There was a brief moment during my sophomore year in college when I was about as hip as reading speculative fiction can make you (which is not such a terribly laughable amount of hipness these days). I was reading ma blogs, and I was buying the books as they came out, and one day I looked at the hugo nominations and realized that I had read most of those stories, when they originally came out, in magazines.

Those days are not these days. The winners of the Hugo award have just been announced, and not only have I not read a single one of them, but I haven’t read any of the nominees either.

In fact, in the last year, I have only read five of which were published in the last five years: The Year’s Best Science Fiction 26th Annual Collection (from last year), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Holly Black’s Valiant, and Stephanie Meyers’ Breaking Dawn.

I am so far from the cutting edge right now…the cutting edge cut me in half and then moved on…

…this is why I find it so hard to imagine that there could possibly be any demand for new books…yet, somehow, there is…

I just finished reading The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction by Samuel Delany and…I don’t know what to think. Oh, I don’t mean that I don’t know what to think about the book. The book is great.

I mean that generally speaking, I don’t know what to think. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I don’t know how to think.

About two years, I started to become aware that my undergraduate education in economics had combined with the graduate degree in demography that I earned by growing up as the son of a professor in sociology to create a comprehensive set of strategies with which to approach all of the world’s problems.

Economics is the study of how human beings exchange things. Within the conceptual framework of economics, it does not matter what those things are. They might be exchanging money for goods, or services for prestige, or work for wages, or if exchanging something in the present in return for something else in the future. All that matters is that they have some allotment of things (and we all, at least, have our bodies and our time), and they want to expend some of that allotment in order to get other things. Economics does not care why they want the things they want. Nor does it seek to dictate what they should want.

Because that part of the equation is already provided for. People are telling you what they want. They tell you by the way they spend their time. People spend their time pursuing love. They spend it working in order to afford expensive, high-status objects, or entertainments, or stuff that will make their kids happier. They spend it working in order to achieve success in their field and the acclaim that comes with it.

(And here is where we depart a little bit from what the economics I learned in school says and venture more into what the ideal version of economics that I have in my head says. So don’t reproach me with some crap that Paul Krugman said, or something)

Because, for economics, no question is more meaningless than what people should want. What matters is what they do want. And that question can be answered. They’re telling you the answer. They’re telling you all the time.

(Now, even this question can’t be answered very easily. Because the main proxy being used for value is money. But someone could want something very desperately and not be able to afford it. What does it even mean to want something and not be able to pay for it? How can that desire be said to exist vis a vis all the other desires you can actualize? How does it affect your actions? Of course there are also some things you can’t buy with money. And peoples’ valuations fluctuate, and there’s evidence that relative rankings of things are not rational in the way you’d expect…etc…)

But what’s nice about the question “What do people want?” is that it is answerable in a way that the question “What should people want?” never can be. It’s very hard to answer the former question. You need to define a lot of terms. You need a lot of caveats. You’d need to run a lot of very innovative experiments. You’d probably need to bring in some neurobiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc. No one’s really done it yet, sure. But it can be done, and the reason it can be done is because of the central assumption that people’s actions reveal their desires.

But the latter question – What should people want? — cannot be answered. If you need a proof that there is no answer to that question…I refer you to…some philosopher (probably Hume). But it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me.

Still, with economics, I have a way to approach problems. First, you look at what people are doing. That tells you what they want. Then you throw up your hands and say, “This is the way things are because people want a lot of stuff and have interacted in such a way as to produce this situation.” Yes, the economics-in-my-head is a very fatalistic system.

Like, let’s say someone is talking about a book, like…the Twilight series. The Twilight series has sold millions of copies. The fact that people buy it shows that they like it. People who don’t like Twilight often buy different books. Those books don’t sell as well as Twilight, and their authors don’t make as much money. Oh well! People don’t like those other books.

Why do people buy Twilight? Well…I can follow that line of reasoning a little farther down…

For instance, I can posit that there are a large number of readers who feel comforted by the notion that millions of other people are reading the same thing as them. These readers are much more likely to read a book they see someone else reading. It spreads virally and little hits become big blockbusters.

This theory would seem to have a certain amount of proof in something like Oprah’s Book Club, which can manage to move millions of copies of any book, from Jodi Picoult to Leo Tolstoy, through this mass-comfort.

Whereas there is another group of readers that feels comforted by the notion that they are strange and special and unique in reading something no one else is reading. They are repulsed by books they see in others’ hands, and settle on something else. This group is the group that really hates Twilight.

None of this has anything to do with the qualities of the book. That is because I am still very suspicious of the notion that a book can be “good” or “bad”. The notion of “good” is tied up with “should”. If a book is “good,” then people “should” want to read it. It seems to me that as long as one person likes a book, then it is good to somebody.

(If no one in the world likes a book in any way, even then I would not feel confident in calling it bad. There may someday be born a person who will like it.)

If I was to describe the quality of a book, I would not use literary analysis. Instead, I would find a random sampling of people, get them to read it, and then survey them as to their opinions of the book. I would assemble a demographic profile of my survey respondents, and ask them all kinds of other questions, and then I would come out and say, “This is the kind of person who likes this book. This is the kind of books he or she likes to read; he/she has this level of education, this income, this kind of occupation.”

(My working definition of a “good” book is a book that people are more likely to like if they’ve already read a lot of books. My working definition of a “bad” book is one that people are more likely to like if they’ve only read very few books.)

Maybe I would assemble a huge group of people with just the same demographic profile and give them all that book to read and scan all their brains (both before and after). And I’d look for variations in neural make-up between the did-likes and didn’t-likes to try to explain, even in this demographically similar group, why some liked it and why some didn’t.

(I know this isn’t how people really do experiments, but c’mon this is a blog entry and not a grant proposal.)

And hopefully, somewhere in this process, I would have a model that I could maybe even use to predict who would like this book and who wouldn’t. Maybe I could use this model to find other books that that person would like. Maybe I could use this model to tweak the book slightly so that more people would like it, or so that these people would like it more.

But at no point, would I ever feel comfortable saying, “This book is great, and people should read it.” Because I don’t even know how to begin to think about that statement. There is nothing in my worldview that can allow me to make sense of it.

…

…

Except I just did that. You might have missed it. It was like twelve hundred words ago.

Because my comprehensive worldview is really good for…something, I’m sure…

…but it’s not good for anything that I actually have to do in my life. I’m not out there running surveys to figure out what people think about books.

All I really have to work with is what I think.

Except…nothing in my training has really taught me how talk about that.

And…it should not be that hard. Because I do things. I act. I am one of those people who I would potentially be surveying. I clearly want things, and like things.

But talking about why I like them, or why something is good, and why something is bad is really difficult for me. It’s something that Delany does really well in this book. For instance, he undertakes a 60-page dissection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. And I read it. And I was impressed. But I still don’t know how he could have the gall to do it.

I suppose my problem is…I am never going to undertake these surveys and brain scans and such…for the rest of my life, my main data point is going to be my own reaction to things. And how can I possibly use that to generalize to other people?

But even my own “reaction” is suspect. The connections I see are largely a function of what I’ve been told. Most of the things I think are just regurgitations of what I’ve read (see…well…everything in this blog post).

How can I, in good faith, attempt to generalize from my own experience?

And this is not an idle concern. It’s of central importance to my attempts to write. What I write will succeed or fail on the basis of whatever kernel of novelty it contains. It will depend on my perceiving that there is something missing from what I’ve read, something that my life contains which the works I’ve encountered do not, and putting that missing thing into my own work…

…which is made a little harder by me not even having the first idea of how to systematize my thoughts about a work…because under the worldview I’ve always operated under, those thoughts didn’t matter.

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…

So, on another note, I think I can safely call The Jewel-Hinged Jaw a mindblowing work. It’s actually not as inaccessible as I’d feared. Although I can’t shake the persistent notion that Delany is using words somewhat idiosyncratically. He tosses out a term like “inchoate didacta” as if it had some sort of formal meaning (as a phrase)…because as individual words, that means nothing to me. “Inchoate” is like…beginning, or half-formed. “Didacta” is like…a teaching? I don’t think “didacta” is a word in English. Still, you can sort of figure out what he’s talking about, and most of it isn’t like that.

(in his usage “didacta” seems to be the background information in a novel, like the fascistic military-service voting system in Starship Troopers or the nature of the egalitarian, anarcho-collectivist society of the Anarresti in The Dispossessed).

Anyways, you should read it.

            This past weekend I drove down to Tennessee to visit some friends (and go to Dollywood!). It was awesome for many reasons, but the main one is that whenever I drive more than 250 miles at a stretch, I have epiphanies.

I’m not really sure why this only happens when I drive, but not when I fly, or take the bus. I think it might have something to do with not being allowed to distract myself from my own thoughts; from being forced to be alone with them for hours on end. But, usually, when that happens I start thinking very fast, and begin going over and over in thought-spirals.

When I drive, that does not happen. My thought proceeds very slowly, in fits and nibbles. Sometimes an hour passes without a single thought that I can remember. But then, slowly, something starts to form, and I am left alone with it, and can build upon it, and even though it begins to degrade the moment I leave the car, something remains behind that I can carry with me forever (or at least for awhile).

During this trip, I somehow found myself thinking about Sturgeon’s Law. For those of you who aren’t in the SF world, Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer (a fairly good one). His law is: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” From Wikipedia:

The first written reference to this appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote: “I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud”.[1] Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do.

            This is often used as a sort of truism in SF. I don’t know why I was thinking about it. Maybe it was because of Larry’s series of posts at the OF Blog of the Fallen on reading and being a good reader. In one of them, he said something like, “I wish people wouldn’t just quote Sturgeon’s Law. That frees them from having to think about why they don’t like the books they don’t like.”

            And I was thinking and thinking, and it came to me: “Where are all these crap books? I haven’t read them. Ninety percent of the books I read are pretty good.”

            I’ve always just assumed that, even though most of the books I read are good, that I am nonetheless occupying a tiny plateau of goodness surrounded by crap: that there are vast, titanic mountains of crap out to get me. But…where is the crap? I can always sort of sense it in the distance, but, somehow, it never gets to me…

            I exercise only minimal discernment in choosing the books I read. I hear about it online, and then I check it out from the library. I glance through it at a bookstore, and if I like the first few pages, then I buy it. It’s not like I’m erecting some sort of super crap-proof forcefield around my bookshelves. So why do the books I read, on average, tend to be so good?

            And I was thinking, and thinking, and…ninety percent of everything I use tends to be pretty good. When I flip through the radio, I can usually find a song I like. When I’m surfing channels, I can usually find something that I enjoy watching. When I go to the theater and see a movie, I usually like it. When I buy an electronic device, I’m generally satisfied by how it works.

            And then, another hundred miles later, I extended it to the rest of my life. When I visit a restaurant, the service is usually pretty good. When I order take-out, I generally enjoy the food. When I get to know someone, I usually find that they’re fairly interesting.

            And it’s not like I am some sort of connoisseur of the finer things. I eat at Burger King. I shop at Best Buy. I watch HBO at 4 AM, and watch USA’s silly low-rent TV shows. My water comes out of the same tap as anyone else’s, and my Coca-Cola comes from the same bottling plant. If ninety percent of everything was crap, wouldn’t it, like…find me?

            I think the key here is the term, “with minimal amounts of discernment.” If I was just buying books by the boatload from the remaindering factory, then, yeah, maybe ninety percent of them would not be to my taste. If I just bashed my remote against a rock and watched whatever channel came up, then I would probably dislike it. But it doesn’t take much time or effort to not do that. It only takes one trip to a bad restaurant to be like, “Huh, not going to come here again.”

            I actually cannot say whether ninety percent of everything is crap. I am not sufficiently willing to sample things at random in order to figure that out. What I am willing to say is that the statement “ninety percent of everything is crap” has, even if it is true, almost no practical implications.

It’s like saying, “The surface of the earth is mostly water.”

            I mean, yeah, that’s true…but that’s no reason to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to find some land to stand on.

            Even if ninety percent of everything is crap, the effort required to avoid it is so extremely minimal and almost totally unconscious that the world might as well be mostly composed of good stuff. And what if the world is composed mostly of good stuff? Wow, that would be really scary. It’s a good thing that my drive ended before I could contemplate that one.

I’m still navigating the appropriate way to use all my various social networkings. Everything is all cross-routed too. Like, my twitter feed and this blog post automatically post status updates on facebook, which is where all my real actual friends who I’ve met in real life can see things.

But any online followers from the writing world are probably not my facebook friends, and they might follow either blog or twitter. Anyway, I posted this to twitter a few days ago, but my story “The Association of the Dead” is online at Clarkesworld Magazine.

So, from the way various raw foodists have explained it to me (and bear in mind that they were almost certainly stoned at the time, and hence perhaps their reasoning does not represent the “party line”) the reasoning behind only consuming raw food is that this is somehow more natural to the human condition. Like, human beings were evolved to eat raw food, and only ate raw food always, until relatively recently, so our systems are all like confused by cooked food, man. And the cooked food, it just kind of shocks our bodies, and makes them go whoah, like what the hell’s happening. So we get all sick and fat and unhealthy, because what we’re eating is all just totally fundamentally not in even the form we’re suppposed to eat it in. Like, it goes beyond chemicals and junk. We’ve heated up the food, applied fire and heat to it, and totally just baked the hell out all the rich natural vitamins and proteins and minerals and nutrients and junk that are supposed to be in it.

Okay, that’s actually totally wrong, and here’s why. There’s evidence that our ancestors, Homo Erectus, used fire as early as 1.5 million years ago. By around 400,000 years ago, there’s widespread evidence that we were using fire in a fairly controlled way, including charred bone! As in the charred bones of things that we cooked and then ate! Modern humanity diverged from whatever common ancestor we had with the Neanderthals (who probably also used fire) 200,000 years ago. So actually, we are specifically evolved as a people who cooked our food. How can anyone think that eating only raw food (especially meat) is a good idea? I mean, I get it if it’s for, like, spiritual or ethical or moral or aesthetic reasons, or whatever. But if it’s for health reasons? Cmon.

I was driving in my car, listening to music today. And because it was some weird folk crap, I was thinking about how different music must have been back in the eras these musicians were riffing off of.

Music, unless one was a musician oneself, must have always been a communal activity. The notion of being listening to music by yourself would have been impossibly alien, not to mention impossible. Furthermore, you’d hear like one style of music, which would be whatever was prevalent wherever you were from. And most of it would be pretty bad. All music would be equivalent to the idiot in the dorm room across from you strumming on his guitar, rather than only listening to the cream of the crop, who’ve been skillfully packed into portable, recorded form.

Wow, we have more access to information than people in the past, I know, that’s hardly profound. But I wonder how constant access to an infinite variety of entertainments affects our life, qualitatively. Are we happier than those people in the past were? Is the quality of our thinking superior? Are we able to appreciate the world to a greater or more refined degree? What would it be like to be as profoundly ignorant as those people would have been?

I guess its tempting to just compare ourselves to people in impoverished nations (or our own nation) who lack many of our amenities, but I don’t think the case is the same. Those people are at least aware of what is out there. Also, even the most impoverished people in the world occassionally listen to a radio (unless they’re Sentinel islanders).

Or something flu-like anyway, which certainly came from my brother. But I’m feeling better now. I’m consistently amazed by how well over the counter medications work at not making me feel terrible. For many, many years I thought that tylenol or advil were something on the order of warm tea or chicken soup in terms of efficacy, until I started taking three pills instead of two (due to my larger size) and realized that they really can relieve headaches and fevers.

Although I do wonder, if fevers are our body’s natural response to being ill, then isn’t artifically suppressing them a bad thing to do?

Also, one of the top results for my name is now my John W. Campbell Award Nominations profile. For those of you not in the know, this is an award that I will absolutely not win, which I am eligible for by virtue of having made a professional sale in 2008. But, at the very least, I hope that the awards page will direct some traffic towards this site.

…you notice the yellow in your kitty’s eyes and think, “Oh no, I hope her liver isn’t failing.”