Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  It is an unfortunate coincidence that the idea we call global warming has followed this exact path. And to make sure you are clear on this I'm going to repeat each of the basic human desires I mentioned earlier but with the words "global warming" inserted in the description.

  (1) Money. It is unfortunate that there has been so much money to be made in writing books and articles which support the idea of global warming because that makes each of the writer's motivations appear suspicious. It is also unfortunate that audiences will pay money to hear speeches and lectures and seminars supporting the idea of global warming because that makes the speaker's motivations appear suspicious.

  (2) Fame. It is unfortunate that it has been so easy to get on TV by supporting the idea of global warming because that makes the motivations of those on TV appear suspicious.

  (3) And it is most unfortunate of all that believing in global warming is now required in order to be part of the "in" crowd because that makes every believer's motivations appear suspicious.

  Mind you, none of these unfortunate things can change whether or not global warming is real. None of them have any bearing upon reality. They can only affect our perceptions of reality. But since all the decisions we make and all the actions we take hinge on our perceptions, it is our perceptions that control our future.

  And it is grossly unfortunate that there have been so many reasons to be skeptical of something so well documented scientifically and so crucial to the long term stability of our civilization.

  * * *

  Revealed Falsehoods

  Written by Mike Resnick

  Over the past century, the giants of science fiction have occasionally written a line or two that somehow survives them and their work, and is eventually viewed by most members of the field as a Revealed Truth.

  Being a natural-born cynic (well, Caesarian actually, but let it pass), I'm here to tell you that Truth, revealed or otherwise, never set anyone free. It is Doubt that sets people free.

  You think not? Let's examine some of these truths that science fiction readers and writers seem to think are immutable.

  And let's start with one that even non-science-fiction people like to quote: Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics, which states that a robot cannot harm a human being, or through inaction allow harm to come to a human being.

  Sounds sensible. Of course we'll build that into every robot we ever make. Everyone knows that.

  Uh. . .well, maybe not quite everyone. Seems to me that in 1991, the entire world saw a smart bomb, which is nothing but a robot in other-than-humanoid form, find its way down an Iraqi chimney. In 2003, we saw the Navy fire a smart bomb into the air while at sea, and the bomb, using its (non-positronic) brain, found its target 450 miles away.

  So much for First Law.

  Then there's TANSTAAFL – the war cry of fans in the 1960s and 1970s, which was Robert A. Heinlein's acronym for "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", a battle cry voiced in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

  But of course it's ridiculous. There are free lunch programs all the hell over. Check your local school. Or look at New York, where Mayor Michael Blumberg has just proposed not only free lunches, but cash payments to poor people who don't break the law, to parents who actually read their kids' report cards, to kids who obey the law by attending school, and so on.

  If there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, it's only because it's been surpassed by a couple of hundred more lucrative free things.

  Okay, let's go back to one of the fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells. Wells explained, time and again, that the proper way to write science fiction was to take one, and only one, scientific breakthrough and write a story around it, that the public couldn't possibly buy more than one a book.

  Sounds logical . . . but it's dumb. It presupposes that the 1950s public couldn't deal with, say, jet planes, television, and the Salk polio vaccine at the same time, or that no 1990s story proposing space flight, cell phones, AIDS medications, and DVDs could be assimilated by the man (or reader) on the street.

  And another revealed truth bites the dust.

  Sir Arthur C. Clarke states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The only answer is: to whom? Not to the people who create it. Not to the people who apply it. Not to all the people who benefit from it. (I love the late George Alec Effinger's response to reading about faster-than-light drives and zap guns and all the other tropes of science fiction that some misguided authors feel they must explain, at length, in their stories: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.")

  Then there's Damon Knight's classic definition of science fiction: "Science fiction is what I'm pointing at when I say 'That's science fiction.'"

  Witty as all get-out. Great line at parties. But I've been hearing it quoted as something meaningful for more than four decades now. Let's try an experiment: substitute the word "Jabberwocky" or any other nonsense word of your choice. Seems just as brilliant (and just an uninformative), doesn't it?

  Then there's Robert E. Howard's classic and oft-quoted line (though of course Nietzsche said it first): "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Sure sounds good. But maybe you should ask a quadriplegic car crash survivor, or someone who's just lost a lung and a kidney to cancer, if they think they're any stronger because of what didn't kill them.

  Sturgeon's Law—"90% of everything is crap"—is so famous that even the New York Times has quoted it. I'd have no problem with it if it were limited to television, movies, and Windows Vista, but it's all-inclusive, and your brain would surely qualify for Sturgeon's 90% if you believed 90% of all medical and technological breakthroughs (or Baen books, for that matter) were crap.

  Back to Isaac Asimov, whose second most famous statement is "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent." Which may very well be true, but doesn't acknowledge the far more meaningful corollary, which is that the competent don't wait that long.

  I'm sure you can think of more of science fiction's Revealed Falsehoods and Half-Truths, but you get the idea. Even in a field as cerebral and forward-looking as ours, we pay lip service to a lot of lines that sound brilliant but hold about as much water as a sieve.

  So the next time someone comes up to you and proves how brilliant we are by quoting an unquestioned statement by one of our leading lights, make sure you're within reach of the saltcellar, because you're going to have to take what they tell you with a few grains of sodium chloride.

  * * *

  The Economics of Writing

  Written by Eric Flint

  I ended my last essay by posing the two major objections to the policy of using free or cheap online distribution of an author's works as a promotional method, which I both advocate and practice personally.

  So, in my next essays, I will deal with the two most important—and rational, let me say—objections to my approach to the problem.

  The first is this:

  What might work for one author, won't work if all of them do it. To put it another way, it may be true that if a few authors use free or cheap distribution online of their work it rebounds to their advantage, because it helps them penetrate the opacity of the book market. But if all authors did it, that same opacity would close down again—except that the level of income of all authors would have been lowered in the process . . .

  Similarly, so the argument goes, if a few authors start handing out their work for free, because they get an immediate promotional benefit from doing do, sooner or later all authors will be forced to do it simply in order to compete—and all authors will see an overall decline in their income. Including the scab idiot who started the ball rolling, because he was too short-sighted to see the inevitable end result.

  Both argument are closely related, and both of them—even if the proponents don't realize it—are based on making an analogy between an author's labor and the kind of wage labor which can be and often is organized by trade unions. The arguments amount to sayin
g that an author who hands out his or her work online for free is the equivalent of a scab, a strike-breaker.

  Let me begin by disposing of the obvious rejoinder to these arguments, which is that authors are not on strike to begin with, so how can an author be breaking a non-existent strike? That's true, of course, but it's also begging the question a little. The underlying argument, whether there's a strike going on or not, is that a worker who agrees to work for less than the prevailing wage in a given industry is in effect lowering the wages for every worker in that industry.

  This is true enough, and it's the reason some trade unionists will routinely refer to anybody who works in a non-union job in a given industry as "scab labor." I disagree with that usage of the term myself, and did so during the quarter of a century I spent as a trade union activist. Quite strongly, in fact. But my disagreement doesn't stem from a different assessment of the net effect of non-union labor. The ridiculous and none-too-hard-to-figure-out-who's-paying-for-it claims of "right to work" advocates notwithstanding, it's a simple fact—which anyone can check for themselves quite easily—that states with "right to work" laws typically have lower wages and benefits for labor in any given industry than states without such anti-labor laws. Often, much lower wages and benefits.

  The reason I disagreed with the usage was because I felt and still do that the underlying problem was and is the continuing default of the labor movement, whose overly paid and usually bureaucratic leadership is generally sluggish and inept at the task of organizing trade unions in non-union shops. So, the charge that non-union labor, as such, is "scab labor" is simply a dishonest way of covering up their own failings. It's a variant of the old sour grapes defense mocked by Aesop in one of his fables: "Ah, that labor is scab labor anyway."

  Still, coming back from the digression, we're left with the underlying issue. Whether or not non-union workers who agree to work for lower wages than union workers deserve the pejorative term "scab"—which they don't, if there's no actual strike-breaking taking place—it's still a fact that non-union labor generally lowers the wages and benefits in any given industry.

  (Yes, yes, yes, there are some exceptions—but, on closer look, even those exceptions typically disappear. The most common reason, by far, that some non-union companies pay wages and benefits that are equal to or even better than union shops, is simply to keep the union out. The owners or management are willing to pay what amounts to a premium so they don't have to deal with trade unions in their ongoing operations. Fine and dandy. But if the trade unions were to suddenly disappear, those high wages and benefits would drop like a stone.)

  That being the case, why wouldn't the principle apply to what I'm proposing? In other words,. why wouldn't a generalized policy of handing out many works for free online, applied by many authors, produce over time a decline in the overall compensation for writing fiction as a form of labor? It seems obvious, after all, that if customers know they can get fiction for free, they will be increasingly unwilling to pay for it; or, if they are, won't be willing to pay as much as they did before.

  Yes, the argument seems obvious—but it's just as obviously wrong. In fact, it's as full of holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese.

  Let's start with the most basic problem with the analogy between authors and wage laborers. It's simple: With the exception of authors who work on a work-for-hire basis, authors are not wage laborers to begin with.

  People often ask me what I like most about being able to make a living as a full-time writer, working entirely for royalties. (I.e., I do no writing on a work-for-hire basis.)

  Most of the time, I think they expect me to respond along the lines of: "It's nice doing creative work that I enjoy." And, indeed, that's my second reason for enjoying my occupation. But it's not the first reason, not by a long shot. First, because it wouldn't be true anyway. The notion that "non-creative" work is dull and tedious is often wrong on all three counts. True enough, some non-creative labor is genuinely dull and tedious. I can well remember working in an auto forge in Detroit running a trim press. My job, all day, consisted of punching out the auto parts made in the steam hammer whose crew I was part of. In the summer, in temperatures that often exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, joy. I also spent several years working in the meatpacking industry, usually at jobs that were every bit as dull and repetitious and sometimes just as hard.

  But much "non-creative" labor is not only not dull and tedious, it's very far from being "non-creative" in the first place. Nor do you have to ascend to the rarified heights of being a rocket scientist to discover that fact. To give a personal example again, I spent many years as a skilled machinist, usually operating a horizontal or vertical boring mill and often doing highly complex and challenging work. Anybody who thinks such labor is simply rote labor and doesn't require a great deal of intelligence and, yes, creativity, is either a fool or a snob or both.

  Granted, the work I do now is more interesting to me. But the main reason I love being a full-time writer is as crude and simple as it gets:

  I don't have a boss. I don't have to punch a time clock. As long as I produce sufficient work of good enough quality for my customers at reasonably regular intervals—which is a given for almost anybody who works for a living—my time is my own and I answer to nobody.

  Or, to put it as simply as possible, I am not a wage-laborer any more.

  In narrowly economic terms, in fact, I am a small independent businessman. Granted, it's a one-person business and I employ no laborers of my own. But that's not particularly unique to writers. There are lots of one-person businesses in the world.

  That being the case, it's not only fallacious but even dishonest for writers to try to use an analogy between themselves and wage-laborers. The analogy washes over—tries to, rather—the essential and critical difference.

  The reason wage-laborers generally need a trade union is because, as a rule, their labor is interchangeable. That's true even in cases where the labor itself is very highly skilled or in short supply. Even the most skilled machinist—or airline pilot or air traffic controller, to use another example—can be replaced. Not easily, perhaps, but they can be in a pinch.

  So, if you allow unregulated competition between workers, you will invariably see an overall decline in wages and benefits. And if anyone doesn't believe me, I can only shrug my shoulders and recommend you study the history of economic relations over the last quarter of millennium, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who doesn't have an ax to grind.

  My labor today, however, is not interchangeable. I don't get paid by an employer in the first place. For a writer, a publisher is not a boss—even if he or she typically only publishes through one house. What the publisher houses actually are is a service that the author contracts with to produce and distribute their work. But an author's income doesn't come from the publisher. It comes from sales of the author's work, the proceeds of which are divided between the author and a publishing house according to specific terms laid out in a contract for a specific book.

  In short, my income derives from royalties, not wages. Those royalties, in turn, derive from sales of my books to my customers—or "fans," as customers are normally referred to in the entertainment industries. The ultimate economic relationship is between me and my fans, and no one else. All the other parties involved in the process—publishers, distributors, retail outlets—are simply intermediaries.

  An author's fan base may be large or small. In my case, it's large enough to enable me to make a full-time living from sales of my books. In the case of most authors, it's not. In fact, it's not even close. Most published authors derive only incidental income from their writing, and even most writers who get published regularly don't make enough from sales of their work to be able to make a living as full-time writers.

  It's that fact, of course, that gives so many authors the illusion that they are comparable to wage-laborers. But they're confusing a general relationship of e
conomic power—"clout," to use a slang term—with the specific relationship between wage-laborer and employer. Yes, it's true that because most authors don't sell very well, that publishing houses can often push them around or dispense with their services altogether. They don't always behave that way, mind you. There are plenty of cases of publishing houses who actually go out of their way to keep an author in print even thought they don't sell particularly well, at least for a while. But it's certainly true, especially in the modern era where publishing is dominated by giant corporations instead of being—as it was in decades past—an industry dominated by independent houses, that it's far more common for low-selling authors to be given short shrift by their publishers.

  Being blunt, so what? The same is true in any entertainment industry. For every movie star who can pull in millions of dollars for making one film—who can, in fact, more or less make or break that film—there are thousands of part-time actors scrabbling at the edges. For every top athlete making millions of dollars a year, there are thousands scrabbling at the edges. For every top-selling popular singer or musician, the same is true.