Monday Morning Insight: “We Choose to Go to the Moon”

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

On this date in 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered what has become known as the “Moon speech” at Rice University. Perhaps the most famous passage of the speech is:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….

To the Moon

(Image: “To the Moon,” by Alex, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

It really is a marvelous speech — I say that as a speechwriter as well as someone who has always been inspired by the thought of going to the moon — and you can read it in its entirety at this NASA page.

In particular, I like the fact that Kennedy clearly understood that the Moon could be the first destination, the first waypoint, the first step in the larger endeavor of exploring space and establishing a presence there. Consider this part, that comes a few paragraphs before that famous passage:

… man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.

Kennedy, of course, was talking about his generation: the “greatest generation,” as Tom Brokaw called it, the generation that volunteered for, fought, and won World War II and then came home and built this nation into an economic juggernaut. The question this raises for me is whether our current generation is prepared to carry on in that tradition — whether we are “determined and cannot be deterred,” whether we have such grand dreams and bold visions and the courage to pursue them.

I hope so.

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Dragon Con Approacheth!

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Over Labor Day weekend I’ll be in Atlanta, Georgia, with 70 or 80 thousand of my closest friends at the Dragon Con science fiction and fantasy convention. The Author Guest of Honor is Jim Butcher, the Artist GOH is Stephan Martiniere, and many of my friends are also guests, attending professionals and performers at the convention.

I’m giving a solo concert (4:00 p.m. Sunday afternoon — add it to your schedule now) and participating in a number of other events. If you’re there, I hope I get to see you!

Here’s a rundown of all my events:

Friday

  • 4:00 p.m. — Art Show “Concert-that’s-not-a-concert” — playing and singing for the art patrons
  • 7:00 p.m. — Princess Alethea’s Traveling Sideshow — I’ll be narrating a live-action “fairytale rant” version of “The Little Mermaid,” and performing one of my filk songs — hosted by Alethea Kontis, with Leanna Renee Hieber, Mari Mancusi, E.C. Meyers, and special musical guest S.J. Tucker — always a fun time!

Saturday

  • 2:30 p.m. — Baen Books Traveling Road Show and Prize Patrol — with a whole cadre of Baen authors!
  • 4:00 p.m. — Panel, “Short or Long? How Do You Know?” — on short stories versus novels, with Sharon Ahern, Jaym Gates, Mike Resnick, Anne Sowards, Fran Wilde, and Timothy Zahn

Sunday

  • 10:00 a.m. — “Ecumenifilk” — I’m hosting a session of music focused on spiritual themes
  • 11:30 a.m. — Baen Books information and author signing booth, in association with The Missing Volume bookstore — I’ll be stationed there (Booth 1301 in Americas Mart Building 2) until 2:00 p.m.
  • 2:30 p.m. — Decisions, decisions … attend the first-ever Dragon Awards, or the Doubleclicks’ concert? Anyone have a Time Turner I can borrow?
  • 4:00 p.m. — Dragon Con Filk Music Track Solo Concert — come hear songs from my albums Distorted Vision and Truths and Lies and Make-Believe, as well as several new songs

Monday

  • 1:00 p.m. — Another turn at the Baen Books information and author signing booth, this time until 4:00 p.m.

At off hours, you might find me attending concerts by my musical friends, chatting with Baen Barflies in Barfly Central, hanging out in the bar with my writerly friends — or quite probably wandering around looking dazed. Be sure to stop and say hello if you get the chance!

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Monday Morning Insight: John Locke on Reading and Thinking

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

This week’s quote comes from English philosopher John Locke, who was born on this date in 1632 and whose theory of government influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States, especially in the run-up to the Revolutionary War.

Locke died in 1704, and his Of the Conduct of the Understanding was published posthumously in 1706 and included this passage:

This is something that I think people who read a great deal are apt to be wrong about. Those who have read about everything are thought also to understand everything; but it is not always so. Reading provides the mind only with materials of knowledge; thinking makes what we read ours. It is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of literary collections; unless we chew them over again—like a cow chewing its cud—they won’t give us strength and nourishment.

Here I make a confession: my own reading is often wide and shallow, and not nearly as deep as I would like or perhaps as it should be. And because I read widely I suppose I might be considered one of “Those who have read about everything” and “are thought also to understand everything” but don’t. What’s more, I’m probably the only one who thinks I understand; I expect most everyone else sees through my pretense.

My favourite book

(Image: “My favourite book,” by Ana, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

I’m convicted by this quote, then, because I don’t practice it as I should. Particularly this part: “Reading provides the mind only with materials of knowledge; thinking makes what we read ours.” I’d like to put that into practice more consistently, but I feel so many things tugging at my time that I skim things rather than scanning them, and I reserve little time to think deeply about what I’ve read.

So this week I hope to take time to really think about the things I read for my own edification, whether online or in print. (That won’t be easy, with Dragon_Con just a few days away, but I’m going to try.)

Wish me luck!

___
P.S. If you’re interested, here’s a link to Locke’s Of the Conduct of the Understanding.

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The Ideal, the Reality, and the Challenge

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I had this thought last night, and it seems appropriate for a Sunday morning:

  • The Ideal is to live with no regrets.
  • The Reality is that we all have some regrets.
  • The Challenge is to overcome the regrets, and get on with life.

I’m sure other people have had this thought, but perhaps not in those words. I’m not quite sure why it popped into my head, if it’s insipid or inspired — but I offer it for consideration.

Path into the unknown

(Image: “Path into the unknown,” by Jacob Surland, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

Here’s wishing you the very best, and hoping you have as few regrets as possible!

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Monday Morning Insight: Reading, Culture, and Education

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury!

Ray Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012), of course, was a prolific and influential author of fantasy and science fiction — he claimed to be a fantasy writer who was labeled a science fiction writer — and one of his most-acclaimed works is Fahrenheit 451, in which the fire department no longer fought fires, but set them: and in particular, set them to burn books. So this quote of his, from the afterword to the 1979 edition of the novel, is quite interesting:

The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us — it’s all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind.… You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

That, of course, was years before social media came on the scene. How much more junk, trash, and tidbits of news do we encounter every day — up to and including this blog post? How short have our attention spans become?

On the platform, reading

(Image: “On the platform, reading,” by Mo Riza, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

Years later, in a 1996 interview in Playboy, Bradbury said,

Listen, you can’t turn really bright people into robots. You can turn dumb people into robots, but that’s true in every society and system. I don’t know what to do with dumb people, but we must try to educate them along with the sharp kids. You teach a kid to read and write by the second grade, and the rest will take care of itself.

Take that last quote, of the importance of teaching children to read and write at an early age, and think about it in light of what the first warns against: the barrages of images we encounter, the reduction of text to snippets, even today the vapid combinations of text and images known popularly as “memes” (but which insult the very name they carry when you consider that “meme” more broadly means an irreducible element of culture or knowledge).

How hard have we made it for teachers these days? Think about how powerfully children are affected by images and sounds, compared to text. Think about the difficulty of teaching children to read and write who are brought up in this age of constant, cacophonous media — and the importance of doing so, if we are to prepare them to avoid becoming robotic in their thinking.

When I think about that, I’m thankful for parents and others who introduced me to books, and for teachers who helped me get the most out of them (including those who let me sit in the back of the classroom and read while they taught lessons I’d already learned). And I’m especially thankful for teachers who carry on today in the face of the obstacles in front of them.

And I’m thankful for you, taking a bit of time out of your day to read this. I hope it was worth your while, and that you can think of lots of people to thank for your ability to read!

Have an excellent week!

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Monday Morning Insight: Finding Out What We Don’t Know

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

Today is Napoleon Bonaparte’s birthday (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), so you might expect that I would discuss a Napoleonic quote. I could — he has a plethora of quotes including a phrase I use rather a lot (“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,” he said) — but Napoleon was kind of a jerk. Sure, he sold us Louisiana and a whole lot more, and he was a skilled military commander, but this week’s quote comes from the commander who bested him at Waterloo: the Duke of Wellington.

In addition to being a celebrated military leader in sixty different battles, Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852), was a Member of Parliament and twice Prime Minister of Britain. I think one of his most interesting quotes is

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was at the other side of the hill.”

Hill

What’s on the other side? (Image: “Hill,” by Henry Burrows, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

I like that because so much of what we do, and so many decisions we make in our lives, are based on our guesses about conditions that we aren’t sure of — what’s on “the other side of the hill” — combined with our predictions of what will happen if we take this action or that. According to Theory of Knowledge, we test our guesses and predictions against experience and thereby prepare ourselves for the next decisions we must make, and the next, and so on.

So, whatever decisions you have to make and whatever unknowns you face, may all your guesses be accurate, your predictions sound, and your courage strong.

Have a great week!

___
P.S. As for the quote itself, I found it in a number of different places but the attribution seemed odd. It was twice dated 10 days before the Duke’s death, yet once it was referred to as being included in a book covering an earlier period of his life. That’s a bit of a mystery, but I still like the quote.

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Monday Morning Insight: God and Mathematics

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

Today is British physicist Paul Dirac’s birthday (8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984). Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrodinger, and is known as one of the founders of quantum physics.

Dirac was a rather famous atheist — his colleague Wolfgang Pauli was said to have remarked, “Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is ‘God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet'” — but later in life he wrote a quite eloquent statement about God and the mathematical relations that describe our universe. In a piece in the May 1963 issue of Scientific American entitled “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature,” he wrote (emphasis added):

It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

Later still, Dirac was quoted as having said simply, “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”

Are we to conclude that Dirac, who in 1927 said, “If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination,” found God in later life? Did something in the nature of quantum mechanics point him toward the divine?

The Beauty of Mathematics

The language of mathematics … it’s more than a little Greek. (Image: “The Beauty of Mathematics” by Peter Rosbjerg, from Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

It would seem not. Instead of coming to believe in the existence of God, Dirac accepted the possibility of God’s existence, and even the necessity of God in certain circumstances:

I would like … to set up this connexion between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance, so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god.

That’s an interesting idea, though I wonder (a bit playfully, perhaps) if the physical laws of our universe are such that to produce a Paul Dirac (or a you, or a me) involves “an excessively small chance.” There have been, after all, only one of each of us in all the universe.

Even as powerful a mind as Dirac’s could not solve all the equations of the universe, and I certainly can’t. So I am content to let God be God and handle the beautiful and mysterious mathematics of creation.

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The Slush Formula

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Writers, can you estimate the chances that your story will make it through the slush pile?

I’ve come up with a formula.

Some background: A couple of years ago, I saw a post on a forum somewhere by a writer who said their story had “zero chance” of being passed on to the Publisher.

They may have been right, unfortunately. But why?

The chance that I will recommend a story to the Publisher is directly related to the quality of the story, the clarity of the storytelling, and the appropriateness of the subject matter. Each of those is a subjective measure, yes — what I think is a great story you might think is mediocre; what’s crystal clear to you might be indecipherable to me; etc. — but all three must be present in sufficient measure for a story to make it through.

Factoring & Expansion Formulas

It’s really not as complicated as all that. (Image: “Factoring & Expansion Formulas,” by CMLorenz16, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

Thus I express the probability of any given story being passed on to the Publisher as

P ≈ Q * C * A

So if a story really has a “zero chance” of being passed on, it is only because one or more of those factors approaches zero.

The good news is that’s rarely the case. (For us, “zero chance” is only when someone submits a memoir or children’s book or something else we don’t publish; then, appropriateness = 0.) So writers who have an accurate assessment of the strength of their story, how well it’s written, and if it’s appropriate should be able to estimate their chances pretty well.

But the thing to realize is that for the probability to be high (we’re talking percentages here, so it will almost never be 100%) each of those factors — story quality, writing clarity, and subject matter appropriateness — must rate very high indeed.

That’s the challenge.

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Monday Morning Insight: Failure and Greatness

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(Another in the continuing series of quotes to start the week.)

 

Today is Herman Melville’s birthday (1 August 1819 – 28 September 1891), so let’s unpack a Melville quote:

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

Most of us fail at something or other before we find something we do well, and most of us will not achieve “greatness” no matter how often we fail and try again.

And “better” in this case is definitely a value judgment.

Since Melville was a writer let’s examine this quote as it relates to the literary world, where it is plainly possible to “succeed in imitation.” We have plenty of writers who have found great success presenting essentially the same stories as someone else, and no shortage of others who continue to do so in search of their own success. The authors bring something of their own viewpoints and voices to the stories, but the common term is “filing off the serial numbers” to make it a bit less obvious that our fantasy story is essentially a repackaging of Tolkien or Rowling, or our science fiction story is a direct descendent of Heinlein or Bujold or Niven or some other famous author.

It’s not too surprising that this is the case. Authors continue to produce Tolkien-esque fantasy stories because the audience has yet to tire of them. From military science fiction to urban fantasy, space adventure to steampunk, the audience yearns for more — so much that authors who have not been able to break in with publishing companies have found their own fans through self-publishing. And if their fans feel they receive good value for their entertainment dollars, then that’s all that matters; after all, if being original means starving, then succeeding by being imitative isn’t all that bad. (We might even disagree with Melville and say that really is better.)

Yet success is not guaranteed, even when imitating examples of success.

Authors and publishers often do not know what story will resonate with a large audience, but that is especially true when it comes to more original stories — ones that are difficult to categorize into existing genre niches. Some works are so original that they define entire new subgenres, but they still have to be good enough (for whatever the audience considers “good”) beyond just being original in order to attract an audience.

But Melville refers to greatness, and I like to work backward from there. The authors we consider “great,” even if they were not pathfinders of their genres, produced work that hums with originality in some respect: depth of detail that puts us firmly in the setting and the story; emotional power that elicits deep sympathy for the characters; pacing and action that set our hearts to racing; all these and more elevate their work from entertaining to spectacular. Did the authors we consider “great” risk failure, or even endure failure, on the way to creating their monumental stories? I think they did, particularly when those stories were fresh and original compared to other things being produced at the time.

Failure

Are you striving for anything great? (Image: “Failure” by Andrea Small, from Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

It may be, however, that they were not trying for greatness. Indeed, it may not be wise to strive for greatness when striving for success is hard enough. Greatness will be determined by history, by whether our stories continue to resonate down through time — but that doesn’t help us very much in the here and now.

Here and now, every writer risks failure with every story they start. It seems safe to say that writing a story that lasts, that impacts generations, involves taking more risk than writing a story very much like another. And even when taking only moderate risks some writers will fail more often, or more spectacularly, than others — but that’s true of every human endeavor.

What about you? How have you failed, and what have you learned from your failures? Don’t let it hinder you too much; remember, Melville considered failure the true test of greatness.

Keep striving!

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There, but for the Grace of God …

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I found myself thinking, as the second major party convention came to a close, about the twists and turns our lives take, about how remarkable it is that anyone rises to fame or prominence, and about how the major party candidates got started on their journeys.

Athletes, for instance, may be gifted physically but they put in long hours of training and practice and preparation before competing, and the competition at higher and higher levels is so fierce that only a tiny fraction of all who ever played the game — whatever game it might be — will make it to the professional ranks. Artistic pursuits are much the same — whatever natural gifts we may have still need to be nurtured and developed, and only a very few professional (as in, making a living from the pursuit) writers, painters, actors, or musicians will ever emerge from the vast numbers of people who have dabbled from time to time in the creative arts.

In each case, the transition from amateur to professional to world-renowned is based on the performance, the output of all the work, as evaluated by the audience.

Can the same be said for politics?

Some politicians have natural gifts of charisma, charm, and attractiveness, and many of them “train” long and hard by networking, developing positions on issues, communicating with partisans (and opponents), and raising money. But political performance seems to be measured by intentions rather than results, promises rather than productivity, and politics is a game in which the influence of others plays a much bigger role than in other areas of life.

The influence of others may be natural to the political game. The intent for the candidate is not to appeal to everyone but to just enough people to get elected — for the party, not to attract everyone but to attract enough to get enough of its candidates elected to enact its preferred policies — so patrons and pathfinders and big-time players who can lend their own influence to a potential candidate become very important to success. Not so in other fields, where a player touted by a superstar must still perform on the court or an artist mentored by a master must still paint something worthy of recognition: in politics, notoriety and the right connections seem to be far more important than doing the actual work of governing or legislating. (Were actual voting records and accomplishments important, ineffective incumbents would be voted out far more often and certainly not be advanced to higher offices.)

Presidential Election Results 2016

Seems reasonable. (Image: “Presidential Election Results 2016,” by KAZ Vorpal, on Flickr under Creative Commons.)

 

With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder if we would ever have heard of Hillary Rodham — if she would ever have been on a trajectory to being a candidate for the presidency — had she not married Bill Clinton, or had he been satisfied with remaining the governor of Arkansas rather than running for President himself. In the same way I can’t help but wonder if we would ever have heard of Donald Trump if his father had not been a real estate developer and provided him with seed capital and connections to start dealing in New York real estate and to branch out into other enterprises. Would they both be spectators had their paths not been paved by others?

Which brings up a more interesting question: which of us, with the right connections or having gained some degree of notoriety or power, might have found ourselves on such a stage? Why them, and not you, for instance?

Perhaps “there, but for the grace of God,” go we.

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