Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Happy New Year! Sort-of, ish. – by Alma Boykin

The sun is shifting farther and farther south, shortening the days and lengthening the nights. The geese are flocking south, with a few Sandhill cranes following. Athena T. Cat has moved from the front couch to the master bedroom and now reposes on my bed, toasting her toes in the afternoon sun that spills under the deep eves. The year turns, the sun moves, plants and animals respond, and time passes.

Happy New Year! Right?

When does the year end, anyway? When does it start? What defines a season?

If you use the Western Christian liturgical calendar, New Year’s Day fell on December 2 this year. The previous Sunday was Christ the King Sunday, when the church looks to the time when Jesus will return as king of the world, to judge the quick and the dead, or as a different part of the liturgy says, “When Christ shall come in final victory and we feast at His heavenly banquet table.” Except we don’t throw wild parties or wear lampshades on our heads to all those things people are alleged to do on New Year’s Eve. Instead we sigh about “where has time gone” and wonder if this year the music director will make good on her threats that Christmas carols will only be sung during Christmastide, that being the period between December 24 and January 6. And everyone grumbles about how long HallowThanksMas lasts.

How many calendars do we live by? There’s the January 1 to December 31 cycle that most of the world uses, or at least adds to their own particular calendar when needed. There are religious calendars, some of which impinge or overflow onto the secular world (Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover and Yom Kippur, the legal holiday of Corpus Christi*.) Personal calendars with anniversaries, birthdays, death days, years in remission, years sober or clean. Academic calendars that count down the days until breaks and summer, often watched more closely by teachers than by students and their parents. Tax calendars that go by quarter or by year and that culminate on April 15, or the first or last days of the fiscal quarters, and that bump into the federal fiscal year.

There are also ghosts of calendars past, like the Thermadorian Reaction, April Fools Day, and the October Revolution that happened in what is now November. Halloween, once Samhain, the end of the year for pagan Irish and others, when the hard times of the year began to draw near as the sun disappeared and took heat and light with it.

Usaians have High Holy Days centering on July Fourth.

For me, the year starts in autumn because the days grow short, planting has started along with planning for the next farming year, and school is in session. This is my favorite time of year, with cooler days, longer nights that give me more time to be out and about, winter music, and the mystery of Christmas. DadRed really dreads autumn and winter, for equally good reasons. I don’t care for spring and summer. The world slows down from the heat, I’m trapped indoors or forced to be up by 0500 in order to do outdoor things before the sun rises, and it’s when storms roll through.

Humans mark the year through different ways and with different start and end points. Some calendars work better than others, at least in the world as it currently is. Some have been adapted to the dominate sun-based fixed calendar that dominates the western world, others remain free-floating and lunar and proudly refuse to adapt. Into the 20th Century (and probably still in some pockets and hollers), some Western Christians maintained that Christmas was not December 25 but January 6, the “Old Christmas” from before the Gregorian to Julian switch. Some calendars are deeply personal, based on when a family came into being, or when life began again after chemo or another life-shattering and rebuilding event. “Only 245 and a quarter days to LibertyCon, not that anyone’s counting.” “Summer doesn’t begin until we reach the lake-house.” “I don’t care what the calendar says, it is winter already.”

Regency London had “the Season.” A lot of Europe still does, focusing on the wild weeks between New Year and Ash Wednesday, the time when the rules are a little looser and satire a little fiercer, when the Fools point out the emperor’s nakedness and people attend the great society balls and parties to see and be seen.

I suspect that deep down, there are as many ways of marking time’s passing as there are people. Wet and dry seasons. Times of flowers and the moon of falling leaves. Religious feasts and secular feasts, the fasting and weeping and wailing leading up to April 15. We watch for migrations and the succession of plants as the sun moves north and south. People in Canada giggle at Santa on water-skies in Australia, while Australians snort at declarations of “Hurricane Season is upon us” from the ‘States. “Hottest year on record,” pronouncements while crops droop under snow in South Africa or South America generate more than chuckles. My new year is somewhen in August, because my life is tied to the academic calendar, then the liturgical one, and the secular one. Half the world’s population marks the new year by the moon, but doesn’t object to parties on December 31 (unless their government is cracking down that year.)

I suspect humans will take our various calendars into space with us, and layer them onto newer systems. In the background to part of Fountains of Mercy, rabbis are (once more) trying to decide how to calculate the High Holy Days and other things for Jews living away from Earth. And people trying to adapt Earth systems to planets with different year lengths. The characters on Shikhari focus on the dry and the wet, and base their social year on those seasons, while trying to sort out what the government on Home meant by “four weeks after receiving this memo, the local Commander is enjoined to…” Whose week?

*I giggled a little too much when the government of France announced that it would cut back on the number of paid federal holidays, and the Communists and trades unions vehemently insisted that Corpus Christi remain on the list.

Recently here, one of those times that the comments get more interesting than the post itself, we came up with the idea that we are in fact elves.  That either time traveling or some weird time-glitch bring us — or our descendants a few hundred years hence — in contact with people in the past and allows them a glimpse into our world.

There isn’t a story there — at least not for me — though there might be a throw away side character or three in future novels.

But, you know, when you think about it we match a lot of the stories about elves.  We are almost impossibly long-lived, obviously supernaturally healthy.  We can turn on light or cook or do any of the things that were near impossible if not impossible even a hundred, much less five hundred years ago, with the flick of a button.  We see at a distance through magic devices (no? explain it to a medieval man. Use small words) and talk at a distance to each other.  We can fly to the air to visit each other, and if we don’t mention details, I’ll bet you good money that a medieval person would imagine us tucking in arms and flying, perhaps in a spangle of sparkles.

Fairy horses? I’ve got nothing, though it wouldn’t surprise me if in another 100 years or so we didn’t have some kind of super horses, bio-engineered for performance and more carnivorous than not.  Perhaps even, too, unearthly beautiful, because why not?

We can even heal bizarrely and startlingly for someone in the middle ages.  I mean, if we come across a guy lost in the middle of nowhere, running a fever and we’re doctors or otherwise equipped for the emergency, a salve, an ointment, or even a shot can bring him back from the brink through the magic an anti-biotics.

Elf shot? Forget the whole thing about stone arrow heads.  We can kill at a distance with startling accuracy.

The fairy midwife stories? Well, if these things are either isolated colonists into the past (something like Simak’s world where they’re running from certain extinction in the future) or sometimes the times contact at random and it’s a farmhouse (or something) that finds itself isolated in the past?  Well!  You know, I’d prefer modern delivery services, too, but if those aren’t available, I bet you those medieval-village midwives (once you disinfect them from head to toe twice) were pretty good at what they did, because they faced — with no modern knowledge or last-minute saves — the problems of childbirth, which are complex and varied.  And enough kids survived that we’re here now.

Then there’s the whole “elves have few children.”  Compared to the historical average, you guys might not even realize how little time a modern woman spends pregnant.  Sure, they might end up rearing only two or three children at most, but rare was the pre-modern woman who didn’t have seven to ten children.  And a lot of them died in childbirth, because the more you walk in the rain, the more you get wet.

This idea has been with me a long time, long before the discussion here.  There was a germ of it last year when we went to the Denver botanic gardens illumination and I thought someone of Shakespeare’s England tripping through a time portal into this fairly mundane Holiday display would be dazzled.  Hell, I always channel my inner 6 year old, who thought the church being illuminated for Christmas (white lights outlining the building and the turret) was an amazing miracle.  And she thinks that the illuminated botanic gardens (or zoo) are a miracle.

Imagine the wonder.  We’re profligate with light and getting more so, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to illuminate the outside of our houses with twinkling fairy lights.  (I’ve had no luck with solar.  I think Colorado is too dusty. But they work places.)

Some of my neighbors illuminate with lights summer and winter, as do a lot of commercial areas.  The colors are just different.

When this arose in the comments, Margaret Ball said “What about being unearthly beautiful?”

And though I know how beautiful we are — yes, all of us — in terms of not being deformed of pockmarked or even — and that was so common even 25 years ago — acne scarred, I confess that made me laugh a little.

And then over new years Dan and I went to the Rembrandt exhibition.  We were looking through the prints and again and again came across drawings of people who were supposed to be young.  Like sixteen to eighteen.  They all looked forty.  And then there were people who were supposed to be forty… I’d take them for eighty.

Sure there are renaissance paintings, say, the Venus on the half-shell, who look young and heart-breakingly beautiful.  And probably were, even if the painter might have idealized her a bit.  But the age thing keeps hitting us in the face.  The men and women of the renaissance were far more in tune than us with the idea that the virgin was supposed to be 14 — by church legend — and the audience of paintings would know that.  Aware of that go look at medieval and renaissance nativity paintings.  Oh, keep in mind Joseph is supposed to be in his thirties.

Now by the time you get to the 18th or 19th century and are looking at the paintings of the upper class, you don’t see that effect much.  They were halfway to being elves.  They still aged faster and harder than us, and do not ask about their dentistry if you prize untroubled sleep.

But if you looked at the people on the street in those days, or if you find paintings of the common folk, you’ll know exactly how we’re “unearthly beautiful” throughout our blessed long lives.

I remember reading, and now I don’t remember which painter or where, though I have an idea it was in the quattrocento (note that wordpress spell checker doesn’t know quattrocento and tries to make it afrocentric. Measure by that our mental decline compared to our material improvement) saying that he’d picked a model because she was so “beautiful” with unscarred skin and straight limbs.

Now do I really believe we’re time travelers?  Um…. no.  I always find it funny when someone comes here to argue with me and tries to claim my reasoning is faulty because “you write fantasy. You don’t know the difference between reality and imagination.”  (Rolls eyes.)  Sure, if you’re a psychotic locked up in a rubber padded room, that might be true.  But I’ll argue you’re then not writing much fiction, and certainly not much that’s commercial enough to be enjoyed by others.

People tend to underestimate the amount of conscious work that goes into crafting a story, particularly something the size of a novel.  They want to imagine it’s all a flash of passion and suddenly the story is all there.

Sure, that can happen, after you’ve written twenty novels or so, but that’s because your subconscious has been trained to do the heavy pulling by then.  Even then you’ll recraft scenes or recast characters, because your subconscious knows what you like but not what other people will buy (your conscious doesn’t know that either, but it can make better guesses.)

Anyway, to write saleable fiction you need to be fully in control.  Sometimes you let the imagination out to play, and then you pull it back in.  And when you let it to play you know d*mn well you’re confabulating.

Sure. It’s possible that some time phenomenon makes us into literal elves sometime in the next few hundred years.  I.e. that we’ll go back in time and meet our ancestors and give them their legends.  Not that I can think of any mechanism right now, but then time is still very much a mystery in many ways.

What is more possible is that these things that were attributed to elves are the long-time dreams of mankind.  Light.  Living with minimal effort. Health. Long life. Not consuming your life in endless pregnancy.

Do we still aspire to a lot of other things, including longer life? Of course we do.

But to our ancestors? We live in an age of magic and miracles, and we live long and blessedly healthy lives.

Shakespeare made his mark on the world by living 2 years more than I’ve lived by now.  And Kit Marlowe was cut down at 29.

We have so much more time.  What are we doing with it?  How much of it do we spend moaning and bitching that it’s all going down the drain and we can’t stop it?

Sure, we have challenges (I’m not sure humans could survive without them) and sure there are some pretty awful people trying to put their boots on our neck. (The wars in fairyland were always terrible.)

BUT we have all this time, all this health, all this light, all this ease.

Let’s be worthy of them and do something, even if the something is fight for freedom and pass the torch one more generation.

There might come a time to be curled up in the fetal position on the floor.  That time is not now.

Up and doing.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

Yeah, I know it’s not too early in the morning.  Today is also my day at Mad Genius Club and I did the post there before this one.  Not that it was early, anyway.  I kind of slept 12 hours and couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that since Dec. 19 I’ve not had a single day without serious physical work.  Apparently after 50 this is not sustainable. So I have flu-like symptoms (despite having the vaccine) and feel like I need to sleep rather a lot.

This is not… great, but I think I’ll be up at normal work rate with a little bit of taking it easy.

So, this is me taking it easy… I guess…

Anyway, when I was little I loved getting up too early in the morning and surprising people/places I loved with their hair down, so to put it.

Like, as a little kid I tended to stay up till forever (my kids too seem to be natural night people, so we let them go to bed whenever, which meant they/) and then I slept till like 10 or 11 am.  Obviously this stopped when I entered school, though the village school was used to my family and quite forgiving of my showing up at 10 am, hastily dressed and still half asleep. (My kids’ school less so, which is why I often delivered Marshall to them at starting time still… what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah, asleep.  Though he’d let me spoon breakfast into his face, dress him and walk him to school in that state.)

But there were a few days I remember (bet you my parents do too!) when I woke up at six or seven am for some reason…. and found out mom and dad had a whole life before Sarah-wake-up-time.

I remember one particular morning waking up to mom singing with the radio and making coffee, and dad joining in and joking.  It was like a whole new world.  It seemed to me the colors were more vivid and these strangers wearing my parents’ appearance far more alive and joyful and… well… young than the people I knew when I woke up at the normal time.

Later on, as a teen, when I went to school in the big city (Porto) I loved it when I dragged my ass out of bed early enough to get to town before the shops opened up.  You’d find shopkeepers whom you knew out in front of their shops washing or sweeping the sidewalk, and looking a little surprised, like you caught them too early in the morning.  It humanized the city and made it less intimidating.

This morning I woke up feeling like I caught THE YEAR that way.  Like, you know, it wasn’t quite expecting me this early, particularly since I have nothing planned, and so I am seeing it early morning, singing with the corny radio music with its makeup off.

This is good, as this is a very scary year.  This indie thing consists of a lot of mind-shifts I’m probably not fully prepared for.

But I am awake and the year is here already.  And it’s time to begin.

So, flu-like symptoms or not, I’m going to drag my half-caffeinated behind into the shower and begin.

There’s a lot of learning to do, but fortunately I think other people are as unprepared as I am, so I might have a fighting chance.

Cue “We have only just began” on the player.

The music is about to start.

Yesterday mom called.  She usually does on Sundays.  This means if we’re at a con, and I suddenly grab my phone and start speaking Portuguese, it’s mom.  I’ve found she tends not to remember “am at conference” and tends to be very worried if I can’t talk right then.

She wished me a happy new year in advance and she said “At least no worse than 2018.”

It’s an interesting perspective, and I realize that it’s perhaps related to her being 84.  All the same….

2018 was in many ways — emotional and financial, mostly — the year from hell.  As most such things do — I have a million superstitions around the turning of the year. Yes, I know it’s stupid. But it’s also human. I’ve stopped fighting it — it announced itself around November 2017 with the school pulling funny things with younger kid’s tuition, so that we entered the year in a panic over money.

Then in February/March/April, there was a long protracted issue with a family member that had me, for real, suicidal for the first time since my teens, both because it was horrible, and because I could do nothing about it.

And it ended just a couple of weeks ago with a real gut-punch that left us financially worried, again.  And it was also emotionally wrenching.

On the other hand…  On the other hand, just as the gut punch at end of year last year was a warning that things in the new year would be awful, the gut punch (or at least half of it) a couple of weeks ago was a sword I’ve been waiting to fall since February, when rumors first reached me.  In a way it was the clearing out of debris of something that had been dead a long time.  (And no, guys, not my marriage.  That’s fine, thank you.)  And after the punch hit and I was physically ill for twenty four hours, it started feeling oddly freeing.  As well the e-sale I’ve been running on Amazon these last two weeks of the year was “oddly profitable,” making me, if not sure — who can be sure — at least reasonably assured that I can make it on my own from indie, with a very small assist from non fic at pjmedia, which — having been cut back through no fault of my own — will now probably only cost me a day a week instead of eating all my writing time.

If I can put out something new every month (not as difficult as it sounds as I have many, many half finished things from “when the wheels came off.”  I.e. when I got very ill 5 years ago.  Some of them are three days from completion, like musketeer vampires and the sequels to Witchfinder (I swear I had an almost finished Musketeer mystery and I can’t even find the OUTLINE for it.  I think it might have gone with the computer that caught fire five years ago.  But I’ll do some more searching before giving up)) I should be not only fine, but thrive.

And the family member issue resolved itself by May, in the happiest possible way: in fact happier than I would have thought possible.

Oh, yeah, and we managed to pay younger son’s bills (with some assist from him with a summer job and now a typesetting business) without going under, even if our savings looks like it’s been on a diet (if you need typesetting, e or paper, ping me, I’ll give you his email.  He has a list of services.)  Ah, well.  That can be put right.  Hard work never killed anyone.  It’s work where you pour out your heart and soul into it and know that people stand by to kill it dead and blame you for the death that guts you.

The health stuff is way better.  WAY better compared to even last year at this time.

Is it “Okay”?  Um…. not yet. But that’s also work for this year.

Older son found the perfect woman (well, they’d been dating for about a year) and proposed this spring.  Even better, she accepted him and became Lovely Fiance.  Even better, we like her too, and she’s rapidly become the daughter we wish we’d had.  They’ll be getting married early next year, and if they don’t give me a firm date, I’m going to roofie them both and drive them down to the civil registry.  (To be fair, he’s waiting for his school to firm up schedule for the year, still… hard on my poor nerves, in Mrs. Bennet’s best style.)  So, yeah, more work for the next year.  Roofying people is SO EXHAUSTING.

I lost 45lbs and I’m back to the weight I was around 4 years ago before the thyroid went seriously to the bad.  More work waiting there too, but it will happen.  It’s amazing how much energy stress eats up, and the sword falling cut down on a lot of that stress.

Oh, asthma seems to be in remission, and despite a late flare these last two weeks, the eczema largely is too.  (The flare is only on my hands, not all over my body as it has been these last two years.)

We found reasonably priced wood, have refloored one of the worst trouble spots in the house, and are ready to do the rest, probably at a weekend a month.  Again, a lot of work, but when we’re done we’ll not only be less allergenic, but more ready to cope with the spate of geriatric issues our cats will have in the next six years.  (The youngest is 10.)

Best of all the stories are stirring again.

And Dan — thank you guys who took him up on his free book for xmas offer — is again interested in writing.

It’s been over a year since we had an away-writing-weekend.

Because I DO have this superstition that the last day of the year and the first day of the new year foretell how you’ll spend the year, we are going away in a couple of hours for a “writing weekend.”  Okay.  It’s only overnight, though let me tell you if we weren’t still kind of tight, and more importantly if Dan weren’t convinced Havelock Cat will die without him (No. Havey is not one of the elderly ones.  No. He’s not ill.  It’s just that if you look in the dictionary under “needy” there’s a picture of his fluffy butt, and he has daddy rolled. “But the other cats will just eat him.  He’s so chubby!”) I’d make it two nights.

So, right now I’m washing and sorting clothes, in preparation to being outahere for new years.

I probably won’t blog tomorrow, as we’ll be making our way back from the hotel (the hotel where we used to have writing weekends, and which — because these weekends are also oddly relaxing and bonding — we’ve nicknamed Hotel L’Amour) sometime around noon.

Though I hope that 2019 will be the best year in decades, both for me and for all of you, I’m going to above all hold on to mom’s wish “Let it be no worse than last year.”

Even though 2018 probably ate ten years of my life with worry and stress, it could be worse.  There could be snakes in here with us. (Arguably, metaphorically, there was.)

Make 2019 better.  But if nothing else, make it a year where all the problems end up well solved, where the solutions are under our control, or we can, at least, mitigate the suffering.

Give us work we can do and which is satisfying, give us challenges we can overcome, give us health and at least enough wealth not to hurt.

Let’s go forth into 2019 and BUILD.

The rest will take care of itself.

FROM BLAKE SMITH:  The Secret of Seavale

A cottage by the sea, nestled in a respectable neighborhood. It should be a safe haven…

Elizabeth Markham has run away from school and seeks the house of her godmother, six miles outside of Portsmouth. Seavale Cottage is a place of peace, and Elizabeth will be safe under Mrs. Brownhurst’s care.

But she arrives at Seavale only to discover that Mrs. Brownhurst has gone away, leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself. She finds assistance in her servants and in her very obliging neighbor, Captain Randall, and all is well until Seavale is beset by strange nighttime happenings. Elizabeth is about to discover that her place of refuge holds more danger than she ever dreamed, and she must gather all of her courage and resources if she and her friends are to survive the secret of Seavale.

FROM JL CURTIS: Rimworld- Militia Up.

It was supposed to be a simple contract for a couple of months of security services off world, but the devil’s in the details.

Tight Bridge Technologies hired Ethan Fargo and his militia to guard their power stations on the planet Endine against mob unrest and sabotage. When they arrive, they find the planetary authorities don’t want outsiders around to uncover their dirty secrets, and the Galactic Patrol’s not interested in providing backup. They all but order him to stop making waves, kicking asses, and taking names. The harder Fargo works to keep his people safe, the more troubles he finds. Dragoons and pirates are stalking the outer system, while the planet itself is a snakepit of treachery, tyranny, rebellion, and corruption. Everyone wants him to fail, while taking the blame.

They made one mistake: they underestimated Ethan Fargo. After the locals kills two of his Ghorkas, and kidnap his lady, he’s out for blood, and to hell with anything in his way…

AND STILL ON SALE:

Oh, yeah, and also my most recent collection is on sale for 99c till the 31st.

So Little And So Light, containing, I THINK my most libertarian short story EVER.

From a parallel world where we have all the dreams of pulp writers, to a future where bioengineering kindles new hates and new heroes, to a different Tudor England, to the intricacies of time wars, this science fiction collection provides a glimpse of things undreamed… some from which we’ll gladly waken, and some we’d very much like to be true.
Contains the short stories: Wait Until The War Is Over, Only The Lonely, Lost, Neptune’s Orphans, After the Sabines, The Serpent’s Tail, Spinning Away, The Private Wound, Super Lamb Banana, To Learn To Forget, Things Remembered, The Bombs Bursting in Air, On A Far Distant Shore, So Little And So Light.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: consist

Very odd.  For the end of the year.

Yes, this is very late.  Mostly because we were picking son up from airport, and apparently today is the most popular day of the year to pick someone up at the airport.  It was crawling SLOWLY towards arrivals.  Also, son didn’t wear a banana costume (family joke) so it took us a while to figure out where he was standing. And here we thought we’d taught them to always wear banana costumes while traveling.  Not only does it make it easier to fine you, no kind of crazy rando is going to mess with a man (or woman, should I be the one traveling) in banana costume.

Anyway, for lack of a banana costume, we did three passes before we found him, at which point we had to take him and lovely fiance to Pete’s Kitchen (what? you know I told you that’s the most likely place to find us on any random day of the week) to celebrate another victory against the demons of the air.  (Trips usually start and end with a visit to Pete’s. Yes, that does mean if you want to join us in the morning (usually) when we travel to Liberty con, you should go to Pete’s at unholy hours.)

So, it’s late and we’re now home, and I’m trying to render some covers… which is when it occurred to me I hadn’t posted (better late than never!)

So I thought I’d give you a running update and also remind those who bespoke books by email and said they’d send a check that they can’t actually BUY THEM unless they send the check (and it clears.)  Five (I think) of you said check was on the way, but we’ve so far got one, for 2 Dyce books.

It’s not a big deal, but I have the books set aside and other people waiting.  And I’d like to get done with this.

Oh, yeah, and also my most recent collection is on sale for 99c till the 31st.

So Little And So Light, containing, I THINK my most libertarian short story EVER.

From a parallel world where we have all the dreams of pulp writers, to a future where bioengineering kindles new hates and new heroes, to a different Tudor England, to the intricacies of time wars, this science fiction collection provides a glimpse of things undreamed… some from which we’ll gladly waken, and some we’d very much like to be true.
Contains the short stories: Wait Until The War Is Over, Only The Lonely, Lost, Neptune’s Orphans, After the Sabines, The Serpent’s Tail, Spinning Away, The Private Wound, Super Lamb Banana, To Learn To Forget, Things Remembered, The Bombs Bursting in Air, On A Far Distant Shore, So Little And So Light.

This one is tricky, because so many people still believe it.  Kind of. Sort of.  Or at least they piously believe it when people with socialist inclinations are in power and it’s a good way to explain why there are no jobs, as opposed to you know their craptastic policies causing it.

It’s still there. Still a believed myth. Just the other day (I think in Denver, but we might have been driving to Colorado Springs to see younger son) we passed a sign saying “robots can’t steal your job if you’re retired.”

Yes, people in other cars probably heard me rolling my eyes.

Sure, there is automation of industrial processes, but calling that robots taking people’s jobs is kind of like calling the ice age that never came “climate change.”  Climate is always changing (with or without human help) and, btw, there are always new gadgets.

None of which means that robots are replacing humans.

To fully understand how pervasive and strange this expectation was, I need to take you back to a time when people actually believed this literally: not just robots, but androids, aka human-shaped machines were going to take over all the functions of humanity and either rule us (a sub function of “the computers will be our kings” something I’ll tackle separately) or just replace us.

Look, it’s easy to look at it as a metaphor.  “People thought communism really worked” (yes, this was true in the seventies too. Not the least because our secret services bought the Soviet line. They’ve been incompetent a long time) “but it made people kind of robots, so their fear that the robots would displace the humans was related to the subconscious certainty that communism would win.”

Um….  Maybe there’s something to it, but I don’t think so.  I have a degree in literature (it came with the languages) and what it has taught me, mostly, is that you can make up any sort of high falluting cr*p but in the end, the curtains are blue. Or in other words, looking for that kind of high meaning and metaphor in competent literature (we’ll leave the incompetent one that thinks it’s all about the meaning and metaphor aside, because that’s a corrupted product of an over-emphasis on academia) is like reading tea leaves or any other attempt to find meaning in a highly chaotic system.

Mostly — trust me, having lived then and “thought too much” — people really were afraid that robots would be better than human at being human and take over.

No, the Carter malaise didn’t help.  Within the framework of believing that centralized systems were more efficient, and coupled with the leftist leanings of most sf writers, it was impossible to explain the crash in the economy and the lack of jobs save by saying that the robots and automation were already taking over the market, and it would only get worse.

Yes, the same thing surfaced under Obama’s Great Recession.  You know, it amuses me that the left never realizes that robots apparently only take jobs under leftist presidents.  Never mind.

The point here is that — besides the sporadic nature of the fear and its correlation to who is in power and how mismanaged the economy is — this fear never came to pass.  And it’s silly anyway.

Sure, we have robots.  Most of the assembly line type jobs — which the left used to write doleful stories about, btw. You might not have read those as they were mostly main stream — can be and often are more efficiently replaced by robots.  Not anthropomorphic robots (I’m researching for a series that requires an anthropomorphic cyborg and let’s just say the tech is far more difficult than anyone in the seventies could even guess at.  Mostly the power supply issues.)

But in our current economy, how many people really do/did assembly line work? Some, of course, as some still do farming, and some even do organic farming.  But probably not, at any time since the seventies (and that change was regulatory, and law more than technology) any great percentage of the population.

Oh, sure, if you want to extend it, we also have automated checkouts, and I suspect most fast food jobs will be replaced by robots within the next twenty years (partly because of the daft drive to set minimum wage, as though economics were not a science and not run by hard numbers. Thinking you can set minimum wage and everything will be fine, and there will be no consequences is like thinking you can legislate it to rain every day. In Colorado. (Not that I’d put that past our governor-elect. He seems to have that brilliant an understanding of the world.) Economics always finds a way, because you can’t really completely change economic systems. You can just channel them in a different way.)

So what?

I never understood the idea that each stage of civilization is the “natural” one, and that once those jobs are gone there will be nothing to replace them, ever.

Sure, the economy is changing.  Very fast right now, due to the second and third order effects of the computer/internet revolution.  These are perilous times, because times of fast change always are.

But there was no big surge of computerization or robots during the Obama administration.  What there was was the democrats standing over the prone economy, hitting it on the face with a bag of hastily printed money and demanding it get up.

IOW it was administrative and economic incompetence — not a big surprise from the party that more and more identifies as socialist — seeking to hide under “the robots did it.”

Look, I worked an assembly line job for a week, as a temporary worker. They really were fairly sucky positions in which human potential is almost utterly wasted.

Part of the problem is that the people who think robots will replace us also consider themselves way above the normal human being.  So they think that most human beings are REALLY only suited to do that sort of repetitive, mind-killing job.

They’re wrong.  Perhaps it is because I actually know a number of geniuses, but I can tell you this for certain: you don’t need to be incredibly smart to be successful or to create a successful job.  Heck, most incredibly smart people seem to be working menial jobs while waiting for someone to recognize their genius (I blame our school system for that, but that’s another post.) And people who are “about average” often do very well, particularly with starting their own business or coming up with an idea for an unmet need.

Part of it is that we’re very bad at measuring intelligence, of course.  But the other part is that humans are ingenious monkeys.  Every step up the industrial/civilization ladder, jobs and occupations and ways of life have been abandoned in mass quantities.

And more often than not, what it has meant is the freeing of minds and energies for more interesting tasks and for creating things that in time displace other occupations and make other people’s lives interesting.

The one thing I can tell you is that save in some countries where 21st century recently met pre-history, we haven’t any great droves of displaced hunter gatherers, unable to find/do other work.

This is because humans aren’t robots. We’re not born programmed to a task.  We adapt and change and find other things to do.

It’s probably not surprising that the people most convinced the robots are going to make us all unemployed and that there are vast masses of people who can only do “jobs robots do for cheap” are the same people who think of humans as sort of widgets, able to be controlled and commanded by a centralized government and reprogrammed over generations into the new man of the socialist future.

They’re wrong.  Which is one reason the robots will never take over.  Humans, even the dumbest of humans, have a capacity robots don’t have: we’re versatile, adaptable and unpredictable.

Bock one route, we’ll find another way.  Which is why even in the Soviet Union there was a functioning market.  It was illegal and dangerous and they called it “the black market” but without it, the robotic-commands of the red oligarchs would have caused even more starvation and deaths than they did.

Are the robots going to take your job? I doubt any time soon, unless your definition of robots include “automated self-checkout.”  If it does, or if your job is repetitive assembly line, light-industrial?  Sure.  Probably in the next ten to twenty years.

But you’re not a robot. And no matter if one of our parties thinks some people can ONLY become wards of the state because they’re not bright enough to survive technological change, you have other options.

Find an unmet need. Make your hobby into a job. Discover a new way of working with the new technology.

Invent, create, look at things a new way.  You’re not a robot and no robot can replace you. Because you’re not one.

You’re a clever ape, and there will never be any reason for you to sit with folded hands watching the machines work.

Go create.

Free to the end of the year:

ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT.

This is the first book I ever sold, and a mythopoeic award finalist for the year it was published.  Yes, cover needs changing, etc, etc, insert usual disclaimer here.  (The rendering computer is up and running, btw.)

Young Will Shakespeare is a humble school master who arrives home to find his wife and infant daughter, Susannah are missing, kidnapped by the fairies of Arden Woods, the children of Titania and Oberon. His attempts at rescue are interrupted and complicated by a feud over throne of fairyland, between Sylvanus, king regnant, and his younger brother Quicksilver who is both more and less than he seems. Amid treachery, murder, duel and seduction, Shakespeare discovers the enchantment of fairyland, which will always remain with him, for good and ill. (This book was originally published by Ace/Berkley 10/2001)

“Filled with quotations and references to the Works of Shakespeare, this debut novel will interest the playwright’s fans of any age” VOYA

“Sarah Hoyt has taken tremendous chances:She has told a tale of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, weaving the language of the plays deftly through the narrative. Reading the book feels like discovering the origins of the quotes we know so well, rather than something derivative.” San Jose Mercury News.

I’ve just been assembling the amazing library system and painting shelves and stuff.

I completely forgot this.  I’m sorry.

Merry Christmas to men, beasties and odd creatures.

AND yeah, there’s some sale items, should you need to relax with a good book.  (Which pre-kids, and eventually again, was the totality of my Christmas.)

Witchfinder if 99c for the next couple of the days. (Yes, I’m almost done with a new cover, but not today.)

In Avalon, where the world runs on magic, the king of Britannia appoints a witchfinder to rescue unfortunates with magical power from lands where magic is a capital crime. Or he did. But after the royal princess was kidnapped from her cradle twenty years ago, all travel to other universes has been forbidden, and the position of witchfinder abolished. Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, son of the last witchfinder, breaks the edict. He can’t simply let people die for lack of rescue. His stubborn compassion will bring him trouble and disgrace, turmoil and danger — and maybe, just maybe, the greatest reward of all.

Here Be Dragons also 99c for the next two days.

A collection of short stories by Award Winning Author Sarah A. Hoyt. From dark worlds ruled by vampires, to magical high schools, to future worlds where super-men have as many problems as mere mortals, this collection shows humans embattled, imperiled, in trouble, but never giving up. Angel in Flight is set in Sarah Hoyt’s popular Darkship series.
The collection contains the stories: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
First Blood, Created He Them, A Grain Of Salt, Shepherds and Wolves,
Blood Ransom,The Price Of Gold,Around the Bend,An Answer From The North,
Heart’s Fire,Whom The Gods Love,Angel In Flight,Dragons as well as an introduction by fantasy writer Cedar Sanderson.

Now go have a merry Christmas.  There will be other sales….