The Dune Ethos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.