B.G., their Reverend Mothers, their acolytes, and their books and teachings contain many wise and wicked sayings, but one that has always stuck with me is from Herbert’s next-to-last novel in this universe, Heretics of Dune: “Never support weakness; always support strength.”

You might imagine that a society of women, especially those undertaking the religious education of the human race, would naturally tend to support the weak: children, other women made vulnerable by bearing children, the sick, the disadvantaged, the dispossessed. They should be following Mother Teresa into the slums of India. Supporting the strong feels all wrong. After all, the strong can take care of themselves. So, was this Herbert, a male writer, injecting an anti-feminist viewpoint into his imagined all-female society?² Or was he simply being perverse?

To understand the Bene Gesserit in this context, we have to examine what it means to be strong as a human being. And I believe this is one of the “cleavage questions”³ that can crack open and help examine much of what is troubling our society today.

We tend to think of “the strong” as those who have the advantage: a big stick, the biggest guns, the biggest bank account, the most politicians in their debt, the most laws on their side. By contrast, then, the weak are those with no weapons, no resources, no friends, and no influence. It’s a formula that speaks to the cynical adage “Might makes right.”

Why do I call that adage cynical? Because western civilization goes back to Judeo-Christian roots that totally deny it. Justice, fairness, proportion, treating people as they deserve—everything we consider to be “right”—stands apart from the kind of force a bully, a dictator, a king, or even a democratic majority can bring to bear. The Bible bristles with counter-stories of the strong brought low, from Pharaoh to Goliath to Caiaphas and Pilate. The human sense of right and wrong comes not from external circumstances of force and power, but from the heart and its capacity to observe, weigh, and decide. Right stands outside the bustle of war and politics and resides in the eye of God.

It’s clear, also, that the kind of strength we are describing in these situations comes from factors that stand outside the person wielding power. To hold the big stick, command the strongest battalions, be able to write the largest checks, influence the greatest number of politicians—these are externals. Any person can pick up the stick, take command of the troops, inherit the wealth, and compound personal influence through a pleasing smile. It takes no special intelligence nor moral goodness to wield such power.

It does take muscles, and the discipline to build them, for a man to pick up and use a stick—but in today’s society, the one who wields the bludgeon is usually not the person in actual power. It also takes a kind of self-discipline to build a personal fortune and the political connections that represent the true power in modern society. You have to work hard and forego many passing pleasures, husband your resources, invest wisely in both opportunities and people, take risks, do favors, listen to a lot of bad jokes, and eat a lot of tasteless congratulatory dinners.

Discipline and dedication are both aspects of personal strength. Yes, they can be used for bad purposes. But any person who dedicates him- or herself to a cause, and disciplines his or her mind, heart, and body to attaining it, is halfway to moral virtue. People who make such sacrifices almost never do so for petty reasons. People do not strain and strive “because I want to be a big man and have everyone at my beck and call.” Instead, people usually dedicate themselves to causes bigger than their own personal selves. You may not agree with the cause itself—the glory of God, or greater Germany, or American exceptionalism, or Marxist principles—but these things stand outside the individual and draw him or her onward.⁴ Even actors and musicians, seemingly the most vain, selfish and self-glorying of people, must reach outside themselves and provide pleasure to their audiences if they are to be successful and attain the status they desire.

In this context, the contrary quality—weakness—represents lack of effort, dedication, and discipline. The weak do not want to spend the effort to achieve anything. They will accept the terms and conditions that others impose so long as they can get a fraction of what they want or need in return. The weak want to be taken care of, carried on someone else’s credit, and appreciated for some quality other than their own contributions.⁵

It is in this sense, I believe, that the Bene Gesserit axiom is meant. It’s a truism that if you subsidize something, you will get more of it. If you support weakness—not the temporary kind, where a man may be down on his luck for reasons outside himself, but the perennial kind that wants and expects a free ride—you will get more people with their hands out waiting to be served. If you support strength—those who have a place to go and the ambition and discipline to get there—you will have more people pulling on their oars and moving civilization forward. One effort supports doers, the other begets the done-to.

If your business is the future of the human race, as it was with the Bene Gesserit, then you can see which way the land slopes and how, left to its own devices, the water will run. You build civilization up, rather than letting the forces of sloth tear it down.

And if this kind of strength is paired with a sense of morality, equity, and proportion, you get strong people who are able to care for others in their times of need. Samaritans rather than bullies. And that’s the greatest strength of all.

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

2. The first Dunenovel was published in 1965, when the counterculture was breaking away from the beatnik coffee houses of San Francisco and spreading nationwide, particularly on college campuses. This was also the time that the Women’s Movement was spreading, with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Herbert was certainly reacting to that current, but I don’t think his Bene Gesserit were meant to parody it—certainly not through all six novels.

3. I take the term from diamond cutting. Carbon crystals are practically impenetrable by shock and hammer blows due to the interlocking nature of their hexagonal lattice. But find the right plane and apply a small amount of pressure, and the diamond splits easily. Some problems are Gordian knots with ready-made fracture lines, just waiting for a sword cut at the right angle with the right kind of question.

4. People who rise on the corporate ladder are seldom aiming for personal power over others. Instead, they are usually seeking the freedom to act, to do things for the good of the organization according to their own views—rather than following the views of their superiors—about what will be efficient and effective. The person who wants someone to polish his boots only so that he can plant them in other people’s backsides is quickly discovered and dismissed as a petty fool.

5. Think of “Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady” in the musical comedy Funny Girl: “Do for me, buy for me, lift me, carry me …”

The Economy as an Ecology

2011-11-14T17:36:00.000-08:00

We are going into our fourth year of recession. We have a bumpy road still ahead of us. And we have no promise of ever again seeing the sort of economic growth and prosperity that seemed to be America’s birthright in the late 20th century. In the Great Recession—as in the Great Depression before this—many people today are adopting the notion that acquiring wealth and property constitutes a kind of theft. One person’s wealth robs others of the chance to make a bare living. If I am rich, then I have made you and others like you poor. What one consumes another cannot have. This notion derives from the analogy of the national economy as a great pie. And it’s simply a false analogy.¹

For one thing, a pie is static. So much exists, to be cut into so many slices, thick or thin, and then it’s gone. Pie is a zero-sum commodity. As noted in my previous blog, an economy is not a physical object. It’s a dynamic condition, a pattern of interchange between one person and another, among people and corporations and institutions. It isn’t a “thing,” at all.

Let’s, however, for a moment, consider that the economy might be a thing. If so, where did it come from? Is it the land? There is only so much land on Earth, and only a small fraction of that is immediately useful. So if I own land and you don’t, am I therefore rich and you poor, and does my ownership deprive you of a living? That proposition might work in a simple farming situation. I got the good bottomland with rich soil and plentiful water, yielding good crops and making me rich. You got the parcel with sand and rocks far from any water source. But as thrifty, scientific farmers have shown in many situations, even poor land can be made to yield with the right application of human energy and creativity. Think of Israel, northern Utah, or eastern Washington. Land left to itself just lies there.

If the economy were a thing, would it be natural resources? Certainly, nations with plentiful timber, oil and gas, and metal ores have become wealthy. As energy and raw materials, these God-given resources are the starting point for many economic transactions.² If I own land bearing these riches, I can become rich. If you own land with no resources, you might remain poor. But just like the land, resources left to themselves just sit there. The Middle East lay above an ocean of oil and remained poor for generations because no one knew how to drill for it, or finding it on the surface, how to use it. The same could be said for western Pennsylvania or the Los Angeles basin.

Land and resources are the stuff upon which an economy can do its work, just as grain is the stuff that a miller grinds. But the grain is not the grinding, and raw materials do not automatically make themselves into wealth.

Is an economy then the mines and factories, the tools of production? Now we’re getting close. If I own a factory, I can become wealthy. If you work in my factory, you might have a living, although I can see to it—through controlling your hours and wages—that you remain on the edge of poverty. But there are many factories across our landscape that became idle and were boarded up. They made goods that people no longer wanted, or made them inefficiently, or made them less efficiently than factories elsewhere. Factories and machines are no more an economy than land and materials. They are a means to the activity, not the activity itself.

So, is the economy the money flowing through it? We value everything in dollar units—land and houses, commodities, shares of stock representing ownership of factories and machines. And certainly, if I have a dollar, that’s a bill or coin you don’t have. But money is just a marker, a tally, recording the transaction. Money is a chip of wood floating on the river that shows you how fast the water is flowing. And money certainly is not finite. As we’ve discovered in the age of electronic banking and stock markets, money isn’t metal disks and printed paper—those are just physical reminders. Instead, money exists in our heads and in our computers. Money is created when an asset such as a share of Apple stock or a house in Palo Alto gains value because someone else sees it as desirable and will pay more for it than the value I see in holding onto it. Money is destroyed when someone else later sees that asset as less desirable and won’t match the money I paid out to acquire it.³

The economy is the activity that finds a use for the land, the materials, the machines of production. Money is the lubrication that raises that activity above the level of simple barter.⁴ Other people and their demand for food, goods and services, energy and housing, make it worthwhile for the farmer to plant another acre, the miner to dig another ton of ore, the factory owner to add another machine line, the developer to extend a suburb. Without demand, these things don’t happen.

Where does demand come from? As noted in my previous blog, demand comes from productive activity. If I have a job and earn money, I have the means to satisfy my needs for food, clothing, and shelter, my desire for transportation, fashion, education, and amusement, and anything else my store of value allows. If I don’t have a job—a place in the economy—I may have wants, needs, and desires, but they don’t become economic demand.

The proper analogy for an economy is an ecology. In a rich ecology, like a tide pool or a rainforest, sunlight is captured, used, and reused at many levels. Plants absorb it and grow carbohydrates. Animals eat them and produce proteins. Food chains develop with expanding niches for more animals and plants. Opportunists thrive, like the bacteria that process rotting vegetation and animal wastes. Life increases. Life makes more life. In a poor ecology, like a desert, sunlight falls without effect—only making the sand hot. Less energy is captured and traded. Niches disappear or become fiercely competitive. Life decreases. Absence of life diminishes life.

In this analogy, an economy with free markets, a robust system of banking and capital, and wide-open trading—like America’s—is a rain forest. An economy with tightly controlled markets, closely held capital, and narrowly defined trading opportunities—like Soviet Russia’s—is a desert.

But you might object that the ecology is driven by a free natural resource: sunlight. Without the sun, life ceases in either the rainforest or the desert. Where is the comparable free resource in an economy? And I answer that the free resource is human energy, creativity, and ambition. We humans want to make things. We want to define and create meaning for ourselves and our chosen group. Some will invent new products, new systems of production, and new ways of thinking that open new courses of action. Others will use their energy and ambition to make those products and follow those new paths. That’s human nature shaped by a million years of evolution.

In a free-market economy that rewards creativity and ambition, human energy is captured, used, and reused. People are able not only to secure the food, clothing, and shelter that they need but to indulge in tastes and pleasures beyond the bare necessities, or to save and invest in ways that increase their future potential. These activities create opportunities not just for the farmer, the weaver, and the carpenter, but also for the gourmet chef, the fashion designer, the cinematographer, the artist and writer, the banker and broker. Activity begets activity, and wealth creates wealth.

In a closed, command-and-control economy that ignores creativity and ambition—except for a chosen class of state bureaucrats entrusted with society’s future—the focus becomes mere survival. All the rest is sunlight falling on sand. It starts with the drive to equitably provide the basics of life to passive citizens, but people without the opportunity to dream and expand their lives meaningfully will sink into boredom, alcoholism, and mischief. Economic activity declines. Eventually the struggle over crusts consumes all human energy, like scorpions grappling in the desert.

Human nature was not designed by evolution to be static. We are not things, but dynamic beings. And we cannot be baked into a pie.

1. I wrote on this subject before, in It Isn’t a Pie from October 3, 2010. It appears to be time to expand and explain the substitute metaphor.

2. “God,” in this sentence, is a kind of shorthand, not a sign of my devotion. The deity stands as proxy for many fortuitous situations that occurred once and will not be repeated: forests of strong oak and soaring redwoods—resistant to pests and perfect for building—found along the West Coast; pools of oil and domes of gas found under ancient seabeds; veins of gold running among the granite; fields of iron oxide lying close beneath the clay. Use them once and they’re gone. The gifts of weather and soil, fossil sea life, or good geology.

3. And money also simply grows or decays over time. If my money in the bank is loaned out to build homes and factories or buy productive land, and later paid back with interest, it grows. If my dollar bills stay under the mattress, the rate of inflation makes them worth less every year.

4. Without money, the miner has to trade a bucket of ore to the farmer for an apple to eat, and the farmer has to collect a lot of buckets and then give them to the factory owner to get the tractor he needs. Money makes things go faster.

When Corporations are People Too

2011-11-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

Some members of the political pole around which the Occupy Wall Street movement has coalesced suggest that one solution to our economic problems would be to revoke or rewrite the legal fiction under which a corporation has status as a person. Supposedly, this would remove the element of big, “faceless” corporations making decisions for the rest of us. However, like most simple solutions to complex problems, I fear this one will have unintended consequences. Bad ones.

The argument in favor of ending this artificial legal personality is that it would remove the shield protecting the living, breathing people actually making those decisions. They would be exposed to public scrutiny and could be punished for their crimes. However, laws are already in place to hold individuals responsible for the decisions they make as corporate officers. Our laws and regulations are thick with personal, human responsibility. Corporate executives and directors who break the law can be and have been prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned.

Still, one of the functions of a corporate entity is to absorb and deflect legal liability, as when there are financial losses to be borne or legal disagreements to be resolved. For example, a corporation may acquire debts beyond its capacity to pay. When the cash flow stops and creditors outnumber payers, the corporation can go bankrupt—divide its assets, pay out what it can, and in the process disappoint a number of those lenders—without impoverishing the human management and the corporation’s shareholders. A corporation may enter into agreements and, if they should become disagreements, bear the consequences of a lawsuit. The corporation can receive and defend a suit from others, or bring suit if its rights are infringed. Although people with a pulse are making decisions about this, they do so in the name of a collective, the interests of the shareholders, rather than as a matter of their own personal honor.

If this weren’t the case, then running a business or buying stock in one would be far more risky. Encounter a downturn in the market, a falloff in sales, an expansion plan gone wrong, or a customer or contractor with a grudge—and you could lose not only your livelihood or your investment but also your home, your savings, all your possessions, and still be in hock for future wages.

Maybe this is what the OWS people want. Make shareholder capitalism so risky and punitive that no one would want to play. That would be a quick route to state-sponsored socialism or communism.¹

But if your aim is to improve our free market system, rather than put a stake through its heart, ending legal personality would probably be a bad idea. Consider that under our system of laws, only a person can enter into a contract, open a bank account, acquire and own property, borrow money and pay debts (a form of contract), hire people (another contract), and function in a hundred other ways required to transact business. If the assembled owners—partners, shareholders, or some other collective with a common cause despite their individual aims and wishes—could not function in this way as a legal entity, our economics would be returned to a medieval level. All business would be personal business. The cobbler makes a pair of shoes and sells them to the farmer, who pays for them with the proceeds of his grain harvest, which he has sold to the miller, who grinds it to make flour and sells it to the baker, who makes the bread the cobbler will buy with the money from selling that pair of shoes.

It’s tidy. It’s neat. It’s personal, and everyone takes responsibility for his actions. People lived that way in Europe for almost a thousand years. They were called the Dark Ages. Business on a personal level will enable a community—a small one—to survive. But it keeps you at the productive level of a pair of shoes and now and then a violin. Try to make anything bigger and more complex, like a piano, and you need several craftsman to come together and blend their skills.

Perhaps those piano makers can all work under personal contract with the owner of the piano shop. That owner takes responsibility for the business, investing his profits when he needs to buy iron for another piano harp, wood for a case, or wire for strings. And if the market for pianos dries up, he takes the loss and goes out of business, returning his craftsmen to farming or working for the miller. This is still at the community level. Such a business cannot aspire to anything big.

Consider the automobile. In the early years of the nineteenth century, hundreds of makers of horseless carriages functioned like our imagined piano shop: garages turning out handmade vehicles, each one unique, with few parts in common. They didn’t travel very far, which was a good thing because if you drove a car made in Cleveland into Chicago, and it broke down, you would have to return to the maker’s garage to get it fixed.

The convenience we take for granted, that a Ford sedan made in Michigan can be sold and serviced in San Francisco, would be extremely difficult to achieve on the basis of such purely personal business. William Clay Ford, Jr., the great-grandson of that Henry who actually did start out in a garage workshop in Detroit, would have to buy and own factories all over the globe, borrowing the money for this from his personal friends. He would personally contract with hundreds of thousands of workers to build the cars, acquire and hold millions of tons of steel and other raw materials as his personal property, and maintain possession of those millions of vehicles until each one could be sold to an individual buyer.

Of course, the buyer of that car would have to save up and pay for it all at once, unless he knew someone with a large amount of uncommitted cash willing to make a personal loan. There would be no banks to evaluate the buyer’s creditworthiness and write a loan against the value of the car. There would be no insurance company to assume the risks of his driving this encumbered asset on the city streets. Every aspect of our lives would be carried out on the basis of the people we knew personally or could convince of our trustworthiness through their personal experience or on the basis of our smiles and winning personalities.

There was a time when such a personal approach to business was the norm, and it could achieve great things. In ancient the Roman world, there were actually corporations with an artificial personality: the societas and collegia, where people joined together and created a group—a body or corpus—that that could enter transactions and acquire debts that were not the personal liability of the members.² But these groups were still social; people came together on a first-name basis and could know and trust the other members. They were anything but the faceless creations of a legal system.

Elsewhere in Rome, however, the individual—the strength of one man’s personality and trust in his skills and judgment—was everything. Julius Caesar was the scion of a noble family and became its paternal head, but he wasn’t the president of any “Caesar Inc.” like the Fords, Hiltons, or Versaces. The family fortune—what there was of it—was his to spend. He made his way as a politician in Rome on the basis of the people for whom he could offer protection and do favors. They became his followers and, if they had personal followers of their own, those became the followers of Caesar as well.³ On the basis of this popularity and not a little personal generosity, the Roman state advanced him in the course of public offices, the cursus honorum, and in time of war gave him command of army units. But as office holder and commander he still had to win the confidence of the people under him. A general going into battle didn’t just give orders and expect his soldiers to carry them out as a matter of law and discipline—he had to make a personal speech before each engagement to whip up their enthusiasm.

Ending the fiction of the artificial legal personality in our current laws would either reduce the power and robustness of our economy to the level of a village in the Dark Ages, or give rise to an even greater emphasis on “the 1%.” These would be the people who, like ancient kings and tyrants, could command a following on the basis of their personality and their fortune. Imagine a society that did not put its trust in institutions like the Ford Motor Company or Exxon-Mobil, which today are owned by legions of shareholders, whose interests are protected by disinterested financial rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s. Instead, our economy would function at the whim of great patrons like Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller—robber barons answerable to no auditors or committees, who could whip out their checkbooks and make any little inconveniences such as laws and competitors simply disappear.

Granting institutions the power to do business has enriched us all, enabling a level of product standardization, global convenience, and economic power unimagined by previous societies. To undo that would impoverish millions. It’s simply a bad idea.

1. Assuming, of course, that the state itself could still function as a legal entity representing the interests of its citizens, a republic, and not as the personal retinue loyal to a single individual, a king.

2. Municipal entities like the City of Rome functioned in similar fashion. And the tradition of collective ownership continued under the church in the Middle Ages, where the members of a brotherhood shared ownership of an abbey or monastery and its property. This tradition grew up with the great universities, where the student colleges were modeled on the collegia of Rome.

3. It’s no coincidence that the criminal organization shown in The Godfather—with its emphasis on favors, protection, personal loyalty, and demonstrations of respect—so closely resembles this Roman tradition.

The Dune Ethos

2011-10-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

I have long been a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune books. I love their incredible energy and rich technical and social detail, but mostly I have been mesmerized by their special outlook on the human condition. This is best shown in the first four books, relating to the immediate family of Paul Atreides, the rebel prophet Muad’dib, from his father Leto’s accession to the planet Arrakis to the death of his son Leto II some 3,000 years later. I’m still an avid reader, but not such a fan, of the books that followed The God-Emperor of Dune. These later books lost focus on that family and became a tangled tale of religious intrigue, hidden spice hordes, grounded no-ships, and wild-eyed faux Bene Gesserit. Good reading, but not all that insightful.¹

So what did those first four books (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God-Emperor of Dune) have that the others seem to lack? I call it the Dune ethos—in the sense of the guiding beliefs that characterize a person or institution—and it’s made up of many parts.

First, there are no fools among the major characters, no easy targets.² All the villains are strong, wily, alert, self-aware, and motivated. The Imperium and its major players define a universe of caution and danger. It’s not enough that one take the normal human precautions against disease, accident, and a plunging stock market. Everyone in your play group is setting traps, sending assassins, and plotting your downfall. In addition to native wits and watchfulness, you need to prepare your own skills in self-defense, surround yourself with trusted, loyal, and capable friends—who are more like family members than servants and retainers—and reinforce their capabilities with weapons training, code words, battle language, and a stock of family atomics.

This is not a world I would particularly like to live in. Watching your back 24/7 and testing every bite of food for poison does not give one the leisure the think and dream. But the Dune ethos requires that in a dangerous environment, you prepare. You don’t wander about trusting to the kindness of strangers and hoping that your inherent inoffensiveness and soft answers will turn away wrath. I found this same sort of preparation in the face of adversity in the film of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless,” Don Corleone says. “Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” It’s always inspiring to see people who take their life situation seriously.

A second part of the Dune ethos is that human skill trumps technology. In the universe of the Imperium, ever-increasing mechanization and automation have already been discovered to be a trap and discarded on religious principle. When machines replace every human function, from working to walking to thinking, then humans become soft, weak, and disposable. The people of the Imperium know that humans must be strong and alert to survive in a hostile universe. And this universe has dangers far beyond mere human interaction: coriolis storms, giant sandworms, shigawire, and inkvines. You might use simple machines in your struggles, like knives and body shields, lasguns and ornithopters, but the intelligence directing them must be human and awake. This is a society that has given human development into the hands of the “Great Schools”—the Bene Gesserit, the Bene Tleilax, the Mentats, the Spacing Guild—to teach and train human senses, responses, and intellect.

I happen to be a fan of technology and automation. I believe machines free the average human from back-breaking drudgery and repetitive tasks, enabling us to think, explore, discover, and dream. But if our machines ever become so all-encompassing that they bottle-feed us, put us to bed, and regulate our oxygen supply, then it will be time for a Butlerian Jihad against them. Until then, I treasure technology and mechanical innovation as an expression of the human mind.

What I like about the notion of the Great Schools is that human potential is limitless and largely untapped. With the proper training, any human mind can access and explore abilities of analysis and calculation usually reserved for autistic savants; any human body can access the speed, grace, endurance, and energy usually exhibited by yogis, ballerinas, and karate masters. The early Dune books were composed in the 1960s, which saw the birth of the human potential movement, and they absorbed that hopeful outlook.

The third dimension of the Dune ethos is the basic decency of the Atreides. Yes, they maintain a standing army, compose propaganda film strips, and attempt to hoodwink their enemies. But Duke Leto and the Lady Jessica understand that they must show trust and offer loyalty to their retainers and subjects if they are to expect these qualities in return. They create a place of safety and certainty amid the storm. Each of their notable retainers—the sword master Duncan Idaho, the knife wielding Gurney Halleck, and the strategist Thufir Hawat—has been raised by the family from questionable circumstances to a position of personal freedom and dignity. Life among the Atreides compares very favorably with the skulking, suspicious, fear-haunted lives of Harkonnen retainers.

As someone who has worked in business organizations for forty years, I can appreciate the management lessons available in Dune. Duke Leto warns his son to give as few orders as possible, because “once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.” In place of such micromanagement, the duke adopts and disseminates a pattern of values and establishes a sense of the way he wants things done. When his employees know what he expects of them, he can leave to their judgment how they will handle any particular situation. This approach is not only more flexible and efficient, but it builds a sense of purpose and pride into the employee. It’s better to enlist the support of fully involved human beings than try to program the actions of meat puppets.

Finally, the Dune ethos explores the limits of personal power. Paul Muad’dib is able to see the future so clearly that he can predict and avoid any trap. But in the end this prescience traps him, and he must hopelessly play out the steps of a dance which he already finds tedious. His son, Leto II, not only shares this prescience but also has access to the past lives, experiences, and wisdom of his every human ancestor going back to Agamemnon; he inhabits a massive, wormlike body covered with invulnerable scales; and he commands a galactic empire maintained by the personal loyalty of an army of fanatic female warriors. Yet he treasures the surprises that one alert human mind and opposing will can create for him. In fact, he plays against this opponent to neutralize his own superior abilities and engineer a death for himself that ensures the continuity of humankind.

I believe in human abilities and the free will to exercise them against an environment of chance and chaos. And yet I know that any single human life is inherently meaningless.³ The meaning is left for each of us to take and make our own … and yet … Learn to play Mozart, write the perfect love letter, bake the most intricate pastries—then die anyway and go to dust. You might create a moment of happiness among the people within reach of your playing, your letters, your baked goods. They too will die and go to dust. The only lasting personal monument is effort that increases human understanding and compassion, raises awareness, and advances the human species.

As an author myself, I know that the richness of feeling and experience that I call the Dune ethos is actually a product of the mind of Frank Herbert. Those early books tap into an understanding, values, and insights that cannot be simulated through clever scholarship or pasted on as an afterthought in the final edit. Through reading his books, we touch the man. That’s magical. And by touching us with his understanding and insights, Herbert transcends death and creates the only monument worth having.

1. I’ll tip my hat here to the other Dune books, written by the author’s son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson. These sequels to the original books are admirable works of science fiction in themselves. I sometimes feel, though, that by mining and expanding on the tidbits that Herbert used artfully to suggest a backstory, they sometimes open too many doors and light too many lamps. For example, by showing Vladimir Harkonnen as a handsome, athletic, disciplined young man who only becomes bloated through a disease inflicted on him as an act of vengeance, we lose the sense of the original: that the Baron was a greedy spider whose vanity wanted to absorb the entire world into his own flesh. Because they often fail to reproduce the original Dune ethos, I sometimes find these follow-on books to be psychologically colorless.

2. Compare this robustness to the Honored Matre “Dama” in the later books. She’s so confident of her superior intellect, abilities, and personal ruthlessness that her enemies can knock her over all too easily.

3. See my blog The Meaning of Life from October 9, 2011.

Hunger for Absolutes

2011-10-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

It seems that something in the human mind is drawn to absolutes. Against a world that is littered with indeterminacy, half-truths, and shades of gray, we hunger for black or white, all or nothing, pure truth determined or damnable lie exposed. Examples are really too many to name, but I’ll try to examine a few.

Consider the fundamentalists in religion. Certainly, given the span of recorded history and the many different forms of public worship that have risen to prominence,¹ one would think questions of how the world was created, what constitutes a good life, and what happens at the end of it would be open to debate and question. The cults of Allah, Amon, Baal, Brahma, Buddha, Enlil, Jove, Odin, Yahweh, and Zeus contain many common elements. From these, intelligent people might come together, discuss, and define answers to the questions of the ages.

But for every ecumenical council, there are a hundred sects claiming to know the one, true, real answer for all time. In America, you find these people sporting bumper stickers that read “Jesus is Lord” and “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It.” In the Middle East, you find them raging in the streets and crying for the death of anyone who questions—and so insults—their religion. Under stress, these people resort to a literal interpretation of their scripture, whether it be the Torah that was blended from the four Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, and Priestly sources; the Bible that was translated at third hand from Aramaic, to Greek, and finally into King James’s English at the beginning of the seventeenth century; or the Quran that was transcribed in the original Arabic from the visions of Muhammad in the seventh century.

The quest for absolutes is not the province of religion alone. Our secular age has given rise to secular prophets like Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao. Each has his own book, his teachings, his maxims. Each has a vision for the future that his followers are supposed to adopt without question. Whether Communist or National Socialist, the adherents are not allowed to question or interpret. They are consumers, not apostles.

Humans crave absolutes in more than just their belief systems. Look at the early sciences, which supposedly followed principles of open-mindedness, investigation, and empiricism. Still, when we first gave up the idea of the Aristotelian, Earth-centered universe enclosed by the “perfect” celestial spheres for Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system in 1543, the orbits of the planets were still presumed to be perfect circles. It wasn’t until a generation or two later that Johannes Kepler described them more accurately as ellipses or ovals.

In the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus developed the taxonomy by which all animals and plants were divided into genus and species. A century later Darwin described the mechanisms—if not the actual chemistry—by which species arise. For generations since, people have accepted that the distinctions between lineages were—well—lines, boundaries that could not be crossed. Among the hummingbirds of North America, the ruby-throated (Archilochus colubris) was on one side, and the rufous (Selasphorus rufus) on the other.

Certainly, the ability to interbreed and the viability and fertility of inter-species offspring are general guidelines to speciation. But we have since learned that genomic variation runs deep even within species. While the genetic variation between humans (Homo sapiens) and our closest relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), might be as little as 2%, the variation between one human being and another due to gene copy number, mutations, short tandem repeats, and other technical differences may be as high as 5%. Analysis of human intestines and skin surfaces suggest that each of us harbors colonies of bacterial as genetically unique as we ourselves are. Recent genomic surveys of the oceans² have shown that what we once thought of as microbial species are actually genuses, with their domains changing over distances as short as twenty miles. Life at the level of our DNA is messier than anyone thought.³

Of course, this preference for perfect circles and well-defined speciation in science might be called first assumptions. As new information comes in, these assumptions are refined to a higher level of complexity. But you really can’t say the same thing for absolutes in politics.

Political and economic theories account for some of the most subtle and devious questions that human beings have to deal with and the choices they have to make. The opportunity for evoking and then suffering unintended consequences in either arena is too great to forego the need for analysis and debate. Yet people repeatedly prefer simple, absolutist solutions and platforms that can be reduced to slogans. “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight”—as if the dispute between two nations could be resolved with a straight boundary line. “No Justice, No Peace”—as if justice was simple and obvious to administer, and peace a single, unified state. And now “We Are the 99%”—as if all the greed and evil could be contained in so small a population fraction as one percent, and as if the rest of society shared unified goals and needs.⁴

Simple economic systems—which ignore or try to contain the tendency of humans to make selfish choices, operate at different levels of efficiency, and obstinately try to work around the rules—usually end up in chaos and collapse. Systems like Marxism and National Socialism delude their theorists, as well as their followers, with the notion that they can create a new kind of human being with a perfected nature. These systems work admirably so long as people can be coerced, or programmed a young age, to ignore personal interest, devotion to family, and individual levels of intelligence and energy. The systems work perfectly with either angels or robots. With humans, they fail miserably. But they have the singular advantage of being attractively simple and absolute.

People in positions of power, who must administer a set of rules and ensure compliance, too easily fall into blanket assumptions about right and wrong and issue “zero-tolerance” policies. “That cheese spreader in your Lunchables package, Priscilla, falls under the school’s definition of a knife.” “The bottle of aspirin in your backpack, Cindy, violates the campus no-drugs policy.” No rule or law can be made to fit all possible situations, but harried administrators will try.

Humans were given better minds than this. Any lawyer or judge will tell you there is more than one way to interpret a statute or a contract clause. In this country, we spend huge amounts of time, effort, and money examining individual situations, mitigating circumstances, possible motives, and mental conditions to establish what might constitute justice. Rather than an annoyance, this effort is one of the glories of our society. We try to balance personal freedom with social stability. We attempt to permit a wide latitude of personal action while ensuring predictable social interactions and fairness for all concerned. It isn’t easy.

If people didn’t hunger for absolutes, they would consistently vote for politicians who promised “I’ll try to see all sides of the question” and “I’ll do my best, under the circumstances.” But the middle of the road is a lonely place these days. We hunger for the man or woman with a perfectly simple solution that can be explained in a ten-second sound bite. We’ll follow a dictator who will cut corners, scapegoat obvious villains, promise free bread, and make the trains that run on time.

Is this human stupidity? Laziness? Inattention to detail? In some measure, perhaps. But even smart people can enthuse about absolutely dumb solutions. Look at the number of educated intellectuals who have fallen for Marx’s convoluted premises and the promise to reverse the economic equivalent of gravity and make water flow uphill.

I believe the hunger for absolutes is a sign of people who are too busy to become educated and investigate for themselves. Most of us—perhaps even 99% of us—are too busy working to put a roof over our heads and food on the table, too busy taking care of squabbling children and aging parents, too involved in the mechanics of everyday life, to give our full attention to the larger political and economic issues of the day. We want a ten-second sound bite because we don’t have the time or patience to read a ten-page proposal.

When times are good, the economy’s booming, job market’s looking up, our savings are growing, and the seven fat years are here—that is, when we have comfort and security and a sense of alternatives being available to us—then it doesn’t much matter what political and economic choices we make. When we’re in good health and fortune smiles, it doesn’t much matter what god we believe in. But when the economy slows, the opportunities fade, the ground parches with dust, and the seven lean years arrive—then there’s no time to study the issues. We want solutions. Now.

I’m not saying that complex political choices and economic solutions should be left to a cadre of experts. Heavens, no! The opinions of the leisured classes occupying legislative chambers and lecture halls are no substitute for the personal interest of an informed citizenry. But I can wish for a greater public appreciation of the complexity of the world we live in. We are all human beings with different needs, wants, desires, skills, and insights. No one from the one percent wakes up in the morning and declares himself a villain; no one among the rest of us is a saint. The universe is not run by clockwork. And no orbit anywhere is a perfect circle.

1. We won’t go into private superstitions and personal fetishes.

2. Among them the voyages of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s Sorcerer II.

3. So much for the Platonic ideal—the presumption that an animal with as many different forms as the horse must derive from one perfect specimen somewhere in the mind of God, of which the horses in our fields are all just imperfect copies. Instead, the genus Equus merely passes through the noble Arabians and the racetrack Thoroughbreds along a spectrum ranging from zebras to donkeys. Making such distinctions is the business of humans and of no concern to the horses themselves.

4. And thereby doing away with the Pareto principle, which offers as a general rule of problem solving that 80% of the effects results from 20% of the causes.

Aggression in a Polite Society

2011-10-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote:¹ “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” One may not always wish to live in such a society—where a sudden wrong move might put you in a crossfire, or a careless word or gesture provoke a meeting at sunrise accompanied by seconds—but it would certainly be a different society than the one in which we live. If the people who promote Second Amendment rights to the extent of concealed carry on the public streets gain ascendance, we may soon find out just how different.

One anecdote may illustrate. Our young cousin and his wife used to belong to a gym in Vacaville, California. Among the other clients were the tattooed members of various local gangs. The wife noted that these people, for all their fierce appearance, were unfailingly polite: “May I please use the weights when you’re done?” In a subculture where any display of rudeness or temper is considered “disrespect” and met with a mortal challenge, you pick your words and your battles carefully. She also noted that these people were polite not only to other gang members but to the civilian clients and staff as well. Guarding your words and emotions appeared to be a full-time occupation.

Compare this to the world we see around us, especially as mirrored in popular culture—the movies and television episodes that feed back images of our society as entertainment. In the media, we see an endless display of “attitude,” whereby the hero or heroine establishes personal space through challenge, confrontation, and aggression. In life, we see people pushing past each other on the sidewalk, cutting each other off on the road, snarling, shouting, and finger-gesturing. Think of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy: “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”

In your neighborhood things may be a little better. I grew up in the East—in the Boston area and then in central Pennsylvania—and can remember a fairly high level of courtesy in everyday actions. I was raised to smile at people on the street, step aside when others are coming on three-abreast, hold the door if someone is following close behind me, help someone whose hands are full. Such actions cost a minimum amount of energy and provide a large amount of the grease that lets the gears of social interaction turn smoothly. The underlying thought was: Why aggravate people? Why make their day a little worse when you can make it a little better? This was part of every child’s training. It basically depends on thinking about and caring for others. It’s a matter of routine, short-form empathy.

I now live on the edge of Berkeley, California. This is the home of the Free Speech Movement and an enlightened, progressive society which is particularly caring for Planet Earth and for people who are less fortunate than others. It’s also the abiding place of the hippie ethos of peace and love. I guess people who have taken on such karmic sweetness give themselves a pass when they go out in public, because I am always amazed at the residual amounts of anger and disdain on display. Drivers cut you off on the road. Shoppers push ahead of you in line. Pedestrians saunter through the crosswalk at green lights—and slow down if they think you notice. And if you attract their attention at all, you get a snarl and a foul word.²

It wasn’t always this way, of course. California and much of the West grew up in ranching and mining communities. When you’re out riding the ranges or carrying around gold nuggets, it’s handy to holster a gun against encounters with rattlesnakes, bears, cutthroats, and card sharks. The sheriff’s jurisdiction usually stopped just beyond the last saloon in town, and you were on your own as soon as you got into the hills. That tended to be a polite society, unless you intended mischief or detected it in your vicinity.

With some of that earlier culture still in mind—and being an avid reader of past and future historical fiction, including Heinlein’s—I am generally appalled at the careless way that too many people in modern society push their attitudes in others’ faces. Of course, given the restrictions on weapons ownership in California,³ rude people will generally assume that the strangers they might be angering are disarmed. But some of those strangers might still have strong arms, hands that can be balled into fists, bad tempers, and a disinclination to be trifled with. Of course, if you swear in a stranger’s face and he hauls off and hits you, the law allows you to sue him for assault and battery. But that would be after the fact, wouldn’t it? In the meantime, you do run a risk of injury. This doesn’t seem to occur to most people.

Not only does our current society provide too many instances of outright verbal if not physical aggression, we also seem to have a growing epidemic of passive aggression. That’s when someone cuts you off at a corner and pretends not to see you. Or you ask someone to pass the salt and he or she drops it just short of your grasp. Or the person smiles through an encounter and then, when you’re not looking, spits in your soup, kicks your dog, or scratches your car. Passive aggression is any behavior that is actually meant intentionally but, if challenged, can be excused as carelessness or inattention and requited with a sing-song “Sorree!” Passive aggressiveness is enemy action under the cover of inoffensiveness. It is the choice of the weak, the powerless, and the cowardly. It is the aggression of slaves.

Overt aggression, verbal assault, passive aggression, and personal carelessness seem to be artifacts of a stressed society. People who are pressed for time, frustrated at the limits of their lives, and pushing uphill against burdens of job, family, commute, cost of living, taxes, and other stressors, will give themselves a license to “share the pain” with total strangers. Since you’ll never see these strangers again, why not make their day go a bit worse to match your own? Or such people believe it would take a saint like Mother Theresa to resist biting someone’s head off if he really got in your way. These are people who have lost their equilibrium and their sense of grace and honor.

On a crowded planet, with people stacked vertically into high rises, and even in suburbia the houses are wall to wall, with my picture window facing into your garage, with pressures building all around, and with more people self-medicating on alcohol and drugs in order to take up the strain—I’m not sure we want to introduce concealed firearms into the mix.

I am susceptible to the Second Amendment-inspired notion that incidents of casual street crime and house breaking tend to go down when the perpetrator can’t be sure the property owner won’t respond with deadly force. And I do most strongly advocate self-defense training and awareness for anyone.⁴ But I’m also not convinced that universal concealed carry—or even open carry—is the answer to our problems.

Until we begin to heal our society of its residual anger, thoughtlessness, and selfishness, arming that society might simply be an invitation to a war zone.

1. In the novel Beyond This Horizon (1942).

2. Some of this, granted, may go back to the progressive motto: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” You rarely see these people harassing homeless panhandlers or pushing around the disabled. But as someone who stands tall, tries to dress presentably, and tends to smile at strangers, I seem to draw their generalized anger as one of the “comfortable.”

3. The law goes far beyond firearms to include almost any concealable weapon that might be used for attack or defense. See California Penal Code Section 12020.

4. The personal force that one learns in karate, judo, jiu jitsu, boxing, or other self-defense training requires awareness and application. The defense reflex may be instantaneous, but the situational awareness that ignites it is always a choice. Unlike a pistol, a punch or a kick can’t go off accidentally. And the responsible sensei works on the student’s emotional and moral balance as much as on stance and center of gravity.

The Meaning of Life1

2011-10-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry, but there isn’t one. At least, not the deeper meaning that most people are looking for: “Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is life all about?” There’s simply no answer to those questions from the biological perspective—which as living beings is all we’ve really got. Cells don’t exist for a reason, and neither do birds, bees, sharks, dolphins, dogs, and howler monkeys. To look for and find a meaning you have to develop something beyond the body: a mind, a soul, or what you will.

Life as an expression of the making and breaking of atomic bonds—that is, millions of complex molecules coming together and breaking apart in millions of complex reactions—happens simply because it can. With the right mix of chemicals and an external energy source, you get the complex, entropy-reversing phenomenon we call life. On this planet, the covalently active atoms oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus, operating in a flexible, supportive matrix like liquid water, supplied with massive inpourings of sunlight or geothermal steam, yield life. On other planets, other chemicals, other matrices, and other energy sources may yield a different kind of life.²

Life as we understand it consists of layer upon layer of complexity. Complex long-chain molecules called polymers, the familiar DNA and RNA, store the formulas for, and coordinate the manufacture of, even more complex polymer molecules called proteins. Proteins fold in complex ways to provide surfaces covered with the right pattern of available electrical charges to attract two or more simple molecules and force the binding reactions—protein-assisted reactions are properly called “enzymatic reactions”—that will turn them into a larger, more useful molecule. Similarly, proteins and their charge patterns can attract large molecules and break them apart, which can be just as useful in the life process.

Almost any chemical reaction can be forced with the application or the release of a sufficient amount of energy, and sometimes these are large and disruptive energies. The wonder of enzymatic reactions is that they all occur at energy levels consistent with other chemical processes going on nearby. That is, pumping in the energy to make a particular peptide bond doesn’t freeze your insides—or cook them in breaking the bond and releasing energy. Enzymes moderate the heat of reactions and let you stay at a convenient body temperature.

Complex collections of these useful resulting chemicals form the membranes and inner working parts of cells—all coordinated by their enzymatic proteins and replenished by their DNA/RNA mechanisms. Collections of cells affect the environment around them, linking together to create complex structures such as bones, muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. Groups of cells also coordinate in a complex fashion to create non-living materials such as tooth enamel, stomach acid, saliva, and tears. These materials function in the environment created by cells groups operating at a much higher layer of complexity—the body.

Within the human nervous system, the level of complexity rises many-fold. The human brain contains approximately 100 billion specialized cells called neurons, and each of these makes an average of 7,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. The resulting 100 to 500 trillion connections allow for recording, analyzing, and coordinating the body’s sensations, perceptions, and movements. From all this complex activity arises the phenomenon we call awareness and the ongoing processes of thought and memory.

These various layers of complexity take you from a collection of active chemicals in a pond to an organism capable of observing the universe, appreciating itself as a separate being, and wondering about its place and purpose in that universe. None of this complexity, however, will tell you why you exist, simply that you can.

The complexity that brings awareness won’t answer that final question. It will not tell you whether to dedicate your life to altruism, hedonism, or mysticism; follow the tenets of Buddhism, Marxism, Islam, or Dianetics; turn left or right along the political path; opt for a family or a career; enlist to fight for or against a tyrant; build a temple or a tomb.

As El Aurens says in Lawrence of Arabia: “Nothing is written.” And that’s a good thing. Our minds are assembled in complexity with sufficient innate programming that the basic mechanism functions. The optic nerve sends impulses that can be interpreted as accurate pictures of the world around us. The aural nerve carries impulses that we hear as voices or music. We can interpret meaning, call up memory, and imagine the future. But beyond that … only freedom.

If there is a God—that is, a complex, powerful mind and will, operating behind the scenes of what otherwise looks like chance, happenstance, and chaos—then He must be a subtle one. He did not create human beings out of all this complexity so that they would have ungovernable impulses that must then be governed by a set of rules you could write down in a book.³ He would not want us all forced to act in a choreographed pattern, like the linked movements of bird flocks and fish schools. That would be a universe of robots! Making programmable robots is obvious and … unsubtle.

If nothing is written, then each of us must write for ourselves. We must pick a path in life that lies within the compass of what we know, fits the span of our capabilities and interests, and remains compatible with our beliefs. But we each must recognize that beliefs can change when confronted with new views of reality. Interests will change in response to our imagination working on new opportunities. Capabilities can be acquired and improved. We start as buds in a sea of sensation and possibility. We are changed by that environment—and we change ourselves in response to it.

We can become anything we want. But we must choose carefully, because as we grow older, the path becomes steeper and the alternatives are harder to find and follow. And at the end—coming sooner than we like—we all die. We all have only so much time to identify, select, and develop the type of life that we will ultimately find satisfying and meaningful.

But still, within those strictures, “Nothing is written.”

1. You knew I’d get around to this eventually, didn’t you?

2. For example, carbon’s ability to give, take, and share up to four electrons enables it to form complex molecular structures. However, in an environment poor in carbon (atomic number 6), the element in the same position on the next row of the Periodic Table, silicon (atomic number 14), could serve the same pivotal role in a life-forming chemistry. Silicon-based life forms would be able to reproduce any chemistry that carbon-based life is capable of, but they would tend to be heavier because their constituent molecules would carry eight extra proteins and a like number of neutrons on each silicon atom.

3. If I believed in any god-as-creator, then it would be a mind that worked its actual decision-making processes far upstream of human life. It would be the mind that determined the structure of the atom and its complex electron shells that allow hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon to bind in these useful ways. That’s about as much winding up as the universe should get. After that, the power of the DNA molecule not only to record but also to mutate and change allows life to develop and the resulting creatures to evolve in response to their environment. A single creation of humankind, or any other species, in its current form would only have worked in the current conditions of temperature, oxygen concentration, water pH and salinity, meteoric bombardment rate, and a dozen other variables. Change any one variable by much, and you doom that life to extinction. To survive in a changing world, life must change. Any one species may die out—and it may have been a toss-up whether Homo sapiens or Tursiops truncatus became the dominant species on this planet (although I personally would vote for thumbs). But life persists and rolls with the punches. And because life is a complex use of common chemicals, it can exist anywhere in the universe, because the atomic structure of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and other elements of the Periodic Table is the same on Alpha Centauri and in the Andromeda galaxy as here.

In Praise of American Creativity

2011-10-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have been hearing so much in the last couple of years about how this country has lost its edge: We don’t make anything anymore. We’ve lost the spirit of competition and innovation. We don’t know anything and can’t teach our children anything. We no longer have dreams or ambition. We, collectively, lack the energy to do anything except get up off the couch for another beer. To quote the replicant Pris from Blade Runner: “Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.”

Yeah, we just wallow in it. … And then you go to an event like Santa Rosa’s The Great West End & Railroad Square Handcar Regatta & Exposition of Mechanical & Artistic Wonders, which is also colloquially known as the “Steam Punk Festival.”¹

This was no manufactured, slick ’n’ span commercial carnival or theme park put on for the benefit of gawking rubes.² The handcars of the festival’s name were creations of individual imagination and energy: magenta turtles and white swans, H. G. Wells’s time machine, a yellow submarine, a Flintstones car on stone rollers, a rowboat on penny-farthing bicycle wheels &hellip: every outlandish thing that might ride on rails propelled by human power.

But it wasn’t just the handcar builders and racing teams who were there to show off. The crowd was thickly sprinkled with people in Victorian costume with sci-fi flourishes: bowler hats and vests, bustier tops and fishnet stockings, goggles and gadgets, ray guns and rocket packs, pinstripes and parasols. The vendors were the sort of booths you see at street fairs every weekend in the Bay Area—individuals selling handmade clothing, craft items, artworks, local and period foods—with a decided tilt toward 19th century costumes, jewelry, and memorabilia. If you didn’t get into the spirit of the thing, you just didn’t get it.

So, what was this? The last decadent gasp of a dying culture, spiritually retreating into a past that never was, in place of a future that never will be? Well … not to look around at the faces. This was fun. This was whimsy. This was people coming from all over the region to play in a consensual fantasy.

It reminded me of what I’ve seen for years at science fiction conventions: people in costume from their favorite books, movies, and television shows. The inspiration might be commercial, but the energy and effort that go into design, tailoring, and accessorizing beat anything a bride might invest in her wedding ensemble. No one shows up in a store-bought costume thinking he’s going to be anything but ridiculous. The whole point is to exercise your own imagination against a common theme.

Science fiction is not alone in this kind of creativity. All over the country millions of people attend annual and monthly events, conventions, conferences, and festivals celebrating murder mysteries, romance novels, comic books (ahem, “graphic novels”), super heroes, gothic horror, vampires and werewolves, historical miniatures and board games, military reenactments, jazz and ragtime music,³ classical and chamber music … anything that can be pictured, played, compared, confabulated about, and loved. If there’s a passion for it, there’s a meeting place for it.

I suppose the roots of these conventions and festivals go back to medieval Europe and the festivals held on a saint’s day, and then to festivals, holidays, and religious observances held in every culture. But the secular twist and the connection with some aspect of popular culture is particularly American. So is the urge to dress up in costume as if it was Halloween—another European festival that Americans have made their own.

Much as you might think our popular culture today is run by Hollywood and Madison Avenue—that we consumers just put our heads back like credulous turkeys, open our mouths, and let the evil masters pour in their homogenized goo and sludge—there’s actually a complex feedback loop going on. I won’t deny that a profit motive may drive the story lines and bend the images appearing in novels and brought to the big and small screens. But these conferences and conventions are also attended by writers, artists, producers, and designers. You can’t package and sell leading-edge imagery and imagination, whether in future fantasy or society murder, unless you have your finger on the pulse of the aficionados.

So is this the last gasp of couch potatoes who are too lazy and stupid to manufacture real goods and provide real value? Instead, we make costumes and dress up to play at fantasy? Hardly. American invention and ingenuity are doing just fine, thank you. We make more goods than the Chinese—it just doesn’t look that way because most of what you see imported from China are relatively inexpensive personal electronics and consumer goods. And even there, much of the value comes from American invention and design. What makes an Apple iPhone or iPad the coolest thing ever and worth a couple of hundred dollars apiece are the creativity and vision of people working in Cupertino, not the ten dollars worth of assembly work done in Shenzhen. The great story of American productivity is masked by the automation in our factories: Our low-skilled manufacturing jobs didn’t go to China; they went to a machine in Schenectady controlled by a computer programmed in San Jose.⁴ The economic genius of America now resides in designing the machines that people in other countries will build for pennies on the dollar.

And with all this, Americans of average education and means are still not a poor people. We’re not a third-world tragedy waiting to happen. Just the opposite. We have solved the ancient problem of human want. Here in the third year of a great financial collapse, we are still 91% employed. Our grocery stores still bulge with foodstuffs and consumables. The vast majority of our countrymen still have jobs, homes, cars, lives—much more stable and secure lives than during the Great Depression. Yes, there are also hunger, homelessness, and growing uncertainty. But amid the so-called collapse, we still have time to celebrate frivolity.

Look around you at the people going about their pleasures. This is something new in human history. This is the utopia of ease and comfort, of spirit and imagination, about which the writers and philosophers of a hundred years ago could only dream.

1. For those who are not aficionados of science fiction, steam punk is an extension of cyber punk that imagines the electron had never been tamed but the digital age happened anyway—and during the Victorian era. Charles Babbage’s difference engine meets the Jacquard punch card, and everything is driven by billowing clouds of steam. Jules Verne and Nemo’s Nautilus—especially in the Harper Goff design: all spiny and spiky with huge iron rivets and fierce, glowing eyes—are the epitome of steam punk.

2. Well, I came as a gawking rube, but that’s my role in all this.

3. Where the costuming runs to tuxedos, flapper dresses, straw hats, and garters.

4. See Automation, Work, and Personal Meaning from February 27, 2011.

Separating Ego from Work

2011-09-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently had a couple of online encounters where artists were personal and passionate about their work. One was an established author disgruntled because readers would come up to him and say they didn’t like this or that about one of his books. The other was a young interior designer upset because clients and contractors were letting considerations of time and money interfere with her artistic vision. In both cases, my reaction was that way too much ego is going into the work here.

Artists are, of course, notoriously self-involved. We are passionate about what we do. We invest time and energy—often more than will be rewarded to any reasonable extent—into making a single chapter or character, a color combination or a design element, work just right. We are constantly dealing, on both the grossest and subtlest levels, with issues of value, judgment, and perception that are always open to question and reconsideration. In the end, our only recourse is to claim, “This is my book, my vision, damn it, and I get to do things my way!”

If it was our own garden, planted and watered with our own hands, enclosed within a high wall, and maintained for our own personal enjoyment, plus perhaps that of a few invited guests, then this might be so. But it’s not.

The interior designer is putting together a room she will not live in, because it remains the client’s room in the client’s house. Ten minutes after the painters and upholsterers walk out, the client’s children may spill chocolate pudding all over the color combination and so make it peculiarly their own. And if the client values having $300 in her pocket over the glories of a linen-covered soffit, well, that’s the choice of the woman who has to live there.

An author is in an even more precarious position in declaring the book to be “mine.” Any story made up of words is a collaboration between the author who imagined the scenes and characters and structured those words, and the reader who brings an understanding of the words and his or her own imagination to the reading, so that they come alive in his mind. Readers put more effort into the experience of a book than they ever do into watching a movie.

When readers travel the path laid out in a book, they do not think, “Ah, the author has made the character say that.” They ask, “Why does the character act that way?” Readers of David Copperfield don’t ponder the motives and emotions and literary antecedents of Charles Dickens.¹ The readers “suspend their disbelief”² and participate in the story as a “found object.”³ They like Micawber, despite evidence the man is a fool. They hate Steerforth, despite that young man’s trappings of nobility. Any work of fiction is an emotional investment for readers, and they’re bound to experience things they might wish had happened differently. For a reader later to go up to the author and express these disappointments is really a sign of how deeply invested he or she became in the work.⁴

Artists may feel passionate about their work for many reasons. First, they selected and dedicate themselves to that art form. I became a writer because I loved words and language and was fascinated by the process of painting pictures and making characters and actions come alive out of nothing more than a flow of words. I may appreciate music or painting as an outsider looking in, but I’m passionate about how words can be used to create alternative realities.

Second, we’ve taken pains to learn the norms and values of our craft. No one can really teach you how to write. No one can give you the vision and taste to imagine how a room might be remade. Teachers can only show you different methods and let you select for yourself what works. They can also critique your methods as a person viewing them from the outside and suggest what may or may not be working in any particular case. But in the end, the artist puts together a unique toolbox of techniques and the experience of using them.

Third, as suggested above, we’ve struggled with this individual creation, this book, this visual treatment of a difficult room. We’re applying what we’ve learned about those values and norms to a particular set of ideas. To some extent, any artist is applying certain known formulas and tricks, like a carpenter tacking up bits of scrollwork or a child doing paint by numbers. The world of choices in any situation is sometimes limited. But to a larger extent—especially if the story or the design is to “come alive”—the artist is watching this particular work evolve. The structure, the choices, often come from the dark gray place behind our eyes, perhaps even behind the back of our heads, which is the subconscious. We don’t always judiciously choose what happens next; it simply occurs to us, it comes to us in a flash, and it feels innately right.

An author is both the calculating architect of a story, placing this piece of action to extend the story line and crafting that speech to cover needed facts, and also the unknowing conduit through which the story coalesces out of the atmosphere of our internal awareness, realizing suddenly that this character must intrude at this point and change the story’s direction. Similarly, a designer may space the sconces along a wall according to a mathematical formula, but know only through some inexplicable insight that the sconces must be a certain shade of blue glass and cylindrically, not teardrop, shaped.

With this level of involvement in the work, it’s difficult to remove our egos and admit that the reader’s experience counts, that the customer will actually live in the room. But if the artist can’t do that, he or she is likely to create a work so intensely private, personal, and … strange … that no one else can penetrate it. And without that penetration, without the participation of the reader or viewer or listener, art has not been achieved.

Think of the poor tattoo artist. Yes, he was born to draw tigers—fierce tigers, with blazing stripes and devouring fangs and eyes that smolder green amidst the orange fur. But this customer wants a rose, a delicate rose, an ephemeral red rose, with a drop of dew. This customer will wear that rose—stare at it, dream of it, treasure it—for the rest of her life. The tattoo artist must not give her one that looks, even a little bit, like a tiger.

Any piece of art—a well-written book, a well-designed living space, a well-painted portrait—is really a gift to the person—the reader, the viewer, the customer—who will live with it. An artist does not want to compromise on craftsmanship, on the elements without which, or when done wrongly, he or she knows the book would be unreadable or the room awkward and unlivable. But the artist must ultimately stand aside from the object and let it simply work for those who receive it.

1. Or, at least, readers for pleasure don’t ponder these abstractions. Literary critics and English majors may so ponder, but they—like other authors reading Dickens—are looking for insights into the experience and craft of writing. Pleasure readers just want to experience the story.

2. To paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

3. To paraphrase the New Criticism—which by now has been so overwhelmed by deconstructionist theory that it feels like medieval scholasticism.

4. Of course, if the reader experiences a piece of faulty craftsmanship—a character whose actions do not ring true, a plot turn that damages the reader’s innate sense of plausibility—then the author needs to listen to the criticism.

Future of Publishing 4 - eBook Publishing: The Author’s Toolkit

2011-09-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve described my views on how ebooks are changing the world of traditional, Gutenberg-style publishing,¹ what does it take to become a self-published author in the new digital ebook market? We’re going to take as a given that you’ve already written a book, fiction or non-fiction, and you have some idea of the kinds of readers it will attract and what they will expect.²

The first challenge is to obtain some basic editing, and that starts with unbiased feedback. This can be as simple as joining a writers’ group³ or maintaining an “I’ll read your book if you’ll read mine” relationship with a fellow writer whose skills and taste you trust. Don’t depend on sending your book to family and non-professional friends.⁴ They’ll try to be nice, and what you want is a critical reading by a professional who tells you where he or she stumbled, got the wrong idea, got lost, or got mad at the author—and ideally they can help you fix the problem. Criticism is good. The critical reader, like a skilled editor, is your “eyes behind,” watching your back as you navigate the story.

In addition to critical feedback, it can be immensely helpful to learn to edit your own work. This takes iron will and concentration. First, you have to let the story get cold—become a “good forgetter” after the heat of writing—and then approach it dispassionately. You must look only at the words on the page and what they will mean to a neutral reader coming upon them for the first time, rather than the visions that ran through your head as you were writing those words. The self-editing process involves a bit of benign schizophrenia, because you have to keep asking yourself: “How would I (the reader) know this if I (the author) haven’t explained it yet?”

After the book is structured and you think you’re finished, you probably still need professional help with the editing in terms of spelling, grammar, punctuation, paragraphing, and all the technical details of manuscript preparation. If you’re already a trained copy editor, then get the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and begin dispassionately whacking commas and adjusting capitalization and spelling choices. Otherwise, be prepared to pay someone else for this service.

Paying a Professional Editor

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the digital publishing revolution is still in its infancy. Most of the freelance editors at work today either hire out to traditional publishers or market themselves to hopeful writers who can’t find an agent or publisher. The usual pitch in the latter case is that a publishing house will only consider a fully edited manuscript. This is simply not true. While obvious sloppiness is a turnoff, acquisition editors really aren’t looking for perfect grammar and punctuation and won’t expect the author to be following the publishing house’s own peculiarities of style. Acquisition editors expect to commission the final editing process once they’ve contracted for the book. The publisher’s first consideration is market potential, and a freelance editor can’t build that in or guarantee a publisher will find it.

But in the digital self-publishing market, readers will expect your book to be as carefully crafted as one from a big publisher. So editing is important. I think of the editing job in two ways: copy editing and structural editing.

Copy editors work with things that are obviously wrong in terms of standard English: punctuation, typos, capitalization, word usage, awkward sentences, consistency and continuity (“This shirt was a sweater on page 98”) and other obvious errors. A copy editor might also offer observations about areas of confusion—such as to who’s speaking which lines of dialog—but will change it only if the fix is obvious (add “Jane said” here and “Clyde said” there). But if the book is going off the track, like not showing how or why they got to Rome after dining in Paris, or whole passages of dialog are banal and obvious and don't move the reader forward, or the ending is really no good—then you need something stronger.

A structural editor looks at the book as an artistic whole. This is what a traditional publisher’s acquisitions editor does, generally working with an author whose book the house has already decided has a potential market and should be published. The structural editor guides the author through a rewrite, rather than taking the manuscript in hand and fixing things automatically, like a copy editor. “You tell us Jane’s a kleptomaniac and has no control over her urges, but it would be helpful if you actually showed her in the act and examined her feelings through internal dialog.” Or, “We already know Jane’s a kleptomaniac, so the fourth trip to the store starting on page 57 is really unnecessary.” “I find the character of Benjamin inconsistent: he says nasty things at the party, but we don’t know why. Then everyone says what a good guy he is. We need some insight here.” “Your ending would be stronger if, instead of Carmen just walking away when Camille kills the dog, Carmen took some action that the reader can identify with.” The structural editor will suggest improvements in line with your original or perceived intentions, but won’t rewrite the book for you.⁵

Right now, it’s hard for self-publishing authors to describe and then find the kind of editing help they’re looking for. I believe, however, that as the digital revolution takes off, more and more good editors and sensitive agents—perhaps unable to find work in traditional publishing—will offer their skills on line and through talent brokers. If there’s a marketplace of authors seeking specific kinds of help, there will arise a mechanism to provide it. And once again, word of mouth from satisfied customers will be the best marketing.

Other Things You Need for Publishing Yourself

Usually your book will require some kind of special coding before you upload it on the digital distributor’s system. Some distributors will take and convert a Microsoft Word file, but Word creates so much hidden coding and formatting that results can be unpredictable. A manuscript in portable document format (PDF) is a bit more stable, but the coding may still confuse the upload. I’ve found that the only format that works consistently across the three platforms I sell on (Kindle, Nook, iBooks) is the epub standard.

ePubs are based on the same HTML coding that goes into creating your author’s website. The chapters are essentially HTML or XHTML files coordinated by specially structured files that define the contents of the book and their order of presentation. You can create all this by working from models and using a basic text editor. A good source for learning about the standard and obtaining the model files is JediSaber’s ebooks tutorial.

There are professional services that will code your manuscript as an ebook, and software like Calibre ebook management will automatically code an epub from most word processing formats. However, being a bit technical and picky about the details, I prefer to work on coding the manuscript myself.

As a publisher, you will need to obtain an international standard book number (ISBN) for the digital version.⁶ Not all distributors require an ISBN, but enough do that it’s worth the investment. In the U.S., ISBNs are provided by Bowker, the provider of bibliographic information who used to publish the annual Books in Print catalog. Other services can obtain an ISBN for you, but the source is still Bowker. You’ll pay about $100 for each book number, depending on the level of collateral services and support you need.

It also pays to copyright your work. In the U.S., you do this through the Library of Congress and its Copyright Office. You can apply on line ($35) or with a paper application ($50). The process is easy, and the government website will answer all your questions, especially as to what can and cannot be copyrighted. One thing to note is that there are no “copyright police.” Obtaining copyright simply establishes your ownership of the work beyond the simple act of creation, which is covered by common-law copyright. But you have to defend that right if someone copies or infringes on your work.⁷ This involves legal action and can be expensive. Pick your battles.

The digital platforms all want you to upload cover art as a way to differentiate and promote your book. If you don’t know any artists who will read your book, paint an inspired picture from some detail, and sell it to you at a reasonable price, there’s still a good way to get art. I favor Getty Images® as a source of relatively inexpensive photos and artwork. You can buy exclusive rights to the image for a lot of money (generally known as “rights managed”) or you can buy the right to reproduce the work (“royalty free”) under certain conditions. With a strong, thematic image in hand, you can then design a simple cover—book title, subtitle, your name—in Photoshop and save the file in the format(s) the distributor is looking for. Be sure to pay for any art you use and apply the appropriate copyright notice when displaying it, usually on the copyright page of your book.

Promoting Your Work

Once you have a book available on the digital platforms of your choice, you’re back to every author’s first chore: getting known outside your ZIP code. There are many ways to do this—all still in development, as the digital revolution devours traditional publishing.

First, you will want to develop and maintain an author’s website. The site is an exercise in shameless promotion: all about you, what you’ve done, why you’re an interesting person, skilled writer, and expert in the field into which you’re trying to sell your work.⁸ You can have a site professionally created and maintained, but updating it by working through others can become frustrating and expensive. The alternative is to get some good web editing software, buy a domain name, contract for webhosting services, and learn enough HTML coding, picture management, and other skills to work the site yourself. (And yes, there’s a Dummies book for learning all this.)

When you produce and distribute a new book, be sure to create a special page on your site that features the book itself. Then, when you announce the book in various media, you want to link directly to this page, so that interested readers don’t have to search for it among all the other nice things available on your site.

Many authors keep a blog, so that they can generate continuing interest in their views, their area of special interest, their careers, and also their new works. The blog can be on the author’s site or hosted by a service like Google’s BlogSpot.

Many authors use social media sites like Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter to introduce themselves, discuss their work, and announce new projects and book titles. This is a delicate business, because the first purpose of these sites is social, not business. It pays to be an active participant, “liking” friends’ posts that reflect your taste and core values, and commenting intelligently on them so that potential readers will understand what a wonderful and thoughtful person you are. Once you’ve established yourself as a person, you can sparingly introduce and discuss your books and link to your website and special book pages. But if you’re too heavy-handed and commercial, people will avoid and even “defriend” you.

There are also paid advertising opportunities, like Google’s AdWords and Facebook Ads, that can target readers who might be interested in your book. In my mind, the jury is still out on how effective this will be for a new author with not much name recognition. If you keep a large mailing list of postal friends and acquaintances, you can also commission and print postcards about the new book and send them to your list.

Marketing is going to be key to getting your book known and start generating word of mouth, which is the best advertising. But this is not a new problem for authors: It’s been a long time since traditional publishers paid for expensive promotions and book tours for all but their bestselling authors. And, in the case of self-published ebooks, time is on your side. The ebook will stay in print, available to your growing circle of fans, virtually forever.⁹ You’re not running ahead of some publisher’s deadline for when the inventory of paper must be pulped and copies remaindered at the bookstore.

Time to build your name and following means everything to a new or returning midlist author.

1. See eBook Publishing in Various Art Forms.

2. Yes, even as a self-published author you need to consider the market in order to know how to promote your book. If you didn’t want people to read it, why go to all this trouble in the first place?

3. You have to be wary of writers’ groups, however. Writing is personal, and you will meet many people with firm opinions about structure and technique who will try to impose standards that may be wrong for your own style, voice, and content. You will also meet a lot of frustrated people whose only joy left in life is verbal assault and battery in the guise of being helpful.

4. Your mother loved your first book, didn’t she, even though it was written in crayon? She will love everything you do. This is not helpful.

5. The acquisition editor’s call for rewrites is one reason—along with the outmoded practice of buying an outline and sample chapters before the book is complete—why publisher’s book contracts usually divide the advance between “on signing” and “on delivery of an acceptable manuscript,” sometimes with a third split to “on publication.”

6. The book itself carries the ISBN, which is used across all distribution platforms. If the book previously or subsequently appears in paper or aural format, those versions will need separate ISBNs.

7. The current ereader services I’ve dealt with will usually enable a “rights managed” function to protect your book against unauthorized transfer and copying. And most platforms make it difficult for you to access the reading device’s memory, extract the book content, and send it to your 3,000 best friends in an email. (Although, with some, you can “loan” the book to another reader through a security function.) Frankly, in terms of stealing ebooks wholesale, I worry more about Google’s apparent efforts to digitize every book ever written and make them available through its own search services.

8. Needless to say—but I’ll say it anyway—you want to create an attractive persona for a wide audience. That means avoiding discussion of your radical political opinions—unless they are central to your work and readership—as well as your nasty personal habits, gossip about and disparagement of your family and friends, and any detail of your life you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. Websites are terribly public places and attract all kinds of notice: to your benefit but also to your harm.

9. Or as long as that particular distribution platform remains popular and relevant.

Where Were You When …?

2011-09-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

What is it about an event that makes us fix the place, the time, the things we thought, even the images of whatever we happened to be looking at—everything about a moment—so firmly in the mind that we remember it a lifetime later? Is it simply strong emotion, the reaction to triumph or tragedy? Or the numbness of shock? Or the flash of intuition that our world has changed?

In October 1957, I was at recess in grade school when someone—it must have been one of the children outside with me—said the Russians had launched a satellite. I remember looking through the windows into my classroom, then being inside looking out at the grass when the teacher confirmed the story. That night my brother and I listened to the radio in our bedroom after lights out. Usually he tuned in X Minus One, the science fiction radio plays, but now we were listening to a rebroadcast of Sputnik 1’s tiny, cold voice: “Beep … beep … beep …” as it went around our world.

In May 1961, I was sitting in English class when the school office put on the public address system the nationwide broadcast of Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 launch and down-range flight. I knew by then that the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had already orbited the Earth, but I don’t remember how or when I learned about that. It was Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital flight that stuck in my mind. I remember looking at the clock in the room as they counted off the last seconds before liftoff.

In November 1963, I was sitting in study hall in a different high school, doing my homework, when the PA system came on to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. That was all they knew at the time: shot but condition not announced, although of course he was killed instantly. I still remember the pattern of black-and-white ceramic tiles in the floor of that room.

In March 1989, I was getting ready for bed, and we had the television on for the ten o’clock news. The lead story showed what looked like a steel bar in a beaker of boiling water, and the announcers were talking excitedly about cold fusion. A nuclear reaction was happening right there in the beaker, with people standing around and the video camera recording it all, amid the neutron flux. I remember being struck by the wonder of the thing: a complete reversal of my current understanding of nuclear physics. At the time I was working at a public utility with a major investment in a nuclear power plant, and I remember thinking, “This changes everything about the energy business.” But, of course, not all world-shaking events are real.

In September 2001, I was climbing into the vanpool that would take me to work at the biotech firm when the driver told me, “They just flew an airplane into the World Trade Center.” At first I thought it was a terrible accident, like the airplane that crashed into the Empire State Building in the fog in 1945. Then, as we listened to the van’s radio, it became apparent that this was a planned attack using our own jetliners loaded with passengers. I remember thinking, “This is an act of war. Now we are at war.”

I’ll carry these memories, like shiny new dimes among the dull gray metal of my usual pocket change, for the rest of my life.

Ten years after that morning in 2001, I still don’t know if my initial reaction—“Now we are at war”—was prophetic or just a fatuous overstatement, like my “This changes everything” response to cold fusion.

Certainly, in the time since then, we’ve declared two wars on Islamic states, Afghanistan and Iraq, for varying reasons. We won both of those wars easily, in terms of routing their armies and toppling the sitting governments. But in neither case has the follow-through—the cleanup, the peacekeeping, the bringing-about-something-better—been completed successfully.¹ And now the Afghan war seems to be spilling over into Pakistan in a reverse-domino effect.

It has taken us ten years of dogged intelligence work to penetrate and eviscerate the clique of rich, sophisticated, disgruntled terrorists who planned and pulled off the September 11 attacks. It took ten years to track down and kill the mastermind behind it—a man whose virtual absence from the world stage, despite his many opportunities for international bragging and nose-thumbing, had by then firmly convinced me that he was already dead.

We still have unfinished business with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our enmity began with the embassy hostage-taking following the revolution in 1979. The struggle continues as the Iranians support terrorism in the Middle East and prepare to acquire for themselves a nuclear weapon. We can only hope that possessing such a weapon leads to a moment of clarity that will keep them from ever using it. For every bomb they make, the Western world still has a thousand. That kind of imbalance just has to sit uneasily in even the most fevered mind.

From one point of view, these are the further steps in a world war that’s been going on, with varying degrees of intensity, since 732 AD. In that year the Franks beat back an adventurous, expanding Moslem army at Tours. Islam’s invasion of Europe was followed by Europe’s invasion of the Holy Land during the Crusades, and it’s been forward and back ever since. In the latest move, Islamic immigrants are flooding into and starting to change the culture of Europe, while oil-rich sheikhs and the Saudi Royal Family promote schools of fundamentalist religion and activist cliques like al Qaeda.

From one point of view, a resurgent and revitalized Islam is making its final grasp for world domination, the universal caliphate, and the West is too trapped in its own colonial guilt and multicultural distractions to notice. But from another point of view, a weak and fractured Middle East—riven by violence between Sunni and Shia, mortified by the rise of a Jewish state in their midst, impoverished by generations of corruption and neglect amid all that oil wealth—struggles for identity while the aggregators of that wealth play the Israeli card, the Great Satan card, the Caliphate card. The powerful few who have risen to the top dream of glory while supporting futile attempts to break the West’s true strength. They may hope that a return to medieval religious purity will win the world, but the West has already shown that liberal measures of education, personal and creative freedom, scientific inquiry, and open exchange of ideas as well as goods and services have unleashed such a power that it can never be extinguished.

If we are at war, then it’s a ding-dong battle² between old men in dark robes quoting scripture and young men and women in white lab coats unlocking the secrets of the universe. If we’re at war, it’s an unequal contest between professional soldiers armed with the most advanced technology and children soaked in dreams of paradise. If we’re at war … then the nicest, kindest, most charitable thing we in the West can do is try not to hurt them too badly as they lurch furiously after their fantasies.

Islam is not the problem. Belief systems may provide a pretext for violence but they are seldom the root cause.³ The real problem in the Middle East is public anger and frustration at being left behind by a larger world the people no longer understand. And now small groups of potential tyrants are using that anger to engineer a shortcut to power through chaos. But eventually wiser heads will prevail and begin to figure out a workable path to the future. And then we in the West must be gracious in offering them a helping hand in developing modern, enlightened states that provide real fulfillment and opportunity for their citizens.

1. See When a War Is Not a War from April 10, 2011.

2. To steal a phrase from Frank Herbert’s Dune.

3. Consider that every successful religion is a means of processing a wide range of human experiences. Religion must offer its adherents a method for achieving salvation amid the difficulties of existence, a route to peace and stability. War against unbelievers—which has been a facet of almost every religion (except Buddhism) at some stage in its development—is always a short-term measure among young, expanding belief systems. But what happens after you destroy or convert your neighbors? In the larger world, every mature religion eventually reaches a point of stability with competing and incontrovertible belief systems.

Future of Publishing 3 - eBook Publishing: No Inventory, No Logistics, No Middlemen

2011-09-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

As I described last week,¹ traditional book publishing based on Gutenberg economics has had a bad effect on authors. It has expanded the number of middlemen they and their work must meet and satisfy: agents, acquisitions editors, booksellers’ buying agents, and sometimes even movie producers.² It has turned the act of writing a book and reaching readers into a high-stakes literary lottery, with blazing success as the only viable option—but only if you are willing to let outsiders and their first-impression opinions direct your creative process. In this environment, new fiction authors and returning authors with less than stellar sales face immense hurdles in getting their book before readers. Agents languish with stables of once-profitable authors who can’t make a sale, and so they won’t consider and take on new clients.

Gutenberg economics have also had a generally bad effect on readers. Popular culture now passes through the filtering lens of more and more middlemen to reach fewer and fewer actual decision makers in big conglomerates. They all look for obvious successes and promote them feverishly at the expense of riskier projects. The result is a lower volume of new titles with far less originality, as every hopeful author strives to copy a known successful formula that will run this gauntlet.

All of this is driven by the physical fact of the book: a wad of paper with ink marks on it. Such an object can only be economically produced in large volumes through the one-time act of running a press. Then those wads of paper must be warehoused, accounted for, shipped to the bookseller, sold or not—and if not, then shipped back to the warehouse and accounted for again—with inventory costs and tax effects looming over the whole process.

Enter the Digital Book

Digital publishing—made possible in various formats by the recent successes of Amazon’s Kindle ereader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Apple iPad’s iBooks app, and other digital readers and print-on-demand strategies—now changes all that. As an author, you still have to write the book as an up-front investment, and it helps to invest in having someone edit and prepare it professionally. But after you have coded your epub or MOBI or RTF version, prepared an eye-catching cover, and obtained an international standard book number (ISBN) and copyright protection, the rest is automatic and electronic.

You, as the self-publishing author, go on line with Amazon, B&N, Apple, and other distributors, sign a non-exclusive contract, and upload the book’s content, cover image, description, and other details. You establish your rights (worldwide or specific to markets like the U.S., UK, or Germany) and set a purchase price. Most of these services offer royalties ranging from 35% to 70% of the book’s retail price.³

There is no press run to pile up copies, no physical inventory to warehouse or tax. There is virtually no distribution cost other than the space allotted on the booksellers’ computer server (usually less bytes than a high-resolution photo would occupy) and adding a couple of lines to their sales and accounting database. Then the electrons go out as readers order the book, and the money comes back in the form credit card and PayPal transfers.⁴

Traditional paper-based publishers have been wrangling with authors and agents over digital rights to their books for ten to fifteen years now. Publishers have long known that, once some kind of digital tablet established an ebook market, readers would choose the digital book over paper in large and growing numbers. But the power of the traditional publisher was based on Gutenberg economics and the investment in making physical books on a printing press. Over the years, the book publisher has accrued other powers: acting as a filter of potential authors and guaranteeing quality and taste to the reader; promoting books in the marketplace; and providing advance payments that support the author during the production period between manuscript completion and the book’s arrival in the marketplace.

Without the investment in a press run, what does an author—or the reader, for that matter—need with a publisher? The guarantee of quality and taste is really a guarantee that the book project will have enough mass market appeal to attract big sales and support a big press run. On that basis, lot of tripe gets published in pursuit of the reader’s bucks. The promise of promoting books has, as noted in my previous blogs on this topic, gone mostly into marketing to buyers at the big chain bookstores. Reaching individual readers is usually left to the author, through arranging his or her own readings, signings, convention appearances, and postcards to fans and friends. The offer of an advance, while nice, is hardly necessary when the production period between finishing the manuscript and having it appear is the time to upload on the distributor’s server.

You as the author/publisher still have to get your name in front of the readers, but the power of the internet helps you there, too. It costs very little in terms of money to set up an author’s website; the real investment is in terms of the time you spend to keep it fresh and interesting so that it will attract new readers and reward those who return. It takes the same or more time, but no extra money at all, to blog as a way to show potential readers how interesting and talented you are. The new social media like Facebook, Linked In, and others provide ways for you to keep in touch with friends and colleagues—and by extension their multiples of friends and colleagues—about your book projects.

You can also take out ads and send copies of your book to online review services. The marketplace for advertising, like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, is still in its infancy and sure to develop in response to authors who self-publish. Most of the online booksellers now offer a reader review feature that lets potential buyers see what others thought of a book. Online services to market the book (for the author) and review the field of current books (for the readers) will spring up to guide the public’s attention. These independent, internet-enabled services are already functioning in nascent form.⁵

As to revenues, new authors wonder how they can make money by charging a low price—averaging just $2.99—for a new ebook. But if the ebook distributor pays 70% of that declared price directly to the author, the book nets about $2. If a traditional publisher gives you the usual 10% royalty (and I’ve gotten a lot less), you don’t make that much money on a $15 trade paperback. I think for the mass of authors the ebook market will be very good—provided they can step up and market themselves.

“But I Like the Feel of Paper”

Right now, the market for books—and especially novels—is in furious transition. Readers who claim they like books are discovering what they really like is stories. Yes, the beloved physical book is a familiar object, but it’s also heavy, troublesome when you want to take four or five of them on vacation, awkward when you’re finished and want to store it on your already bulging bookshelves, and increasingly expensive. The average novel in hardcover lists for $20 to $35—so expensive that bookstores now routinely discount them deeply. In paperback, the price is $10 to $20, and also discounted.

By comparison, the digital version that goes out on the distributor’s ebook platform (Kindle, Nook, etc.) is usually half to a third of the paperback price. It is immediately downloadable (no trip to the store or UPS delivery from Amazon), virtually indestructible (break or lose the tablet, and you still own the book on the distributor’s server), easy to carry (those memory chips can store a whole library), electronically searchable and navigable (“Where have I seen this character before?” Search back through the text), and adjustable (scale the type size for aging eyes). The book automatically keeps your place, right up to the last page read, and with the right apps can duplicate this service across a variety of platforms (e.g., with a Kindle or Nook app on your iPhone and iPad). This convenience, along with the knowledge that your purchase involved cutting no trees to make paper and burning no diesel to ship books, is a clear win for digital editions.

Readers also get a much wider selection of authors, styles, and views of the world—more potential books that they will find are written exactly to their taste—and the personal pleasure of discovering a midlist or little-known author who can reliably create the magic for them. What Gutenberg did to quills and parchment,⁶ ebooks are doing to presses and paper: changing the manufacturing process and expanding the world of reading a thousand-fold. The power of the publishing conglomerates to dictate literary winners and losers is broken.

Will the printed book entirely disappear? Of course not. Some people will always love a book so much that they want cherish a copy on good paper bound in cloth or leather. Others will want to send favored books as gifts. But for general reading, to satisfy the hunger for one more story, paper books will go the way of newsprint as an archaic medium. We’ll get our daily fix of science fiction, romance, mystery, and so on by electronic presentation.

As the market turns to digital books, the current crop of heavy-hitters will still thrive on name recognition. Dan Brown and other bestselling authors will still lead sales. But the gates will open for other authors who can tell an interesting story and satisfy the reader’s urges but have been kept out of the market because their work did not have bestseller potential. The market will recognize many new “goodselling” authors as well as quirky, niche authors who may attract only a thousand readers worldwide, but those will be the most loyal buyers of all. These new authors will also have time to make their names known and reach their intended readers, because the ax of being remaindered need never fall on a digital book.

The gates will open, also, on a flood of truly incompetent authors who can’t tell a story and don’t even know that they can’t. But that’s where word of mouth—the only marketing mechanism that most readers really trust—will establish quality and originality, or their lack. But quality in the marketplace is always in the eye of the beholder and buyer.

1. See Through the Eye of the Needle in Various Art Forms.

2. Especially in the context of media tie-ins like the Star Wars or Star Trek books in science fiction, where a studio owns the creative rights. It can be creepy to have movie producers—who traditionally disdain to read lengthy, detailed pitches and treatments—call for changes and even third-party rewrites in a novel-length book.

3. This compares favorably with the 6% or so royalty in traditional paperback publishing and 10% in hardcover. And, if you are represented by an agent, he or she takes 15% off the top of that royalty.

4. There is no real need for issuing a new edition, either, except for clarity or to reboot sales. If the author discovers an error or typo in the current text, fix it and upload again; future buyers—or those who archive the book away from their readers—will get the corrected text. Similarly, while the author can withdraw a title from sale, it remains available to past purchasers because they have bought the right to read the text in perpetuity.

5. For example, see the goodreads book recommendation service.

6. You can still get nice calligraphy done: diplomas and certificates and cute mottos to hang on your wall. You just don’t try to read the latest thriller in parchment.

Future of Publishing 2 - Traditional Publishing: Through the Eye of the Needle

2011-08-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

As I wrote last week,¹ Gutenberg economics—the costs of putting a book on the press and printing up a bunch of copies—drives the publisher to want to make more copies, in order to keep the per-copy cost low. But the economics of running a bookstore mean it cannot afford to actually stock these all these different books at wholesale without the ability to return unsold books to the publisher. That essentially puts the risks of creating a big inventory of books right back on the publisher.

The 1979 Thor Power Tool ruling² made holding that inventory much more expensive. As a result, the accounting departments at big publishers eventually sent discouraging words down to their acquisitions departments. The first directive was, try to publish only bestsellers. This quickly drove up the advances of, and started the bidding wars for, authors with a bestselling history.

Picking a Bestseller

Book editors might know about the current market: They can see trends from their own sales figures, from Publishers Weekly, and from what they hear over lunch. They know the kinds of books people are reading and buying right now. What is much harder to see is that kind of potential in any single new book. This doesn’t mean book editors are stupid or can’t see literary quality. Any new book that takes off and soars in the lists must satisfy a complex mix of factors.

First, it must have inherent quality, because readers are intelligent, sensitive, and averse to inept storytelling and dull writing. Second, a bestseller needs originality, because readers are naturally looking for something new and fresh and won’t brag to their friends about a book that’s just same-old, same-old. Third, a besteller must also have familiarity, because readers have basic expectations that must be met. Any book that’s too exotic or strange has a hard time surviving the lag between a reader’s initial intrigue and his or her long-term enthusiasm. It’s also hard to recommend a book to a friend if you can’t quite describe it. And fourth, the bestseller must have a huge factor of luck, because word-of-mouth is most easily generated for books that resonate with some larger event or trend in the outside world.

It’s easy to write a good book. It’s harder to be original. It’s damned hard to be original in a mature genre or field where everybody thinks everything’s already been said. And it’s impossible to predict events and trends a year into the future—which is when this manuscript in the editor’s hands will actually arrive on bookstore shelves, after contract negotiations with the author, rewrites,³ production and printing, and pre-sales marketing to and negotiation with the stores’ purchasing agents.

In all this uncertainty, the wise course is to go with a known quantity, an author with proven—and huge—sales, even if you have to steal him or her from another house. But unfortunately, although bestselling authors may have large followings, few authors have consistently good books. Every author has at least one great idea and great book in his or her heart, three to five pretty good books, and a trailing stream of potboilers and occasional stinkers. It’s a much smaller group of readers who will find something consistently satisfying in the author’s every work,⁴ although these readers will be the most loyal.

Think back over the great bestsellers of the past, and you’ll find they are really unpredictable. Stephen King began writing horror novels in a market where everyone knew that American horror—the stuff of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft—was long dead. It took guts for an editor to buck that trend and publish King’s first novel. Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October, which was a new and essentially technical view of warfare, saw many rejections before it was finally picked up by the Naval Institute Press, not a mainstream fiction publisher. J. K. Rowling saw phenomenal rejection with her Harry Potter series, which turned the worlds of magic and the mundane on their heads, before acceptance at Scholastic, again not a major fiction publisher. It’s a truism that every “overnight success” is about ten years in the making.

In any event, it has been many years since a new author could hope to make a pitch directly to a book editor. Sending a manuscript to a publisher is called “going over the transom” and lands the book in the publisher’s “slush pile”—the cabinet full of unsolicited manuscripts that a book editor with a spare afternoon might look through and occasionally try to read.⁵ Books languish for months on that pile until someone gets busy, writes the necessary “not for us” letters, and sends the misdirected and misbegotten things back to their authors.

To get to a publisher, you have to first get an agent. Book editors use agents and their tastes and instincts as a first-line buffer against the flood of new manuscripts that would descend on them daily. The agent has become the first filter in the process of finding a publishable manuscript. The reward for this work—which often includes consultation with authors who have both potential and the willingness to reshape their work—is the agent’s right to represent the author and take a cut of his or her royalties. Still, the agent is looking for the same things the editor does: market potential of the current work, and the author’s potential for writing more than one good book. For the author, of course, pitching to an agent, who then must pitch to the publisher, only adds to the number of conflicting tastes and opinions that the work in hand must satisfy. And it piles on the middlemen.

More Bad News from the Accounting Department

Other directives came down from accounting to the desks of the acquisitions editors. All of them turned the publishing business into a needle’s eye through which an author and the book in hand had to thread.

The second directive was, shed the midlist authors, whose books are now more expensive to hold year-over-year. The outcome of this was that established authors with solid followings, although perhaps not stellar sales, now found it harder to get published. Multi-book contract deals also became harder to get, because each book’s sales were now under a magnifying glass. That makes it harder to plan for trilogies, series, and other ways an author sustains the readers’ interest. Fiction publishers like series and related books, but their tolerance in the face of disappointing sales is hair-trigger.

The third directive was, choose only new authors whose books have bestseller potential. This has driven a sameness in product—think of the number of vampire books now flooding the young adult category—as editors chase last year’s success. The pressure to guarantee a bestseller has also worked against authors with the sort of individual style and quirkiness that readers may eventually come to love.⁶ And at the same time that new authors are pressured to make a big name for themselves, the accountants have ordered book editors to shorten the decision time to remaindering a book, in order to avoid piling up inventory costs. If a book can’t make its sales target by the end of the taxable year, it will quickly disappear.

Consider also that publishers really don’t market books anymore. They will advertise to the booksellers, but to reach the readers themselves, authors are on their own. The watchword is “Marketing of your book will be review driven,” meaning that favorable book reviews will promote you—or not. Authors are expected to schedule their own appearances at conventions and book signings, arrange readings, and print and send their own postcards. Building a reputation this way takes time. You have to let word of mouth do its work. But if the book is going to disappear from the store shelves in three or four weeks, then go to remainder soon after that, there’s no time for word of mouth to spread. And if you don’t get a chance at a second book … well, never mind.

Consider that publishers—and the agents who ride ahead of them—now often recommend that authors write a book so that it will show obvious potential to be made into a movie.⁷ Authors are encouraged to pattern their characters after currently popular stars, adopt a plot structure that easily translates into a three-act movie script, and finish with a happy ending “in which the hero and the villain go mano-a-mano above Reichenbach Falls.”⁸ This increases the homogenization of popular culture and limits an author’s style and creativity—exactly the qualities he or she needs to set his or her work apart. Ironically, selling a movie concept is even harder than selling a book deal, because of the comparatively much greater investment in production costs. So the likelihood of a book becoming a bestseller because it reads like the movie it might one day be made into is … well, circular.

Consider that publishers and agents now urge fiction authors to create their own “franchise” as a way of selling more books. Think of Ian Fleming’s James Bond: The hero always lives to fight another day, in a new book with the same essential plot but different setting and villain. That limits a lot of potential new story lines and the possibilities for character growth and development, which serious readers expect. But, ironically, the publisher will watch the sales of that first novel with a deadly stare. If sales don’t reach expectation, there won’t be a second book. Even a two-book contract can be abrogated.

Publishing is a slow-moving business. The effects of Thor Power Tool didn’t really begin to take hold until the mid to late 1980s. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that publishers began actively cauterizing their midlists and cancelling book contracts that they finally figured out were uneconomic. Authors with 20 and 30 books to their credit and a legion of happy readers were shut out. Suddenly, the only people making agented sales were the big names—think Stephen King and J. K. Rowling—and first-time novelists with bestseller potential, most of whom were about to take a short ride over a waterfall.

1. See Gutenberg Economics in Various Art Forms.

2. See Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s discussion How Thor Power Hammered Publishing.

3. The lead time necessary to produce a book is one of the reasons editors, at least in fiction, won’t consider a manuscript based on sample chapters and an outline anymore. They want to see the full execution before committing to it. For authors, this means the end of writing up the bare bones of an idea, pitching it, and then obtaining at least part of the advance in order to live while writing the book. You now have to put your full effort into a finished book on spec—and then if that doesn’t sell, go write something else. Writing a first—or even a second or third—novel has become the purchase price of a ticket in a huge national lottery.

4. In this context I always think of the heartfelt refrain from Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides: “Oh, mama, do it again!”

5. Early in my career, as a book editor, I read tons of slush. You quickly identify authors who in desperation have sent their books to the wrong house (e.g., novels to an academic publisher) and those who for all the paper in the world can’t get to what they mean to say. They all get polite “not for us” replies. Once in a hundred manuscripts you discover a book that is almost on target and with a little structural work could be really quite good. The editor would like to take the author in hand and offer these suggestions, but then a senior editor wisely asks, “Say they did all that rewriting, would you still publish the book?” “Well, no, it’s not really for our market, but it would be a better book.” “If they do the work, they’ll expect you to publish it. Let them go with a polite ‘not for us’ reply.” Reading slush is like looking for diamonds on the forest floor—not hopeless but heartbreaking.

6. You wouldn’t believe the number of fantasy authors who, after the initial success of the Harry Potter books—a quirky series if there ever was one—were told to write books about boy wizards with glasses. The only thing most publishers know about bestsellers is what was successful last year.

7. I’ve actually had a potential agent suggest this. The cinematization of novels is no doubt driven by the fact that most of the major book publishers are now owned by conglomerates that also own major movie studios. The dream is to co-market the book and the movie and so reduce advertising costs. This arrangement also drives the plethora of media tie-in novels—the Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files etc. books—that, at least in science fiction, has slowly taken over bookstore shelves.

8. The rules for what will make an acceptable movie script are much stricter than for genre fiction. To see how precise the format is, down to the page counts devoted to each act, read Syd Field’s books, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and The Screenwriter’s Workbook.

Future of Publishing 1 - Gutenberg Economics: What Is a Book Worth?

2011-08-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

As an author whose career has included book editing, fiction writing, publication with a New York publisher (Baen Books), and now self-publishing on the new digital platforms (Kindle, Nook, iBooks), I have a lifelong interest in the publishing business and where it’s going. I hope to share some insights over the next four weeks, but first it’s necessary to review the economic realities of traditional, paper-bound publishing. Here is what I see, from several viewpoints.

Gutenberg and the Publisher

Ever since Gutenberg and his printed Bible, publishers have had to deal with inventory. The mechanics of printing are that you spend a great deal of time preparing a template—the page form made of raised type or, in the case of offset printing, a sheet of aluminum with the page imaged in ink-adhering varnish—from which many identical copies are struck. In the case of a book, the total preparation effort includes: the author putting the words in order; the editor checking and adjusting them; the designer developing a layout and commissioning a cover; the typesetter rekeying the text;¹ the proofreader checking his keying accuracy; the printer laying out the pages and making up the page forms or sheets, mounting them on the press, bringing the press up to ink, running some test pages, and initiating the print run of 10,000 or 100,000 copies.

All of this work goes into making one copy of a book. Say the costs of “make-ready,” including the author’s advance, the fraction of the editor’s, proofer’s, and printer’s salaries attributable to the book, paper and ink, and equipment utilization, amount to $50,000. Then the first copy of that book, if the press run were to stop there, would cost $50,000. If the run stopped after two books, they would each be worth $25,000; after the third, $16,666.66 … and at the 100,000th book, $0.50. After the press run has finished, other costs like binding and warehousing accrue to each copy of the book, and those costs depend on whatever economies of scale exist at that stage of production.

Since the editing, typesetting, and press setup costs are about the same for any novel-length fiction book,² the way to save money on the process is to print more books. High press runs lower the cost of the individual books in the publisher’s warehouse. Note that these same Gutenberg economics apply to many other “make from a template” production processes. The high cost of a computer chip, for example, goes into its design and the preparation of the mask for printing the complex circuit on silicon wafers. Once the design is fixed, print as many wafers as you can sell the chips.

One of the issues with Gutenberg economics is that errors and last-minute updates become progressively more costly to fix as production moves forward: easy at the manuscript stage, more expensive once the book is in type, unimaginable after the printing press has run. Even after the press run, the printer will want to use the same type casting or aluminum sheets for a second, third, fourth printing, so changes at that point must wait for a new edition.

The economics of holding a large press run in the warehouse became more complicated in 1979 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The ruling affected how companies account for the cost of goods sold and the cost of goods still in their warehouses when paying their income tax. The economics and accounting practices are complicated,³ but the result is that publishers suddenly found it much more expensive to hold large inventories year over year.

This doesn’t much matter if the book is a bestseller and will sell out 100,000 copies in a year, but many authors never see bestseller status. Over the years, all publishers have acquired a stable of authors in the middle of their catalog—the “midlist”—who might sell a few hundred or a thousand books a month. Other publishers serving specialty markets might have their top selling authors in this category.⁴ At that rate, a press run of 50,000 copies might stay in inventory for three or four years. Midlist authors and those publishing in niche markets need this time to develop a reputation by word of mouth among their readers.

Gutenberg and the Bookseller

When you walk into a bookstore—either the corner bookshop or the Barnes & Noble at the mall—what do you see? Thousands of books! Books for every interest and taste. Books for everyone. Making so many different books available represents a huge investment for any store. Of course, the latest bestseller will fly off the shelves, but many of the books there represent new authors or established authors whose older works move slowly—the midlist, again. These books may languish on the shelves for months, maybe years. How does the bookstore deal with the economic risk of buying and holding all these books?

First, the bookstore buys the book from the publisher at a deep discount. Terms vary, but the store owner—or the buyer for a national chain like Barnes & Noble—will usually only pay about 60% of the book’s cover price. That allows the store to charge the full cover price and receive 40% of it to pay for shipping from the distributor, holding the inventory, advertising, and paying store rent, salaries, and taxes. But still, if the store had to pay that much to stock all those books, running the store would be a risky business.

Second, the bookstore’s purchase of any book has an escape clause. Almost every book publisher and distributor maintains a returns policy. Again, terms vary, but after a specified minimum time on the shelves, the bookstore can return the books to the publisher and get its money back or a credit against future purchases. If the book is a hardcover or large-format trade paperback, the store returns the books themselves, usually with the publisher paying the shipping costs. If it’s a pocket book or mass-market paperback, the store clerk strips off the covers, mails them to the publisher, and pulps the book.⁵

Returned books go back into the publisher’s inventory and may be sold and shipped elsewhere. Stripped books are lost to the system and removed from inventory accounting. In either case, the publisher never knows what exact proportion of books in a press run are actually sold, or stay sold, until the returns come back from the booksellers.

If the publisher decides to let the book go out of print—essentially abandoning it—he tells the store manager not to ship back returns. The unsold books are now the store’s liability, called “remainders.” Those are the books on the store’s “bargain table,” where you can pick up a full-color history of transatlantic liners that once cost $90 for just $5 or $10. Some outlets also buy up remainders to move them at ultra-low prices. Remainders that hang around too long move out to the table on the sidewalk as “Last Chance - $1!” The store doesn’t want to hold them in inventory any more than the publisher and will price them to disappear.⁶ These books are one step away from the shredder.

The main point is that any book in the store really has only limited commercial value—to the store—until you pick it up, go to the register, and pay for it.⁷ Shelf space is valuable, and bookstores pay tax on their inventory, too. With more books coming out all the time, and with publishers willing to take unsold books back into inventory or see them pulped and still provide a credit against future purchases, the store has every incentive to push the fast movers and send back the slow ones. The pace of turnover on store shelves helps the bestselling author but can be hard on the midlist author of modest sales and brutal on new authors trying to make a name for themselves.

The bookseller returns policy is one of the reasons major publishers have acquired such powerful control of the book business. With large size, they can offer store credits and discounts that smaller publishers struggle to match. They also can average out the profits from fast-selling books and losses of slow-selling and largely returned books. The last thirty years have seen many small houses acquired by large ones, and large houses acquired by conglomerates with other media interests. The economics of paper publishing have also been driving independent booksellers out in favor of national chains that can negotiate volume deals with major publishers.

Gutenberg and the Author

The cost of printing—of turning the manuscript in an author’s hands into a bound book that large numbers of people can access and read—has always been a barrier to publication. Someone must make that investment, and whoever owns or controls the press chooses the content. Publishers have always been selective about which projects they will take on. The number of hopeful writers has always been far higher than the number of published authors.

The number of hopefuls has gotten much higher in the last thirty years with the advent of the personal computer. Before computerized word processing, an author used a pencil, or a single sheet in the typewriter, to draft the chapters. After reworking through several drafts, with lots of crossouts and cut-and-paste, he or she would then type a fair copy with two sheets and carbon paper between. Changes and additions at that late stage mean a lot of retyping.⁸ I wrote two novels this way even before I began writing seriously for publication. Today, writing is a lot easier: open the file, drag the cursor, start keying. Nothing actually forces the author to go back and deal with the individual words that pour forth.

Many disappointed writers who believe they simply must be published take the self-publishing route with what used to be called a “vanity press.” But any author who buys his or her own books is entering the current chain store environment at a great disadvantage. Bookstores still want the right to return unsold books, and most authors are not prepared or equipped to offer this. And most authors are not prepared to negotiate with a national buyer or move inventory quickly. In fact, the only successes I’ve ever seen in self-publishing of traditional, paper-bound books involved extreme niche markets: The author was writing about local history or a subject with immediate appeal in a certain area where he or she could sell direct to local, non-chain bookstores. And local stores that can make those kinds of buying decisions are getting scarce.

From the author’s point of view, the publisher’s need to account for store returns—which can often be 50% or higher for a new writer—means a delay in sales accounting and distribution of any royalties. The author has to live longer on the advance money. If sales and returns are disappointing, there may never be “sell through” to cover the advance already paid, and so no royalties from sales.

The economics of Gutenberg publishing and bookstore operations greatly favor investment by large corporations in large press runs of books that will move quickly. That’s generally bad news for most writers. Since the accounting pressures created by the Thor Power Tool ruling, the economics of holding an inventory and dealing with returns have meant the death of a lot of writing careers.

1. The book went to a typesetter for rekeying in the old days of typewriters and hot-metal typesetting. Today, the author submits a word processing file, and the editor and designer work over it on page-layout software like Adobe Framemaker or Quark Express.

2. Books with lots of illustrations cost more—and have variable costs—to prepare because more work goes into the design of each page, and the photos and artwork must be processed into screened, color-separated images. New computerized page-layout programs are driving these costs down, too, as they output color-separated files that can go straight to burning the aluminum offset sheet.

3. For a good description of the case’s effects, see Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s excellent analysis How Thor Power Hammered Publishing from the SFWA Bulletin.

4. My early career as a book editor was in specialty publishing—first at the Penn State Press, a publisher of academic books, and then at Howell-North Books, which published heavily illustrated books of Californiana and railroad histories.

5. That’s why you see a notice in paperback books about a book without a cover being stolen property. The publisher has been assured that the book was destroyed.

6. Although I’ve not tested this, I suppose if you grabbed one of those books and ran down the street, no one would come out of the store to chase you. But I don’t like to encourage theft in any form.

7. That’s why Barnes & Noble puts in cushy chairs and encourages you to stop and read: Anything that binds you to a book is helping to move it toward the register. And if the pages get a bit dog-eared and you put it back on the shelf to take a fresh one for yourself—who cares? The unsold book in the store goes right back to the publisher.

8. I knew an author who would draft his book on the computer, print a copy, then erase the file. He would then retype the book into the computer to create the fair copy. As I discovered in going from pencil draft to typewriter, as you have to retype you usually find faster, more economical ways to say what you mean. Economical writing is a pleasure for the reader.

The World We Live In

2011-08-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

It’s a truism these days to say that parents and children—in fact, members of any generation—live in different worlds. They have different concerns (getting your driver’s license vs. paying the insurance bill), different tastes in music (the melodies we remember from our youth vs. that “awful noise” the kids listen to),¹ and different tolerances for stress and stimulation (riding the rollercoaster vs. sitting quietly and sipping a glass of wine).

Time in this case—plus an aging metabolism and endocrine system—brings a change in your relationship to the outside world. But there are other divides among the human population. The largest is probably differences in the depth and amount of a person’s background knowledge, whether acquired through formal education or personal study and reading.

Most people, for example, live in a Euclidean world not much different from that of the ancients. The space around them has three dimensions (up and down, side to side, forward and back). Lines are straight. Rooms are square. Dance floors are flat. Wall and floor meet at right angles. The horizon is as far as you can see. For everyday activities, this is an adequate view of the world.

A person with a little more education might live—at least some of the time, when thinking about the science—in an Einsteinian world. He or she has learned that the space around us is supposed to be shaped by gravity. Such a person knows that not only is the surface of the Earth curved, but all space and objects near the Earth are curved. The pencil between your fingers—even though it looks straight—curves very slightly downward along its length. Despite what your Level Devil tells you, the dance floor falls away in all directions from the spot where you’re standing. If it didn’t, you would be walking uphill with every step you took from that spot. The horizon is eight miles away if you’re standing in a wheat field on the Great Plains or sailing the ocean; it’s considerably farther if you climb a tower or a mast.²

For most people, humans and animals are different orders of being. They interact differently, understand differently—there is a great divide between the two. And they feel instinctively that the animals they encounter are of different specific types, as they were for Plato. All horses, for the ancient Greek, were imperfect copies of an ideal being, Horse, which was the model for an entire class of animals. And horses were very different in nature, strength, disposition, and other characteristics from cows, or goats, or lions. Each animal had its specific nature. Each represented something unique.

A person with a little more education understands about evolution and shared inheritance. The line between species becomes blurred. Horses are appreciably different from cows but not so different from donkeys and zebras. The dividing line seems to be the ability to breed: horse and donkey mate and the offspring is a mule. Most species crosses are indeed mules in the sense that the offspring are viable but not fertile.³ From this understanding, the world view of an educated person sees more sameness than difference. Rather than a static picture of different animal types existing forever, such a person sees a temporal flow of characteristics, one animal into another, as genetic mutations thrive or fail in the changing environments into which they are born.

For an educated person, it’s not really surprising that humans and horses, or humans and dogs, communicate so well. The difference in intelligence between human and dog is greater than between one human and another, but much less than between humans and fish, say, or lizards. The differences in intellect and awareness between land-based mammals are those of scale, not ultimate nature.

Of course, there are mammals of perhaps human-scale intelligence with which we don’t communicate so well. Humans have always had a special feeling for dolphins: They just seem more active and responsive, more intelligent, than tuna or swordfish or sharks. We have related less well with whales, perhaps because they are so huge and apparently self-involved. For years we hunted whales for oil—some humans still hunt them—where we never actively sought dolphins for their meat.

We know, or believe we know, that dolphins and whales have a complex form of communication based on sound, just as humans communicate largely through sound.⁴ But try as we might, we can’t crack their code of whistles and clicks. While the larynxes of gorillas and chimps can’t make the sounds we consider spoken language either, we can teach them sign language and share symbolic thoughts with them. The sound-making capability of dolphins and whales is far more complex—perhaps more complex even than the squeaks and hoots that make up human language—but we still can’t crack their code.

I submit that this may be due to the different worlds we live in. A dolphin, swimming free in the ocean, having no hands with which to manipulate objects, whose range of vision is limited by the murk of floating plankton and the feeble depth to which sunlight penetrates, inhabits a very different world from any land-based animal. A dolphin has a different orientation in space, relies on different senses, faces different concerns and dangers, has a closer horizon—or perhaps, with sonar, a farther one—than humans.

Dolphins don’t just hear and respond to a different music. They have a completely different shape to their world.

Given the different worlds that humans themselves may live in, and the world views that separate humans from our animal neighbors, then how much more different will be the first aliens we encounter? They are certainly not going to be Vulcans—humanoids with pointy ears but still having two arms and hands with five fingers. They may not even be as close to us as dolphins or spiders. And the environment that shapes their minds is sure to be very different from Earth’s.

Our first-contact aliens will likely be so different from us—not only physically but mentally—that we might not even recognize them as being alive. It’s going to be a very strange universe out there, and we’ll all have to be careful where we step.

1. But some things last. When I was a child, the music of my parents’ generation, Guy Lombardo and Tommy Dorsey, seemed quaint and corny. I liked Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles, which they hated. But we both loved classical music. And many youngsters today still like the Beatles. Quality endures.

2. I’ve always thought that sailors could readily grasp the fact that the Earth is a sphere because they could experience the curvature directly. As a ship sails away from the shore, the city skyline remains perfectly visible but the wharf disappears below the horizon. And as another ship approaches at sea, its topmasts and sails are readily seen but the hull is still hidden until it comes much closer. An agile mind will put these facts together and realize that the Earth’s surface cannot really be flat.

3. In fact, interbreeding—and the viability and fertility of the resulting embryo—have become the modern criteria that define speciation.

4. Dogs, on the other hand, seem to communicate most readily by scent. They may have an array of barks that may communicate basic emotions like alarm, anxiety, joy, and so on to one another. But when they want to recognize an individual and navigate the world around them, they follow their noses.

Labels as a Way of Life

2011-07-31T15:20:00.000-07:00

I recently got into an online tiff in the comments section of a friend’s Facebook posting. Another commenter had mentioned the demotion of Pluto as a planet,¹ and I responded that I think we can get hung up and waste intellectual energy on labels. A flurry of responses greeted this observation. One person pointed out that, without labels—terms for things that we can all agree upon—communication is impossible. Another quoted Plato on the necessity of having experts assign the names for things. At that point, I yielded the floor in disgrace. Now, I’d like to continue the thought in the form of an exploration.²

Clearly, people care whether Pluto is a planet or not. The new definition of “dwarf planet” seems to hinge on the fact that Pluto has not cleared out small objects and debris in the neighborhood around its orbit, as more massive bodies tend to do.³ To the extent that this new definition helps us understand something about the mechanics of planetary systems—and perhaps will help us interpret what we’re going to see happening around other stars—I applaud it. To the extent that people are unhappy because they grew up in a solar system of nine planets, learned mnemonics to remember all their names in order, and treasure each planetary discovery as a human achievement, then the label is a time waster.

Labels can indeed be useful. In the biblical creation story—or at least one of the creation stories⁴—God parades the animals he has made and lets Adam name them: cow, horse, sheep, goat. It’s very handy to be able to walk into a stable, point to a stall, and not have to tell the stable boy: “Bring me that animal with four legs, but with rounded hooves and no horns, for I want to go riding today.”

Things become less clear when you reach back up the evolutionary tree and delve into cladistics, or the grouping of animals based on their common heritage. For a long time, we all knew what a mammal was: warm-blooded, covered with hair, bearing live young, not poisonous, not scaly, not feathered. However, a traveling science exhibit called “Extreme Mammals”⁵ shows all the possible variations in mammals; some of them are hard to fit into the basic definition. Of course, there are also marsupials, who fit all the criteria of mammals but bear young that are hardly viable unless tended in a pouch, and the platypus which looks a lot like a mammal but lays eggs and has poison spurs. And current thinking now supposes dinosaurs to be as warm-blooded as birds. On the other hand, whales and dolphins are not noticeably hairy.

You can still use the term “mammal” in general, non-specific conversation. But at some point, trying to classify everything you see as either mammalian or not becomes a time waster. You either end up with a hopelessly complex label, full of subclauses and exceptions, or with a handful of animals that just don’t fit all the criteria. The newer classification systems build trees of descent from common ancestors, originally by comparing physical features, now by comparing genetic material. The old kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species organization is rapidly becoming obsolete. Today we know animals by how many genes they have in common and what SNPs they share.⁶

Moving beyond the rigors of scientific definition, labels become even more problematic. The Zen warn us to be wary of labels, because they lead us to think we know all about something and so keep us from really looking at it.⁷

In my youth, I tended to drink too much. It didn’t really bother me—of course, it never does—but I noticed that I was beginning to read and remember the definitions in self-help guides about what constitutes an alcoholic and how he or she acts. I would read about some contributing behavior, such as taking a drink in the morning to ward off a hangover, and think, “Well, I don’t do that, so I guess I’m not an alcoholic.” Avoiding putting a label on what I was doing, which would force me to take some kind of action, seemed important at the time. So long as I could wiggle around the terms of the definition, I could keep on drinking. Only when I put aside worrying about whether or not I fit the label “alcoholic,” could I then begin to examine my behavior directly and take action.

Labels have always dominated our political discourse. One adopts a party affiliation, the label “Republican” or “Democrat,” as shorthand for a selection of views and definitions. One feels more at home in one camp or the other. But, like taking a suit off the rack and wearing it, there are usually places where the label doesn’t fit. It tugs against or sags across what we really believe.

Most Republicans, for example, believe more or less in personal responsibility, libertarian rights,⁸ self-reliance, fiscal conservatism, shareholder capitalism, and free market economics. Although a lot of Republicans are strongly believing Christians, and some are dogmatic in their views on gays and abortion, among other things, I’m not one of them. And I don’t know any Republicans who would—according to the label used by some Democrats—abolish all social programs and safety nets in favor of some kind of extreme social Darwinism that would increase the position and power of the rich.

On the other hand, I can intuit—although I don’t know for certain, because I don’t vote that way—that most Democrats believe in fairness and personal equality, the power of community and social cohesion, group rights based on affinities like union membership or racial identity, the need for states and institutions to support those who can’t take care of themselves, and the wisdom of disinterested government employees and public servants in regulating the activities of people driven solely by self-interest. Although many Democrats strongly believe in the overall power of the state and in organizing principles like Marxism and socialism, and some are dogmatic in their animosity toward wealth and property, among other things, I know that not all of them so believe. And I don’t know any Democrats who would follow the example of the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge in moving academics and city dwellers out to the countryside so they can learn peasant values at the point of a gun.

There was a time, when I was young, that individuals could appreciate and find common cause with those across the aisle. Certainly an Adlai Stevenson, Everett Dirksen, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had friends and admirers in the opposing camp. That doesn’t seem possible these days. The extremes in each party are pulling the center of mass away from the center on each side. Some people cannot say the word “Republican” without thinking “Nazi” and “evangelical crazy” and wanting to spit. Some people—I try not to be one of them—cannot say “Democrat” without thinking “socialist” and “Stalin apologist” and wanting to run screaming.

Of course, the plurality of voters in this country are wholeheartedly neither. They stand in the middle, and for them the labels don’t fit well at all. They’ll vote for a Republican or Democrat depending on what the candidate says and whether it makes sense. And, of course, when the party in power begins to act as if that vote was a mandate to pursue all of its pet policies, reasonable or not, we get a sudden turnover. Johnson and the Great Society beget a Nixon. Nixon and self-interest beget a Carter. Carter and international apologetics beget a Reagan. And so on, with repercussions, right down to today.⁹

It’s only the inherent power of our two-party system, and the infrastructure that supports it, which keep us from devolving into the tiny, fragmented political parties of Europe. “We’re not socialists but social democrats!” And then, to get anything done, they have to form coalitions that vote with bartered uniformity in their parliaments.

Political labels also have a tremendous power to cloud our vision of what a proposal actually is and how it will help or hurt the country. The current debate over debt limits, spending trends, tax rates, default, and the federal deficit—which I hope will be resolved by the time you read this—is an obvious example of such obfuscation.

Labels help us communicate, indeed, but they also can keep us from seeing what, exactly, is going on. Calling Pluto a “planet” blinded us all to the subtlety of its relationship with its environment. Calling someone by a political label can keep you from seeing the subtlety and humanity of his or her political thinking. Use labels for communication but, as the Zen advise, be wary of them.

1. The International Astronomical Union so ruled in August 2006. See, for example, the article at www.space.com.

2. Anymore, the only way I can think about a subject is to write about it. The act of writing makes me put my thoughts in order, examine and challenge my arguments, take them to a logical conclusion, and check my facts and references. In fact, writing a book is simply the exploration of a large, inviting, but vaguely known territory. Writers are explorers of strange landscapes.

3. I guess this is why biggish, spherical rocks like Ceres are not planets, even though they orbit the Sun as do Earth and Mars.

4. As we learned in Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version, the creation story is told at least twice and with different details.

5. I saw it last year at the California Academy of Sciences, but I believe it’s going around the country.

6. SNPs are “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” representing one altered base in the genetic code. Sometimes that base change leads to an altered protein; often it does not. Sometimes the new protein works in a slightly different way from the original; often it does not. So SNPs are more sensitive as relationship-defining criteria than are physical characteristics. Because the rate of change in genetic material is fairly constant, you can track animals, diseases, and human populations through time with SNPs.

7. It was in this sense that I objected to the agonies about labeling Pluto as a planet. If you have a handy definition like that, it may keep you from seeing what’s really going on. In truth, at the time I was thinking, “Planet, shmanet, Pluto’s an interesting object regardless of what you call it.” Now, having looked into the actual IAU redefinition, I think the label “dwarf planet” actually helps us see something interesting about Pluto and other small bodies.

8. What do I mean by “libertarian rights”? It seems to me that “rights” today has developed two meanings. One responds to the progressive’s sense of “things that must be provided by law,” such as public education, child protective and abortion services, and—soon—health care. The other responds to the libertarian’s sense of “things that must not be curtailed by law,” such as freedom of speech and assembly, security of home and person, and—now under challenge—gun ownership. The line between them isn’t always clear. The right of two gay people to form a binding spiritual union with the same official standing as the union of two straight people seems, to me, to fall on the libertarian side. And the ability to choose abortion seems like a libertarian matter—although not the expectation that it will be provided at public expense.

9. I’d like to believe that we could distill the ideas of the middle-of-the-road, independent voter and come up with the platform for a third party. But what would happen, I think, is we’d get a hundred different possible mixes and matches: “More state support, please, but strengthen the family … Stronger borders, please, but spend more on immigrant education …” and so on.

The Age of Intermediates

2011-07-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Today we like to think that we live at the pinnacle of human development. Nowhere on this planet—which, as near as we can tell, means nowhere in this star system and probably nowhere within thirty lightyears of here—has technological progress, or progress in a great many other areas, come so far.

Consider technology first. In 250 years, we’ve gone from the first inefficient steam engines to jet engines that whisk hundreds of people through the stratosphere and across continents. In 100 years, we’ve gone from the first crude radio messages to a globe bathed in radio and video transmissions, communication with satellites and probes all over the solar system, and seamless wireless links between people and with a worldwide information infrastructure. In 50 years, we’ve gone from simply identifying the molecular structure of our genes to reading and manipulating the code.

The extent of our achievements goes well beyond physics, electronics, and biology. Through the study of neuroscience, psychology, and games theory, today’s best diplomats and negotiators could run circles around a Richelieu or Medici. With an accumulated appreciation of tactics and the nature of battlefields and engagement, our best generals would handily defeat a Napoleon or Wellington. In the arts, our best writers can create characters and stories whose power to capture the imagination rivals those of a Shakespeare or Chaucer. Our best artists can create images of such visual strength that a Michelangelo or Monet would feel envy.¹

We seem to stand on the peak of achievement. It hasn’t always been this way. The Romans, for all their military and engineering achievements, looked back with humility at the intellectual achievements of the Greeks from preceding centuries. And for a thousand years the Europeans who inherited the Greco-Roman tradition knew themselves to be living in a dark age. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that art and philosophy began to copy the classical forms and then exceed them. It wasn’t until the 17th and 18th centuries that thinkers began to replace classical superstition with scientific observation.²

Of course, from the viewpoint of objective truth, we do stand on a summit. The things the average person in the western world takes for granted in everyday life—from the consensual hallucination of the movie theater or video game to the instant contact of the cell phone and instant meals from the programmable microwave—have never existed before. We live in an age that would seem like magic to the most advanced thinkers of 500 years ago.³

But to the science fiction writer—and by extension, to anyone who reads and resonates with the visions of such writers—the glass is still only half full. We live in an age intermediate between what was and what will be or may be possible.

For all the trips we’ve made to low Earth orbit, our isolated visits to the Moon, the probes we’ve sent to sample and observe on Mars and the outer planets, we’re still only at the beginning of humankind’s use of space. The average person only knows about space through the achievements of a select few, the same way the average person of the 15th and 16th centuries only knew of Asia and the New World through the visits of Columbus, Magellan, and their crews. The average person in the West may own a satellite dish or a GPS unit, but his use of space is entirely secondhand.⁴ We still only dream of colonies on the Moon and Mars and voyages to the stars.

For all that we’ve learned and achieved with DNA, RNA, proteins, and our appreciation of cellular mechanics, we’re still only at the beginning of understanding and manipulating life. We still advance our stocks of cattle and horses, dogs and corn through the inspired guesses of breeders who bring together sire and dame, stamen and pistil. We still use whole animals in our animal husbandry. We can only dream of designing hybridized creatures like the chairdog⁵ or manipulating cells to create fossil fuels and exotic materials like synthetic spider silk and latex on demand. And molecular biology is still only the doorstep to a thriving nanotechnology.

For all our medical advancement, we still take organs from living or terminally damaged donors to implant in those who are dying for want of a healthy organ. We still supplement lost and immobile limbs with mechanical devices that only simulate original function. We are only at the threshold of growing new organs on synthetic armatures using a patient’s own stem cells. We are only starting to design mechanical arms and legs that interpret the body’s own nerve inputs. We can’t yet stimulate the brain’s optical centers to give sight to the blind, bud limbs to regrow missing arms and legs, or repair damaged nerves to recover function.

For all that we have achieved with civilization’s infrastructure to promote physical and emotional comfort, we still don’t have a comprehensive theory of economics and personal worth. We still let whole populations starve, not because there isn’t food enough in the world to feed them, but because they are on the wrong side of a war or economic system. We let individuals in our cities wander in confusion and fear and eat out of garbage cans because we don’t have an adequate understanding of human responsibilities, rights, and capabilities.⁶ We cannot yet differentiate freedom from license or supervision from tyranny. We are a long way from achieving the sort of balanced, stable, educated communities of equals that colonize the planets of our science fiction stories.

The water empires of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians stood halfway between the hunter-gatherer societies that came before them and the organized political and military regimes of the Macedonians and the Romans. The last centuries of the second millennium—the period of Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment—stood halfway between the philosophy and achievements of the Classical Age and our own modern era. And so today we live in an intermediate age.

We stand halfway between the first gropings of scientific observation and the full use of physics, electronics, and biology in everyday life.⁷ We are halfway between the first organized thinking about politics, economics, and psychology and a fully functioning society that appropriately accommodates people of all conditions and capabilities. We are halfway between the flight of the first fragile airplanes and a life among the stars.

The glass is both half full and half empty. We have a long and exciting road still to travel.

1. Of course, there’s also a lot of truly dreadful art and bad books afloat in the culture today, along with a lot of boneheaded generals and terminally clumsy diplomats. But the past had its tedious writers, uninspired painters, and second-rate professionals, too. To quote Theodore Sturgeon: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap—but then ninety percent of everything is crap.&rquo;

2. Superstition may be defined as the dominance of imagination, hope, and fear in our interpretation of the world around us. “The world is whatever you think it is.&rquo; Science is the dominance of observation and logical reduction. “What do you actually see? What can you prove? That is what the world is.&rquo; Aristotle and Plato observed, but they did not always reduce their observations to what they could prove logically. For example, Aristotle explained gravity as the tendency of things to move toward their “natural place.&rquo; Hardly a robust definition. It took a Newton to recognize gravity as a force with predictable and calculable effects.

3. Or to quote Arthur C. Clarke once again: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&rquo;

4. And—damn it!—I still don’t have the flying car or rocket backpack that the Sunday supplements promised me.

5. Found in the later Dune books of Frank Herbert.

6. Some will say that we have already found the perfect system for taking care of people—and then they invoke Socialism, Communism, or some other manifestation of the Leviathan state. I believe the various forms of collectivism practiced in various societies in the 20th century (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, etc.) adequately proved that regimentation, central planning, and state-mandated distribution of goods only destroy human ambition and creativity. But while free-market economics and shareholder capitalism have created great communal wealth and well-being in the West, anyone can still point to disturbing cases of exploitation and neglect. No, our economic and political thinking has a long way to go.

7. Is there a natural limit to our understanding through science? For all our theories of physics, we still do not understand the commonest forces like gravity, electricity, and magnetism. We can write equations that include their observed effects, like Newton, but we still don’t understand what force means at either the relativistic or quantum level. We don’t understand the structure of space or the nature of time. We are beginning to suspect they harbor forces like dark matter and dark energy, but we still have trouble even quantifying them. Perhaps our knowledge of the universe will always be limited by the fact that we are beings finite in space and linear in time, but that does not mean we won’t learn a lot more in the coming decades and centuries.

Manifest Destiny in Space

2011-07-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

With the last flight of the Space Shuttle program, everyone is giving the fleet a cheerful and tearful sendoff and wondering what comes next. For the moment, we’ll rely on the Russians to service the International Space Station and watch as the Chinese expand their presence in and above Earth orbit. No doubt the U.S. will continue to send un-manned missions to the inner and outer solar system. But what is the next big step for the U.S. space program?

With the current debate over our $14 trillion national debt and the spending cuts and tax increases needed to address it, clearly—at least to me—space exploration will take a back seat to mandated spending on entitlements and necessary spending on our military and infrastructure for the foreseeable future. The taxpayer-funded ride may be over.

I’m not exactly sad about that. Reflecting on NASA and its achievements, I harbor a dark thought: What if the U.S. computer industry had been dominated and directed by a similar large government organization over this same period? I think the IBM 360 mainframe, Fortran, and COBOL would have gathered the same loyal adherents and dedicated funding as the Atlas and Saturn rocket systems. They would have persisted as our main computing tools until a major change in policy brought out the VAX or PDP-11 minicomputer, which would be reaching its end of service in 2011. The average person would only interface with a computer in large organizations, such as banks, major companies, or government departments, and then only through a text-based terminal. Graphic user interfaces and personal access to the internet would be dreams of the future. Our cars would still be mechanically carbureted, and our cell phones would be the size of lunch boxes.

It was entrepreneurs like Hewlett and Packard, Wozniak and Jobs, and a thousand others that brought us the chip-based microcomputer. But they didn’t do it in response to a government mandate (“a computer in your palm by the end of the decade”) and didn’t ask for billions in funding to begin development. They took processors that were already being designed for machine actuators and put them in a box with a screen and keyboard. It was nerd candy: an unhandy, complicated appliance of limited usefulness that required the buyer to think in new ways and usually learn a new language.¹ But thousands of people like me bought those first machines, the Apple II, Commodore 64, and the TRS-80. It wasn’t because we needed them so much as we were fascinated by the idea of owning a computer, a machine that did whatever you told it. And we sensed that it would someday be important and make a real change in our lives.²

The space program has proven that you can get to orbit and beyond on a large, expensive hydrogen-oxygen rocket, or an airplane-shaped hybrid riding on an external fuel tank that itself is boosted by solid-fuel rockets. Unlike the Saturn, which was fire-once-and-drop-in-the-ocean, the Shuttle was supposed to be reusable. But it wasn’t really reusable like a car or an airplane. To land the Shuttle and take it back into space took months of rebuilding, refinishing the ablative tile surfaces, re-assembling the orbiter with its fuel tank and boosters, and then prepping and training for a particular mission.³

If humankind is going to continue in space, we need a better reason than government mandate and a better approach than taxpayer funding. We need entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan and Richard Branson to find easy and sustainable ways to get us to orbit and then offer them at a reasonable price that will support our active presence and use of near space. But they won’t do it unless there’s some kind of demand. Putting communications, weather, and spy satellites in orbit is a meager market, easily served by NASA and the European Space Agency.

I know some people would pay a high ticket price—perhaps a year’s salary—for just one ride into space; the same way I once paid a lot more for an Apple II and its components than I ever would have paid for the most expensive typewriter. I suspect that bridging the gap between this early “enthusiast’s vote” and regular use of space travel will require a period of trial demonstration and public feedback, the same as it did for microcomputers. Space travel will have to demonstrate compelling features—like going from Los Angeles to London in two hours on a parabolic sub-orbital flight, or manufacturing pure crystals and high-strength alloys in zero-gee orbital factories—before the average person will pay for it out of pocket. In the same way, chip-based computers had to offer interactive games, information access, instant communications, and personal productivity before the average person would bother to own a computer.

Of course, the computer industry was helped along by Moore’s law: the truism that the capacity and capability of computer chips doubles about every two years. It has not yet been shown that any similar law will govern the chemistry of jet and rocket engines. This is why I can hold a powerful computer in my palm today, but the family car still doesn’t fly, and I don’t get to soar in the sky with a rocket-pack. But development of low-cost, personal alternatives to the billion-dollar Space Shuttle will take the effort of an entire industry of researchers and entrepreneurs and go through many cycles of trial and error. We’re only starting this process.

Still … I believe it’s our destiny to go into space, and not solely through huge government programs. There are obvious reasons to get off the planet: to control the local environment and protect ourselves from asteroid strikes and other hazards; to gain new real estate⁴ and resources; to have some forward base for meeting extraterrestrials, in case they turn out unfriendly. There is also the imperative of our genes.

Humanity is, by and large, a migratory species—not that we follow a north-south pattern like birds; we’re simply aggressive and restless. The majority of us walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Waves of immigrants washed into North and South America from Eurasia 12,000 years ago. Waves of invaders washed across Northern Europe from the Steppes during classical times, from the Dorians that flooded down into Greece to the Celts, Goths, and Vandals that plagued the ancient Romans. Waves of Europeans spread out across the Atlantic and around Africa to rediscover the lands and cultures of Asia and establish a new order in the Americas during the last millennium.⁵ Travel, exploration, the search for something new and better in the next valley are in our blood.⁶

Maybe not next year, maybe not in twenty years, but we will eventually stop paying government-funded visits to the edge of space and decide to make a permanent home there for humans. It’s what we do.

1. You didn’t exactly have to learn BASIC or some structured programming language to use most of the early microcomputers, but it certainly helped. But even to buy the machine in the first place you had to wade through features and capabilities measured in unfamiliar units like bytes and bits, ROM and RAM. To hook up a printer you had to learn the difference between serial and Centronics interfaces and learn to set a baud rate and a handshaking protocol. The first computers weren’t at all appliances on the level of a toaster or refrigerator.

2. Being a writer, I was already thinking of using a computer to enter and manipulate text. At that time industry was just starting to use word processors—text terminals hooked up to mainframes or massive, expensive machines harboring minicomputers inside bench-like consoles—and I suspected the little Apple II might be used in the same way. I was right.

3. Cost and environmental impact are also concerns. The Shuttle’s liquid hydrogen-oxygen main engines burn cleanly, emitting only steam. But stockpiling and handling these gases in liquid state are a major undertaking. And the solid boosters are fueled with ammonium perchlorate and aluminum powder, which don’t burn as cleanly and are difficult and dangerous to manufacture into motor cores.

4. Most of that real estate will be in tunnels and under domes. None of the local planets offers the possibility of ever walking on grass under an open sky. To understand why, see my blog The Myth of Terraforming.

5. Yes, and some of us also stayed in Africa. For every Marco Polo who went off to find China, there was a settled population of Chinese waiting to be found. But which of them captures our imagination? We read with interest the story of the Joads who packed up and went to California, not their neighbors who stayed and starved under a bridge.

6. It can easily be argued that these successive waves of exploration and invasion usually brought bad things for the indigenous peoples, whether early hominids outside Africa or native Americans in the 19th century. Some even compare humanity to a virus on this planet and fear that we should ever get off it and contaminate space. But we are what we are, however imperfect. For those humans who would wish to see us all removed from the ecological equation, I can only say it’s not a survival trait to vote with those who want to see you dead. I make it a practice never to vote that way myself.

God’s Echo Chamber

2011-07-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

This past week we’ve seen the jury acquit Casey Anthony, the Florida woman accused of murdering her two-year-old daughter because, apparently, the little girl was inconvenient to her lifestyle. The case had become a media sensation in the way that monstrous mothers, sociopathic serial killers, and other unnatural creatures often do. They strike a nerve with the public and arouse moral feelings that the more commonly explicable murders and rampages don’t quite touch.

Such unnatural crimes and the media attention they draw are not new. The London papers delighted to tell of Jack the Ripper’s latest murder, and U.S. newspapers and later television followed the cases of the Lindbergh baby and Nicole Brown Simpson with the same energy that the online news media and cable channels have reported on Casey Anthony. What’s new in this instance, however, is the presence of the internet and social media—tweets, blogs, Facebook postings, and comments on blogs and postings—through which the public has an opportunity to respond and share its outrage.¹

Imagine for a moment that you possessed the all-hearing ear of God in the age before our current electronic communion. A people unable to tweet and post their outrage, their hopes and fears, their desires and discontents, would turn a private voice to God, sometimes prompted by the sermons of their priests and pastors. Aside from the background patter of grant me grace … please cure Mother’s cancer … help me get that promotion … make her love me … get me into medical school, which is the carrier wave of particular pleadings, the ear of God must routinely hear community-wide surges of anger, fear, and protest: burn the witches … death to the Corsican tyrant … protect us from the Hun … justice for little Caylee …

The united voices that once only God could hear—except for occasional grumbles and murmurs traded across the back fence or in line at the supermarket—are now ringing across the public webpages of the internet and in the comment spaces of social media. Suddenly public opinion is a real, instantaneous, and measurable force.

Once the editorial offices of local newspapers could only weigh the bags of mail that arrived for and against a proposition or public position, and then publish a scant two or three letters that seemed most fervent or articulate. Now every letter, every opinion, every murmur and howl is available for examination somewhere on line. Once people sent chain letters by paper mail asking for blessings and dollars to be sent to the top-listed originators. Now they circulate heart-felt messages by email and ask the recipients to forward the text to all their friends.

This is a new thing, and it raises some questions about where our society is headed.

One question involves the reputed wisdom of crowds. Science fiction author John Brunner, in his semi-prophetic Shockwave Rider from 1975, showed his main character, among other things, running a Delphi Poll. This is an artifact of Brunner’s vision of future electronic media, in which a person or organization might offer a general proposition on line and allow the public at large to comment and vote on it. The majority opinion would supposedly approximate the truth. Or, as Brunner put it, “while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody does …”²

For a while, the venerable Popular Science magazine was running similar back-page polls on popular questions like when we would go back to the Moon and when fusion power would become feasible. This was a sort of Delphi poll testing public feelings about the future.³

Nonfiction authors John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene originally published Megatrends in 1982. Their book discussed trends in society based on the number of column inches of newspaper and magazine stories assigned to particular topics. It made for entertaining reading. And it did capture a snapshot of what was on the minds of newspaper and magazine editors—and presumably, through their collective instincts, of concern to the reading public.

The question is, how reliable is all this? If we could combine and interpret all the tweets and postings, reading them like the hanging chad of a Florida poll, would the aggregate tell us anything useful? It would certainly tell us when we wanted to return to the Moon, or how strongly we felt about mothers who supposedly murder their daughters. But absent the mechanics of appropriations and taxation, engineering effort and public contracting, would it pinpoint the date of an actual Moon launch? Hardly. And if you were accused of a heinous crime, would you accept the average ruling of a million bloggers and tweeters over the deliberations of twelve identified, interviewed, and selected citizens? Personally, I’d prefer trial by combat.

A second question is whether all this outpouring of feeling is good or bad for society. Certainly it’s therapeutic. Everyone now gets his or her say. And the tweets, postings, and blogs are totally uncensored. No government or party organization controls them.⁴ The enthusiasms and prejudices of newspaper editors and journalists and television executives are not leading them. The parties and the popular media may feed and stir some of this sentiment with a stick, as with the coverage of the Anthony case. But individual human feeling outruns the wisdom of party leaders and media moguls. Indeed, the consensus political positions drawn up by the two national parties are becoming fragmented as websites and blog collections focus on every position across the spectrum.

For every opinion you might have, you can find a focus of a thousand or a million other people who agree with you. And for the rest … you can tune it out, just not go there. Once your town or city newspaper brought together a variety of opinions, and a few of the leading papers in New York and Washington purported to speak for the country. Once the three major networks sampled the news of the world. Now you can log onto one or another site to get the news you like, or click to a cable channel that agrees exactly with your views.

Under Gutenberg economics, when it was a serious investment to put out a daily newspaper or run a TV news department or print and distribute a paper book, just a few voices would actually be heard. They would represent public opinion only because a plurality, if not a majority, of the public supported them by purchasing the paper or book or tuning into the station and supporting its advertisers. Now, while it still costs something to run a cable TV channel, that cost is less than organizing a nationwide affiliation of broadcasters. And creating a website or an ebook costs only your time and attention. With the internet, the act of publication is virtually free.

I’m not the first to notice this, of course. As little as ten years ago you still heard about the “global village.”⁵ Electronic media and popular news and television were supposed to bring us together and create a single forum for conversation. Certainly the outcry over the Casey Anthony verdict has had this effect. But the potential for isolation and parochialism is also there. While many voices condemn the murder of inconvenient children, and some even look for vigilante action to correct the jury’s “mistake,”⁶ there may be quiet corners of the internet, reachable only through the right search words, that offer advice and instruction on the guilt-free elimination of unwanted toddlers. For every opinion and taste, there will be a magnetic pole to draw and align it.

In the last twenty years we’ve entered a new age. It offers exciting possibilities for human creativity and freedom. I certainly wouldn’t give up the technology that makes it possible. But we’re now also able to hear in detail all the cries and curses and squeals and pleadings and promises that once were reserved for God’s ears alone. I wonder if we’re ready for it.

1. I haven’t made any kind of survey, but the fragments I see floating through my little window on the internet suggest the tweeting public rejects the jury’s verdict on Casey Anthony.

2. The principle is taken from the old carnival and charity scheme of collecting money for letting people guess the number of jellybeans in a jar. Presumably, if you average all the guesses—from the village idiot who hazards “Two?” to the wide-eyed child who says “A billion!” and all the people in between who squint at the jar and guess 1,000 or 1,300 or 1,200 or 1,150—you get a number that’s correct to the last bean. But this only works, supposedly, if you get enough people to guess.

3. A Popular Science poll in 2000 also showed that 45 percent of respondents believe Earth has been visited by intelligent aliens. Opinion is not provable fact.

4. Although the Chinese are trying, at least within their own borders.

5. The term appears to have originated with Marshall McLuhan and his views of the media. Of course, McLuhan still lived in the Gutenberg age.

6. Apparently, right after the verdict people were tweeting for the TV-fictional vigilante Dexter to visit the mother.

Abracadabra

2011-07-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

Magic has traditionally used the spoken word, or incantation,¹ to precipitate its power. In the Harry Potter world of J. K. Rowling, the spells are just one or two words—usually with a Latin flavor—spoken with particular emphasis by persons of a wizarding nature, and the spell is usually supported by a wand or other prop. In the memorable Black Easter of James Blish, all magic is performed by conjuring and contracting with demons, but the conjuration must still be spoken, aided by the use of particular configurations, signs, and instruments, and adhering to strict rules and formats.

We are now living in a magical age indeed.² We have achieved, on an everyday level and accessible to the common man, a degree of magic to which priests, conjurors, and charlatans going back to the ancient Egyptians could only pretend. With a few words, whether written or spoken, we can control vast machines, both physical and metaphysical, to produce vast riches, carry us bodily to far places, spread our voices and bring us tidings, and otherwise do our bidding.

The incantation may be as long and as complicated as writing a hundred thousand lines of C++ code or Java script. It may be as simple as placing a fingertip on an icon on a touch screen—which then invokes those thousand or million lines of complicated script.

My fellow Baen Books author Rick Cook caught the flavor of this in his Wizardry series. A systems-level programmer from our world is transported to a world where magic is ascendant. He quickly becomes a champion wizard by regimenting all the complex magical spells under programming rules and automating them with a Unix daemon. The fun ensues as he befuddles the archaic magic users who are stuck in their old ways.

If you don’t believe that computers and their code run our modern world and provide us with the power of truly advanced magic, consider the following.

Every robot you’ve ever seen or known about, from the tiny Roomba that sweeps your floor to the Cave Crawler that explores old mines and performs underground rescues, is controlled by a computer. They have sensors for detecting their environment and chips with hard-coded rules for moving and stopping. They and the machines to follow are the golems of our time.

In modern factories, the flow of goods—from the incoming materials deposited at the loading dock, through all the steps of processing and manufacture, then into inventory and out to the loading dock again—everything is tracked by a computer using barcodes and scanners. No one is running around with a clipboard anymore, asking where the boxes of vacuum tubes have gone. The individual processing lines and their robots are certainly controlled by computer. Where refrigeration (called “cold train” in the industry) or other special environmental factors such as humidity are required, storage conditions are monitored and adjusted by computer. In the most automated factories, the physical movement of goods and their processing with machines and robots is orchestrated by a computer system that runs the motors on conveyor belts, measures the entry and exit of materials and goods in surge bins, and adjusts the processing speed of each section to keep the flow smooth. The software controlling the computer may be hard-engraved on a chip or called into memory from a disk, but somewhere in its history are lines of code written by a programming wizard.

If the factory is automated, so is the store where you buy the goods it makes. If you go into a Home Depot or Wal-Mart, you won’t find anyone with a clipboard running around taking inventory of goods on the shelf. All modern packaging bears a universal product code (UPC) that uniquely identifies the item. Pallets are scanned at the loading dock and entered into the computer’s inventory. Items you buy are scanned at checkout and removed from inventory. When the inventory gets low, computer software notes the fact, consults purchasing trends both in store and nationwide, and reorders goods at the prevailing sales level. Every transaction goes through accounting, along with your payment and the invoice from the supplier. Accounting is a computer, too, as are payroll and purchasing.

If you step onto the local subway, light rail, or train system, you’re putting your trip under computer control. Every block of track, switch, train movement, and station announcement is either controlled or monitored by a computer. No one is running around throwing switches by hand. In the most automated systems, like BART in the Bay Area, a central computer directly senses the presence of the train on the tracks, controls its speed, stops it at the station, and announces the train’s imminent arrival with real-time estimates. And every action is a line of code—a written incantation—in the computer.

Computers are essential to the design of every new aircraft. Humans may suggest new wing shapes and engine capacities, but computers finalize the details. And no one is producing engineering drawings and schematics with a pencil and a T-square. The final shape is dreamed in a computer. In the most advanced planes, the pilot is no longer heaving on controls that move the flight surfaces with pulleys and cables. They move by hydraulics—oil running through pistons, pumps, and pipes—and computers operate it all based on inputs from strain gauges attached to the pilot’s familiar control yoke and rudder pedals. It’s called “flying by wire.” Behind the wire is a programming incantation. The movement of airplanes through the sky are tracked by computers attached to radar stations. Human air traffic controllers may give voice commands to human pilots, but those controllers know about the situation in the air only by staring at computer screens.

The car you drive used to respond to mechanical inputs. When you pushed on the gas pedal, a lever opened a throttle plate in the carburetor. When you pushed on the brake, it put pressure on hydraulics through a master cylinder. Now electronic systems—computers backed up by lines of code—operate the engine and monitor the braking system. If you drive into the mountains, the engine management system adjusts the fuel/air mix for reduced oxygen. If you brake aggressively on a slippery surface, the computer in the ABS system will override your foot pressure and ease the brakes to prevent the wheels from locking up and skidding.

There was also a time when, if your battery was dead, you could start the car by rolling it downhill in second gear and popping the clutch. The distributor would spark mechanically, the carburetor would feed a bit of fuel by gravity, and the engine would catch and run. Now, of course, if your battery is dead, the engine management computer is asleep and no amount of rolling friction will wake it up. Time was, also, when a thief could hot-wire a car by rubbing together two wires leading to the ignition switch. Now that switch and the key that operates it are only a convenience. The real protection and authorization to start the car is a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip buried in the key head. It communicates with a reader that talks directly to the computer. No signal, no start—no matter how many wires you rub together.

If you think the bank holds your money somewhere in coins or bills or gold bars, think again. Most banks on the street have some ready stash of bills and coins. If you ask for it, some of them may be denominated and handed out as “yours.” Similarly, the U.S. Treasury has some gold bars at Fort Knox—but don’t try asking for them. Nowhere is the physical amount of money in the system equal to even a small fraction of what the economy and your bank think of as “money.” Your account is an agreement between you and the banking company, and between the bank and anyone to whom you owe, or who owes you, money. The bank enters certain zeros and ones into your account on deposit, and removes them on demand, representing a sum you all agree represents “your money.” But it’s actually just promises, tracked and pledged by a computer. The transactions are just the bank’s computer talking to other computers somewhere else.

And, finally, any of our human transactions taking place between people outside the same room (and sometimes even among people sitting next to each other) are facilitated by computer. The phone system doesn’t use a “switchboard” anymore; it’s all done with computers. And your voice isn’t the amplitude modulation of a carrier signal, but instead it’s digitized, packeted, and sent in pieces down the wire. Your Tweets, your Facebook page, the information streaming over your computer or iPad screen—all are computer generated and computer enabled. Even the page you’re reading now is backed by lines of code and stored on a server. (To see some of the HTML programming, go to your browser’s command menu, pull down on the tab that says “View,” and look for a command using words like “Source” or “Coding.”)

Modern civilization, at least among the developed countries, is an interlocking series of “abracadabra” incantations, executed by software daemons, using the engines of chips, disks, and circuits.

If you’ve ever done any programming,³ you know how finicky and precise the language can be. The old English-class bugaboos of grammar, syntax, and punctuation apply with unbelievable force—but using new rules, depending on the programming language. Drop a comma, or put the semicolon inside the quote mark instead of outside, and you won’t merely be thought unlettered by the people around you. You will see the machines stop dead, or give false answers, or light up your screen with strange colors.

Bugs and glitches in even the simplest programs used to be common. Now, of course, much of the code that runs our machines is modular, written and checked by computer programs themselves. This is called computer assisted software engineering. Humans only intervene at the highest levels of programming—that is, deciding what the “abracadabra” should actually do. Glitches arise only because there are so many millions and millions of lines of code that undreamed-of combinations and conflicts are bound to arise . And in any system approaching the scale of grains of sand on the beach, random errors will creep in because of cosmic rays, mechanical errors, and tiny voltage fluctuations. And so the bug fix for the next version collects. But none of it is actually, ahem, a human error.

We live in a world run by sufficiently advanced magic that humans are not really in control anymore except at the very top level. All of this has happened in the last forty years, with the advent of the microchip.< sup>4 Today, we only invoke the daemons and then stand back in wonder.

1. From the Latin incantare, meaning “to enchant.” But consider also that this word includes the Latin root cantare, meaning “to sing.”

2. Of course, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

3. My own dealings with computers go back to 1979 and a spiffy little Apple II that I bought because it was, well, a computer and I never had a chance to own one before. Using it was a combination of running programs you bought on tape or disk and programming your own in BASIC. I learned a bit of BASIC and even started to learn the machine’s structured language, Pascal. I had dreams of writing code and creating games as a way to get rich. Then I saw my first Pong game that invoked gravity and I knew that, far from getting in on the ground floor, I was way out of my league and that only people with solid wizarding credentials would make a go of this. But I still like using computers.

4. My father was a mechanical engineer who started working between the world wars at Bell Labs and finished his professional career at Sylvania. He used to say that two facts of modern life in the twentieth century had gone generally unnoticed by the general public. One was the revolution in materials—with the chemistry of polymers and alloys replacing basic materials like rubber and steel in everyday goods. The other was the increasing number of small motors in our lives. When he was a boy, the average person might have one pump out at the well to draw water, an engine under the hood to power the car, and maybe a couple of household motors in electric fans and the phonograph. In his lifetime we suddenly had motors all over the car to run the wiper blades and roll up each of the windows; motors all over the kitchen to run mixers and dishwashers; motors in the bathroom to run shavers and even toothbrushes. Toward the end of his life he would add small computers. If your shaver—which a hundred years ago was a piece of really sharp metal with a folding handle—has a window to tell you the state of the battery charge and when to clean and change the cutter head, you’re served by a computer as well as a motor.

The Problem with Space Elevators

2011-06-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

One of the more popular proposals for overcoming the Earth’s gravity and putting payloads into space without the expense and risk of chemical rocket launches is the space elevator. The proposals have several forms, but the simplest appears to be as follows.

Step one: Put a satellite into geosynchronous orbit. This is the orbital track 22,300 miles above the equator where a satellite moves at the same relative speed as a point on the ground. Thus the satellite does not appear to move in the sky from the viewpoint of a person standing on Earth. Many communications and weather satellites already occupy such orbits.

Step two: Drop a thread of incredibly¹ high tensile strength from the satellite to that point on the ground. You can use any existing or conceivable material: cables made of a single long-chain molecule, or spider silk, or carbon nanotubes … whatever is so tough that you can’t break it no matter what kind of stress you put on it. Reinforce that initial thread with enough additional cables and material so that the tether reaching down to the Earth will not break and will form a stable structure you can climb on. The limiting factor here will be adding so much reinforcement that your tower falls of its own weight.

Optionally: As you build your tether and tower down from the satellite, extend another tower up into the space beyond your geosynchronous orbit. This will supposedly stabilize the satellite, so that instead of perching at the top of a tower, it is actually at the midpoint of a span anchored by a farther satellite 44,600 miles out. That farther satellite will be moving at supraorbital speeds, so that it pulls outward on the whole structure, creating tension. Of course, that puts even more stress on your tower materials.

Step three: Attach an elevator cage to the tower and haul your passengers and cargo up to the geosynchronous platform. At that point, space ships can match orbits with the platform, take on and discharge people and goods, then accelerate away to the Moon, Mars, the stars. Arriving passengers and cargo would enter the cable car and descend to Earth.

The concept of a space elevator—sometimes also called a “skyhook”—has been in development over most of the 20th century by various authors and inventors.² Arthur C. Clarke—no slouch as a scientist—used the concept as the centerpiece of his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Frederik Pohl and I used a similar concept for orbital transfers in our collaborative 1994 novel Mars Plus, the sequel to his award-winning Man Plus. There is even a national 2011 Space Elevator Conference this coming August in Washington, DC, to discuss progress on the concept.

The only trouble is, I don’t believe such a thing will ever be built. Aside from the expense and the improbability of (1) discovering a sufficiently high-tensile-strength filament and (2) producing it in the requisite 22,300-mile length to anchor the orbital platform, my main objection is coriolis force.

Coriolis force is in play anytime you work around a spinning object, whether a disk or a globe. It results from the different parts of the object moving at different absolute speeds.

As a thought experiment, consider the Earth. With a circumference at the equator of 24,900 miles and a rotation period of 24 hours, a person standing in Quito, Ecuador, just south of the equator is moving east at a little more than 1,000 miles an hour.³ A person standing at the north polar axis—or say just south of it, one foot away from the exact point—is moving in a tight little circle just over six free in circumference.⁴ North Polar man is moving east at only about 3 inches an hour. Anyone standing along a line between Quito man and Polar man is moving more slowly the farther north his location happens to be.

If Polar man faces south and throws a baseball straight at Quito man, it’s going to land somewhere out in the Pacific. This is because Polar man’s baseball is moving east at just 3 inches an hour, while Quito man is spinning east at a 1,000 miles an hour. To hit Quito, Polar man has to throw the ball well to the east of his target.

This has nothing much to do with the fact that the baseball is in the air while the world turns beneath it. If the man at the pole starts walking due south, with every step he encounters ground that’s moving toward the east just a little faster than he is. With every step the ground is accelerating him eastward, putting a drag on his shoe leather. It’s not much of a drag, but between the pole and the equator, he accelerates from a virtual standstill to moving eastward at 1,000 miles an hour. If he runs, the effect is more pronounced, although probably still not noticeable. If he gets in a super-fast race car and accelerates southward at 1,000 miles an hour—taking about six hours for the trip—he’ll find his tires smoking from the eastward drag.

What applies to bodies moving across the surface of a spinning globe equally applies to bodies moving outward on a spinning disk. Objects placed near the center of a phonograph record, say, move more slowly than objects at the edge. They may hold the same relative position, but the object at the edge has to move much faster to stay in line with the object at the center.

In the case of the space elevator, that disk is the plane that includes the planet’s center of mass, the location of the tower base at the equator, and the geostationary platform 22,300 miles above it. The people and cargo waiting for the elevator on Earth are moving east at 1,000 miles an hour. The platform in geosynchronous orbit above them is stationary from their point of view. But to keep up with the surface, the platform is actually moving east at slightly more than 6,800 miles an hour.⁵

Just like the man walking south, any people and cargo riding up the elevator to the platform need to acquire 5,800 miles an hour of eastward speed by the time they reach the top. Throughout their transit to the platform, the tower structure will be constantly pushing them eastward faster and faster, and accepting a corresponding westward drag on its structure. Similarly, any people and cargo coming down the tower must lose speed. As they descend, they will drag eastward on the tower, and it will pull them westward.

If you creep up or down the 22,300-mile-high tower, you can acquire or lose this speed gradually. The drag on the tower would minimal, like the wear on shoe leather for a man walking south. But if you shoot up or down the tower at any speed, the eastward push and westward drag—that is, the amount of energy consumed over the shorter period of time—is going to be much greater. The force on the tower will be much more noticeable, like the burn on the tires of Polar man’s high-speed racer.

You might overcome this tower push and pull by firing rocket motors to the west as you go up, or east as you come down. But timing the rocket thrust to the current lateral inertia of the cable car is going to be tricky. And we’re dealing with impressive amounts of force the more quickly you travel along the cable. Get it wrong, and you’re going to put even more strain on the tower structure.

Alternatively you might simply travel on the tower at a walking pace, like Polar man going south. At that speed, about 5 miles an hour, it will take you twenty-six weeks—or half a year—to travel the 22,300 miles. And the additional food, water, and air you need for that journey will only add to the weight you need to accelerate or decelerate. Oh, and pack a library of entertaining videos and good books, a gym for working out, and good company to pass the time.

Unlike my previous blogs discussing the impossibility of time travel, transporter beaming, and planetary terraforming, space elevators are theoretically possible. But I don’t think they are ever going to be feasible or practical. Still, they’re fun to think about and read about. And, like wormholes and supra-light travel, they save a science fiction writer and his or her characters a lot of time and effort.

A friend of mine feels it’s bad policy for me, a science fiction writer myself, to publicly question these staples of the art. But while I enjoy a good read and can accept a bit of science fallacy for the sake of story, I do believe in a future of wondrous advances. I want to see them happen. I want our scientists and engineers to make them happen. And I don’t want people believing too strongly in alternative futures that simply are not going to come around. Go that route, and you might as well believe we’ll be advance through magic rings, swords of power, and the benevolence of dragons.

1. Some would say “magically.”

2. Inventors and contributors include Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and Leningrad engineer Yuri Artsutanov, who seem to be the original inventors. Jerome Pearson of STAR, Inc., claims to have conceived a similar idea when he was working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Physicist and science fiction author Robert L. Forward, in collaboration with several other noted scientists, proposed an alternative to an equatorial tower, the “space fountain.” It would use a stream of magnetically accelerated projectiles to raise a space platform off the ground and into orbit. Instead of riding up a solid monofilament tether, the cargo would tag along with the projectiles.

3. That is, 24,900 miles divided by 24 hours equals 1,037.5 miles per hour. … I always have to check my math.

4. More checking. A circle with a radius of one foot has a diameter of two feet, which multiplied by pi yields a circumference of 6.28 feet. Multiplying that by 12 inches to the foot and dividing by 24 hours of travel time yields just over 3 inches per hour.

5. Check again. At 22,300 miles above the Earth’s surface, the platform is actually 26,263 miles from the center of the planet. (Earth’s diameter is 7926 miles, which divided by two yields a radius of 3,963 miles from the center to the equator. Add that to the elevation of 22,300 miles.) That orbital radius of 26,263 miles represents a diameter of 52,526 miles and a circumference, or distance traveled in 24 hours, of 164,931 miles. The geosynchronous platform is actually moving at 6,872 miles an hour—or just about 5,800 miles an hour faster than the cargo waiting in Quito.