What do we want?  Time travel.  When do we want it?  Yesterday.

But until we get it, the past must remain not only another country, but one to which we lack passports. We get tales from it, of course, but the tales we get are frequently distorted and sideways, emphasize something far too much, and ignore the important things altogether.

This is particularly true of tales from our time written about the past.  These are often like the stories told about other lands by people who only heard about other lands without ever having visited.  So you get people who talk about the vegetable lamb, or the world of upside-down people.  Which, if we could only visit, would turn out not to be true.  (But of course we can’t visit because we didn’t, or does that mean that when we do, the past will change, like the future.  I think I’m getting a headache.)

So we have to get first-sources.  The problem with first sources was that nine times out of ten they weren’t writing for the future – not even those who made vague references to “you, my grandchild” – but to the people of their time.  Which means the things they focus on are not the things we really want to or need to know about.  It is as though we’d got a way of looking into the past but were utterly at the mercy of an errant, wandering camera lens.  (Can you imagine that?  Send a probe back to look at the crucifixion, and find yourself following an errant camel-merchant through the Syrian desert, while you scream in frustration.  Send a camera back to Lincoln’s inaugural, and find yourself watching wax flowers being made in a shop somewhere in Virginia.  Hit head on desk.)

Worse problem, though, is that often people don’t realize that primary sources are not in fact talking to them and weren’t rigorously designed to give them a clear view of the past.  So they’ll decide something is really, really, important and must have affected everyone at the time, because, duh, that’s what we read the most about now.  (Of course this fails to take into account that the things preserved were those that for some reason appealed to people of our time. This is how, say, a future historian might decide the most important thing about the nineties was unorthodox use of cigars.)

Most of the stuff I learn about the past, I learn when I’m not trying to learn it.  For instance, I found out about victory gardens – you’d think having read about the US in both wars, having read people’s bios of that time, having taken American history in college, this would have been mentioned sometime, right?  You’d be wrong. – from Disney comics I bought for my kids.  The company was going out of business and offered to sell one each of their print run from the beginning, so I ruined myself on Disney comics, because Marshall was at the point when his desire for story and plot outstripped his ability to read, and I wanted to bridge that gap.

So I found out about Victory Gardens while Mickey Mouse was traipsing around with a gun twice the size of his head (Mickey was way cooler then.  Now he’s rather effete and Minnie seems to be interested in museum galas and the like.)  Then there was the Great Depression.  I’ve read moving accounts and literary descriptions, but nothing brought it home to me so much as the thirties era Mickey Mouse Adventures in which the prize for a big contest is… “a good job.”  And the good job?  Bell hop.  Then there’s the forties? Fifties? Era Donald duck in which he puts uranium buttons on his nephews hats, so he can follow them with a Geiger counter.

Second to Disney books in teaching me stuff about daily life and the things people believed and how they lived are mystery books.

Oh, you can glean stuff about what people believed and what they expected from any book, including science fiction books.  But the problem is that you have to think about it.  Like I can deduce “good” clothes were far more important and expensive in Heinlein’s day, because his women wore aprons.  (Or I could view it as a sign of feminine oppression – but I’m not a bubblehead.)

And you can sort of figure what they expected of the “good” future and how they viewed government power.  BUT it takes effort.

Even in literary novels it takes effort.  I swear they’re all either concerned with the very rich or the very poor, neither of which has much to do with how the middle class lived.  (And neither of which might be accurate, since few writers were very rich or very poor.  They were mostly projecting.)

But mysteries are often concerned with the middle class, and the quotidian lives of the middle class at that.  From Agatha Christie you can learn an awful lot about England between and during the world wars, from ration cards, to how important nylon stockings were, from the difference between real butter and margarine, what was considered attractive, how people (still) lived in country districts, etc.

In the same way my recent tour of Rex Stout has made me aware of stuff like… how government was viewed.  You could have dropped my jaw with a feather when I found that the bureau of price control were the good guys in one book, while a group of industrial producers bent on evading some draconian controls were the “vultures.”

At least we have that.  At least it’s not that bad now.  Yes, I know Stout was “progressive” but that was still beyond and above.

It also makes me aware of stuff like what’s considered “living well” and such.  Eh.  I’ll take my current middle class conditions, thank you so much.

A moment of chortling delight was hearing a NYC location described in much the same way a friend who lives in the city described it just recently.  Apparently some things never change.  (This was a snobbish area.)

I don’t think it would be practical to research for say an historical mystery by reading mysteries of the time (not unless you’re trying to do say a Christie pastiche… which I might yet do.)

And yet the glimpses we can get are fascinating and not things you’d guess from the works about the past.  Two takeaways – P.J. O’Rourke is right.  The future, with some notably disgusting intervals, is usually better than the past.  And the romanticizing of the past can be fun and entertaining (Simak’s, Bradbury’s) but only because we see it through a softening lens.  Up close and personal some of the wrinkles would be horrifying to those of us alive today, even those who remember some of it.

If we’re very lucky, our descendants will say the same of our time.

*Peter Grant is the author of Take The Star Road and the just released Ride the Rising Tide both of which made the list for hot new releases.  Not bad for an indie author.  He talks about his writing later this week (Wednesday) at Mad Genius Club, but for now, he’ll talk about … other things*

Of Worlds and World-Views

 Peter Grant

Sarah’s very good at highlighting differences between cultures and societies, be they Portugal versus the USA, or how populations are counted in Africa, or building fictional settings and universes.  She and I are both immigrants to the USA, and both of us have experienced many things that are literally foreign to most of our readers.  This helps us as science fiction and fantasy authors when we try to build worlds that are new and unfamiliar to our readers.  I’m sure both of us have found our foreign backgrounds useful in that regard.

Almost all authors draw upon local sources for their inspiration.  Sometimes the similarity is blatant, such as Frank Herbert’s Dune series, where the Fremen culture of Arrakis and their jihad clearly draws heavily upon the rise of Islam.  Other fictional worlds and societies are much harder to relate to their earthly counterparts, because their authors have taken great pains to disguise them;  or perhaps they’ve drawn upon elements from multiple cultures and mythologies and combined them.  One of the things I most enjoy when reading science fiction or fantasy is to try to identify the cultures and myths that have influenced its author and/or gone into its creation.  It’s a pleasant – albeit occasionally frustrating – mental exercise.

We have so many variations in societies and cultures on Earth that it’s a much stranger place than most of the worlds we can possibly imagine!  For example, I was born and raised in Africa, and spent many years traveling around the continent.  I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of tribal and ethnic cultures (including low-level initiation into some of the mysteries of the sangoma – a witch-doctor or traditional healer).  Let me give you just three examples of different world-views from my own experience.

– When lightning hits a tree, and it smolders and then bursts into flame, we understand that the transfer of electrical energy has heated the wood to ignition point, resulting in the fire. However, to one rural witch-doctor of my acquaintance (a lady in Malawi who’d completed high school education, including basic physics and chemistry), it was clear that the gods of the trees were at war, and the god of that particular tree had just been zapped.  When I remonstrated with her, pointing out that she’d been to school and must therefore surely understand that such superstition was false, she looked at me pityingly and said something condescending about how blind we Europeans were to spiritual reality!

– When South Africa achieved democratic government in 1994, many areas of society previously dominated by whites were thrown open to other races.  The national sport, which under apartheid had been rugby (a white-dominated sport) instantly became soccer (football), which was far more popular among the black population.  The national team was soon dominated by black players and coaches.  The latter immediately began to use muti (herbal concoctions and supposedly magical ‘medicine’ supplied by witch-doctors) to ensure victory.  When some players objected to finding their uniforms and boots stuffed with muti, the coaches became highly indignant, and most of those who complained found themselves shuffled off the national squad.  Muti was also a factor in the recent World Cup in that country.  (Of course, looking at the NFL and NBA, one does wonder sometimes . . . )

– During a visit to West Africa, I stayed at a remote village for a couple of days.  One morning I noticed a lizard sunning itself on a tree branch close to the guest hut.  I moved slowly over to the tree, ignored by the lizard, which clearly had no fear of humans.  It even let me stroke it gently – at which two men coming towards me broke into loud cries of amazement at the ‘white man’s courage’.  Baffled, I asked them what they meant, only to be told that the lizard was deadly poisonous to the touch, and any black man doing so would certainly die in agony within minutes.  When I looked up the lizard in the local school’s encyclopedia and showed them the entry (which stated unequivocally that the lizard was completely harmless), they shook their heads and said that applied only to white men, who were immune to the lizard’s lethal toxins.  They couldn’t be persuaded that their tribal superstition was completely without foundation.

The same problem can be found in many primitive cultures throughout the world.  No matter how much ‘modern’ education is provided to the members of those cultures, it usually takes generations for cultural presuppositions to be supplanted by informed understanding.  Sometimes it seems as if that will never happen.

Of course, our own First World cultures aren’t immune to such problems.  Consider:

– The germ theory of disease took decades to be widely accepted in the Western world, despite overwhelming scientific and empirical evidence of its truth.  Believe it or not, there are still those who engage in germ theory denialism!

– Despite overwhelming historical, documentary, archaeological and eyewitness evidence, there are many who refuse to believe that the Holocaust ever happened, or who downplay its severity or significance.  Holocaust denial remains a serious problem in neo-Nazi and neo-fascist politics.

– Communism has failed miserably in every single country where it’s been tried.  Nevertheless, there are ‘true believers’ who continue to insist that communism would be the best possible system of government, if only it were properly implemented!  We have more than enough of them right here in the USA, including some of the ideologues that have influenced the current Administration and informed its policies.

(Both Sarah and I have experienced communism – the ultimate expression of left-wing, liberal, progressive politics – at halitosis range.  Our resultant incandescent response when others try to promote such policies leads our respective spouses to try very hard to limit our exposure to them!)

Most First World people of my acquaintance – in Africa, Europe and the USA – regard primitive superstitions as arrant nonsense, without any basis in ‘scientific reality’.  I take malicious delight in pointing out to them that they live in societies and cultures where:

– the daily horoscope is essential reading for many people;

– homeopathy is accepted by millions as a valid form of medical treatment, despite it being categorically and incontrovertibly ridiculous from any normative scientific perspective;  and

– people pointlessly and repeatedly sound their vehicles’ horns in traffic jams, apparently in the belief that by doing so they’ll somehow magically make the vehicles around them start moving again.

So much for scientific reality . . .

How about you, friends?  How have different cultures, mythologies and world views informed and influenced your own development, and continue to affect how you perceive and interact with the world and the people around you?  Have you ever examined them in any depth, or is this something that’s largely unconscious and instinctive for you?  Let us know in Comments.

So I was completely out of ideas for posts last week, and I searched out “idea for blog posts” and came up with this place promising to send you 100 ideas a month for some low fee.

The beautiful part about that – think about it – is that someone saw a need for ideas under the great pressure of daily posting and came up with a way to make money out of it.  I was going to say “America, what a country,” and I’m almost absolutely sure that the blog site was American, but it’s also an internet thing.

Someone saw a way of selling something that doesn’t even need to be shipped over the net, pure information.  And there it is.

Of course, in a way this is the beauty of ebooks too, the wonderful improvement over printing and sending books on paper.  It strips the experience of everything but the words.  We used to evaluate a book on a million things (and I think cover is still important, though the sales results I’m seeing make it important only for the extremes – truly awful or truly good, and most of us fall somewhere in between.)  The idea that we can sell ideas – air, nothing, is astonishing to me.

I was brought up in a very concrete type of world.  Mom would stop everything for me, if I was actually doing work she recognized as work.  This always struck me as funny because the “work” she respected was stuff I did for relaxation, like embroider or sew.  For this, she’d bring me better light, ask me if I was quite comfy and leave me alone.  But if I was reading or writing, it was classed as “playing” and “time wasting” (even when it was for school) and she would bug me, ask me questions, demand I help, etc.

It was obvious what she’d been trained to view as work was things you do with your hands and which produce results you can hold.

Which brings me to the one blog post I thought I could do from that list.  It was called “My Children Will Do It Differently.”

I looked at that for a long while, and tried to think what my children will do SIMILARLY.  Okay, they will probably work, and live and eventually die.  And I hope they’ll fall in love and marry and maybe have children.  But if we get more granularity on that, it’s all different.

Take me for instance (you can have this here writer cheeeep.  Well, her books, at any rate.) It’s a little more pronounced in my case, since my parents grew up in what was in Europe a slow recovery after WWII.  I’ve mentioned here before their home for the first 16 years of marriage would fit in my current bedroom.  (Though to be honest, my current bedroom is huge and weird, which is why I made half of it into an office, because who needs a bedroom that large?  I don’t sleep that much.  Of course, it has drawbacks, like the fact that when I type late at night or early morning I wake Dan up.)  In their world, in their culture, the idea of women working, even from home, was weird.  Mom did, but she – I think – always felt a little guilty over it.  (Which was sort of a family tradition on dad’s side, at least.)

I remember being very young – just before starting school — and hearing my parents talk about me.  Remember, because of how small I was when I was born, they expected me to be intellectually impaired. So, they were discussing my future prospects, and I remember mom saying “Well, she’s pretty enough.  If she doesn’t “go” at school, I’ll just teach her to be a housewife.”

In a way, I think, every child is a total surprise to their parents, and it must have been very shocking to mine that I insisted on concerning myself with matters of the mind (and could usually eat the guys’ lunch intellectually) but had to work really hard at house keeping, which didn’t come naturally at all.

But beyond that the world was changing in ways they couldn’t see.  Let’s suppose that, as they expected, I didn’t “go” at school.  It would have taken very little.  Given a less understanding elementary teacher and a father who’d pre-taught me at home, I’d have got discouraged.  I had many of the same issues younger son had (girls just grow out of them a few years sooner) which meant writing was slow and laborious, particularly done with a quill pen. If the teacher had taken my wretched blotched pages as a sign of my ability or lack thereof, I’d have been confined to dunce class forever.  Also, being very sickly helped.  By nature I am rather active, and as a child spent most of my time looking for ways to get into trouble.  If I hadn’t been sick three weeks out of four, and if at the time the right treatment for such things HADN’T been to isolate the patient and restrict them to bed, I’d probably never have made the effort necessary to read, despite clear dyslexia.  (Or difficulty focusing.  It’s hard to tell in memory.)  BUT it was dead boring in bed, the room (my parents’ room) didn’t even have a window and I practically lived there for weeks at a time. Oh, and little friends were not encouraged to visit.  Which meant I had to find ways to amuse myself.  Most of the time these involved lego houses and stories told to myself, but I lived for when my brother read to me, and I found that I could sort of re-read comics he’d read, and after a while, not sure how, I found myself reading – and then of course it was amusement that could be had in bed, and a way to escape it.

Let’s say I’d been a completely healthy kid, and had indulged in being outside, doing things outside, and had never really learned to enjoy reading for fun…  And had therefore found school boring and been a mediocre student.  Even then, the future my parents saw would never have happened.  By the time I was twenty the country had changed so much even working class men expected a woman who would be good at something other than housekeeping.

I often wonder what similar errors I’m making with my kids.  The thing is in times of catastrophic change, and this is one, all you can do is prepare your kids for the world you lived in.  And it’s almost sure my kids won’t live in it.

Heck, take just twenty years ago – when we moved to town – the post office was the center of my life.  If I had money, I was mailing stories/receiving (mostly rejections) responses in the mail.  My normal circuit pushing the pram was bookstore/bookstore/bookstore (used/new/used) and then post office and/or library.  I didn’t buy books every day (though I often took books from the free rack, which had been deemed too tattered/out of date to trade in.)

Of those destinations now, all but one bookstore are gone, and the bookstore has become the much smaller appendix of a toy store and two restaurants.  The library is mostly a day-homeless-shelter and seems to have fewer books every time I go there (and more movies.)

And the post office… the last time I went in (to mail back a contract) I found that most of the people in line were doing bulk mailings.  This accords with what we get in the mail.  Other than the occasional check – perks of the writing life! – mostly we get circulars, printed offers, coupons…

Most of my writing business is now transacted via email.

I have friends halfway around the world to whom I talk more often than to my neighbors.

Even the way in which I married would be different now.  We courted with phone calls and letters – now it would be email, and skype.

I think my kids will do it differently.  The relationships they’ve had have been at least partially long distance.  Let’s face it, it’s much easier for Odds to find each other now.  (I think my mom was wrong, anyway.  Even extending the search area to the entire city, the chances of any man around there wanting me for a wife were minimal.  I usually scared them off quickly enough.  See, I was Odd.  I didn’t act as they expected.)

Other things I can sort of see will be different, too.  Already, half of my shopping, including groceries, is done via Amazon.  I expect this to only grow.  I expect work to be unmoored from a point in space.  I.e, I expect they could live in New Delhi and work in New York City or vice versa.

The tremors this will set of are never ending, from the way people marry – will it be different if you’re both going to work down the hall (or in the same room) from each other your entire marriage?  No?  I mean, Dan and I like working next to each other, but most people don’t seem to – to the way they raise kids – two stay at home parents would be a major difference from the current system – to the way they buy houses (imagine the great price equalization if you don’t have to live in the city to work there) to… everything.

I expect they’ll live in a world I’d barely understand if I got transplanted there tomorrow.

But it will be perfectly fine, if I get there by living day to day.  I hope to still be alive 20 years from now and be able to look back and do a post on “how we do things differently” and “how my children’s lives are different.”

This is why I think that in a time of catastrophic change central planning is risible.  Even more risible than it was before.

And I think that though we might get the rug yanked from under us, the central planners will have it even worse.

In the end creativity and adaptability will take the day.  And the forces of control and rigidity will not stand against them.

 

UPDATE and A POINT OF ORDER: If you’ve been troll-hammered from this blog for good and sufficient reason, and you come back under another IP, you’ll get banned unread.  I give people a chance to come back — sometimes two or three — after a few months, but not if they just change IPs immediately after, which frankly smells of either paid trolling or mental illness.  If you’re intent on coming back and commenting, let a few months pass. And referring to having called me “Mrs. Hoyt” won’t mollify me, when what you called me was “Hoyt.”  Just in case you guys wondered if you’d seen what you’d seen, that’s what happened.

Okay, I wanted to put up some housekeeping, but I didn’t want to make that the entire post.  First, Charlie and I are now doing a sort of “Sarah Promo Post” writ large.  I’d still like to do one here, anyway, but we’re also doing them on PJMedia Lifestyle every Friday.  For examples see here:

Book Plug Friday

Book Plug Friday #2

Send the books you want us to promote to book.plug.friday@gmail.com.  Below are the guidelines:

• it should include a link to Amazon if at all possible. B&N and iTunes links are okay in addition, but frankly Amazon gives PJ a cut for any purchases you make through our links.
• Deadline for Friday is Tuesday midnight Mountain Time the same week.  That is, if you want it in this Friday, we need it by this Tuesday midnight Mountain Time.
• No more than 2 books per author per week, and don’t resubmit a plug for at least a month.
• Please submit a blurb of 50 words or less with each book.
• If you’re using a Heinlein character as a pen name, you must include a signed note from Ginny Heinlein.
• It’s free, don’t complain about the service.
• The whim of the editors is law, even with respect to the preceding six rules.

Other updates: I’m doing occasional intermittent articles at PJmedia lifestyle.  Feel free to drop by and throw peanuts or something. On Saturday I’m doing a 13 weeks series on organizing your creative life, which several of you could probably apply to writing and stuff.  I’m also doing a ten guilty pleasures (first one up, Pride and Prejudice!) and a series on catastrophic change.

Also, a reader, G. K. Mastergon has asked me to mention the contest their company is holding.  It’s a writing contest.  Go here for details.  I’m not endorsing the contest in any way.  I haven’t looked at it in depth, but if you think it’s worth your while, go look and check it out.

UPDATE: Mark Alger has a post on cover and type.  In the same vein there’s also this which someone suggested should get the artist hired to do Baen covers.  I particularly love the one for Fahrenheit 451, but thinking about it, I think it works because Fahrenheit 451 is a classic.  If it weren’t though, would the cover signal right to you?  I mean, would you see “science fiction” much less “literary science fiction?”  The same with 1984.  Now for classics whose general theme is widely known, these covers are brilliant.

Anything else any of you fish catchers (think about it!) want me to mention?

Last week things seemed to conspire to cause me to write on a particular topic.  First there were a few comments on Mad Genius Club (which, btw, has a different post today and one that might be of some interest (or not)) discussing whether having over-demanding parents actually resulted in over-achieving children.  And then there was the comment here left by someone who thought I needed three thousand words on the subject of something I studied in college in far more depth than she seemed able to grasp.  At the end of it, and almost as a throw away, there was a bit about guilt which implied that guilt was always bad and that, of course, in the future, when we’re all like onto angels, no one feels any guilt at all.

So, let’s take these in turn.  Of course most of us think over-demanding parents are terrible.  I didn’t like them one little bit when I was little, and I don’t think I’ve grown to like them any better, even as I became one.  (Or did I?  The questions is “is it OVER-demanding?”)  Besides, there’s all the stories of stage parents, and what they do to the poor mites caught in the clutches of their overweening ambition.

But let’s start with that last.  Having been caught in the mad whirligig of what I’m assured is a saner version of the entertainment business (Ah!  Like a man running down the street in his underpants is saner than one running down the street in a fish costume, screaming “I’m a carp.”) I can tell you that even if you have genuine talent (whatever in heck that is) and even if you’re working out of your own ambition and not mama’s, it will still destroy you given enough time and indie not emerging.  (I’ve gone slightly mad.  It finally happened…)

What I mean is I don’t think it’s possible for a parent, particularly one who thinks their kids are geniuses in something related to show business, to apply that kind of pressure to a business that rewards in inconsistent and capricious manner, without making the child go completely insane.  I’m not even sure it’s possible for you to apply that kind of pressure to yourself over a few years without going completely and permanently insane.

Also, through years in gifted classes, magnet schools and several other places where the academically interested gathered, I’ve seen enough parents pushing their kids to do things they clearly couldn’t do.  That is bad, and that will break the kid.  As will pushing your kid into something they really have no interest in, no matter how gifted the kid is.  As someone who picked her degree not because of an overwhelming interest, I’m here to tell you it’s very difficult, no matter how “gifted” you are in the matter.  My interest was always in writing fiction, only being in Portugal at the time, I thought I couldn’t possibly live from it – but because it was “safe” since, if there were no jobs for translators/interpreters, it guaranteed a teaching career (and there were always jobs for that.)  I am not actually gifted in languages, but I am gifted in humanities, which means I only needed to study very hard in the language courses, and could “fake” the rest.  It was still hard to make myself do it, because I had no interest in it.

The human mind is a wonderful instrument for avoiding work, and when it doesn’t want to work, it’s very good at thinking up reasons why, including up to – for a book I really didn’t want to write (no, it’s never been published, long story) making me fall asleep whenever I sat at my desk.  Doing that through a whole degree is a pain. I’d never have finished if I hadn’t also been working part time.  Being half-dead in class helped.

So, yeah, pushing your kid into fulfilling your dreams is a bad idea.  And pushing your kid into having perfect As when they don’t have the capacity is a bad idea.

For the longest time, I thought #2 son was going to end up wanting a Classics degree, and I was prepared to tell him to at least take some tech thing on the side, like car repair, so he could make some money while translating from the ancient Greek for fun in the evenings.  As it turned out, he fell in love with the idea of aerospace engineering and that was that.  But the other was possible.

So, pushing beyond the kid’s limits will make your kid a neurotic mess.  So the key is to know what the limits are and push up to them and not further.  This isn’t as hard as you think.  If you’re an engaged parent and don’t have an ego the size of Pluto, you’ll know the signs you’re pushing too far too fast.

However, isn’t it best not to push?  Oh, heck, no.

Look, the other thing humans are really good at is not doing much of anything.  I know that I met just as many “brilliant wastrels” as I did “Overpushed not quite geniuses” in my school career.  You probably did too.  Which one does best as an adult?  It again depends on whether the people being pushed have a vocation and an interest.  And if the parents are stupid enough to push too far and break the kids.

But as for hearing your parents’ voice in your head telling you all your efforts aren’t “good enough” I know a lot of us live with it, and are fairly happy and fulfilled.  If it gives us that little extra edge, that is not always a bad thing.  After all, people who are too contented, do nothing.  And do they enjoy doing nothing?  In my experience, since the human heart is a thing of perverseness, no, they don’t.  They do nothing, and they hate themselves and others and go around complaining about everything and everyone and society too.  They are aware of wasted potential within themselves, they have never acquired habits of work because nothing was ever required of them, and they feel dissatisfied, but don’t know how to fix it.

Which bring us to this idea that the ideal society has neither guilt nor shame.  This is of course the idea of the noble savage turned on its head: in the perfect future, the perfect human has no complexes, no hang ups.  He sleeps with whomever he wants to, does whomever… whatever he wants to, eats whatever he wants to, and always feels in perfect joy and kindness with himself.

Of course, in the real world, savages have more taboos, more guilt and more shame than any more “civilized” human and imagining they don’t is a form of patronizing and often of racism. Just because their taboos and their internal mechanisms aren’t ours, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  For instance, if what I read about the Maasai is true, the women might seem care free and promiscuous, but actually their liaisons outside marriage must fit a certain age and social pattern or be very strongly frowned upon and punished.

In the same way, imagining a future where all of us are perfectly from all guilt and shame, is impossible if we still remain human.  We might feel guilt and shame about different things, but if you imagine you’re more free of hangups than your medieval ancestors, let me tell you, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.  Oh, sure, we don’t feel guilt (and certainly no shame) for breaking religious taboos we don’t have – say meat on Friday – but we do feel guilt over things that would puzzle our ancestors: leaving the light on too long.  Eating too much (unless, of course, they were very religious and the ‘too much’ rises to gluttony.) Throwing cans not in the recycle bin, or even littering something that – to judge by people in other countries still – they’d do carelessly and with no remorse.

Shame is simply a mechanism of social cohesion.  You feel you shouldn’t do this or that because “what if anyone knew?”

Sometimes it’s completely stupid or at least opaque to us.  For instance, where I come from, when all the clothes were dried outside, we had a line down in the patio for drying our undies.  Because the rest went on top of the garage, and people might see them, and it was a shame for people to see your undies.  Now, I think it would be more shame for people to think you didn’t wear undies, but that’s just me.  Maybe it was for people to avoid seeing their neighbors’ sprung elastic and parachute-like bras.  Maybe it kept people from dying of embarrassment in public.

But sometimes shame is useful.  Say that of your own you don’t have enough morals not to shop lift.  Say you think the corporations make too much money or whatever.  So you’re ready to bag that candy bar, but you think “what if I’m caught?  I’d die of shame being arrested.” And you don’t.

Shame normally ensures you follow social norms.  Its value is as good as the social norms, but insofar as it lubricates the gears of societal intercourse, it’s a good thing.  If it’s a shame to cover your behind on Friday, then by gum, go around without undies on Friday.  Yes, it’s stupid, but if everyone else is doing it, doing it too will make them happy and who really cares.  (Okay, me.  No one should have to see my behind.)

What about guilt?  Guilt is more serious.  Guilt is between you and your G-d, or if you lack a G-d, between you and your ineradicable beliefs, and in my case, “yes.”

I feel guilty if I injure another person, both because that’s against my religion and because it is against my principle of not hurting people (unless it is necessary to defend myself.)

Now how it’s dealt with is different if it is inadvertently or on purpose.  Inadvertently, my religion says I’m innocent (though I still need to think through the circumstances and avoid doing it again, if possible.)  My civic conscience gives me no such leeway screaming that “you should have known better, dummy” even if I did it inadvertently.

Do I walk around with a sludge of guilt?  Oh, sure I do.  All adult humans do.

Is this a bad thing?

Well, it depends, doesn’t it?  Feeling guilty because I trod on an ant on the sidewalk is probably stupid.  Feeling guilty because I failed to save a kitten born too soon and tossed out, and which I didn’t find is stupid too.  Doesn’t mean I don’t feel that guilty, but it’s dumb.

Feeling guilty because I didn’t do as well as I could for my kids is only good in the sense that I pause before I repeat the mistake.  (Though it might not be repeatable in this life, there’s always the grandkids.)

Feeling guilty if I’d committed murder?  Well, wouldn’t not feeling guilty be much, much worse?

Guilt of the stepping on an ant kind is not, no, going to make me insane.  Even guilt for murder wouldn’t, if I’d committed murder because I HAD to.  Yes, I’d still feel guilty, but it wouldn’t drive me nuts.

The idea that any form of guilt at all is bad and eventually makes you insane is a lie.  We all have guilt, even if it’s guilt over having guilt.

Guilt is the electrical fence around your idea of how life should be lived (whether that idea is originally yours or received.)  When you touch it, or even approach it, you should feel the shock.  Its pain is less than what you’d feel if you went out into the open field and your life lost all goalposts and all moorings.

Shame is a small social kind of the same thing.  It’s the “did I violate a taboo of my society, which will cause people to shun me” whether the taboo is sane or not.  For instance, if I lived in Portugal I’d wash my sidewalks and front porch every week.  Not because I care but because “the neighbors will talk.”  It would cost me 2 hours a week, but it would keep me in good standing.

In a functioning, non toxic society shame keeps people doing things they might not naturally feel inclined to, but which in the end are good for the society itself.  Say, keeping the sidewalks clean.  Or keeping an eye on your kids, so they don’t wander about half naked in the street.  Or staying indoors instead of talking to boys out on the street, which might seem perfectly innocuous to you (We were talking books.  Sigh) but which will give you a reputation and make your eventual marriage harder.

Shame enforces the rules that allow us to live cohesively together.

Guilt enforces the rules – internal or external – without which we start doubting our own humanity.  (Note, I’m not saying those rules are eternal or even universal, but they are what reassures each of us we’re human among humans, and that we’re “good” for a definition of good.)

Now it is true there are people that feel neither guilt nor shame.  Weirdly, they’re not angels. They’re psychopaths.  The smarter ones, who wish to survive, learn to fake the normal feelings of mankind.  The ones who don’t, usually are heinous and remembered throughout history.

Our education system, having forgotten that we’re social animals and neither angels nor islands, seems determined to uproot both guilt and shame.  And a society with neither isn’t a society.  And if it works (it won’t.  People find new sources of guilt and shame.  See “judging” and “not recycling.”) that would be a way the world ended.

UPDATE: different post over at Mad Genius Club.

(with a side note on electronic estate planning.)

by Robin Roberts

*Note from Sarah — Robin Roberts is my lawyer and he’s very, very good, so listen to him.  However I want to add ONE thing to planning your elife if you’re a writer.  I get sent novels, short stories, etc by friends, merest acquaintances and total strangers to “read and give me an opinion.” Most of the time they don’t get downloaded, and it’s not even because I don’t intend to read them — it’s more that I have a mind like a sieve.  If you’re a friend, a regular commenter or a friendly acquaintance and waiting for me to read your stuff, poke me.  But if I like the person, they do. If these are already published, I put them in my ebooks drive (i.e. the books I buy/get to read.) But if the person wants comments and editing, it goes on the work drive.  So, suppose I drop dead tomorrow.  Given my tendency to write under names even they don’t know, how does my family figure out which books are mine?  Well… I keep them under a directory called Other People’s Writing.  If they can’t figure it out from that, I can’t help them. And now listen to Robin who knows a lot more about this stuff.*

Sarah and I were discussing some deep philosophical concept via email (either ICANHAZCHEESEBURGER pictures or the best way to word a Craigslist ad for selling the boys) when she sent me a completely out of topic message: “if you have time and patience, would you do a post about electronic estate planning for writers”.

So what can I do?  Here are some more or less random thoughts based on my years of estate planning and probate practice.

Estate planning for authors must be more carefully thought out than ordinary estate planning. Authors have a unique form of property in a copyright of a work.  It is “intangible” property – in contrast to tangible property like cars, personal possessions or real estate. (Even bank accounts are “tangible” in the definition that I’m using).  And in the more common vernacular of “intangible”, your heirs may not even think of that form of property in dealing with your estate.

In ordinary estate planning, one aspect of what we consider is whether or not the client’s estate would have to undergo the probate process upon death – the court administration of an estate.  Most states have some form of easy non-court process – often nothing more than a sworn affidavit and a copy of the death certificate to claim property – for heirs to obtain their inheritances for small estates but what a “small estate” can be varies greatly from state to state.  Sometimes a court appointed executor for the estate ( or personal representative as called in other states ) can have powers that make such a court probate useful even if the estate would qualify for “small estate” handling. We can also use trusts – revocable (aka “living”) or irrevocable – to organize an estate to avoid probate.

Authors, with their unique forms of assets, can use a couple of mechanisms to make it easier for their heirs to handle their copyright works upon their death.  Certainly a well-drafted will can operate on an estate.  Finding an estate planning attorney who also understands copyright can be important because of some of the statutory issues in US Copyright law, e.g., the Section 203 right to terminate transfers has a specific list of who succeeds to the right upon the author’s death.  Consider that you may wish to separate control of your copyrights from the monetary benefit.  In other words, you may wish to appoint someone to have the power to license your works after your death to control how your work is exploited that is different from who you want to receive the revenue from those works.  That may require that your estate plan create some mechanism like a trust to hold those copyrights.

Another mechanism is to use a corporation or limited liability company to control the ownership of the works, then use your estate planning to decide who keeps control of the corporation and who receives revenue from it.  Perhaps using more complex structures like voting trusts to keep control the corporation in the hands of a trusted administrator while seeing that your heirs receive the benefit of the proceeds. That can be more complex to set up during your lifetime but less work for your heirs.

 

Now for this purpose, trusts are very useful and there are lot of really neat things you can do with trusts that are well drafted. The original purpose of trusts was to separate the benefit of property like income, rents, profits etc. from the control of the property.  But you won’t find a trust that is designed to work with intellectual property assets like copyrights and trademarks in a Nolo Press book or software will drafting programs or online legal document services. Estate planning firms charge serious money for drafting trusts and explaining to you how to use them.  Indeed, the latter is the real problem.  I can’t tell you how often I run across someone who has paid thousands of dollars to a law firm to draft a trust, then failed to fund the trust i.e., failed to transfer into the trust the property that its supposed to control.  If you don’t know how to use a trust, you’ve bought very expensive but not very soft toilet paper.

Now what did Sarah mean by “electronic estate planning”?

Today, so much of our lives are online, especially for people who feed themselves with words.  So much of our lives are also in our email, on websites, in forums and such.  Even outside of the literary world, when we handle estates we are finding a lot of trouble dealing with the deceased’s online life.  Some of it is obvious, like online banking.  If you don’t get mailed bank statements, it can be a struggle finding financial accounts.

So everyone needs to keep some records of where their accounts are, their email accounts with passwords (well, except for the ones you use to pay for your porn website subscriptions … don’t ask …), websites that they own, and such.  And it can be a good idea to have a list of online forums if you have a significant online life.  Our online lives are becoming more significant.  I greatly miss some online friends or acquaintances. There have been many times that I’ve been truly grateful that someone was able to come online and tell me of an online friend’s passing because they knew about that forum.  (This can also be true for a serious illness, some of us were very concerned about our ability to reach Steven Den Beste last year during his recovery from his stroke.)

But an author also has to consider how to organize for his heirs or executors the intangible assets of his writing business.  The copyrights that he holds, are they registered?  If not, is there documentation of the work sufficient to establish when it was created and published?  If they are registered, is there a list of all the copyrights for the heirs/executor to use to find them? What accounts are setup with Amazon, Nook Press, Smashwords etc. and what are the account credentials?

And pen names pose a special problem.  Some are only decorative, in that the copyright is registered in the author’s real name. Compare “S. Andrew Swann” works with the copyright page in the name of Stephen Swiniarski for example.  But its possible to register a copyright in a psuedonym that is opaque to the Copyright Office. Have you done this and if so, are there records in a convenient place for your executor to find?

Some authors use the tradename or “doing business as” registrations of their local Secretary of State to be able to accept royalty checks in their opaque pen names, do your records include these filings so that your heirs/executor can locate them and renew them if needed?

These problems are also among those more easily solved by an author owning a corporation or limited liability company that has in its records those works, or even has the works registered in its name as works for hire (see Kevin J. Anderson and his use of Wordfire Inc.)

 

Robin D. Roberts

http://www.robertsandroberts.net

 

CROSSPOSTED at Mad Genius Club

 

For previous chapters, click here

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

 

Miss Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage

A Most Fantastical Crew

We stood there on that slippery horrid pink…  I tried to think of it as a rock, but I was more or less sure that it was actually a muscle or a gland or … – a part of someone or something – and watched the little boat approach.

As it came closer it became obvious that it was not made of anything sensible like wood.  Instead, it appeared to be assembled of bones.  Not human bones, thankfully, or I might have given way to strong hysterics which likely would have vexed Mr. Merrit very greatly.  As it approached, it looked like it was made of great planks of cartilage, like one finds inside certain sea animals.  But its masts had teeth along the length and looked like they had been built of mandibles.  And the “cloth” hanging from the mast was pink and horrible, and I suspected was really a flap of skin, perhaps from this same creature inside whom we seemed to be lost.

The whole had a fish-like aspect.

When I was very little, Jonathan had a tutor for only one summer, before papa decided that Jonathan would be better off at school or, as he said, being someone else’s problem.  The tutor was a tall, thin man, who coughed a lot, but he had brought with him the most amazing and interesting collection I’d ever seen.  He had mounted skeletons of birds and fish, and pinned butterflies beneath glass.  When he’d caught me spying into his room, he’d asked me if I wanted to be told about his treasures, and had given me an interesting lecture on each of the skeletons and butterflies and insects that crammed the tiny room my parents had allotted him. I’m not lying, it really was interesting, and I’d probably have gone back to him for lectures, except nanny had caught me in his room and nearly had strong hysterics, and treated me to a very long talk about how some older men like little girls.

At the time it had all gone so far above my comprehension I’d thought nanny had lost her mind.  Now I understand what she meant.  One hears stories.  But it wasn’t so with Mister Brim.  He had talked to me as he would have talked to any other interested creature.  It appeared he’d been on a three-year-long tour through Africa or South America or some place that is, at this distance, hard to remember.  It was where he’d contracted his cough and ruined his health, and that had caused him to return home.  But obviously his mind and his passion remained there, and he just wanted to talk about his happy times.  Since Jonathan wasn’t much interested, he’d spent an afternoon talking to me.

I thought of him, as that odd little boat came to dock near us.

From a distance, I’d thought that there were little men aboard the boat, but now I saw that they were monkeys.  A vast number of monks – I thought chimps – wearing ragged sailors uniforms, but not sailors as in our own navy.  More like some exotic navy all silks and odd tailoring.  They were little white tunics, and bulky ballooning pants and colorful silk sashes carried around their waists.

I heard Betsy say, “They’re monkeys,” in an astounded tone, beneath her breath, and then the boat was docking up against the soft pink stuff, and a monkey jumped up and tied it with a thick rope of unknown – and best not examined – provenance to something in the protruberance upon which we stood.  And Wolfe Merrit cleared his throat, “I say,” he said, in the tone of a gentleman trying to make conversation at a social function.  “I say, you wouldn’t happen to know where three forlorn travelers can get shelter, would you?”

The monkey who’d tied the rope looked at us and blinked.  It seemed to me that his eyes were far more intelligent than they should have been, and I wondered why I wasn’t scared.  I should have been.  It wasn’t as though bone-built boats crewed by monkeys were a normal thing in my life.

I could only think that either I’d become too tired and inured by all the successive shocks and incongruencies of the last many hours or that the monkeys were too… entertaining.  They looked much like a circus act trained by someone.  I wondered whom.

The monkey turned and gestured towards the boat, and another of his fellows came scrambling up, and across the rope.  He was better dressed than the others, in that his clothes looked newer and his baggy pants were made of striped silk in gold and silver and red that must at one time have been blindingly bright.  He wore a rope of pearls around his neck.

He bowed deeply to us.  “My fellow here,” he said.  “Does not speak your language.  You talked to him.  What do you need?”

“I …”  This impeccable speech, in the Queen’s English, from a Monkey had stopped even Mister Merrit cold.  He cleared his throat again.  “Who do I have the pleasure of addressing, sir?”

The monkey bowed.  The feeling that I was caught in the middle of a circus act was stronger than ever.  “I am Arya,” he said.  “Arya the Voluble.  Arya of the Nimble fingers.”  He looked inexpressibly sad, as though he’d suddenly remembered that his entire family had perished in a horrible way.  “Arya, alas, the great sailor.  Which I misdoubt my lord Hanuman would believe now.”  He sighed, a very human sigh.  “For two years now we’ve been lost in the gullet of this beast, having been swallowed in becalmed sees, and how we’ve survived, milord, it would make you weep to watch it, for there are neither forests nor trees, neither fruit nor plant here, and what our lord Hanuman must think has happened to us, when he sent a crew of his best magicians and his most competent tricksters.” He sighed, then opened his arms and showed us both palms in a very human gesture.  “I know not.”

I knew not either, save that Merritt hadn’t corrected the “my lord” and that his hand had clasped my arm hard enough to bruise.  I didn’t know why, except I assumed something in the monkey’s speech discomfited him.

He finally found his voice and said, “We’re in a beast, then?”

“Oh, aye, a great tentacle beast, like an octopus.  My lord Hanuman sent us for to see if we could put it to sleep again, as it’s been for centuries uncounted.  Instead it swallowed us whole, and our craft too.”  He must have seen us staring at his craft.  “Oh, aye, not that.  A proper craft, which is moored at our home island.  We would not risk it in these daily expeditions to get our living from the gullet of the beast.  Because one day we will defeat the magic on it and leave here to go home.”

“Magic,” Merrit said.

“Magic barriers,” the monkey said.  “Like a magical strainer.  They don’t let anything magical pass out of the beast, once swallowed.”

I shuddered.  The idea of living out my life here did not appeal.  At my side, Betsy gasped but said nothing, which was a vast improvement over what she would have said just hours ago.  The poor girl must be very tired.

“I see,” Merritt said.  “then you can’t tell us how to leave?”

“No,” Arya said.  “Except that perhaps with your magic and our magic we can confound it.”

“Are there… many other people here?”

“If you mean many other magical creatures, there are other tribes of lost travelers, but we stay away from them, for they don’t consider monkeys quite … creatures that shouldn’t be eaten.  We lost a young and well intentioned fool our first week here, and since then we avoid them.  Not that I blame them exactly, for men have often eaten monkeys, and there is little to eat here.  Except that we’ve found you can take vast strips of the beast’s muscles, and they don’t even taste too badly, and they grow back wondrously fast.  If you come aboard my meager vessel now, we shall take you to our village, where you can bathe and get fresh clothes and share our humble repast.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a species with a massively growing population must be in need of another planet.

And that’s our problem.  We don’t have a massively growing population.  We might not have a growing population at all.

For thirty years now I’ve had this funny feeling at the back of my head.  It started on coming to the States and hearing that Portugal had a birth rate of something like six children per woman.  It made me sort of sit back and blink.

Again, yes, I know that anecdote isn’t data, but I knew at least 10,000 families fairly well – those in the village – and I knew OF probably a million families if you count my school friends, people I knew casually, etc.  Of those I knew exactly three families with six or more children, one with four and a couple with three.  More common – far more common – was the family with two and one child.

Sure in my parents’ day six children weren’t unusual, though back then it was highly unusual to raise them all.  Mom came from a family of six that raised five, and dad came from a family of four that raised them all.  But their generation didn’t reproduce in nearly the same numbers. My generation as far as I can tell has hardly reproduced.  Or the generation before mine.

Because Portugal is a relatively traditional country compared to the US most boomers did get married (sometimes several times) but few of them had more than two children.  And in my in-between generation, I’m a miracle of fertility with two children.  (And, of course, I don’t live there.)

Of course, when Portugal joined the EU suddenly we were told its birth rate was beneath replacement.  Then there was the USSR.  It too was growing, and its population would in fact crush us, and then, suddenly, after the collapse, it has negative births vs. death.

Meanwhile I’d been getting a feeling – just a feeling – this sense that the population wasn’t “exploding” nearly at the rate we’d been told it was.  While school books and textbooks said that we were expanding at a geometric rate, it didn’t seem like that anywhere I looked.

It was sort of the feeling Heinlein described in one of his books, when he talks about how he and Ginny went to Moscow and it didn’t “feel” like it had the population they said it had.

I’ve studied history.  I know what a society with a rapidly expanding population (and young population at that) looks like, and we have none of the symptoms.  In fact, we have the opposite symptoms, though masked by “digesting” the huge lump of the boomers as it moves through the elephant.

Twenty years ago, discussing this with a friend, she called me crazy, because, she said, if the population wasn’t booming, why were houses taking up more and more green space?  Why were cities expanding into areas that had previously been forested?

My answer, of course, involved people preferring more space (I always live, by preference, in walkable neighborhoods.  It’s not a greeny thing, it’s the fact that I know if I don’t have to run errands on foot I will never walk.  I don’t even particularly prefer Victorian houses, though they can be neat – they’re also a pain to clean – but that’s what’s mostly available in walkable neighborhoods.) Most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, you can reach out the window and touch your neighbor’s hand if he reaches out.

These days only the cheapest suburbs do that.  (And our region was a suburb when first built.)

And yeah, in places like Portugal you see a lot more vertical building and the overtaking of traditional villages, but a lot of that is because – as we discussed here two days ago – people no longer wish to raise ten (or one) kid in an unheated hovel with two rooms.  (My mom’s parents raised a family of five in a home the size of my current bedroom.  It had bedroom, common room and kitchen.  The girls – three plus a cousin who more or less lived with them – slept in a double bed in the living room, two facing each way.  The boys slept next door at their grandmother’s house. Now, her parents were much poorer than my paternal grandparents, but those living arrangements were middle class in her day.  In fact, until I was seven, my parents had both children in very little more space, and either I or my brother were farmed to sleep next door at grandma’s.  And we were if not the upper crust of the village – those being rich farmers – but we were close to the top of the middle class there.)

What I mean is that most of the signs people scream about as “expanding population” are in fact signs of expanding affluence, or expanding demands in lifestyle.

There has for instance been a move en-masse from less desirable to more desirable areas.  In the states this seems to be a move from the old rust belt states to more sun-blessed areas.  Going to Ohio, where I was an exchange student thirty five years ago, last year, it was not only obvious that it was shrinking – there were a lot of boarded up areas; houses were being offered at ridiculously low prices; selection in stores was much smaller. – but also that it was stagnating.  Most of the people we ran into were older – our age and older – or very young, ie high school kids waiting to move out.  The “vital years” of say between twenty three and thirty five seemed to be largely absent, doubtless having moved elsewhere.

In Portugal the movement is from G-d forsaken villages to cities and the surroundings.  This is in accord to culture – the idea of suburbs puzzles me, and I suspect would puzzle most Portuguese.  Life is always in the city and has been since Rome tramped in – and facilitated by highways which make it easy to live in one city and work in another, but difficult to go anywhere from villages in the mountains. So the village where I grew up, being 10 km as the crow flies (?) or so from Porto (remember Europe, everything is scrunched together) has been overtaken by the city, but when we drove around in search of Celtic ruins to show the boys, we wandered up areas of boarded up villages, decaying farmhouses and areas so isolated you couldn’t hear a sound of civilization.  Many more so than one used to find when going through that region.

And the States had and might still have (though with La Grande Salida (sp?) this is unlikely) a growing population, but this is mostly due to immigration, not to our craptacular birth rate.  It is the same mechanism that draws people to the sun states, or the cities.  They’re looking for a better life.

But the important thing is that we don’t KNOW, and we can’t KNOW.

Censuses, even in the US where we take them semi-seriously are manipulated.  Mostly they’re manipulated upward.  Because our electoral system depends on proportional representation, people who feel threatened with losing power come up with adjustments to the head count.  “Uncounted populations” and “people who are afraid to answer questions” and…  And arbitrarily add a number of people to the top of the count every census.  How many are added depends on how many congress critters and ward bosses need to retain power – pretty much.  If you buy that’s a scientific process, I have some swampland in Florida.

We do know how that can be expanded, because it’s turning out, for instance, the number of uninsured people with chronic illnesses is less than a tenth what it was puffed up to be around the time they were trying to pass the Unaffordable Health Care Act.

And if you think that other countries are better – please!

In democratic countries, the benes are usually distributed per-head: representation, aid, pork for a particularly region.  In the non democratic ones – the ones that are usually net receivers of public aid – it gets even worse.  Far, far, far worse.  They’re not just lying to themselves.  They’re lying to the UN and international aid associations. Frankly, they’re probably also lying to their own country.  You have no idea – NONE – how law abiding the US is.  Even now.  Even with all the “illegal immigrants” supposedly hiding in the shadows.  In Portugal, which isn’t even a third world country, lawlessness is a way of life.  For instance, when I was a kid, the government insisted you pay a radio license (no one had TV.)  No one did.  QUITE LITERALLY no one.  When the inspectors came by (once a year or so) word came down from the entrance of the village and people would hide their radios.  As far as official statistics, in Portugal at the time no one owned a radio.  Even though radio soap operas were a growth industry.  It was a miracle.

Do you think they don’t lie about their number of children?  Particularly when the government pays a subsidy per head just for having children? (It’s called support of family.) Particularly when so many births take place at home and often people are slapdash about registering?

I’m surprised Portugal doesn’t STILL have a birth rate of six children per woman.  They must be losing their touch.  I suspect it has to do with EU mechanisms curtailing that.

But what about the countries that aren’t part of a semi-civilized polity?

These days it has become more or less fashionable to say that Islamic countries are the only ones growing in population.  The Muslim womb will conquer the world.  But there are the occasional reports, sneaking in, under the wire, on things like women having discovered the rhythm method via the web and limiting their own fertility.  And no one asks: who goes into the desert and counts the Bedouins?  Or do you go up to one guy and ask him how many children he has, then extrapolate?  And why would you trust a guy, for whom having more sons is more power and definitely more honor..

But Sarah, you say, you know that they’re immigrating to Europe in massive numbers.  Yes, they are, and do keep that in mind.  More on that later.  However, the numbers are not nearly as massive as they were when the Europeans were going the other way (to all the world, not just Muslim countries, not considered particularly desirable at the time.)  Keep that in mind too.  Their immigration has more to do with their truly bankrupt economies than with their birth rate.  Portugal has a birthrate below replacement, but anyone with a bit of initiative still immigrates (usually to England these days, seems like.)

Also keep in mind that though their first generation seems to have much higher fertility (seem to have, you say?  Well, look, even in the US welfare recipients, which a lot of these first generation immigrants from third world countries are, are known to borrow neighbor’s children to show up at the welfare office.  Also, I’ve heard from social workers, they often apply for welfare at all cities within driving distance, under different names/addresses.  You think CLOSED ethnic communities largely hostile to the host country wouldn’t do the same?  Why?) than natives, the second and subsequent generations match with locals.

Is this happening?  I can’t tell you.  NO ONE CAN.  Because if the figures aren’t reliable, then we’ve got nothing.

The last time I talked about this, someone said “give us a way to investigate, and we’ll do it.”  The problem is that I’m not a trained anthropologist and I can only guess at methods.  One of the methods, if you can get those figures (and I’m going to guess you can only get it for the more developed countries) is to find the sources of water to a city, then supposed population and calculate whether that’s even possible.  Another would be with the food entering the city.  Another yet would be to count houses, occupancy, and figure out if it’s possible to have close to that population.

I don’t even know how to get those figures, though I suspect some of you do.  And in water sources, at least, you’re going to contend with “green” propaganda which tries to exaggerate water one way or another.

But Sarah, if you have nothing concrete, how can you say you know the statistics are wrong?

Well… first, because as I said, they’re not even particularly smart, even in the US about telling you they’re “inferring” people who are “hiding.”  And the movement is always in one direction.  They never say “this family answered the census twice in different addresses, so they can receive welfare at two locations.”

Second because there are things I know have happened – the AIDS epidemic in Africa, say – which were barely a blip on the demographic radar, in an absolutely impossible way.

Then there’s – as with evidence of self-deportation in the US right now – just… living day to day somewhere.  You see things.  One of the first signs in my region that people were leaving back to South America was that the mostly Latin high school closed, and its remaining population was dispersed to other schools.

In the same way – look, read the Heinlein juveniles.  They’re not of course a record of the future, but they’re a reasonable extrapolation of what an exploding population looks like.  This happened, historically, in Elizabethan England (not through an increase of birth rate, but through an increase in survival of infants) at proportionally larger rates than the boomers here.  It happened in most of Europe at the same time.

So, what does an expanding population look like, from other signs?  Well, humans are a colonizing species.  When we have an excess of young, we send them off.  They go and find new land, new places.  They go and discover new things.  Life changes very fast, and not just technology-change-fueled.  There’s new fashions, new mores, exploring of new (usually really old) ways of living.  There’s a feeling of POWER to the youth.

What there isn’t is a bunch of kids living with their parents and re-hashing the “controversial” ways of their parents or grandparents.  What there isn’t is overprotective parents struggling not to lose their one or one of two chicks.  What there isn’t is a sense of restraint and traditionalism to the culture.  (Which, yes, we do have.  It’s just our “traditional” got set in the last population explosion and it was influenced by Soviet propaganda.)

And that’s part of your answer on why Space colonization isn’t happening – it isn’t happening because there’s no population pressure driving it.  It is a longing of the mind, not the body.  But even if you think that Space is too hard to conquer, there isn’t other colonization taking place.  There are plenty of regions in this globe that are – yes – still untouched, including much of the Americas.  Beyond that, there is easier colonization than space, including some sort of “living on the sea” arrangements.  But it isn’t happening.  It JUST isn’t.  Why not?  Because there’s no pressure. (Which is also why it’s possible to abandon less hospitable areas.)

And then there’s the international financial crisis.  Socialist and socialist light regimes REQUIRE larger generations each time, in order to keep going.  They’re not getting that.  Demand is soft because the consumers counted aren’t there.

This is where I bear the bad tidings: writers of the golden age of SF imagined a falling population kind of like Europe after the plague, but they forgot something.  That was an abrupt fall and the few survivors inherited a lot from the dead, leading for many of them to a surplus for the first time.  Which in turn fueled an expansion.

But a naturally falling population looks different.  It’s a narrowing of consumer demand, a narrowing of expectations.  It’s becoming a little poorer every generation and – because of our expanding life spans, at least for now – a smaller younger contingent supporting a huge aged one.  Which makes having children harder.

If this sounds familiar, that’s what we’re stuck in.

I don’t hold it against Heinlein not having seen it.  Yes, he should have, but there was no genetic evidence (which we have now) that humans are like any other scavenging population self-limiting.  If we get the sense there’s too many of us around the population seems to limit, either volitionally or through some biological mechanism (perhaps explaining the epidemic of infertility.) Also in his time, it seemed like all the rules had been swept away.  Humans were living in new, new ways and nothing was impossible.

He was right at least in one thing.  When he said population pressures cause war, he was right.  But it wasn’t population in toto.  It was population of YOUNG people in proportion to old.  If you want to know why the cold war never went massively hot – that was it.  It came close during the boom, but then it cooled again.

I don’t believe in massive conspiracies.  You know that.  I think a conspiracy of more than a few dozen people with a lot to lose is highly unlikely.  But this wouldn’t take a conspiracy.  It takes a hundred little acts of corruption, a thousand acts of lack of exactness.  And once the figures move out of the village, out of the region, out of the city, out of the country, other governing bodies aren’t aware and take those as gospel truth.

It is a thing that humans are prone to – taking written numbers seriously and acting as though they were true.

And this, in turn, brings out cries of how we’re overpopulated and we’re all going to die.

I made this bet before and I’ll make it again – in twenty years, we’ll hear panicked cries, as the evidence of a fallen population (as the boomers die) becomes clear.  Governments will then try to tell people still of an age to reproduce it’s their duty to have kids.

Might very well be too little too late by then.  My biologist son tells me that the human species has gone through at least three bottle necks when populations around the world were reduced to maybe a few dozen individuals, maybe a few hundred.  There is a pattern of this, which means it’s part of who we are.  Though I hope this time is the first time we’ve talked ourselves into it through statistics.

However, meanwhile, please stop screaming at me about “exploding populations.”  You don’t know.  And neither do I.  No one knows, because all our figures are vitiated by the interests of those who are supposed to curate them.

What we know is that humans are certainly not expanding and not claiming brave new territory.  And those of us like me who think we must go to space; we must expand or risk losing civilization, have a tough, tough row to hoe.  Because there is no population pressure pushing us outward, and no vast numbers of expendable young to send ahead of us.

And that might kill us.

It’s become a thing among Heinlein fans, writers and readers alike.  We get together for a good talk, and a glass of wine, and one of us will mention something nuts and the others will go “Well, these are the crazy years.”

Things like the girl who had to remove a decoration from her purse before boarding a plane because the decoration was in the shape of a revolver, though about finger sized and evidently cut in half lengthwise.  The TSA thought the ban on guns applied to this too.  (Of course, she’d flown with it before, so it was just this TSA station, but nonetheless its rulings were absolute.)

Things like the little deaf boy who can’t sign his name because one of the letters looks like a gun.

Things like kids getting in trouble because of a fictional story they wrote.  Things like my younger son – it’s a theme, yes.  The boy is lightening rod on his mother’s side.  More on that later – getting sent to the school psychiatrist because he used the following sentence in an essay “Some people think I’m crazy.”

Then there is the shooting in the Aurora theater, which doesn’t even make any sense, except in a culture where it’s better to be famous for killing people than to be obscure.

There’s half (half?) of our literature and movies, which glorify behaviors that in real life get you killed or make you a bum.  There’s the fact that being thrifty, hard working and honoring your contracts makes you “uncool.”  There the fact our women are taught to hate all men and men are finally learning to avoid women.  There’s…

You say it in groups of Heinlein fans, and people go “Well, these ARE the crazy years.”  And you move on.

I’m here to tell you these are not the crazy years, these are the fracking insane years.  Yesterday I went for a long walk and because I didn’t have my son – he was volunteering at the hospital – and therefore had to stay off the more interesting parts of downtown, I took an audio book to keep me company.  The book, because I’m writing space opera and trying to internalize his rhythms (and also because I really am trying to avoid using his terminology, etc, by reminding myself what it is.  I grew up with it, and to me it just means “science fiction” but of course it’s more than that), was Methuselah’s Children by Robert A. Heinlein.

When he hits the description of the Crazy years – you know, kids striking for less homework, more pay (for going to school) and eating clay sandwiches and such, I thought “Brother, you didn’t know from crazy.”

Part of his explanation – built into his world building – was that the crazy years were brought on by population pressures.  One must give the man one strike, and that’s a big one, but it’s one he shared with every scientist of his time.

At least he seemed to have a clue what really was at the bottom of it.  “Semantic confusion.”  Semantic confusion is a big big issue, and it is what is at the bottom of our own insanity.

Heinlein believed that semantics would become an exact science.  Since he based his beliefs on the scientific magazines of his time, I’m going to assume there was research into this.  But it seems to have come to nothing.  Or did it?

Was this one of those sciences that was never published?  One of those things that were considered too dangerous for people to know?

Let me put it this way, if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible, because guys want to have women available to them with no strings attached” most women figure out that’s bad, right?  But if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible so no man will hold strings on them and they can be free” this is liberating, right?  Semantics.  Not looking beyond the significant for the signified.

But the emotions know, if the head doesn’t.  Pretty words can beguile women, and tv shows can show the wonderful joys of the slutty lifestyle, but every one of a us knows a woman who is turning forty and fifty, still raising the fist of liberation but finding fewer and fewer takers and, let’s face it, sinking into a pit of quiet despair.

Because men and women are different, and studies prove this.  You shouldn’t need studies.  It’s evolutionary.  It benefitted men to sleep around and so those who did it with no issues were the ones who left most off spring.  It did not benefit women to sleep around.  It benefited them to have a guy know (or think) the kids were his, and therefore bring her the best hunk of mammoth from his hunt.  Her kids survived.

Studies have shown that though in both cases sex creates attachment, the effect is much stronger among women.

There’s other stuff.  We won’t talk about the human papilloma virus, now endemic in populations, which apparently causes interesting forms of vaginal, penile and mouth cancers.  The widespread dissemination of it requires that most people have MANY partners.

BUT at the heart of it, guys enjoy the hooking up culture, women don’t.  I’m not saying there weren’t always women who enjoyed it – of course there were – but statistically speaking, women favor attachment over hooking up.

How in hell did “liberating women” turn into “make them available for men’s fun with no pressures and no commitments?”  How can we believe “Men and women are exactly the same, despite different evolutionary pressures, despite the fact we can see and hear they aren’t?”

Semantic confusion.  We confuse equality before the law with equality.

How did not teaching your kids to read – whole word, making the classroom fun, “new methods” of learning for something that has been done in a mass setting and successfully since at least the Roman Empire – become “pedagogy”? and “Desirable”?  Semantic confusion.  We think “new” is better and trust “new discoveries” to make learning “less boring.”  (Almost all basic learning is mind bogglingly boring.  But it opens your wings to the sky.)

How did “Question Authority” become “Question all authority except your hippie teacher?”  Semantic confusion.  The teacher is after all cool and still behaves like an adolescent and assays your fears of growing old and unhip.  And he says the authority are those other people.  You know, the unhip ones, like your parents.  And you don’t think that the teacher has power over the classroom.  That he has his own authority.  And that he’s using it to manipulate you.

How did “Speaking Truth to Power” become saying platitudes that are already enforced from the top down in our laws and in our societal assumptions.  You know, things like “Anyone could be homeless.  They just need compassion.”  (Actually this is true, but for the long time homeless compassion should come in the form of making sure they take their meds and at least moderate their behavior enough to live in society.)  Things like “Women are exactly the same as men and any differences are cultural.”  (Actually women are driven by different hormones which shape thought, which shape – oh, never mind.  Yes, some women are more masculine then men, but not the vast majority.)  Things like “You should be able to make a living at whatever you want to, whether it’s something other people want or need or not.”  Things like “What’s wrong with capitalism is that it doesn’t distribute money equally.”

This is “Brave and courageous” I suppose because they can give you your very own TV show, for parroting what the authorities want people to believe.

But the thing about semantic insanity is that words aren’t the truth.  Words are just words.  Our lying eyes still insist on telling us where reality differs from the words, and things start cracking up.

The first symptom is an amping up of insanity.  Do women feel used and treated like dirt?  Do they get upset because younger women (DUH) attract more men?

Well, you get screams of “harassment” at mere words said in passing; and you get “lookism” and its being considered a bad thing to note someone is in fact female.

They could step back and think that perhaps sex for its own sake is bad, and perhaps there is a reason for mating for life and having support in your middle or old age.  But that would require real talking truth to power.  And that they can’t do.  Because everyone knows married people are unhip.

Is your kid failing to learn to read by the new spanking shiny methods?  Well, then he must have a disability and it must be the fault of something that’s tragically unhip, like irradiated food.

… But insanity can only be amped so much.  After a while even the crazies know it’s crazy.  And then, there’s the fact that semantic insanity encourages the sort of behavior that makes things worse and takes society apart faster.

And then the crash comes.  The normal result of the crash is a strong man regime, and maybe that’s where we’ll end up.  Only not the current strong men, because they’re semantically insane.  The very people trying to speed up the crash are the ones least likely to survive it.

Because most of them are third generation indoctrinated and unable to think of the signified beneath the significant.

I’m an odd duck.  I’d prefer no enforcement of even the old morals.  It makes most of us Odds distinctly uncomfortable, when any societal normal is rigidly enforced.  And it makes it difficult for creativity and invention to flourish.

But that’s where we’re headed if we don’t rein in this semantic insanity, because a strong-man regime that’s closer aligned with the majority of people is better than what we have now, which is only aligned with the reality inside people’s heads.  (Or at least the kakistocracy’s heads.)  It will allow people to survive better.

Or we can turn back now, and try to think clearly and believe our lying eyes and not the pretty stuff we want to believe.

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

There is a different post over at Mad Genius Club:  Entanglements.

The Portuguese are a very odd people  (you can stop guffawing now, it’s unbecoming).  I don’t know if there  is such a thing as a word devoted solely to nostalgia in other languages, but there is one in Portuguese.

They told us in translation class that this word – Saudade – can’t be literally translated to any one word in any other language.  Its definition would be something like “a near sick longing for days gone by/someone who is dead or far away/a condition you can’t be in again.”

The only time I can honestly say I’ve experienced it full force is in the middle of winter in Colorado.  I’m a person who doesn’t function well (or often at all) in cold weather, and sometimes I just long for warmth and know I can’t get it, and get all upset.

If I could recapture one day in the past – just one perfect day – it would be labor day when Marshall was three, and we discovered the decaying amusement park where I set Noah’s Boy.  The kids were young enough they never tired of the rides.  We went there I think at five, and stayed till long after ten pm.  Dan went on the rides with them, but I don’t do rides (I don’t pay money to be made uncomfortable.)  So I just took three mysteries, and walked around, and waited for them, and listened to their excited stories about the rides.  Then we went for a train ride around the park.  And, because all other restaurants were closed and we’d already eaten at our favorite diner that day, we ended up having late dinner at a Chinese restaurant downtown with a view of the city and introduced Marshall to Peking Duck.

If I could relive one perfect day, it would be that.  But it doesn’t rise to the level of saudade, because afterwards, I would want to be right back where I am.  (Though if we’re going to talk about knowing what I know now, this was right after I’d sold Ill Met By Moonlight, but it hadn’t come out, and if I’d known then what I know now, I’d not have bothered pursuing a career again, except for trying to get in at Baen.  Everything else would have gone in the drawer.  It would have saved me years – years – of stress.OTOH who knows if I’d be the person I’m now, and have the abilities I have now.  Yes, I know I might have better ones, but what if I didn’t.)

So, yesterday I was hanging out at Powerline, and saw their little thing on the pictures of the early twentieth century that Glenn put up.

John Hinderaker says this My reaction is, it isn’t just Detroit. The whole world looks better to me–less crowded, cleaner, more confident and hopeful. Better dressed, too.

So, I went and looked.  I can do saudade like nobody’s business, I was trained early.  But looking at those pictures, what came to mind was my childhood.

No, I didn’t grow up in that time.  Believe it or not, I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, plus twelve years.  However, looking at those pictures, they looked more familiar to me than I suspect they would for most of you.

I was told when I was little that Portugal was twenty years behind the rest of the western world.  Maybe so.  I’m sure the gap in medical science and other such things was no more than that.  Were it more, born premature and fragile, I wouldn’t be here.

However, it is a bad thing to think of civilizations and of history as moving along the same lines everywhere and in every respect.  It’s a human error, of course, and one that often shows up in science fiction books as “they have nineteenth century level technology.”

The thing is not scripted, and someone can be living at the nineteenth century level in transportation, say, and at the twenty first in medicine.  Or, as I understand applies in parts of Africa, at the medieval or before level in technology, but with ipods or cars.

In the area I was in, the pockets were more complex than that. Yeah, we mostly had “nineteenth century level” transportation tech, except that there were cars and buses and particularly vans and trucks aplenty.  The… a … domestic tech might have been pre-nineteenth century.  Most kitchens didn’t have running water, so it had to be got out of the well and carried in.  And our house had a – cold – shower, but most houses didn’t even have that.  (And the only person who used that was my dad.)

Looking at those pictures, I could feel the scratchy fabric on the skin, the sense you have in summer of grime all over you when you don’t bathe but once a week and just washing in parts from a basin is not the same.  I could smell those pictures too.  Yes, they’re beautiful, but I could smell the horse manure on the city streets and the tang of the smoke of those trains in the air.

And I could smell those children: unwashed hair and sweat.

I remember thirty years ago, even, getting on a train in Portugal – when it had come long distance from the mountains – was a noseful.  Not that people didn’t wash.  They did, once a week or so.  But we humans are stinky beasts.  And in winter you needed to add the smell of coal fires, which many people used to dry clothes and most people – outside the urban centers – used for heating and cooking.

And I knew that the beautiful shops and restaurants would be sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and frankly, that as beautiful as they look, you couldn’t get the variety you get now at your local seven eleven.  Or frankly the quality.

As for “less crowded” – not really.  There were probably more people you were forced into close contact with.  There are statistics proving there was less footage per person in houses, and I attest to that in trains and buses and city streets.

As for ideas – brother, you think we’re badly off now – back then they really  — really – believed big government could solve everything and take us to the stars and make everyone’s life paradise.  And we won’t go into the thousand indignities that composed daily life, which were taken for granted.  And no, I’m not talking of “women and minorities.”  We have gotten more… civilized – for both good and ill – in the last hundred years.  If you don’t believe me, read books from that time.  (For Us The Living, but Rex Stout of the time, too.)  Men seemed to be as violent as adults as they now are in Middle School: a constant game of “I can knock off your block” which must have been hell for Odd males.

So, what causes the “saudade” in rational people, with no invested interest in returning us to the past?

I think it’s two things: there is a sense of confidence in the photos.  Yes, part of this is that it was a more masculine society and in contradiction to what I said above, maybe we need to go halfway there again.  Maybe society shouldn’t be as namby pamby and “mommy will hold you so you don’t fall.”

But the more important one is the aesthetic.  I’ve talked here before about how our aesthetics, our society and to an extent our morals were all shocked by World War One and what we have now is the equivalent of a child hiding in the closet and denying its childhood, because it all ended badly.

For the last almost a hundred years, we’ve been living with the stripped down function-over-form aesthetic, the aspiration to look proletarian, the undecorated, stripped down look that became fashionable post WWI as a reaction against the previous aesthetic.

The thing I want you to understand is this: There I no reason for it.  The reasons you’ve been given in school are not reasons, but someone’s guesses at why it had gone this way, or even someone’s bankrupt justification of why it “should” be that way.

Things like “there were fewer resources and we had to stretch them over more people” are patently not true.  The price of raw materials has gone down, not up.  Things like “Stripped down following of form is always more beautiful” is someone’s aesthetic OPINION and you don’t have to believe it.

Look, I can even see where in those days those clothes they wore were horribly uncomfortable, and the decorations in bridges and stuff were hard to make and expensive.  But now?  With our materials?

We can make the future look like anything we want and make it comfortable too.

And that goes double for societal confidence.  As long as we remember that things don’t need to be done by the state to be big or ambitious?

What I want to say to you is this: You like the look of the past?  Take the look of the past.  (I’d argue there’s a great hunger for this.  Look at Steampunk.)

You want the societal confidence of that time?  Have it.  Yes, we’re going through bad times, but we have the resources and the abilities to make things better.  Do we have the abilities to make things perfect for everyone?  No war, no disease, no crime?  Well, no. The infinitely perfectible humanity is a dream that has caused more death and devastation than any other dream of mankind.  Let it go.  Just concentrate on making things better, and, yes, prettier if you can.  Societal confidence will come with it, with improving things step by step.

Let others dream of the past.  You forget about saudade, okay?  You take what you like/love/admire about the past and bring it to the future, with all the improvements the future offers.

Be not afraid.  The future is wide open.  It is yours to shape.