The Virus and Publishing

During this time of upheaval in the financial markets it's difficult to predict the effect on publishing. Traditionally when the economy goes south people read more. Will that hold true now? Are we a Netflix nation?

Last month an editor requested a piece of fiction with a specific subject and the peculiar word count of approximately 20,000 words. I finished it on time and much to my amazement rather liked it when it was finished. It was/is to be included in a four-author anthology. Now, who knows?

How much do the major publishers depend on huge publicity pushes with multi-city author promotions and carefully staged appearances at events. I have several not so carefully staged mini events pending. I enjoy presenting information about my books, but Colorado is really shutting down right now.

The United States has a wide-spread sophisticated health care system. Our population as a whole is healthier than most of the world. Colorado has an awesome system in place. Our governor took immediate steps to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Much to my amazement, the bishop of Colorado (Episcopal--my own denomination) just sent an email requesting that parishioners attend online. St. Luke's will be closed for in person worship this Sunday.

Is all of this necessary? I don't know. That's the point. The amount of confusion from both a health and financial standpoint is eerie.

We here in America are in a state of suspension. Waiting to see. Waiting to see.

No Spam Calls in the Future

Futurists like to give us a rosy view of tomorrow, mostly because they're funded by technologists with something big to sell, never mind the negative consequences. On the flip side, novels about the future tend to be bleak and the setting is often quite dystopian. Three of the landmark works about this grim future are 1984, Brave New World, and We. Most of us are familiar with George Orwell's 1984 and its oppressive totalitarian theme. In fact, "Big Brother is watching" is synonymous for government and corporate surveillance. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World takes a lighter, though ultimately just as constrictive view of a future society managed through biological engineering. Individuals are brought into this world through a decanting process that determines their station in life. What we consider natural birth is regarded as obscene. People are kept docile through officially sanctioned casual sex, group think (social media, anyone?) and the drug soma. "Don't give a damn, take a gram."

Both of these books draw quite a bit from an earlier Russian novel, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, first published in 1920. In this work, people live in glass houses, literally. They are allowed one hour a day "to lower the shades," meaning time for casual sex. Aside from that, there is no notion of privacy. Although Zamyatin intended this story as a critique of Soviet totalitarianism, read today, it's a fantastic satire of how our online lives have taken mastery of our existence. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon--the Internet sees all, it knows all.

Which brings me to another more modern novel, Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan (Now available on Netflix). It too is a dystopian tale, one that disturbed me when I first read it. The salient premise is that in this future, humans are implanted with an electronic "cordial stack," which downloads your consciousness. As long as the cordial stack remains undamaged, your consciousness can be swapped from body to body, what the book calls "re-sleeving." It's an extraordinary inventive piece of science fiction, and Morgan further delves into the premise by thinking through the consequences of swapping bodies. For example, you can testify at your own murder. In his world, the process is quite expensive--the cost equivalent of a house mortgage--so that "re-sleeving" remains the domain of the government and the wealthy. So the rich have the financial means of switching bodies as casually as the rest of us change clothes and thus the ability to be immortal.

On my second reading of Altered Carbon, years later, I stumbled over a detail that emphasized just how difficult it is now for science fiction to remain ahead of science fact, even for a work as trail blazing as this one. When the protagonist used a fob to summon a flying taxi, I thought, why doesn't he use the app on his mobile phone? Then I realized, his phone was simply that, a phone. But many of us seldom make calls on our phones; we mostly communicate via text, email, and instant messenger, something that's not done in this story. Also, Altered Carbon is a mystery so there's a lot of sleuthing about and looking for people. Again, why would that be necessary? We all know we can be tracked by our phones; why couldn't these future people be easily followed by their cordial stacks?

Smart phones represent a technology whose implications we still have a hard time understanding. Besides compromising privacy, they provide a deeply engaging experience that makes their use addictive. One tragic and unintended consequence is how they've facilitated distracted driving so that in the last two years, traffic fatalities have increased because of cell phones.

And I need to mention, that in those very different futures sans cell phones, people are never bothered by telemarketers.

Generation NaNoWriMo

Lately I was invited to speak, along with two other local authors--Cheryl Carpinello and Jerry Fabyanic--about our experiences as professional writers to students at the Rocky Heights Middle School. My sons are in their thirties, and so I have little recent experience with young teenagers. I was curious about our audience and before the talk I shared my thoughts with Judi Hoist, their teacher and faculty advisor. Obviously, things have changed since I was an adolescent. Demographers and sociologists like to group populations by age and tag them with attributes to differentiate them from their predecessors--BabyBoomers, Generation X, Y, Millennials, etc., Though the students at Rocky Heights fall outside the scope of Millennials (born between 1983 and 2000) but since they share many of the same cultural traits--access to the Internet, cell phones, social media--they are for the moment classified as Millennials.

My perceptions were framed by the whining I've heard from older generations about Millennials--that they're helpless without a connection to the Internet, that they're spoiled and feel eminently entitled, and they're clueless about the world. However grownups have been complaining about the younger generation since ancient times.

The children now love luxury.

They have bad manners, contempt for authority; 

they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

Socrates

Plus I've seen how my sons and their peers have stepped up to their responsibilities and challenges as have all generations before them.

This particular group of students was from the school's NaNoWriMo club. What impressed me was that they not only knew about National Novel Writing Month, but they actively participated in the event and in writing year round. Before the talk, Hoist proudly showed me a dozen books written and published by her students. The examples were indie-published by Amazon and showed a level of craft and application that eludes many adult wannabe writers that I've met.

The session began with Hoist counting noses and briefing the group about our visit. They then filed into the library and took seats. Hoist handed out snacks the students munched on and this seemed to have calmed them down. I counted 40 students with only five boys among them, and while it might be easy to draw the conclusion that boys are not as academically oriented as girls, in fact, the robotics club was going on at the same time, and there the boy/girl ratio was reversed.

Carpinello, Fabyanic and I were allotted an hour and a half, and beforehand we worried that the session would drag along. But once the Q&A began, the students proved eager to ask detailed questions and quiz us about our takes on various aspects of writing and publishing. What we didn't do was talk down to the students since they had a surprisingly keen grasp of the subject. The Q&A further deepened my impression of what these young scribes were capable of. Their questions focused mostly on the technical aspects of writing: asking about when and why would you use 3rd POV versus 1st person POV, what should go into a prologue, when is too much exposition?

The time quickly passed and at the end we sold a few books. The girls were especially drawn to Carpinello's high fantasy stories. On the way out we passed a rehearsal for the school play, and those students were every bit as serious about their craft as were ours in the NaNoWriMo club.

My takeaway from all this? Anecdotes about slackers and losers among the next generation make for interesting but misleading news stories. The next wave of leaders and movers are diligently at work and getting ready to take control when their time comes.

Our future jobs

First off, my newest book, University of Doom, is out. I blogged about it last month so you can read about it there.

Lately, what's really gotten me wound up is talk about a Universal Basic Income. What drives this idea is that advances in Artificial Intelligence and automation are going to push a lot of people out of a job with no work to turn to. The most popular guess is that by 2030, robots will have replaced fifty percent of all jobs. Self-driving cars are about five years away, and the first two industries to be hit hard by them are taxis (to include Uber and Lyft) and commercial trucking. In the US, we have around 3.5 million commercial truck drivers, and there's plenty of speculation about how many of them will lose their jobs to automation. In the Wolverine movie, Logan, there's a scene where robotic trucks make a cameo appearance. It's a quick look, but telling in how no one in the movie remarks about them. Plus, we have to account for the ripple affect as the elimination of those drivers will impact truck stops, diners, repair facilities, and the industry's administrative overhead.

Elon Musk is among those giving the most dire of warnings. The problem is, without jobs, what will people do for money? Representative Chris Lee of Hawaii has proposed discussing the state issuing a Universal Basic Income, but as the idea is still in its infancy, the details are yet to be sorted out. As in who gets it? How much will it be? Where does the money come from?

Which got me thinking about the world of the future as we see in it in science fiction. We seldom see people in regular jobs. We have cops, guards, soldiers, the IT geeks, assorted pilots and crew, scientists, and those people at the top calling the shots. Once in a while we might see a clerk (though according to the futurists, those jobs will be among the first to go). And what about us writers? Will we be replaced by robots? The publishing industry would love that. (I call dibs on that story idea.)

This is obviously a huge topic and one I'll return to in the future. What I'm most curious about is crime in the future. Because of technology, fraud and theft have become more widespread. Our dependence on evermore prevalent narcotics is a major factor in violent crime, and the sex-slavery trade is as prolific as ever. So it seems, we crime writers will not lack for inspiration.