Are People Really Self-Publishing Millions of Books Each Year?

Recently I was surprised to read that the number of "new" books self-published annually was in the millions.

Why?

My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.

Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.

It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)

Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.

Do They Really Publish a Million Books a Year?

Recently I have seen it estimated that, excluding self-published titles, between 500,000 and 1 million new titles are published in the U.S. each and every year.

I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.

After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"

One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.

Quentin Tarantino's Recent Thoughts on the Bond Series

Quentin Tarantino name has come up before in relation to the Bond films.

Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.

That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.

The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.

However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.

Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:

1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)

2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)

3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).

There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.

Social Withdrawal, or Social Rejection?

When those who attend to the matter of those who have withdrawn from society write about them their tendency has been to emphasize the actions of those who have withdrawn, and identify these actions with choices they have made. They gave up on the job market. They dropped out of the "dating pool." They refused to come out of their bedroom, or their parent's basement.

I suppose this is intuitive for those who take the conventional view of things (individualistic, squeamish about the existence of society and its inequalities, not least in the area of power). But, here as in so many other areas of life, that view can be limiting and misleading--overlooking the extent to which those who act in such ways may be coping with choices others made, and in which they could not do much more than acquiesce, which may have them not so much withdrawing as accepting others' rejections. The rejection of potential employers. Rejection in "the dating market" and social life generally. Even rejection by their own families.

After all, it does not seem to be those positioned to "succeed" that take that course, but those who have the most frustration, to go by what the anecdotes and even the statistics tell us. Not the privileged kid with all the advantages who got all the breaks and is now on the "fast track to success" but the kid who never got a college degree is likely to end up playing games in their parents' basement. Not the "eligible bachelor" who walks away from dating, but those whose prospects were much less good. And not the popular kids but the victims of those vigilante enforcers of social life, bullies, who end up hikikomori.

Considering all this one can plausibly see all these persons as having been "shut out" before they became "shut-in." And that seems to me to confirm yet again the value of the sociological approach to the issue on the part of those who want to understand, and help, rather than wring hands and moralize in that way that the real-life Ron Burgundys of the mainstream media love so much.

Another Take on the Cult of Celebrity

My usual first thought regarding the cult of celebrity is its foolishness--and the second, its essential backwardness, reflecting as it does a hierarchical outlook more befitting barbarians than civilized people (the more in as it is so much taken for granted). However, one alternative treatment of the theme that impressed me was David Walsh's discussion of the issue way back when Michael Jordan retired. Certainly he remarks the essentially inegalitarian character of a society where celebrity exists in such a manner. ("Excessive celebrity must be . . . a rationale for inequality and reinforces it." After all, "[t]he heaping of fame and wealth upon a single individual . . . is only possible and meaningful if the vast majority have no access to those rewards.") He noted, too, that the status of celebrities from the world of entertainment was partly a matter of the repellent, toxic quality of the public figures seen to be elsewhere. ("It was impossible for a sports star to swell" to such a "monumental size in the American popular consciousness" as Jordan did "as long as there were figures . . . respected, rightly or wrongly, for their accomplishments on behalf of society as a whole." In the era of the Clinton impeachment that was ongoing as Walsh wrote those words, he asked, "Who deserves such admiration?")

However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,

going about their daily lives without any sense of a greater purpose to their existence than the struggle to make ends meet . . . denied richness and pleasure and variety and meaning . . . turn hungrily to the media-chronicled lives of celebrities--who apparently have everything they don't . . . who are "real" while they are, to themselves, non-existent--in search of a life with content.

He adds that "[t]his vicarious existence stands in for real existence, except because it is not real or substantial . . . can never fill them up, and so they are always desperate for more, something, anything to fill up the gaping hole."

In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")

They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).

All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.

Remembering Spin City

Recently considering the politically "safe" character of the '90s-era sitcom I found myself recalling the sitcom Spin City, precisely because it was so blatant an example. Here we have a sitcom with, for a protagonist, the Deputy Mayor of New York, and the Mayor and his staff for supporting characters--but, from what I saw of it (which I thought was a lot in reruns on FX), it was pretty much your standard workplace comedy, full of wacky characters who do not actually do anything but get on each others' nerves and have "Will they/Won't they" romantic tension under the nose of a silly, incompetent, oblivious boss.* A little "identity politics" apart, I have the impression that the "China" episode of the not wholly dissimilar The Office all by itself spent more time on a political issue than anything in Spin City's six seasons did--to say nothing of how it looks in comparison with Michael J. Fox's previous long-running sitcom, Family Ties (to which there is a tiny allusion at the end of Fox's character's departure, when he goes on to a job in Washington D.C. and mentions meeting a Senator Alex P. Keaton from Ohio, of whom his opinion is none too flattering).

In all that, as in a great deal else (yes, a good part of the humor would probably be off-limits today), it was quintessentially of its time.

* Indeed, his Mayor Randall Winston being the first impression Barry Bostwick made on me the thought that he was Thodin in Lexx was quite a shock.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine and the Way the Summer Box Office Used to Be

Recently I remembered here the year 1989 at the box office--both the hype that surrounded it, and the ways in which that year did anticipate the box office as we now know it (in particular, how superhero movies and animated family films, not very big genres prior to that point, would come to dominate the theaters).

Still, it seems worth noting that alongside those anticipations--whose significance is far clearer in hindsight than it was at the time--looking at the year's, and even the summer's, roster of hits reminds us of how different (in some ways, more diverse) "the movies" used to be. Certainly the summer season saw plenty of action movies, which that year were the biggest moneymakers (with Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 2 raking it in). However, they dominated it less completely than they do now. The top hits of that summer, after all, also included Turner & Hooch, When Harry Met Sally, Parenthood and Dead Poet's Society--comedy, romance, dramedy, even drama oriented to people who were at least nominally adults selling a lot of tickets.

What a different cinematic world that was than the one we live in now.

Is the World Already Crawling With Artificial Super-Intelligences?

Amid the present furor over progress in the area of chatbot development many a commentator is raising the tired old specter of inhuman intelligences, perhaps super-intelligences, emerging and escaping human control, perhaps to wreak havoc of a kind that will threaten human freedom and even survival.

Arguably the world has long seen its life dominated by such super-intelligences--the "artificial men" of Thomas Hobbes, the "corporate persons" brought into modern jurisprudence by a nineteenth century argument over railway fences. These entities, with their resources of surveillance, data-processing, decision and action far, far beyond that of any one human, at once everywhere and nowhere, and theoretically capable of living forever, are just as artificial as anything contained within the casing of a computer--and for many a hapless individual just as incomprehensible, intractable, threatening. Indeed, were the world to actually ever be dominated by robot overlords one may wonder if those individuals would feel that their life is any different for it.

H.G. Wells' "Bookish Illiteracy"

In his Experiment in Autobiography there is a point at which H.G. Wells suggests that the "caricature-individualities" of his realist novels might not seem very relevant for long, that civilization would simply have moved on.

Of course, as with so much else in Wells, his creations remain relevant precisely because civilization did not move on in the way in which he imagined. The problems with which the world was wrestling in his time remain the ones which bedevil it now--the organization of human economic and social life in line with not just the possibilities presented but the necessities imposed by the advance of technology and of knowledge broadly. Economic life, war, "sanity"--considering the situation we are in now it can feel as if society has made little to no progress at all, the past century a waste or worse that has left people scarcely trying even as the challenge has got bigger and the stakes higher.

For the moment, though, I have in mind something rather lighter than those problems, like the "bookish illiteracy" of one of those caricature-individualities he specifically raised as likely to have lost its interest before very long, Alfred Polly (of his 1910 novel The History of Mr. Polly). Mr. Polly, Wells tells us, "specialised in," as he put it, "the disuse of English." This was because, while he was fascinated by "words rich in suggestion" and "loved] a novel and striking phrase," his limited formal education left him with "little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English"--with this getting worse the more exotic the material got. To him Boccacio is "Bocashieu," Rabelais "Rabooloose."

Still, in spite of his familiarity with such figures his reading was less a matter of middlebrow chasing after classics than of omnivorousness for anything in print, at least insofar as it promised to satisfy a taste for manly adventure, which was what got him into reading in the first place. "Penny dreadfuls" were a big part of his reading diet in those early adolescent years when he was bitten by the bug, with their Haggardesque tales of tropical exploration and dives into the mysteries beneath the sea and battles where young Polly vicariously "led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts," and "rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten." And the habit stuck, such that later he liked "Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne."*

Considering all this it seems to me that this is all very far from being irrelevant. Indeed, those of us who have ever been bookish have likely been that before we became "literate" (How do you get to be good at reading if you don't do much of it? And who has not mispronounced words they read but did not hear?); or our taste in that reading (as we are unlikely to become enthusiastic readers if it is all a matter of "eating your vegetables"). Certainly looking back at what--and how--I read at his age I do not think I was so different. If I now bore the readers of this blog by writing about people like Balzac--and Wells' realist novels--the author favored back then was Clive Cussler, a teller of adventure stories where exploration and the sea and battles all figure very prominently (if with rather less of the Victorian sensibility that so colored Polly's consumption), while I might add that even today Dumas' Vicomte appeals to me less than does his preceding tales of Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan.

Of course, it may be the case that Wells did not imagine this ceasing to be the case so much as he imagined it not being the case for anyone in adulthood--that complete literacy would be universalized, and certainly that anyone bookish in inclination would not, through the premature end of a poorly conducted formal education, pronounce "Boccacio" as "Bocashieu." In that case one could give him some credit for being right about Polly-like "bookish illiteracy" becoming less relevant--though not in the way he expected or hoped. In our time it is not illiteracy that appears to be on the wane, but rather bookishness, particularly the kind associated with plain and simple literary pleasure.

* Vicomte is the third novel in Dumas' cycle about the Musketeers, after the original The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After--and not just to Polly but anyone expecting a swashbuckler in the style of the prior two apt to be a disappointment, one reason why film adaptations of Vicomte de Bragelonne are very rare next to the others. (Still, they do take part of the book--specifically the portion now remembered as The Man with the Iron Mask, where we do get some "blood and swash.")

On Longtime Fans

I remember how when I first started to look into science fiction seriously, and read some of the history and criticism of the field in the course of that--much of which was, for better and worse, written by veteran authors--they often seemed to me jaded and picky and snobbish and negative.

Later, though, I came around to understanding their attitude. When a fan starts taking an interest in something their interests are fairly wide, and they are prepared to give a lot of things a chance, enough so that they may find the jaded, picky, snobbish, negative attitude hard to understand. But eventually they develop likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies--becoming aware of things they would enjoy more of, and things they never want to see again--at which point they, too, appear jaded and negative, perhaps even in the same ways.

Certainly this happened for me. Many years ago my patience was at an end with dystopia (especially the progress-hating kind designed to crush people's hopes of anything ever being better), and disaster (I think we've seen enough real-life disasters these days to find the fictional formulas unconvincing), and the post-apocalyptic situations to which disaster leads (especially of the reptile-brained survivalist variety), and robot stories of the Frankenstein complex type (I'm on Asimov's side here), and the Luddism generally associated with that (because, aside from being wrong-headed, it's trite and boring). As might be guessed from such a list I also have less patience with ostentatious Modernism and postmodernism in form and content, from the nihilistic poses of the self-satisfied edgelords down to the kind of science fiction storytelling that strives to overwhelm the reader's ability to process what they are reading with minute details irrelevant in any conventional narrative sense (Bruce Sterling once compared it to the "hard-rock wall of sound"), while if still willing to look at a long book, I find myself ever more demanding in regard to their justification of their length. (Basically, if you are going to make me sit through a thousand pages, or even just three hundred, you had better make them count, and few do. Art aside, how often do our adventure storytellers these days match their pulp predecessors for pace, incident, fun?)

Alas, such dislikes rather limit the options these days, or so it seems to me. What do you think? Are we seeing less of these things in recent science fiction than before? And what are we seeing more of?

Remember When They Thought the Action Film Was Dying Out?

Probably not. But that was the way the entertainment press was talking circa 1990, believe it or not.

What brought that on? Simply put, the style of action film that dominated the '80s was looking increasingly decadent between the ever-bigger budgets and ever-sillier results, while the grosses were hitting a limit--with this underlined by sinking franchises.

Thus Rambo: First Blood, Part II was a cultural phenomenon in 1985.

Rambo III was . . . not. This "most expensive film ever made" (capped off by Rambo's joust-like charge in a hijacked Soviet battle tank at a Hind helicopter) was received by many as laughable rather than exciting, as it took in one-third what its predecessor did at the box office.

So did it go with other films like the same year's The Dead Pool, and Red Heat, and the following year's Red Scorpion, and Tango & Cash (and in their different ways the "young adult" version of Rambo that was Disney's The Rescue and that James Bond-redone-as-'80s-action movie Licence to Kill), while even as it became a big hit the $50 million Lethal Weapon 2, with its bomb-in-the-toilet and the bad guys' house sliding down a hill, seemed to testify to the difficulty of "going bigger" as much as Rambo III (and Tango & Cash) did.

This may have been all the more the case with the films losing their thematic charge as the "post-Vietnam" sentiment waned, the moral panic over drugs and crime probably began to burn itself out, and the culture went increasingly "ironic"--and the following year did not change that. In the summer of 1990 the studios backed Total Recall and Die Hard 2 with Rambo III-like budgets in the hopes of seeing the movies achieve commensurately high ticket sales--and did not quite see their hopes fulfilled. Meanwhile the sequels to Robocop and Predator did not do quite so well as hoped, either.

At the same time they watched the romantic comedy Pretty Woman, the romance-cum-supernatural thriller Ghost and the family slapstick comedy Home Alone top the box office that year.

This, they said, is how the box office is going to be trending.

It made for a headline-grabbing narrative--the more in as this was the period of the last really big "moral panic" about violence in popular culture. But it was not really true. Rather those who made the judgment would have done better to pay attention to how big Batman had been the year before, and Dick Tracy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were that year--and even the success of The Hunt for Red October (the last three films all placing among the ten biggest moneymakers of the year). Scaled-up adventures with heavy military hardware helped keep something of the '80s-style action movie going through the '90s, while even if the injection of that element extended its life only so much, the superhero movies showed how the genre was tending. The action movie was not passing, but evolving--such that the superheroes dominate the big screen as the romantic comedies and other such films have been relegated to the small.

Red Forman's Vision of the '70s on That '70s Show

Watching That '70s Show years ago (mostly in reruns) I found it a mixed bag. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

The antics of the young people who were the focus were pretty forgettable for the most part, and as it happens I actually remember more about what the adults said and did. Not that they didn't have their limitations, of course. Eric Forman's father Red was a pretty standard string of pretty standard period sitcom clichés--a working-class man who, repeatedly and badly dinged by life, has nonetheless found himself with a family in the suburbs with its different tone and expectations in middle age, to whose seemingly unending demands he responds gracelessly and insensitively; and a reactionary old member of the Greatest Generation who is endlessly tearing into the Baby Boomer son he regards as a soft, incompetent, wimp; but who, for all the coarseness and the sarcasm and the yelling, can always be expected to do the "right thing" in the end (however grudgingly and, again, gracelessly), while every now and then reminding us that he is a human being after all.*

. Still, the writers every now and then gave us a little more than the usual--in part by, in this era in which social reality was not to be seen much in a major network sitcom (1998-2006), occasionally mining a little of that reality for comedy, with a memorable black-and-white sequence in the episode "The Velvet Rope" presenting us with what Red imagined his life, and the world, would be like at that point, an era of burgeoning incomes and exploding consumer technology making life better and better for Joes like himself. We heard, too, something of its basis--the sketchy premise that, because the American worker was "experienced, loyal, and hard-working," and Germans and Japanese were not, the post-war boom that made it all possible would just go on and on.

Of course, as people learned the hard way in the '70s, it didn't (and couldn't, certainly on that basis), and the world was very different for it, with one consequence the bitter gap between expectations and reality. (There went the flying cars! Or, as Red Forman seems to have referred to them in that scene, "hovercrafts.")

Much as progress-hating postmodernists sneer at those who dare remember and bring up those broken promises the reality is that those promises really were important, and their breaking important; that there really is a disaster and a tragedy here; and far from helping the world understand with it and cope with it and move on to something better (not their forte) they have preferred to indulge their stupid ironic snobbery as the world falls apart, making them infinitely more deserving of contempt than all the people and things on which they presume to look down.

* It seems worth noting that in the show's equally nostalgic '80s counterpart, The Goldbergs, paterfamilias Murray is very similar.

Cameron Diaz's Last Comedy, and Science Fiction Become Reality: Thoughts on the 2014 Movie Sex Tape

I was not a particular fan of Bad Teacher, but I did end up catching the reteaming of director Jake Kasdan with Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel in Sex Tape three years later.

The film had me thinking of those who love to tell us that if the science fiction genre seems less fresh and visionary and original and vibrant today that is because writers cannot keep up with a reality where technological change is far outstripping the rate at which writers can work. "The whole world has become science fiction!" they tell us triumphantly as they lift their cell phones high. ("I am holding a cell phone! The future is now!")

This kind of talk has never impressed me--struck me as mere shilling for consumer gadgets, and propaganda for the "information age," all as one sees how much technological progress has actually run behind common expectations for decades (got that self-driving car yet?), how little change there has been in the more fundamental areas of life. (The smart phone has been around for so long now that you have people old enough to vote who literally do not remember a time before its appearance--all while such things as the production and content of food, shelter, clothing, energy, transport, medicine have changed very little, to name but a few of those essentials people rarely look away from their screens long enough to notice, except when they do not have them, or use their withering math skills to understand the bill for them and are horrified. No, this is not the world of revolutionized abundance you were promised.)

Still, Sex Tape seems to me to be a movie which really would be a good example of how what would have been science fiction once has become contemporary reality--in its depiction of contemporary mores, and communications technology. Written in 1964, for example, it would have been prophetic--rather like Murray Leinster's extraordinary extrapolation "A Logic Named Joe," which saw fifty years ahead to the era of the Internet very, very clearly indeed. But of course it was no such extrapolation--leaving us with, in this case, rather a mundane farce, rather than any great vision such as gives many a science fiction classic an interest even where it ceases to entertain in the usual ways.

A Word on Genius: Balzac's The Two Brothers, Again

The two brothers in Balzac's Two Brothers are Philippe and Joseph Bridau. From early on in life, because of how they look and how they handle themselves, everyone expects great things for Philippe, and nothing for Joseph, with this confirmed by the choices of career each makes--Joseph's becoming a painter seen as a disaster by his mother, in contrast with Philippe becoming a soldier, and while frankly a mediocre one happening upon a succession of unlikely opportunities that see him a colonel after only a few years' service.

At least early in life Joseph accepts the assessment of his brother if not himself, mistaking Philippe's "patronizing manners" and "brutal exterior" as reflective of his being a "solider of genius," such that Balzac quips that "Joseph did not yet know . . . that soldiers of genius are as gentle and courteous in manner as other superior men in any walk of life" (and Philippe, distinctly, not one of those). "All genius is alike, wherever found," Balzac adds.

The idea that the person of true genius is "gentle and courteous" would seem unknown not only to the young Joseph, but to people generally these days--be it in how the courtiers who lionize "geniuses" in public life sing of the oafish and nasty conduct of those they designate as such as if it were a common, predictable, even necessary part of a package at which we should all be awestruck. This is, if anything, reaffirmed by the depiction of "genius" in fiction, which often presents them as thoroughly unpleasant, arrogant people (like the supposed scientist of "genius" as written by the hacks who crank out our pop culture).

Why is that? I suppose it is because a great many people, in line with the prevailing belief that the world is some perfect meritocracy where people get what they deserve, such that it is assumed that those who hold high positions are more meritorious and deserving than others, quite stupidly equate position with capacity. They associate Authority with irascible, impatient, bullying individuals ever tearing into those they see as their "inferiors" (not unreasonably, given that there is never a shortage of this kind of thing), and associate superior intelligence and talent with that (entirely unreasonably, given that there is ever a shortage of these kinds of things in high places), producing a characteristic example of the kind of muddle into which the "conventional wisdom" leads those benighted enough to believe in it.

Those Who Walked Away From Self-Publishing

Recently I was surprised to read claims that people are still self-publishing millions of books annually--precisely because self-publishing has proven such a disappointment. I expected that, after their initial experience the discouraged, exhausted--and often poorer--survivors of the marketplace slaughter tended to give up, while their experience discouraged others from going where they had gone before, all the more in as the "revolution" some hoped for never happened, was indeed cut off at the roots by the stagnation of the e-book and e-book reader's proliferation, the decline of book blogging and the ever more controlled nature of the Internet narrowing their publicity options, and of course, the unflagging hostility of the elitist bullies keeping the Gates of Literature so that folks like the Kardashians can become Authors but they can't (as said bullies tell them that they are "unworthy," when really the issue is that the Kardashians are famous but they are not, the insult as dishonest as it is cruel). And indeed, my admittedly unscientific impressions of such authors' pages on Amazon is that after putting out a few books, and (to go by sales rankings, ratings, reviews) not gotten much attention, their output has trailed off.

Is it possible that, in spite of all the disappointment, people have stuck to it? Even become more inclined to it?

There are some possibilities here--the most obvious of which is the extreme strength of the determination of a great many people to become authors, to make a living writing full-time in spite of the poor odds and the ever-abundant discouragement. Still, it seems to me that there is something to be explained here--and another reminder that no one has even begun to properly tell the story of self-publishing in these times.