For background, please take 1 minute to watch the following Monty Python clip:

In the commentary on Life of Brian, John Cleese said that the depictions of the fractious, factiony Jewish Revolutionaries were a satire on the left wing activist groups of the 1970s. “They were so interested in ideological purity,” he said, “that they never accomplished anything.”

The last couple years have seen a lot of this kind of thing on the left and the right–the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are not as disparate as their rhetoric makes them seem. To speak in very broad terms, both of these movements are responses to the theft of trillions of dollars from the public and private purses by the collusion of regulators with industry.

The history behind this theft, though, are non-trivial and often subtle, and it’s going to take a lot more than slogans like “Taxed Enough Already” or “We are the 99%” to get anything done. For an in-depth analysis of how this all happened, and a discussion of some things (that are unpopular with all four of the most visible political parties) that can be done, I recommend taking a look at this analysis:

The trouble with both OWS and The Tea Party, in my view, is that these groups have both succumb to the Judean People’s Front syndrome: when faced with a crisis, they have both run home to their pet ideologies as the source of all wisdom, created an insular culture with a bunker mentality, and then started shouting loudly about those who disagree. The Tea Partiers are blaming the socialists for the bailouts and agitating for a radical repeal of taxes and regulations (without agitating for any substantive budget cuts that would make such a repeal feasible), the OWS folks are latching on to a caricatured version of anarcho-syndicalism (the philosophy of Noam Chomsky) or democratic socialism (i.e. European-style central planning and social safety net).

And while everyone is shouting at each other, something vital is being missed:

The Loyal Opposition
When two people disagree about the best course of action, but agree on the goal or on the problem, and both share a true concern for the matter at issue, you have the right ground for the formation of a Loyal Opposition.

This is a basic value of republican society (note the small “r”)–another name for it is pragmatism. Such a system works very well at enhancing liberty and prosperity, as it allows you to watch out for the corruption you find most intolerable, while trusting that the other parties will be watching out for corruption that might slip past your radar. It’s “I’ll watch your back, you watch mine.” The world, and especially politics and economics, is a complex place, and the loyal opposition is vital to the continuation of the Enlightenment civilization.

The trouble is, it’s more comfortable to be in an echo chamber where those who share your views congregate, even if they do not share your values. Jeffersonian Libertarians, for example, have very few values in common with theocrats–but they’re both populating the tea party. Progressive Liberals (i.e. those who believe in working for incremental progress toward the liberalization of society) have very few values in common with Marxists. But these coalitions persist because it is more comfortable to talk in terms of this years electoral policy proposals than it is to talk in terms of long-term goals and agendas.

Different Kinds of Revolution
Broadly speaking (like everything in this post), there are two kinds of political revolution: The Populist, and the Coalitional.

Populist Revolution
Populism has always been the tool of the demagogue. The October Revolution, The Fascist Revolutions, The Cuban Revolution, and the other revolutions that darkened the 20th century were populist in nature. These are movements that start out of vague popular unrest, are backed by a lot of rage and irritation, and explode almost spontaneously on the scene. During the explosion phase, they grasp about, looking for a unifying voice, and that void gets filled by someone who can speak the right homilies–code phrases about class warfare, or about a Christian nation, or about a return to old-fashioned values, or about social justice. That someone is–very often–a demagogue: someone who is willing to say the popular thing and cloak themselves in the mantle of a humble savior, and who promises radical reform, redemption, or revolution. These movements are characterized by their pursuit of ideological purity, of utopian dreams, and of simple solutions that, while they sound appealing, do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

After all, it doesn’t follow that installing a revolutionary dictatorship will result in a better life for people who were suffering under the boot of a corrupt monarchy or corporate-controlled state (as happened in Russia and Cuba respectively). It doesn’t follow that returning to agrarian existence will make the country strong and morally pure and free from imperial oppression (as happened in China). It doesn’t follow that a return to Catholic morality will fix a crumbling infrastructure (as happened in Italy), or that embracing Protestant Lutheranism and Teutonic Identity Politics or exterminating the Jews will rescue a country’s looted economy (as happened in Germany).

Populist revolution is, and has always been, one of the two chief dangers faced by democracy (the other is popular apathy combined with a culture of fear, which invites aristocracy).

Coalitional Revolution
Coalitional Revolution happens when disparate interests with specific agendas team up around their few common goals. Because of the tenuous nature of the coalition, the aims of the Revolution look, necessarily, decidedly modest. “No taxation without representation” is a very, very thin goal, politically speaking, compared to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

There have only been a handful of coalitional revolutions in world history, and they are the only ones that have not lead, in short order, to dictatorship. Two that spring to mind are the Athenian Revolution and the American Revolution (though there have been several others).

To take the case most of us are most familiar with, let’s look at the American Revolution. This was a period where anarchists, antimonarchs, property barons, industrialists, free trade advocates, theocrats, farmers, merchants, and socialists banded together for a single common goal: to end British Rule in the Americas. They were able to do this because of an implicit (and sometimes explicit) agreement that those who fight get a seat at the table to form the new government. There was no common cause, there was no common leader, and the Constitutional convention was filled with people who would just as soon have seen each other dead (fun fact: there have been a handful shoot outs and duels between senators during congressional sessions).

How do you create a revolution out of that? Thomas Paine found a way, by writing a book called Common Sense and encouraging open debates to get people to think about the two issues they could all agree on: that foreign kings were obsolete, and that a people had the right to chose their own government.

The American Revolution was preceded by years of public education and debates, of long and boring discussions and arguments and fistfights (and sometimes gunfights). In all of this time, the one thing that was never in the cards (despite how some people agitated for it) was a grand unifying vision for the country that would result. It was the only way it could happen, in a landmass populated by colonies that were both urban and rural, both slave and free, theocratic and religiously liberal, separatist and cosmopolitan. The people who pushed the revolution realized that the only way to make meaningful change was to table the question of reforms until they were in the place to implement them.

And who can blame them? Patrick Henry wanted a theocracy. Madison wanted a secular state. Franklin wanted scientific socialism. Jefferson wanted anarcho-capitalism. The Baptists in New England wanted the Quakers in Pennsylvania burned, deported, or tried for heresy. Some wanted universal slavery–others wanted it abolished at the outset. The agendas were so diametrically opposed that the Revolution would never have happened had they not believed one another capable of honor–and had the strength to hold each other to the obligation to hash out compromises the hard way.

In school, we learned about the uncompromising men, heroes or villains–people like Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, but “uncompromising” is the one thing that they weren’t. Because when they sat down in Philadelphia, they did nothing but compromise. They did not trust each other with the power to take their property, their land, their freedom, or their labor if given a chance, so they hammered out a compromise that let each of them keep what they held most dear, without giving them the power to take those things from other people.

They found a kind of permanence in an ideal that Marx articulated eighty years later, but never understood: The Permanent Revolution.

Why It Blew Up in Oakland
Reading about a coalitional revolution, you might hear in it the echoes of the Civil Rights movement, and you’d be right. Martin Luther King was very well aware of the techniques of Coalitional Revolution, and during the 60s you could find, at many protests, tents for the sharing of ideas. Little universities, at which people shared reports from the front lines and (at least before 1969, when things started to fall apart) welcomed disagreement and discussion. There were people who were in the business of working out compromises–southern churchgoers side by side with Marxist Jews from New York, Republicans side by side with Democrats, disagreeing about the best policy framework while all agreeing that segregation, lynching, and systematic repression had to go.

But one of the camps in that movement DID lose: The Race Warriors. All across the country, there were people invested in the ideals of violent, populist revolution. They agitated for (and tried to create) a full-blown civil war around the subject of race.

For better or worse, a lot of those people still live in Oakland, and they have a cottage industry called professional agitation. It doesn’t take much effort to learn that crowds on the street can be turned violent very easily. In a group of ten thousand, you only need a few dozen people positioned in the right places to turn a peaceful protest into a riot–either by goading the protesters into misbehavior, or by attacking the cops directly, forcing the cops to push back and escalate. These few folks in Oakland and their brethren throughout the U.S. (and also members of various intelligence services, who have non-classified manuals on the technique) are very good at this kind of destabilizing work.

This is why New York might have had a few police skirmishes early on, but Oakland is the place where things went batshit crazy. Oakland is a city whose underlying social history (on both sides of the blue line) guarantees that, if a riot is going to become a war, Oakland is where it starts.

Street wars are one of the fertile germinating soils of populist revolution, and they are a very, very dangerous thing. So far, the OWS movement in New York seems to be holding their shit together in spite of repeated skirmishes–let’s hope they continue to do so, rather than letting misguided solidarity with Oakland push them into escalating (and let’s hope the vast majority of the Oakland protest keeps its cool heads even as the agitators try to work their dark magic).

Becoming The Judean People’s Front (or not)
Without a non-partisan, unambitious slate of achievable objectives, Occupy and The Tea Party are both going to fail. So long as the members remain committed to utopian ideologies or uncompromising agendas, all they’ll achieve is sewing more and more discord and partisanship in a country that is already suffering from deep-rooted, demagogue-driven populist vitriol.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Tea Party, and Occupy, and most of mainstream America agree on the basic problem:
Government and industry (in this case, the financial industry) have colluded in such a way as to create massive opportunities for fraud and theft, and they then colluded to reward those who perpetrated the theft by protecting them from the consequences of their actions (and all this in a climate of grab-it-while-you-can budgetary policy).

That has to stop, and stopping it without ruining our economy or our environment or our stability as a civilization is a solvable, short term, practical goal.

But people from both camps, and from the vast silent majority, have to start narrowing their focus and talking to each other. We have to rediscover the loyal opposition.

The Real Value of Occupy and The Tea Party
Because of how easily they are gamed, subverted, and perverted, street protests and agitation are often a very, very ineffective tools of political change. They can be valuable though, and if a coalitionary revolution arises from them, they can be world-changers. The small goals that the coalition achieves sends ripple effects throughout the world (look at what’s already happening just with the small amount of liberalization brought about by Arab Spring).

Taking to the streets in useless demonstrations of emotion and unfocused frustration can, and often does, defuse those emotions, which can render the reform impulse impotent.

But for all these objections, both of these movements share something of real value even in their most useless and wasteful demonstrations:

The are reminding people of their civil rights, and of their importance. The right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition the government, the right to bear arms, the right to free speech–these are rights that are again unpopular among vast swaths of the population.

When the powers that be push back disproportionately, it reminds people that this is America, and the very rights to not be gassed and to not be provoked to riot by the cops that are supposed to prevent a riot, are sacred. And they have to be, if we want to continue to live in an open society where argument, and experimentation, and discourse are allowed.

Keeping those rights front and center shores up the ornery nature of the American public, and makes them less likely to accept dictatorial solutions.

What if the ebook revolution isn’t about ebooks? What if, instead, it’s a symptom of a fundamental restructuring of most of the nature of market economies?

Here’s my line of thinking:

In getting any given market, you have three basic problems:
1) Discoverability
2) Awareness
3) Perishability

With food (and, as Dean Wesley Smith aptly pointed out, with books), the perishability issue is the most pressing. Turnaround has to happen fast, or the product spoils, either because of inherent perishability (in the case of food and pharmaceuticals) or limited shelf space (in the case of almost everything else), or because of changing demand (fashions, tech gadgets). But with digital products, and with manufacturing-on-demand, the marginal costs of production are much, much lower, so the tolerance for long-term return is consequently much higher, in economic terms.

With ebooks and POD, for example, I can write a book today, and even if it never breaks big, I’ll still be earning pizza money from it in thirty years. If, over that same thirty years, I stick to writing at a manageable pace, I’m building a passive income that will replace my regular household income, so long as I’m patient enough.

Discoverability and market awareness are the next big hurdles, but market persistence is the single greatest generator of market awareness. If you live in town near a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (assuming it serves a cuisine you like and has a sign that catches your eye), chances are very good that you will eventually have dinner there. Then, if you like it, you’ll eat there again sometime–maybe regularly. Coca-cola might spend billions on advertising every year, but all that money does is keep their logo visible. It makes them familiar–which means that you’re more likely to grab for a coke when faced with an assortment of unfamiliar choices.

In the collapsing global supply chain of the last thirty years, this has produced what economists call a “Matthew Effect.” The big brands get bigger, the little brands fade out. They fade out because they don’t make enough short-term profit to assure them of long-term product positioning that could build market awareness and enhance discoverability. The short-term profit problem is tied directly to manufacturing costs: to be on the shelf, you have to have cash outlay to produce a product. To stay on the shelf, you have to recoup enough to make the next round of perishable products, and you often also have to buy co-op space (where you pay rent for your shelf space) to the retailers selling your products. After all, if your product doesn’t move, they’re taking a bath on shelf space they could be devoting to brands that move faster.

In The Long Tail, Clay Shirky spotted that online retailing changes this to some extent–digital products and theoretically infinite shelf space mean that anyone can hang out in any marketplace for as long as they want, so long as their products aren’t perishable and the cost of carrying the product is near zero. He said the future consists of selling an increasingly small volume of an increasingly large catalog (i.e. instead of selling 5 cans of coke, you might sell 2 Cokes, 1 Pepsi, one RC Cola, and 1 7up).

As the long tail model has spread into the content industries (books, films, music, etc.), we’ve heard a lot of doomsayers talk about how the long tail will make it impossible for artists to get discovered, for movies to recoup their costs, for bands to afford studio time. And in some cases, these predictions have born out in the short term–but I’m beginning to think this is a temporary situation. Here’s why:

Corporate accounting philosophy, all things being equal, tends toward the short term. Stock price is based in large part on the perception that profits in the next quarter will match predictions, and for the stock price to rise those predictions and the reports validating them must show a certain amount of growth–otherwise, profit-seekers will move their stocks to other companies which appear to be growing fast. In other words, the stock market is a venue on which people with a short-term focus gamble on blockbusters. The previous generation of VCs, getting their start in the dot-com era, have mimicked this blockbuster mentality, looking for ultra-high returns on a short time horizon. And, in a world of blockbuster products, mass media, and collapsed supply chains, this sort of thinking was thoroughly reasonable.

But it’s also highly volatile. It’s the kind of underlying market conditions that create market bubbles. It creates an unstable economic environment, and a reluctance to invest, as eventually even the adrenaline junkies run out of tolerance for ultra-high levels of risk.

This is where I think ebooks come back into the picture. Take the slow-growth model I outlined above. Agonizingly slow growth, even. With digital products, having no manufacturing costs beyond the initial R&D, it’s a natural fit. It’s the one place where the long tail REALLY works, if you have the patience for it. And I think that this fact, coupled with one other, is starting to radically reshape the fundamentals of the world economy.

That other factor is something called “discount rate on those dollars diminishes–if the project is internally financed, that discount rate can fall to near the level of inflation.

Practical results would include:
Large studios being more willing to finance niche-market entertainment.
Crazy-innovative disruptive technologies would get a longer exposure window in the marketplace.
Niche-market products becoming economical for giant corporations to manufacture (I’ve got my pie-in-the sky hopes for a revival of the Pontiac Firebird line, assuming GM doesn’t go belly-up again in the next ten years).
Drug development becoming more economical, as long earn-back windows become more viable (which translates to cheaper medicines in the medium-to-long term).

From my (admittedly limited) vantage point, the penetration of this kind of long-term, long-tail thinking into these large sectors is inevitable, both because of risk fatigue and because of the continually-diminishing marginal costs created by infinite shelf-space, JIT manufacturing, and easily retooled assembly lines.

The mass market revolution of the 20s-50s, after all, was created by the underlying economic realities of assembly-line manufacturing and mass media. The per-unit manufacturing cost was SO low on an assembly line compared to hand-making something, that artisan jobs shrank to hobbies, and the market access costs through mass media were SO high that only a well-financed company could even hope to have a chance.

But now, thanks to the convergence of the Internet with other communications technologies, the marketplace is atomized. Despite the temporary dominance of any single company (in the last twenty years we’ve seen Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, and half a dozen others all take their turn at market dominance in one space or another–there’s no reason to expect that the current apparent monopolies will prove any more resilient), then both the marketplaces and the products they carry will continue to grow more diverse. For companies and investors to continue to remain profitable (or dominant),they will be forced to move to more subtle and diverse ways of quantifying risk and tabulating returns; shifting some of their business to long-time horizon projects. And a long time horizon changes everything about the way the world currently does business.

I wish I could effectively emphasize how important this kind of a change is. The best way I know is to list companies that are characterized by this kind of long-term thinking, and that took a long time–often more than a decade–to achieve profitability. Pixar and Apple spring to mind as ones that you’ll all know. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Edison’s Menlo Park are some others.

Because of all this, I think that what we’re seeing in publishing is a minor early symptom of a wave that’s in the process of altering the face of civilization as fundamentally as did the printing press. And, like that earlier revolution, it’s going to take a while to shake out–maybe a lifetime or two. Growing up in the late part of the 20th century, people of my generation had to learn to be extraordinarily impatient in order to survive. Now, the tables are turning. Entrepreneurs in the early 21st century now must learn patience and endurance. That goes double for authors and creatives–at least if we want to see our endeavors pay off (instead of winding up bouncing from one perceived failure to another because we can’t sit still).

Five or ten years or twenty years isn’t too long to wait to live off a passive income from ebooks. Our grandparents had a word for what we’re calling the worst-case income scenario of an indie author who sticks with it for the long haul: pension

I know these musings might rub a lot of you the wrong way. I could be completely wrong. Please do drop comments and arguments below (and please make them more nuanced than “the corporateocracy will never let this happen” or other species of that kind of fearmongering). The more I think about this situation, the more radical the outcomes look to me. Radical changes to the very economic ground we walk on are often tumultuous, uncomfortable, and terrifying. But the possible outcomes of this thing looks for those of us starting on a path of life-long innovation and creativity, whatever the industry, than the situation has in at least a hundred years–if not at any time in recorded history.

Assuming we keep our heads.

I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.

Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?

There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” After all, most readers who are confused on a point of history or arcane knowledge (and who are of an intellectual or curious bent) that you employ will go to Wikipedia to catch up with you. It therefore follows that if a point in your story–particularly a major plot point–turns on a bit of arcane knowledge, you damn well better make sure that a cursory glance at Wikipedia won’t make you look lazy.

Not that I have anyone particular in mind, but for the sake of illustration, I’m going to pick on two popular authors (one of whom I really like, the other of whom I admire, but don’t much enjoy).

[Be warned: Spoilers follow]

First, Jeff Lindsay, creator of Dexter. For the book Dexter in the Dark he brings in a serial killer who leaves the device “mlk” at his murder scenes. Dexter, after a considerable amount of Internet research, concludes that this is a reference to the god “Moloch.” So far so good–anytime someone’s got the guts to work some obscure mythology into his storyline, I’m a happy guy.

Unfortunately, Lindsay then goes on to say that “the characters ‘mlk’ were from an ancient language…Aramaic.” And that’s where the book, for about two chapters, descends into the kind of incoherence that only badly-researched mysticism can create.

Moloch, you see, is a Phoenician god, and the Phoenician used an entirely different alphabet from Aramaic (the language of the Canaanites), despite the languages being related. Aramaic doesn’t have any letters that look remotely like an “m” or a “k”– but Phoenician does. There are a dozen other reasons, too, that the idea the Moloch would speak Aramaic is ridiculous, but let’s just stick with these two which–feel free to check for yourself–are easily confirmed by a Wikipedia search.

And, really, if you’re going to go to the trouble to use something as esoteric as Moloch, and you’re going to try to make it cool by dipping deep into Kabbalistic Demonology, you’re going to have to do some research (unless you’re like me who reads stuff like this for fun), so why in the world wouldn’t you do a basic fact check?

A more eggregious example of this kind of thing is Dan Brown, who writes occult history thrillers (so far so good), claims that admitted hoaxes such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail are legitimate true histories (not so good–at least he could rely on hokum that hasn’t been publically acknowledged as a prank by its authors), and then goes that one further:

In The Da Vinci Code, a multinational conspiracy of elite catholics spend gobs of money and kill loads of people in order to save the church from a secret that would destroy it: That Jesus was…married?

Um…come again? Okay, yes, the Vatican is a bastion of sexual repression that has inarguably engaged in a good bit of historical forgery and cover-ups over the centuries. But of all the secrets they could be hiding about the origin of Christianity, this has to be right up there with “Jesus used Crest Toothpaste” in the annals of “inconvenient facts with the fewest possible consequences to Christian doctrine.” If Brown wanted some real dynamite, he could have gone for another fringe theory that’s actually got some scholarly support and would actually give the Catholic Church huge headaches if it were to become commonly believed(such as the fringe scholarly theory that Jesus Never Existed).

Still, sex is sexier than fraud, I suppose. And Brown writes a hell of a page-turner, as evidenced by his amazing sales numbers.

[End of Spoilers]

I humbly submit that if we’re going to be telling stories that present the illusion of reality, that delve into the “what ifs” and “what could have beens,” why not at least put in Wikipedia-level research? Or, if we can’t be bothered, perhaps we should let go of pretense to connect our illusions to reality, and just make up the names as well. Seems to me it would be much less confusing–and present much less of a liability to the coherence of the illusion–than throwing out bogus facts that put us at risk of failing the Wikipedia Test.

—-
A few great authors that usually pass the Wikipedia test:
Gary Jennings, Ken Follett, Clive Cussler, Clive Barker, Isaac Asimov, Gail Carriger, Leon Uris, Cherie Priest, Thomas Harris, Stephen King (this is what I came up with at 4AM. It’s not an exhaustive list by a long shot).

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

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I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

It is now perhaps more popularly known as “white guilt” day, the day when people who are culturally descended from those early settlers and the people they conquered go into reflexive spasms of regret over the conquest of a paradise uncorrupted by the sins of European so-called “civilization. It brought environmental catastrophe, plagues, wanton slavery, and ugliness hereto unseen on the face of the earth.

I’d suggest that both camps would be helped considerably by reading Columbus’s diaries and some primary sources from the intervening centuries (i.e. stuff written at the time, not later interpretations), but in my experience that would do very little to illuminate the discussion. More’s the pity–in a world where there are persistent social problems involving repression, slavery, genocide, and merchantilist cronyism, the jingoistic crowing on one hand and the paroxysms of masturbatory guilt on the other hand have the cumulative effect of cultural blindness.

So, for the record, and in the hopes of shedding a little light on a day which usually generates meaningless heat, here a few potentially relevant thoughts:

Every square inch of the globe has been taken and retaken in wars stretching back to the beginning of human settlement. Nobody is a native, with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines (they are the one aboriginal people whose history I don’t know well enough to include in this group).

Slavery, rape, warfare, and genocide, are human universals–each has been practiced in some form everywhere, in all cultures, aboriginal and agrarian, primitive and technological, since the beginning of recorded time, with one exception: The post-enlightenment western world from the late nineteenth century onward. Although the debates over just war, women’s rights, slavery, property rights, and freedom have been popular among philosophers since the fourth century B.C.E., it is only in recent centuries in the Western World that they have been able to gain enough of a foothold to become (slowly, haltingly, and imperfectly) the dominant ideals of a civilization.
Pretending that the crimes of Europeans against aboriginal American nations are uniquely cruel, unprecedented, or a fight of warlike bullies against peaceful victims is ahistorical, dishonest, and racist both against the aboriginal peoples and the different peoples that settled the New World. Worse, it diminishes the continuing presence of these practices in our world in forms as brutal and wretched as any in history.

Europeans are not a unified racial or cultural group, and were not considered one in the US until the mid twentieth century. Many writers had to fight for the right to include Italian, German, and other non-English and non-French characters in their novels during the early decades of the twentieth century. In terms of colonial behavior, the conduct of the Portugese, the French, the English, and the Spanish were all radically different.
It’s no accident that England became the dominant world Empire for three centuries–they were the only power to allow dissent, encourage native education, and, in some measure, allow local native governments to retain a degree of autonomy, and it’s no accident that countries who have thrown off the English yolk still maintain peacable and very friendly relationships with the mother country. No other colonial power in world history has enjoyed this circumstance, and it exists because of the way the English treated their subjects–cruelly, sometimes despotically, but almost always better than the native governments they displaced. It is perhaps an irony of history that the practice of constitutional democracy and the contempt for feudalism and dictatorship spread across the world through the stepchildren of history’s most extensive imperial monarchy, but the historical fact remains:

The colonization of the new world by the people who did so, at the time they did it, allowed Enlightenment ideals to flourish far from the watchful eyes of Torquemada, Calvin, Luther, Elizabeth the First, and the other despotic dictators of the period who were heavily into thought control. In the New World (and nowhere else in history), the ferment of notions such as “The Brotherhood of Man,” “Human Rights,” “Civil Rights,” “Freedom of Thought,” “Freedom of Speech,” and “The Equality of Women” took hold. It spread first to Europe, and then over the next few centuries, to the entire world (which now, at least, pays them lip service). That ferment is directly responsible for the citizen-based governments now present in almost all former British colonies, which to this day represents a disproportionate segment of the non-oppressed people of the world.

To note these differences in imperial approach, and their effects, is not to justify the racism, sexual oppression, theft, and violence that accompanies even the most genteel of historical colonial expansion. It is good and appropriate to reflect, to be self-critical. The freedom and moral imperative to do so is, perhaps, the most important legacy of the Enlightenment. But doing so dishonestly, often in service of reactionary political thinking and uninformed by an understanding of history, is neither enlightened nor laudable; it is simply self-righteous bullying, which is ugly on everyone.

Finally, in keeping with the theme that seems to be emerging in this post, there’s one more thing worth pointing out: One of the basic notions underlying Enlightenment civilization is this: a person’s destiny is not predicated on their heritage. I am a writer. My father was a professor. His father was a rancher, then a laborer. His father was a dirt farmer. Four generations, five different careers. Many people on this continent are less than three generations away from slavery–one of them sits on the Supreme Court. In any other era, in any other civilization, my destiny, your destiny, and the destiny of almost everybody would have been prescribed by law based on the social position of our births. Today, though birth has a definite effect, no law binds us to the position we start in.

It is, therefore, immoral to identify a person as an oppressor because of her heritage, or as oppressed because of his heritage. Each person is responsible for his own conduct and destiny and (though the ideal still is very imperfectly practiced and should never be taken for granted) should not be judged based on the crimes–or lack thereof–of his ancestors.

So, by all means, let’s have the debate. Let’s talk about the unintentional bacteriological extermination of entire nations. Let’s talk about the breaking of treaties, of the deliberate biological warfare, of the eugenics laws, the thefts, the enslavements (by many names). Let’s talk about the innovations of government by the Iriquois–and by Solon of Athens, whose ideas were ignored until resurrected by James Madison. Let’s talk also about the Aztec sacrifices, the pre-Columbian continent-wide warfare, the warlike tribes of the southwest, the raiding parties (provoked and unprovoked), the rapes and child prostitution on both sides of the Indian wars. Let’s talk about the unintended consequence of the colonial conquest of the Americas: a world climate in which colonialism is all but impossible, where invasion of a peaceable nation often provokes a near-universal military response from the other nations of the world.

And do let it be a genuine debate. Let us eschew both jingoism and masturbatory guilt fantasies. Let us throw off the suffocating weight of sacrament–both the ashen sackcloth and the waving flag. Let us instead engage in an honest exchange of ideas for mutual enrichment, rather than a shouting match of competing, unenlightened, and blinkered moral paradigms.

“Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard… not that I’m incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn’t one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So… mortal… what’s your excuse?”

Harlan Ellison is arguably the least popular author in science fiction, because his personal reputation (some of which, he’s the first to admit, he worked hard to earn) paints him as something in between Q and the unholy hybrid of Ross Perot and a pissed off garden gnome. He’s also one of the greatest living authors in the world; the quality of his stories, and their diversity, is such that he’s never been out of work since he started selling consistently in the 1950s and 60s.

He edited the two greatest anthologies in the history of the genre, he penned the Star Trek episode that showed the possibilities inherent in Gene Roddenberry’s lovably hokey show, his influence on and friendship with J. Michael Straczynski were instrumental in bringing Babylon 5 to market (thus giving Ellison an instrumental hand in two of the most historically important Science Fiction dramas, as measured by their effect on culture–in Star Trek’s case–and on the nature of televised drama in the case of Babylon 5). He’s the author of two of the most reprinted stories in history. He nursed the New Wave movement of the 60s and 70s to something artistically and culturally important, with ramifications far beyond Science Fiction.

A lot of my friends (as in, almost all of them) can’t stand him. Some will go into fits of huffing and profanity when he come sup in conversation (as will a much greater number of my casual acquaintances). He’s an irascible bastard, with very little patience for those who (in his opinion) don’t get it. He’s scrappy, picks fights whenever he can, and is a master of scandalizing the easily scandalized. And arrogance? Yeah, he’s got a lot of that.

And you know what? I don’t care. Normally I’d smile and nod, but it’s time to go on record saying I don’t give a good goddamn if Harlan Ellison is an asshole. Although I enjoy being kind to people whenever possible and dislike cruelty, I always have and always will admire Harlan’s work ethic, his devotion to excellence, his impatience with half-assedness, his integrity, and the amazing quality of his work over a more-than-fifty year writing career.

So, like Peter David’s Q said, yeah, he’s arrogant. And if you have a problem with that, I gotta ask: What’s your excuse, mortal? I certainly don’t have one. I haven’t earned that right. If I live long enough and write well enough, I might have a ghost of a chance of earning it, but that day is decades off (at best).

I think it’s an important thing to say, and to say now. Because, you see, Harlan is dying. Today, he is appearing at MadCon in Madison, Wisconson, and it will be his last public appearance. Ever.

You can read Harlan’s announcement here.

There are only a very few people left who have been around our field since the beginning, or nearly so. Harlan Ellison, Frederick Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, James Gunn, Michael Moorcock. I might have missed one or two, but the fact remains: I can now count our living history in names that don’t even take up all my fingers and toes.

These are the people we owe our field to. Their stories, and the tales of those who came before them starting in the 1920s, have helped shape our civilization, because they inspired the scientists that entered the space program, that powered the computer revolution, who pioneered the internet, and who are now powering the biotech revolution. They are the visionaries whose dreams our stuff is made of.

If you are fortunate enough to be in the room with any of these people, treasure the chance. Listen to their stories. Remember the history. They’re going fast, and I suspect that most of us in the under fifty category won’t realize how precious they are until it’s far too late.

One of them comes to Scientific American belatedly (it was originally published on May 16) from the atom smasher at Fermilab, which may just have answered the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?

I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m talking physics. There’s been a problem in fundamental physics that goes like this: Matter and Antimatter are both created out of the probabilistic churning of the quantum foam in the vacuum all the time – and then they annihilate one another. It’s this kind of probabilistic interaction that produced the Big Bang, but if matter and antimatter annihilate one another, then why should there be anything at all?

Well, after crunching a couple decades worth of data from Fermilab, it looks like occasionally, in special circumstances (like those that prevailed at the time of the Big Bang), the quantum foam produces about 1% more matter than antimatter, so when all the annihilation happens, there’s a residue.

Assuming that the data holds up, we now know with quite a lot of surety why we’re here: because we, and the rest of the universe, were in that one percent of matter which didn’t get annihilated.

But more important than that is the scientific paper today out of AAAS from the lab of Craig Venter, the man who invented shotgun sequencing, the method of DNA sequencing that is now the most widely used in the world. In a modest paper entitled CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME, Venter and his team announced something that will change the world every bit as profoundly as the printing press once did: The creation of an artificial organism.

Let me reiterate: Humans have now created, from scratch (the genome from scratch, that is), a life form that can reproduce, metabolize, and respond to stimuli. An artificial, designed genome runs the show. The ability to do this is something we’ve been seeking for centuries, and now that it’s here the implications are astounding. We now have the ability to, for example, resurrect extinct species, create designer organisms to dispose of pollution or convert electricity from sunlight, and that’s only the very, very tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Remember this date. In twenty or thirty years, when nothing in the world is the same and never will be again, you’ll have Craig Venter to thank for it, and May 19 will be the day on which you remember that it was today (well, yesterday now), that the human race became the author of an entire biosphere, rather than simply the usurping editor of the one in which we arose.

Part three of three of the live call-in show that launched Down From Ten — this one plays almost like a Reprobates Hour episode on the history of the podcast novel. A change of pace from the previous episodes, and a very interesting one.

Part 2 of the Richard Carrier is now live. We continue our conversation about science in the ancient world, discuss the works and missteps of Rodney Stark and his theory of the scientific revolution, read and discuss ancient documents germaine to the topic, and talk about the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Hera Flea returns with more Reprobates News, and Danny Schade continues to supply additional questions and commentary.

Next time, in about two weeks, we’ll talk to Cory Doctorow about DRM, Freedom, Surveilance, and Linux.

Enjoy!

It’s been a long time! Before my life was swallowed by the podcast of my novel Predestination and Other Games of Chance, I recorded quite a bit for Reprobates Hour. So now, to kick off part 2 of Season 3, Richard Carrier returns to talk about science in the ancient world. We discuss the works and missteps of Rodney Stark and his theory of the scientific revolution, we talk about the amazing and usually forgotten scientific and technological discoveries and innovations in the ancient world, and have a lot of fun along the way. In this first of three episodes, we talk about science in the Greek world. Next week, we talk about the Roman world. Hope you enjoy!

The Reprobates are back in town — spread the word!

If you have a moment this weekend, rent one of the 210 movies Forry appeared in, read one of his stories that can be found in anthologies, or read a story by one of the writers he nurtured. Read some lesbian erotica – Forry was, after all, the author of some of the first critically respectable lesbian novels under the name “Laurajean Ermayne” and was named an “Honorary Lesbian” by the country’s first ever Lesbian Rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis. Watch a Ray Harryhausen or Ed Wood film (he was instrumental in the careers of both men), or a film by Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, or a show by Penn and Teller (all of whom he inspired and helped along the way). Go to a fan event – oh, I didn’t mention that Forry organized some of the first science fiction conventions, invented the term “sci-fi,” and won the only Hugo award ever for World’s #1 Science Fiction Fan?

I never got to meet Forry personally. I had the chance on several occasions, and always had more pressing things to do. Now I won’t get it again. I know him through the stories of several friends who grew up under his tutelage, whose careers he nurtured, and whose lives he touched. All of them tell the same story of a man who was too kind ever to make a serious enemy, and who was always nine years old at heart. He treasured his first ever issue of Amazing Stories, and never fell out of love with science fiction, or movies, or life, or his wife, or his friends. Few of us will ever be so lucky to be so well remembered when our time comes.

I’d wish Forry a peaceful rest, but if what I know about him is anywhere near true, then he’s probably sitting on the bank of the River Styx right now, scavenging for a sandal that Odysseus might have left behind, and dreaming of setting up the definitive collection of mythological artifacts for all visitors to the shores of the afterlife. When he does, he’ll sit out in front with a recliner, a good book, and a movie screen. When you walk up, he’ll greet you with a smile and, if you’re not careful, he’ll start telling you a story. You’ll never get away — but then…who would want to?

Often, fantasy and historical fiction falls prey to this far too easily, because we don’t often question where certain expressions in our language come from. For example, you wouldn’t want to describe a complete package as “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” if the story you’re writing takes place before the seventeenth century when the musket became widespread in Europe. The reason? “Lock, stock, and barrel” are the three major components of a musket, and all three together means that you have everything you need to assemble one.

This kind of thing can shatter the illusion that you work hard to create, as it did for me in Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers” during the sloppiest moment in the film. At the battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn commands a brigade of elf archers to “fire” on the enemy. I can’t emphasize this enough: nobody in the history of the world has ever fired an arrow. The notion of “fire” being synonymous with “activate” was nonsensical before the invention of the first ever fire-powered weapon, the cannon in the 13th century in China (not introduced into Europe until much later). Even so, archers were not commanded to “fire” until many generations after bows, arrows, ballistas, catapults, and crossbows ceased to be used in military combat. When commanding archers, the term is “loose” or, less frequently, “release,” “arrow,” or “trip” – NOT “fire.”

To further the historical literacy among fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction writers, I recommend bookmarking the phrase finder and using it frequently when writing and proofreading. A good etymological dictionary and slang dictionary wouldn’t hurt either.