Last Month (December 2001)

 
01 January 2002
Aspirations

I hate so-called "New Year's Resolutions." Most of the time they're more honored in the making than in the doing; that's why we're all so amazed when someone actually follows through on them. So I do not "resolve" any of the following, particularly as a number are at best partly under my control. Neither, of course, do I think I'll actually achieve them all.
 

1. I aspire to complete all revisions on that long-suffering-through-hanging-fire novel early enough to have query packages out by the end of the year.
2. I aspire to have at least two more books under contract.
3. I aspire to thrash AOL so badly that it'll fire its lawyers. Failing that, I aspire to a resounding victory that establishes that the DMCA is not a "get out of jail free" card, and that the ostrich defense fails.
4. I aspire to terminate several specific literary scams with extreme prejudice. I also aspire to seeing the proprietors take nice, long vacations—say, 51–57 months at Club Fed.
5. I aspire to influence Hugo nominations so as to prevent any subliterate crap from making the ballot based on the author's reputation among fen. (This one is the least likely to be successful.)
6. I aspire to travel to foreign countries, encounter fascinating new cultures, and meet interesting new people. Then kill them. Oops. That's one from a couple of decades ago.
7. Jaws aspires to cut the number of swimmers at Florida beaches by 20%, either by fear or direct action.

There. That should keep me busy. Not out of trouble—I wouldn't know how to handle that—but busy.

◊        ◊        ◊

On a broader front, here's hoping to put Armageddon off a few more years. I'd try the old "peace on Earth, good will toward (wo)men" line, but my former profession rather robs that of credibility. Come to think of it, so does my present profession.

04 January 2002
The Return of the Dark Lord

I do not know who created this gem. I have searched diligently.
 

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows XP on my PC.

I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows XP CD. To my surprise he threw it into my microwave oven and turned it on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: "Do not worry, it is unharmed." After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: "Take a close look at it." To my surprise the CD was quite cold to the touch, and it seemed to be heavier than before.

At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I had ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D2C206F6E65204F5320746F
2066696E64207474656D2C204F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20616C
6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D

"I cannot understand the fiery letters," I said in a timid voice.

"No, but I can," he said. "The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. In common English this is what it says:

"'One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them'

"It is only two lines from a verse long known in System-lore:

"'Three OSs from corporate-kings in their towers of glass,
Seven from valley-lords where orchards used to grow,
Nine from dotcoms doomed to die,
One from the Dark Lord Gates on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
 
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.'"

Those of you snickering in Cupertino should ponder that, to make the overpriced toy computers you so enjoy both "user friendly" and powerful enough to compete with the Dark Lord's latest products, you had to remake your entire OS so that it sits on top of a variant of Unix—the OS that perfected "user hostile." And those of you who insist on playing with your Palms should get out of the bathroom. You're in there all day and all night! You'll go blind if you keep playing with that tiny, umm, screen!

05 January 2002
License and Registration, Please

Partly in response to StephenMatthewSL LeighFarrell's journal entry of 03 January, and partly because my opinion of Certain Establishment Reviewers has, if anything, deteriorated of late, I offer the following comments. Uh oh. When John starts off by saving the predicate for the end of the sentence—in good Germanic fashion—and doesn't actually state his thesis up front, we're in for a good time. I think I'll go terrorize a few helpless swimmers. You might wish to put the acid-resistant cover over your keyboard/mouse/trackball.

Reviewing books is not for the average reader on the street. As I think I've made abundantly clear, both in the abstract with an essay and journal entries, and with concrete examples like this broad one and this narrow one, reviewing requires a willingness to listen to what Harlan Ellison calls the "built-in bullshit detector," and explain to the public when the detector's meter gets pegged. While I respect StephenMatthewSL's comment that he doesn't have enough time to finish reading material he doesn't like, let alone write a review on it, and in particular respect the intellectual honesty implied by that comment, I'm different. Unlike the vast majority of the active American reviewers of speculative fiction with reasonably wide circulations—as a nonexhaustive list, those at Locus, SF Chronicle, PW (sad to say), Kirkus, the New York Times, the Big 4 speculative fiction magazines, and the New York Review of Science Fiction—I've got a tad more training in critical reading and analysis than the average bear. Or average English major, editor, or writer. I'm not infallible, by any means. I'd like to think, however, that several years of academic study of one of the major components/ancestors/modes of speculative fiction (the utopian novel) have taught me how to exceed the bloody marketing copy for the plot summary, if any, in a published review! Sad to say, many of these reviewers haven't learned the same lessons. Or, in two particularly appalling instances in which the reviewer seems to keep writing the same six or seven reviews over and over and over, any lessons at all.

Sadly, one of those appalling instances is a longterm reviewer at one of the aforementioned publications. As both the reviewer (to a limited extent) and publisher (to a great extent) extoll their influence—and, if one reads my reviews and essays, it should bloody well be obvious of whom I'm writing—I will not engage in an ad hominem attack because such an attack would take attention away from the objectively clear deficits in that reviewer's analytical and writing skills. I'd like to pull that reviewer over on the information superhighway and ask to see some literary license and registration of reality (and then suspend the license for drivelling under the influence). It's not just that I so frequently disagree with said reviewer. It's that said reviewer has now, for the fourth time in the last year (that I've caught, anyway), relied upon a marketing package in making a plot summary—a marketing package that did not reflect the final work as published in two critical aspects that underpin the worth of the book. (I've seen the same marketing packages. I still have a few connections.)

There's certainly nothing wrong with positive reviews. When justified by the underlying work. When resulting from actually reading the underlying work. When supported by material from the underlying work. But absolutely not when produced to meet some artificial deadline for more assembly-line drivel. This is why I never review a later book in a series without having read all of its predecessors—even when tearing all of the pages out and putting them end to end will never reach a conclusion. Thus, I have not reviewed Robert Jordan's arboricidal nonsense; I have limited time, too, and however justified it would be, I will not review book n without reading 1 through (n–1) just to trash it. I prefer to have the first-class hanging only after a fair trial, not instead of it. (I have skimmed enough of Jordan's work to believe that my predisposition is correct.)

The emperor has no clothes. The emperor's court is just as naked. And there's nothing attractive about a bunch of naked fen and writers.

08 January 2002
A Simple Lesson in Economics

This lesson would probably not meet the approval of any Chicago School economist. It certainly would not meet the approval of a rabid supply-sider. However, the math behind it seems compelling, and not just to me.

The essential factors in any macroeconomic model are Capital, Labor, Product, Supply, and Demand. (We'll leave the government out of it for the moment; this is one of the few situations that is not affected by taxation and spending policies.) This leads to familiar models such as this one:

Product = f(Capital, Labor)
Price(Product) = g(Price(Capital, Labor), Supply, Demand)

This is a generally satisfactory model for tangible goods, such as automobiles. Although an automobile is an immensely complex widget, with at least thousands of individual inputs into the final production and pricing results, there is a tangible thing at the end. At each step, it's relatively easy to factor in the transaction costs of a given input; most models hide this in the parameters of f and g. The underlying model can rely upon a given input of capital as a fairly discrete quantity.

Making our product an intangible, such as a work of literature, completely bollixes this model. It's fairly easy to demonstrate that, within certain broad ranges, it is impossible to predict price elasticity of demand for intellectual property that does not itself produce a tangible economic good. (A book is not a tangible economic good, as it has no inherent economic value; only its contents do.) Typically, this is fudged as an expression of noneconomic motivation by economic actors, or some other such nonsense with about as much explanatory value as the typical Star Trek remodulation of the deflector dish. What it obscures, though, is a critical question. At least, it's a critical question if one wants to have some idea of how writers are going to survive into the next century, as media behemoths gobble more and more of the available market with material of which Julia would be ashamed had it spewed forth from Pornosec's novel-writing machines.

In economic terms, what is intellectual property?

This is a trivial-seeming question with a nontrivial answer. The obvious answer is that since it's property, it functions as capital. It seems a bit invidious, though, to try to amalgamate truly unique pieces of capital into some cost-sales analysis for setting royalty rates and book prices. One of the key assumptions of macroeconomic models is that the input factors are essentially interchangeable—that is, one piece of capital (sufficiently specified) is the same as another of the same specifications. Once one gets beyond Pornosec's products, though, a sufficient specification results in a capital set of one. The pieces (books, songs, plays, paintings, whatever) are not interchangeable.

Treating intellectual property as labor is also a less-than-satisfactory analysis. Labor always works upon something; it cannot create value without an input of some kind. If the intellectual property is both the output and the labor, the capital component seems to have gone missing.

I'm going to leave you hanging here. If, that is, your eyes haven't glazed over already.

 
13 January 2002
I Misplaced the Can Opener

We'll save the economics for another time, since I'm fighting both the flu and a pinched nerve. That leaves me with nothing with which to fight the inertia of the dismal science. It does, however, leave lots of time for Flexoril.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to catch up on my reading when my attention span matches that of the average politician. There's a limit to just how much football one can tolerate (fortunately, during the playoffs, there isn't much American football, and the real stuff—the only activity more strenuous than genocide—is timeshifted this time of year). So my stack of books is now about two feet tall. Plus the ones I really need to read for work-related reasons.

Thus, I'm a recliner potato today. The crop will probably be pretty poor, but at least in that way I'll be growing. So to speak.

17 January 2002
Dismal Pseudoscience

You shouldn't be surprised to find out that the last question I put forth in the discussion of economics was a trick question. Even though it's the obvious one, it's the wrong one, because it makes two untenable assumptions. The obvious untenable assumption is that an economic factor must fit within a single category—in this examination, that intellectual property is either capital or labor, but cannot have aspects of both capital and labor. The more subtle bad assumption is that all capital has the same characteristics. To put it another way, it is the assumption that a capital-to-capital translation within an economic process does not require a value input.

Sad to say, this translation cost explains a great deal about the poor compensation for artists. The artist writes her novel. That's great. But it's not an economic good yet. An economic good must find a market. A single sale of that novel, to a single reader, is not going to even pay for the author's supplies (such as the coffee consumed while writing the novel). Thus, the manuscript needs to be turned into more than one copy of the novel. That, in turn, requires different capital inputs. This is substantially different from traditional manufacturing processes, which also add other capital inputs to an idea to create a good. In those instances, the idea is merely a blueprint, and what matters is the res created by the process. Conversely, with art, the res—the thing itself—is not what matters. Instead, it is the perception of the work of art. And that is tremendously difficult to translate into that other kind of capital: monetary capital.

This translation problem is compounded by another one: the irreproducibility of art. No artist has ever turned out 100% successful works. Even those whose saleable output seems to always be of high quality have their peaks and valleys, not to mention all those false starts and never-completed works that never even make it to the marketplace—whether it's an economic marketplace or a marketplace of ideas.

19 January 2002
Sad Truism

Of course, there is a point to this trip through the swamp of ill-defined economic gibberish. It is a very simple one: Every translation or other transformation of economic inputs has a transaction cost. As a corrollary, the greater the potential transaction cost, the greater the opportunity for fraud.

I might get in trouble for this. So be it. (Go ahead. Sue me. Make my day.) This abstract discussion has been pointing toward a serious problem in the publishing industry: the agent game. The system practically begs for con artists to take up residence and become dominant players.

• With its continued contraction of opportunities for meaningful review of manuscripts by editors without prior payment, the industry itself encourages—one might almost say virtually requires—a fraudulent environment. For example, whatever its intentions, Penguin-Putnam's current program provides covert approval for fee-charging agencies and publishers, because by function that is exactly what it does, with the same (illusory) guarantees of a sympathetic or accurate reading. For example, initial press releases promised that manuscripts paying the reading fee (and it is properly characterized as nothing else) would be read by "senior editors." As it turns out, this means "poorly paid editorial assistants who may or may not have any experience with actually acquiring a manuscript."
• Agents are completely unregulated. There are no effective constraints on advertising; there is no competence requirement, nor a training requirement, nor even a supervision requirement; there are no enforceable standards of conduct; there are no enforceable standard contracts, agreements, or procedures; there is no licensing authority that would have the ability to even suggest any of these necessary elements. Real estate agents are licensed, and very few real estate agents are ever entrusted with multimillion-dollar transactions (the big properties are almost all brokered by lawyers), yet Stephen King's neighbor, or dog, could hang out a shingle as an agent and do so. In fact, my dog has.
• There is no reliable source of information on practices and theory, and precious few sources of any kind on track records.

I won't go on further, except to refer you to Lucy Literary. Although I will be happy to meet virtually any fee-charging agency in court if the agency believes that I have somehow defamed it. Remember, though: truth is a complete defense to any defamation claim. And I get to take discovery to confirm that the agency cannot prove that what I've said is false.

If you don't like this you can just go to LL.

23 January 2002
Eyes on the Prize

At least the British have begun dismantling the ghetto walls. Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass was just selected as the winner of Britain's Whitbread Prize as the book of the year. Not just "children's book," but in direct competition with four other adult-oriented books.

Sadly, the BBC article linked above doesn't give enough context about the Whitbread. It is roughly equivalent to a combination of America's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award: it is credited both by the "general public" and the "serious reader." It is even given grudging respect in academia.

Pullman's win is groundbreaking in two respects. First, it's a win for speculative fiction. As I think I've made clear enough in the past, marketing category does not (which very few exceptions) determine the worth of a work—particularly as most of the people who try to pigeonhole books in this manner haven't read them. Pullman, at various times and in various places, has claimed that his novel is not fantasy, but "stark realism" that uses fantastic elements to reveal and discuss the core of human character. He's both right and wrong in this respect. Functionally, he's absolutely correct in the positive definition. He's wrong, however, with the implied definition that fantasy does not use fantastic elements to reveal and discuss the core of human character. Even bad IFSs do, if only the shallow character of the author/editor/marketing dorks (and, in the very worst cases, such as Gor, some of the readers). Second, this is a win for so-called "children's literature." Nobody who actually reads His Dark Materials can seriously believe that it's a "children's book," and probably not even "YA." However, one surface characteristic—the ages of the protagonists—has been seized upon as justification for categorization by people who haven't read the book.

Of course, this will just upset some hardcore fen even more, with their ire about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (not a bad book at all, if one actually reads it in its context) winning the Hugo for Best Speculative Fiction Novel last year. The saddest aspect of this is the sheer ignorance it betrays. They are different books, of different types, with different intended audiences. Neither book's intended audience is the core of fandom. Rowling is writing for younger readers, particularly those who are not predisposed for or against any specific literary mode. Pullman, on the other hand, is writing for educated readers, who recognize Paradise Lost (and Paradise Regained), who perhaps have read Dante, who have some concept of Norse mythology… that darned classical education again. His work is much more demanding of reader involvement than is Rowling's (or, for that matter, the vast majority of fiction, speculative fiction or otherwise, being published today). This is precisely why it won the Whitbread Prize: it has substance. It's not just another Wimpie's burger-with-onion-powder, but a real literary main course. Certainly, it has its flaws, such as the frantic tying up of loose ends in the last fifty pages, when a less hurried pace (and an additional 150 pages or so) would have been a significant improvement. However, there are no perfect works of art, so that's not a serious criticism.

I'm actually looking forward to the firestorm this will ignite among the fundamentalist bookburners in this country. If you think they're pissed off at Rowling for "glorifying witchcraft," wait until they read a book claiming that their cramped vision of the Christian deity is not even in charge in heaven. Wait a moment. What am I saying? That's assuming that they'd read the book in the first place!

31 January 2002
Hair? What Hair?

That is, I won't have any hair left after this week and next. It's a bit of a busy time, as the calendar entry indicates (there will be no journal entries before 06 February; even if they're dated earlier, I won't be posting anything until I get back). In no particular order:

• At o-dark-thirty on Saturday, I'll be at the airport on the way to LA. When I get there, I'll be preparing for oral argument on Monday in Ellison v. Robertson. It's not major enough to change AOL's stock price, but it's sure as hell major enough for us!
• A number of nastygrams need to be finished up and sent to various recipients. If they all come back with the appropriate checks attached, I'll be holding for clients as much money as I've made since 1995. I expect otherwise.
• It's tax preparation time, kiddies! Fortunately, I don't have to issue 1099s. But keeping track of all of the pieces of paper necessary for even a modest law practice like mine is a bit of a chore.
• Somehow, some other stuff has to get in there, like preparing to teach a continuing legal education session on copyright, talking to reporters, etc.

Wait a minute. I don't have much in the way of hair to start with, so what am I worried about?

◊        ◊        ◊

On a slightly more literary note, I'll be posting (in a separate file) my award recommendations for this year's Hugos right after I get back. Looking at the preliminary list, I can see that some people are going to be really pissed off by some of the absences. Tough elephant toenails. Frankly, some of these egos deserve even the minor pinpricks I can provide, because two of the books that some reviewers have lauded are nothing more than attempts to show that the author is a bit cleverer than the reviewers. That the attempts succeeded says volumes about the general literary perspicacity of reviewers, speculative fiction-oriented or otherwise.

Well, at least as far as the novels go, I won't keep you in suspense. I recommend the following short list of novels for your Hugo nomination ballot (alphabetical by author):

• Jonathan Carroll, The Wooden Sea
• Neil Gaiman, American Gods
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
• Terry McGarry, Illumination
• Sean McMullen, Eyes of the Calculor
• Kristine Smith, Law of Survival
• Ken Wharton, Divine Intervention
• Connie Willis, Passage
• Gene Wolfe, Return to the Whorl

Although it's a bit weighted toward the Ws, that should give you a taste for what I think is appropriate. Aside: I do not follow the "foreign editions get an extra year" extension for Hugo eligibility, which may account for a raised eyebrow or two. And then there's the fact that the two primary candidates are both overblown, but that's for another time.

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