Book Review: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Posted on December 19, 2015 by John Walters

In my last post I wrote down some thoughts this book inspired in me about how its themes relate to the world of publishing.  Now I want to directly confront what it says about global economics.  The basic premise of the book is that inclusive political and economic systems thrive, while extractive systems impoverish countries they control.  Once either type of system is in place, it is very difficult to dislodge, as it has inherent factors that strengthen it against adverse or opposite influences.  Critical junctures in history, however, can impact either type of system and bring about change.

Early on in the book, the authors spend several chapters refuting other explanations for global poverty and plenty, and in later chapters they reinforce their own theories with numerous examples.  The weight of example is compelling.  It’s hard to refute so much evidence.  And yet, I found myself wondering about certain aspects of their arguments.  Not the basics; the basics are sound.  There’s too much evidence to refute their postulations about the economic strength of inclusive systems and the inherent weakness of extractive ones.

The problem is, it doesn’t offer any solutions.  It presents the situation of why some countries are sinking in poverty with great clarity, but offers no way out.  It explains why extractive societies begin and endure but offers no alternative to the heartbreaking torment the mass of people go through under them.  All right, perhaps offering solutions wasn’t the intentions of the authors, but it leaves readers with a dilemma.  It’s as if you can see a mugger murdering someone and robbing them of everything they own but being helpless to do anything about it.  Dictators throughout history have exploited the poor, and in many countries in this present time they still do, and we see the evil but feel powerless.  Knowing what prompts social forces to give rise to and sustain the evil does nothing to mitigate it.

Don’t get me wrong; the book is still fascinating.  But I get a sinking feeling as I read and contemplate historical instance after instance of the depravity of human nature.  What is the solution?  What can we do about it?  This book presents no answers.

Another problem I have with this book is its writing style.  Perhaps I’m spoiled by reading too many historians like David Halberstam who are also stellar writers.  This book is written in workmanlike, academic, but hardly lively prose.  Part of the problem may be that there are two authors so there is no distinctive voice.  Part of it may be that the subject matter is so complex that it’s hard to express it in a lively, engaging manner.  Or perhaps it’s just me.  I found myself getting muddled sometimes and having to go back over parts to be able to extract their full meanings.  I seldom have to do that when I’m reading something by Halberstam, for instance.  The subject matter and approaches are different, you may say, and I might agree with you.  Nevertheless, if you tackle this tome, don’t expect an easy read.

All in all, this book is too valuable to ignore.  It’s important reading.  You have to diagnose the sickness and discover its causes before you can eradicate it and prevent it from happening again.  It’s discouraging, though, that throughout history, as the authors so efficiently expose, strong leaders are only too happy to seize control and enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow humans, their society, and their country.  It’s a very sad situation.

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A few more thoughts to wind this up:

Near the end of the book the authors discuss the failure of foreign aid to alleviate the economic problems of poor countries.  They use Afghanistan as an example.  When the Taliban were defeated, aid organizations swarmed into the county, yet instead of setting up an infrastructure of inclusive economic and political institutions, they proceeded to construct an infrastructure of airfields so they could fly around from one place to another in their private jets.  Additionally, donated aid was siphoned off for administrative costs of the main aid organizations, contractors, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, and so on, until there was little or nothing left for the people for whom it was intended.  Transport organizations and other hired Afghanis were typically exploitive, extractive former Taliban who hiked up their rates many-fold for the aid organizations.  This is a common pattern concerning aid to underdeveloped countries.

The authors also bring up the inability of international organizations to engineer prosperity using the ignorance hypothesis.  This theory posits that poor countries are poor because they do not have the wisdom to follow proper economic guidelines without assistance.  If they only have the proper guidance, they will prosper.

A stark example of the failure of this theory in my own experience is the case of the Greek economic collapse, which I experienced while living in Greece.  A number of things precipitated the Greek crisis.  Its political system is predicated on extraction, on the ruling political parties awarding positions and business perks to their cronies, on bribery, on siphoning funds out of public treasuries.  But it took a turn for the worse when Greece joined the European Union and all of a sudden had access to vast loans from the EU.  It’s not that they used the money unwisely, although they did; it’s that they never should have had access to the funds in the first place.  It reminds me of the crazy credit card offers I receive all the time in the mail.  Those damned companies are not doing me any favors by offering me those cards; what they are doing is trying to sink their hooks in, hoping to be able in the future to extract interest and penalty fees and so on.  Greece should never have been lent so much money.  Once it was done and Greece couldn’t pay it back, the huge burden of debt accumulated from the compiling interest.  And then what did the EU do?  Crush Greek economic growth by unreasonable demands on its infrastructure.  The EU never should have distributed such large loans so liberally, and once it did, it should never have expected that a struggling country like Greece would somehow morph into a model economic entity that would be able to instantly make good on the loans.  And now, the EU is in a bind because Greece is a part of it, intricately woven into the European economic body, and to cut Greece loose would involve an amputation that would precipitate irrevocable side effects.  If the EU wants to help out, it needs to back off and let the Greek economy, however small and fragile, reassert itself, instead of imposing ever more draconian measures that only grind it into the dust.

As you can see, having lived there so long and having invested myself so much in Greece, I get a bit emotional when I see its present sad and sorry state.

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Inclusive and Extractive Economies in Publishing

Posted on December 13, 2015 by John Walters

I have been reading a book on global economics, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, and my thoughts, as always, turn to publishing.

You don’t have to agree with everything the book says to be stimulated by its ideas.  It posits that political and economic institutions are mainly responsible for a nation’s poverty or prosperity rather than commonly held theories highlighting geography, culture, or the ignorance of their leaders.  When institutions are inclusive, that is, democratic and open to new ideas, technologies, innovators, and entrepreneurs, a nation flourishes.  However, when institutions become exclusive, that is, they exist for the enrichment of a small group of elite, they may experience growth, even rapid growth, for a while, but it is unsustainable due to the lack of incentive to develop new technologies or foster new investors for further growth.  The authors time travel through history giving the reader a myriad examples to support their theories, on the way explaining why other theories, such as Jared Diamond’s theory, as put forth in the prize-winning “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” of the natural resources in an area determining its prosperity, are inadequate or incomplete.

And so, of course, I inevitably begin to compare these economic postulations with the state of publishing today.  As writers see the field, which institutions are inclusive and which are extractive?  We have Amazon and other self-publishing venues on the one hand which have developed cutting-edge technologies, put them out on the market for free use, opened the gates wide for authors and other artists, and invited them to come share the wealth for a percentage of profits.  We have the oligarchs of big publishing on the other hand, who tell writers that these self-publishing venues are exploitive, that they encourage substandard work, that they upset the status quo, that they are not part of the traditional pattern of things.  It reminds me of the reaction of guilds of scribes after Gutenberg invented printing and moveable type.  Amazon is obviously and blatantly inclusive, while traditional publishing has always been exclusive and extractive, taking as many rights from authors that they possibly can while paying them as little as possible.  Apart from a few big-name authors who receive big advances, authors in a publishing company’s stable function as serfs, enduring the hard work of creation while passing on the bulk of the profits to overseers.

If this was all that was happening, however, it would not account for traditional publishing’s extreme reactions in the face of self-publishing.  After all, one would think, why should they care if people self-publish their books?  Traditional publishers posit that those works will get lost in a crowd of other works and come to nothing anyway.

But there is another extremely vital factor at work, and it is the reason that scribe guilds rose up against Gutenberg, and why the Luddites in England rose up against the Industrial Revolution.  It is what the authors of this book call creative destruction.  In an inclusive economic system, new technologies and innovations do not exist amicably together side by side with the old.  The new inevitably destroys or alters the old.  That’s why traditional publishing companies and authors who make their livings off the old system of publishing are up in arms against self-publishing and all the changes it brings about.  They see old facades and structures crumbling around them as the new systems assert themselves.  Change does not allow the intact preservation of the old.  Although inclusive economies may mean more prosperity for more people, the extractive elite inevitably lose out as the wealth becomes better distributed.  Since their prosperity is built on exploitation and exclusivity, if they want to retain their positions at the top of the pyramid they can do nothing else than fight back against the technologies that threaten them.  They could, theoretically, embrace the new technologies and welcome the changes, but it’s unusual throughout history for extractive institutions to do so, because by their nature they pander to a pampered elite.

I don’t think that self-publishing will completely destroy traditional publishing, but I do think that drastic changes to the publishing landscape are inevitable and irrevocable.  There’s no going back.  And the harder institutions and individuals fight against innovations, the harder it is for them to adapt and benefit from them.  When extractive institutions fall, they often fall hard and fast because of their lack of resiliency and flexibility.  They can’t bend in a storm, so they break.  The only way to grow is to embrace creative destruction, not attempt to forestall or avoid it.  What the authors of the book call historical critical junctures arise from time to time; institutions that have brought themselves to a point in which they are open to progress benefit, while others shatter or decay.

Analogies are not always precise or all-encompassing, and the complexity of social, political, and financial situations precludes neatly describing them in a few catchphrases, but these thoughts might help bring things into slightly better focus.

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Book Review: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2105 edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams

Posted on December 5, 2015 by John Walters

I picked up this anthology recently when I went to check out the new physical Amazon book store in University Village shopping mall in Seattle.  I had heard through the online short story market grapevine that Adams was soliciting story submissions for a new series of year’s best anthologies, but I didn’t realize until I bought this that it’s the first entry in the science fiction and fantasy category in the larger “Best American” ongoing collections, which include Best American Short Stories, Mystery Stories, Essays, Travel Writing, Sports Writing, and so on.

To make the final selections, Adams perused the thousands of science fiction and fantasy stories published in 2014 and culled his favorites down to a list of eighty possibilities.  He then sent copies of the eighty stories to Joe Hill with the authors’ names removed, and Joe Hill read them all and chose the twenty he liked best as the final entrants in this volume.

Now of course a best of the year anthology is like any other anthology or magazine that selects an elite amount of finalists from thousands of possibilities.  It does not, of course, mean that these stories are the definitive best of the year, only that they are the stories that were the editors’ personal favorites.  There are a number of best of the year anthologies every year in the science fiction and fantasy field, and the stories seldom match volume to volume, because editors have different tastes.

As with any anthology, I found some of the stories to be superlative, some to be readable, some to be rather poor, and a few to be boring and all but unreadable.  I won’t go into criticizing the poor stories, because I have no inclination to discourage the writers.  Some of the stories I find excellent are “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawaii” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, about the social implications of an army of vampires conquering the world; Each to Each by Seanan McGuire, about a submarine crew of women mutated into mermaids to become more efficient sailors in the U.S. Navy; How the Marquis Got His Coat Back by Neil Gaiman, a bizarre fantasy set in the London Below universe from his “Neverwhere” novel; and “The Bad Graft” by Karen Russell, about a woman who becomes possessed by the spirit of a Joshua tree.

Some of the stories that I didn’t much care for appeared initially in slick literary magazines, and they struck me as similar to those that were innovative back in the 1960s and 1970s but have by now been done to death.  They are presented in polished language but bring nothing new to classics stories in their various subgenres.

Overall, I found the story quality no better or worse than in similar anthologies I have read recently.  What I did appreciate and find interesting, though, was the process of blind final selection by alternating editors.  Although Adams will continue to be the series editor and make initial selections, he plans to choose different editors each year to come up with the final choices.  This process, along with the opportunity to read some of the better new work in the field and the inexpensive price will probably encourage me to read more volumes in this series as they come out.  You’re never going to find an anthology that prompts bells and whistles from every story reading every time unless you edit it yourself, but I’ve found I can get something constructive from all the stories, good and bad.  The good ones will give me a great reading experience, and the bad ones will show me how not to do it – that is, cause me to analyze what’s wrong so I can avoid making the same mistakes.

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Book Review: The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany

Posted on November 29, 2015 by John Walters

I went to a Halloween party held by a local writers group and among the festivities was a book exchange.  I brought a suitably creepy Stephen King novel and came away with this one.  “The Ballad of Beta 2” is not a novel, actually, but a fairly short novella.  Delany wrote it before he broke out of the pack with award winners such as “Babel 17,” and “The Einstein Intersection.”

It’s not a remarkable novella, actually.  It’s a fairly standard deep space adventure; neither the character nor the plot have any of the sophistication of work that Delany was soon to unleash.  It’s an early career effort that might not even find a publisher nowadays.  It reminded me of some of the early works I have read by Silverberg and Ellison and some of the others who became rising stars in the late 1960s.  They all went through a period of writing adequate, pedestrian stories before they broke out and found their own unique voices.  About the only one I can think of who came out of the mold full-blown brilliant was Roger Zelazny, who dazzled the science fiction universe right off the bat with his masterpiece “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” way back in 1962.  Ah, wait.  There was also Cordwainer Smith, whose first published story, “Scanners Live in Vain,” now considered one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, was rejected by all the major magazines and was finally published without payment in a small press periodical.  But most of them paid their dues by writing mediocre penny-a-word pulp at a prodigious rate before creating their masterpieces.

So “The Ballad of Beta 2” is readable and entertaining but otherwise unremarkable.  What I found interesting, though, was the publishing circumstances that made this print edition possible.  As I said, I don’t think it would be published like this today.  It’s a slim little volume with large print put out by Ace Books.  I’m surprised, considering its size, that they didn’t tack it onto one of those strange Ace Doubles.  Perhaps it’s the wrong era.  You might find tiny novellas like this independently published nowadays, but the big publishers steer clear of them, generally opting for thick bloated tomes to make readers think that they’re getting their money’s worth.  The thing is, a lot of the great classic award-winning books were short, around 50,000 words or so, back in the 1960s and 1970s.  Publishers allowed writers to tell stories at the length they needed to be told, rather than insisting on stuffing them with fluff to fill them out to higher word counts.  Literature lost something when publishers began demanding that every novel had to be a telephone book sized doorstopper.

Which brings us to self-publishing, come to think.  Before I lament the state of traditional publishing too much, I should remember that it’s no longer the only game in town.  Writers can publish their own works and set their own rules.  A lot of writer have taken to the novella or short novel length.  I’ve published several novellas myself as self-contained works in my series “The One Thousand.” And my recent novels such as “Caliban’s Children” and “The Fantasy Book Murders” come in at about 50,000 words each.  It’s a thrill to be able to let the work itself dictate its length rather than a suit in an office making accounting decisions.

Another interesting thing about this edition of “The Ballad of Beta 2” is its simplistic copyright page.  None of the fancy stuff that appears in modern books, just a simple statement that it’s a work copyrighted in 1965.  And in the publisher’s name, not the author’s.  At least that’s not common corporate habit anymore, to seize the copyright from the author right out of the starting gate.  Admittedly contracts with major publishers are still horrendous, with the publishers trying to seize as many rights as they can for as little money as they have to pay, but at least copyrights are usually registered in the names of the authors.  And again, it highlights a difference with self-publishing, where the author holds all the rights and fully controls his own career.

Just a few musings while pondering this paperback edition from years gone by.

*     *     *

I found out through trusty Wikipedia that “The Ballad of Beta 2” did originally appear as the flip-side of an Ace Double in 1965 and didn’t appear as a single edition book, which is the book I obtained, until 1971.  The copyright page makes no mention of this.  By 1971, Delany had already won four Nebula awards and one Hugo award, which would have convinced the Ace editors that such a slim, spare book might sell on its own.

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Book Review: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

Posted on November 22, 2015 by John Walters

This book is not only fascinating, exciting, surprising, adventurous, eye-opening, invigorating, and educating but it’s well-written too.  You’ve heard of Alexander Dumas, of course, the author who wrote “The Three Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and other tales of adventure; well, this book is the true story of his father Alex Dumas’s adventures upon which so many of the younger Dumas’s stories are based.  Reiss dove into an incredible amount of research to dig up this tale, and it was worth the effort.

The novelist Dumas’s grandfather was an aristocratic Frenchman who moved to the French colony in the Caribbean that encompasses what is now called Haiti and took a black mistress.  Alex Dumas was their son, a dark-skinned mulatto, half white French and half black Haitian slave woman.  Although he was born free, he spent a brief time as a slave before his father brought him to France and gave him an aristocratic upbringing and education.  It was a narrow window through which Alex Dumas leapt, as in the European countries all around blacks were kept as slaves, but in revolutionary France, for a brief period of time, they were freed and given the equal rights of all French people.

As a young man, Alex Dumas received a generous allowance from his father as he pursued his education and enjoyed the frivolities of Paris.  There came a time, though, when he enlisted in the French army as a dragoon, a common foot soldier, though with his aristocratic background he could have had an officer’s commission.  He was tall, broad-shouldered, and strong, and had been trained as a swordsman at one of the finest academies in Paris, and he quickly excelled and received promotion after promotion.  During one of his tours of duty he met the white Frenchwoman who became his wife and the mother of Dumas the novelist.

The book discusses the political background of France at the time in some depth to explain the extraordinary opportunity Alex Dumas had to excel and rise in rank.  With his battle prowess and intelligence he was a natural leader and hero.  France wanted to export its revolution to other European lands and set its armies out on conquests.  Dumas led his troops to victory after victory and found himself eventually promoted to general at the head of an entire army.  During the Italian campaign he began to run afoul of a young ambitious Corsican upstart named Napoleon, but he conducted himself so brilliantly that even Napoleon was forced into begrudging praise.

The next expedition was Napoleon’s disastrous journey to Egypt.  Dumas again excelled and proved himself a worthy leader, but Napoleon’s fleet was destroyed and the Egyptian campaign turned into an expensive fiasco.  Dumas left Egypt with a few other officers, only to encounter a Mediterranean storm aboard a leaking vessel.  They were forced to make port in southern Italy, which was held by enemies, and Dumas was arrested and imprisoned for two years.  It was this experience that inspired his son to write about the fictional Count of Monte Cristo and his terrible ordeal in a forgotten dungeon.

When Dumas was finally freed, his vigorous health was broken and France had changed.  The revolution was over.  Napoleon had taken over as dictator and had begun to create all sorts of new laws curtailing the freedoms of blacks and mulattos.  Dumas and his wife and children found themselves poverty-stricken, unable to claim the pension that Dumas was due.  It was discovered that he was very ill, with cancer as the author of the book relates, and he died forgotten and penniless at the age of forty.  Although his widow petitioned his old military friends and colleagues, Napoleon himself had given instructions that nothing was to be done for his family.  The novelist Alexander Dumas, along with his mother and sibling, grew up in poverty, and he was unable to afford a secondary education, but his talent as a writer brought him wealth and international fame.

This is a true story as exciting as any historical novel you might possibly find.  A great read.  Highly recommended.

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An Encounter With the Amazon Book Store

Posted on November 14, 2015 by John Walters

There are advantages to living in Seattle.  The first ever brick-and-mortar physical Amazon bookstore opened here recently in the University Village shopping mall near the University of Washington, and late on a rainy Saturday morning I had a chance to go check it out.

It’s not large as bookstores go.  I’ve been in some Barnes & Noble stores, especially in New York, that dwarf it.  But the beautiful thing about it is, apart from some displays of e-reading devices, it has books – only books.  And the books are all displayed with the covers facing outward, making the book browsing experience wonderfully simple and relaxing.  The selection of several thousand titles is culled by Amazon from the millions that it sells online by sales and reviewers’ ratings, meaning that you’re getting some very good, tried and true selections indeed.

As you enter the store, the nonfiction is on the right and the fiction on the left.  These are broken down into subcategories such as biography, history, society, cookbooks, art, and so on for nonfiction and all the various genres in fiction.  Straight ahead in the back is a special children’s section with books arranged on shelves according to age categories.  Just outside of the children’s section to the left is a young adults section.  In the center of the store are the displays of Kindle and Kindle Fire devices of various sizes and grades, all turned on so that customers can try them out.  There are also an abundance of stools, benches, and chairs where customers can relax and peruse their finds, and the restrooms are spotlessly clean, practically gleaming.

The books don’t have prices, but there’s a good reason for this.  The prices are linked to the online Amazon store, so that you pay the exact same price for the book that you would if you bought it online.  There are scanning terminals located throughout the shop so you can scan the barcodes of the books you are interested in to find out how much you would pay for it.  The pricing system is brilliant and compelling.  Were I to go into any other physical bookstore, I would pay almost twice as much for the books I selected, or go out with half as many books, because I would pay full retail price.  This way I get the best of both worlds:  Amazon savings and the fun of browsing at a physical bookstore.  As I looked over the covers, I continually recognized well-known titles that I have meant to read but haven’t gotten around to yet.  Amazon’s method of selection ensures that the most desirable books are right there in your face.

Why would Amazon go to such trouble and expense?  After all, they already run the biggest bookstore in the world online without the trouble of maintaining a physical location.  Personally, I don’t think it’s some sort of all-encompassing leap from virtual to physical.  It’s an experiment, like much of what Amazon does.  If today’s crowd is any indication, it’s a great success.  The place was full of book browsers, and it’s likely to get even more popular as the holiday season approaches.  But that’s not the point.  As I said, Amazon doesn’t need to go physical to make money.

This is a science fictional idea, as if the virtual Amazon book world stretched forth and conceptualized itself in physical form.  It’s like an amusement park for book lovers, everything you always wanted in a bookstore:  easy browsing, great selection, and unbeatable prices.  I might also add:  clean environment, efficient organization, and friendly and abundant salespeople.

Whether Amazon has the intention of expanding the idea into other cities I don’t know.  If it does, and it selects the cities and locations wisely, the additional shops will probably also become immensely popular.  If it doesn’t, this singular store will become a magnet for book lovers whenever they are in the Pacific Northwest.

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After the Fireflood

Posted on November 8, 2015 by John Walters

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My new novel “After the Fireflood” is available in print and electronic form here.

It’s a series of interrelated stories set in the future. Here’s what it’s about:

During the Fourth World War, the entire Earth is engulfed in a torrent of fire, transforming the landscape and obliterating all life.  Using terraforming, time travel, and other expediencies, human survivors from Moonbase and the outer colonies attempt to cope with their devastating loss, reconstruct the Earth’s surface, and reorganize Earth sociologically to ensure lasting peace, while others plot to claim the pristine reconstituted planet for their own purposes.

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Book Review: 21st Century Science Fiction Edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Posted on October 31, 2015 by John Walters

This is a good anthology.  It’s an effort to showcase the work of science fiction and fantasy writers who have made their mark on the field since the beginning of the 21st century, and for the most part it succeeds.

That’s not to say that all the stories are good.  Some are excellent, some are fairly good, some are merely passable, some are not really stories at all but merely info-dumps of ideas, and a few – one in particular – was so boring that though I was loathe to skip ahead (I almost never skip parts of books) I was crying out inside as I read, “Make it stop!  Oh, please, make it stop!”

The overall impression I get from the collection, though, is that it’s a solid, well-thought-out presentation of representative stories.  I not only had some great reading experiences with some of the tales, but I was able to catch overall trends of what has interested speculative writers in the last decade or so.

The first story, “Infinities,” by Vandana Singh, is superlative.  First published in India, it tells the story of a mathematician obsessed with number theories who uses them to achieve entry into an alternate universe.  “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I had read before in another anthology, deals with the media obsession with non-news and contrived news, but it works because of the depth of the main characters.  “Erosion” by Ian Creasey tells of a crisis an augmented human goes through on Earth before his trip to a far interstellar colony. “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear is the story of an unlikely relationship between a damaged war machine and a scavenging boy along a beach in a post apocalyptic world.  “Finisterra” by David Moles has unique, mind-boggling, and very cool alien life forms large enough for towns of humans and aliens to live on them flying high in the atmosphere on a giant planet.  These are just samples of some of the many absorbing stories in this extensive anthology.

The editors do a good job of introducing the authors and hinting at the themes of the stories without giving too much away in the introductions.

I think this type of collection is valuable, especially for libraries, to preserve stories that might otherwise lapse into obscurity after electronic or paper magazine distribution and to provide readers with a glimpse into the diversity of the wonderful world of science fiction.  I have libraries to thank for much of my early introduction to the science fiction field – and I was especially drawn to anthologies of shorter works.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an anthology of which all of the stories pleased me.  There were always some I liked more than others, some I was drawn to and would read over and over, and others that just didn’t connect with me.  Overall, though, I would say that this anthology as a whole works as an introduction to a number of important authors and a diverting piece of entertainment.  It hits more than it misses.  It was particularly valuable for me, as it was my first introduction to the work of many of these authors.  I admit that I tend to favor science fiction from back in the late sixties and early seventies – the so-called new wave era – as that is when I cut my teeth in the field both as a writer and as a reader.  It’s not just nostalgia, though.  I think there was a vibrancy back then that is missing in much of today’s work, a trend towards experimentation and expanding the limits of the genre.  I saw some daring work in this anthology, but not much.  It sticks mainly to classic themes.  That’s not a criticism, just an observation.  The field could stand some shaking up.  This anthology provides some tremors.  I’m waiting for the earthquake.

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Who’s My Enemy?

Posted on October 25, 2015 by John Walters

The tendency of human nature is to place blame when things go wrong, or even if things don’t go as right as you would like them to.  I’m not as successful as I’d like to be as a writer.  I produce good novels, stories, memoirs.  Therefore it must be someone else’s fault, right?  I fall into this pit more often than I’d like to admit, but recently I pondered the situation and came to some conclusions that helped me relax and gain better overall perspective.

First of all, are magazine and anthology editors my enemies?  After all, they reject my stories more often than I would sometimes care to admit.  Sometimes they don’t give any explanation either.  Sometimes one editor rejects a piece and then the next editor accepts it with glowing complements; so the first editor must be crazy, unintelligent, or sadistic, right?  Wrong.  Editors have many reasons for rejecting stories, and some of them have nothing to do with story quality.  They may reject them because the stories do not fit the theme or ambiance of the magazine or anthology, or because they received too many similarly-themed stories lately, or the story is good but it’s just not their particular cup of coffee or tea.  Editors are individuals with singular tastes and inclinations.  Just because an editor rejects your work doesn’t mean the work lacks merit.  That’s why it’s so important to keep stories on the market until they sell.  Perusing my submissions log, I see that it’s common for my stories to hit ten to twenty markets before selling.  I’ve also sold stories the first time out.  You just never know.  But editors are not my enemies; they are my allies.  When my stories fit their editorial guidelines, strike their fancies, and they have slots for them, they publish them, granting me both a paycheck and publicity.  Editors need writers just as writers need editors.  It’s a symbiotic relationship.

All right, I’ll let editors off the hook.  Maybe it’s the readers’ faults.  Are readers my enemies?  No, not at all.  I need readers and they need me too.  They crave good stories, and I need someone to read my stories.  Even those who post mediocre or poor reviews are not my enemies.  I’m a reader too, and I don’t appreciate everything I read; I have to admit that I usually avoid posting bad reviews unless as a warning or there’s something for others to learn from the situation, because as a writer I understand how discouraging bad reviews can be, but I’m not going to get all bent out of shape if someone says they don’t appreciate my work.  Writers and readers are in a human relationship, and not all relationships work if they are randomly matched.  They usually work best if people have something in common.  Readers are not always turned on by every writer’s work, even if it’s good work.  People make choices, have preferences.  One problem here is obscurity.  Many readers might appreciate my work if they could find it.  That’s not their fault.  Readers are not my enemies.  I need readers; they are who it’s all for.

Perhaps other writers are my enemies.  After all, how dare they become more successful than I am, often with much less effort.  They must be cheating in some way, right?  No.  In fact, I have found the writing community overwhelmingly supportive.  I have never heard of any other occupation where there is such a sense of camaraderie and willingness to assist newcomers in learning the ropes.  Almost all writers realize what a tough game it is and are willing to extend a helping hand.  They are not in competition with each other.  Especially with the advent of the self-publishing platform, there is room and opportunity enough for all.  Other writers are my friends and colleagues.

Then the enemy must be…  Myself.  It’s the logical conclusion to come to.  If it’s no one else’s fault, it must be mine.  I must be doing something wrong, or perhaps I have no talent or am not cut out for this.  Well, admittedly this one is the hardest to shake.  I know myself so well it’s easy for me to come up with all sorts of excuses, shortcomings, laziness, procrastinations, weaknesses, and deep dark sins that can justify my lack of success as a writer.  I think these ogres are what keep writers up at night and cause them to despair more than any others.  But honestly, I’m trying as hard as I can.  I began decades ago.  The reason I set out on the road in the 1970s was to find my voice as a writer.  I have continued learning and growing and producing through a lot of traumatic and trying experiences.  Sometimes I despair, yes, but I have never quit – at least since I took up the torch again about two decades ago after abandoning it for a while due to unavoidable life circumstances.  I do my best.  The scene in “Good Will Hunting” comes to mind when Robin Williams tells Matt Damon over and over again, “It’s not your fault.”  Writers, it’s not your fault that you’re not as successful as you planned or hoped – at least if you’ve been giving it your best shot.  You just have to continue to persevere in spite of outward circumstances, in spite of the odds.  As long as you keep writing, as long as you continue to strive for your goals until you attain them or die trying, you are a success.  After all, there’s no ultimate goal except to express ourselves.  We write because we must.  We can’t not write.  All the rest, the rejections, the acceptances, the fame, the money, whatever, are the fluff and filling, the stops along the way, the bright lights, the dark tunnels, the road signs; they are not the road itself.  As writers, we are not on journeys that have ultimate destinations; we are on the road forever.

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Book Review: Grumbles From the Grave by Robert A. Heinlein, Edited by Virginia Heinlein

Posted on October 18, 2015 by John Walters

I had never heard about this book before I came across it while browsing at the Seattle Friends of the Library book sale, but I had certainly heard of the author.  Even before I took a science fiction literature class during my year at Santa Clara University, decided I wanted to be a writer, and began avidly reading science fiction, I had heard of Heinlein.

My first encounter was through a boxed set of Heinlein novels that my maternal grandmother gave me one year for Christmas.  I don’t remember all the titles, but the terrific adventure of a community of people with a genetic predisposition towards longevity escaping into space “Methuselah’s Children” was one of them.  I don’t know if I’ve ever read it since then, but some of the exciting sequences are imprinted in my mind as freshly as when I read it as a young teen.  There was also the creepy horror alien invasion novel “The Puppet Masters,” which was scary enough to be memorable.  Yes, Heinlein had quite an impact on me at an early age.

But it was nothing compared to what happened when, as an older teen, I read “Stranger in a Strange Land.”  What an experience!  It was adventurous and awesome and mind-expanding and risqué and flamboyant and wonderful.  I have read it several times since, but I still have a vivid memory of how it felt to read parts of it for the first time.  It became one of my germinal coming-of-age books, fitting in as it did with the hippy counterculture in which I was becoming enmeshed.  It’s still one of my favorite novels of all time, although I prefer the shorter version which was the only one available for decades to the longer “uncut” version that was recently released.  I’ve already written about that elsewhere, so onward.

Heinlein died in 1988, and his wife Virginia published this book in 1989.  He had planned a book of his letters with this title while he was still alive, but never got around to creating it.

The letters are not chronological, but rather divided into sections according to subjects, such as his beginnings as a writer in the early pulps, his sales to slick magazines, his juvenile novels, his adult novels, writing, house building, traveling, and more.  The last two sections are devoted to the writing of “Stranger in a Strange Land” and the literary world’s reaction to it.

Although Heinlein refused to rewrite his work unless guided by an editor who had already bought it, he did a great deal of cutting and polishing before releasing his novels.  These letters though, are rough-edged, but that is not to say they are not erudite.  They are a fascinating behind the scenes look at his interactions with his agent, his editors, and others with whom he communicated professionally.  It never lags; it never bores.  Even the bits about his household and cats and intricacies of constructing his homes from scratch are interesting.

Every writer is different, of course.  To attempt to search for patterns in the lives of such an idiosyncratic group as writers is an exercise in crazy-making.  Some writers, like Jack London for example, struggle in poverty before achieving success, but with Heinlein it was different.  He sold a story in his first shot to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction back when it was the most prestigious science fiction market.  He subsequently sold almost everything he wrote, and so had little tolerance for self-failure, often threatening to quit writing if his terms were not met.  In that way I couldn’t much relate to him, as I have had to scrape and struggle every inch of the way for my own meager successes as a writer.  He made a lot of money off his work, and attracted swarms of devoted fans without trying to cultivate them.  In fact, he often got fed up with all the uninvited guests, obscure and famous, that continually appeared at his door, especially after the publication of “Stranger in a Strange Land.”  In his later years, burdened by one illness after another, he was forced to slow down, so that most of the correspondence in the book is from the 1960s and earlier.

Like I said, it’s a collection of letters so the prose is not great art, but I still recommend the book as a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes in the life of a great writer.

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