Fiction – Page 17 – Auxiliary Memory

Ebook Economics

Big name authors are making ebook marketing deals like Open Road Integrated Media and Odyssey Editions, while Amazon claims they are selling more ebook titles than hardbacks. Is there an ebook gold rush? Is 2010 finally the year of the ebook? I’m meeting more and more bookworms with Kindles and Nooks. I ordered the new third generation Kindle the day it came out, and lucky for me, because it sold out in a matter of days.

If everyone reads on an ebook reader does that mean printed books will go extinct?

On several of my online book club groups we have been grumbling because of rising ebook prices. Ebooks used to be like paperbacks – far less glamorous than hardback or trade editions. After the Kindle came out, ebook editions started coming out concurrent with the hardback editions, but priced at $9.99. Can you imagine in the old days if new books were published in hardback and mass market paperback on the same day? Which would you have bought?

Are cheaper ebook editions published the same day as hardbacks too good to be true?

Publishers now want more money for ebooks because ebooks are replacing hardbacks, as well as trade and mass market editions. It used to be you bought the expensive hardback because you wanted to be among the first to read a book. Sure there are book collectors, but most people just give away their hardbacks when they finished them. Publishers want the most money for a book when its new, even if its in a digital edition which has no collector value at all.

It’s now possible on Amazon to find Kindle editions more expensive than hardback editions? WTF? That doesn’t make sense, does it? What will be the new cheap mass market paperback edition then? If everyone reads ebooks will they slowly drop in price as their sales dwindle? Instead of waiting for the paperback edition, people will wait for the $4.99 digital edition.

What does that mean for new book sales, used books and remaindered books? It used to be if you waited a few months you could buy a new hardback marked down for a fraction of the original price. $35 books would go for $7.99. Or you could go to a used bookstore or a library book sale and get a copy even cheaper.

If a bestseller sells a millions digital copies, how many used and remaindered books will show up for sale? Will physical books from before the ebook era become more valuable as less books are published on paper? Or will people just prefer a Kindle edition?

I’m in four online book clubs and I try to read one or two each month. Some books I can get at the library, but often I can’t. My choice is to buy either new or used. I can generally get used hardbacks cheaper than new mass market paperbacks. But if I had a choice between a $5 used hardback and a $5 download I’m going to pick the download for the convenience. However, if the choice is a $5 hardback or a $9.99 download my decision gets harder. The idea of having a 3,500 book library on my Kindle is cool, but not when I think it will be $35,000.

I’ll never need 3,500 books on my Kindle. I read about 50 books a year, and even if I live to be 90, that’s only about 1,600 books, but still $16,000 at $10 each. I could save a lot of retirement money by going to the library or shopping for used editions. But what if used editions disappear?

Here’s where the pricing of ebooks will effect me. I want the latest yearly edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. At Amazon, it’s $26.40 for the hardback, $14.95 for the trade paper, and $9.99 for the Kindle. If I wait it should show up at Edward R. Hamilton for $2.95-4.95. Amazon has for years stopped me from buying it from my local bookseller because of the huge discount. The trade paper is $21.99 locally. If I want this year’s edition now, the ebook is $9.99, which is $12 cheaper (not counting tax) locally, or $5 cheaper from Amazon. That’s a pretty good deal.

But book publishers are balking at selling new books for $9.99. If the Kindle edition was the same as the trade edition, wouldn’t it be logical to get the paper edition? I could give it to a friend when I’m through, or donate it to the library. But would I pay the same just for the convenience of having it on my Kindle?

Authors are flocking to agents to get special deals for their back list of books. Royalty rates are 25-70% for ebooks compared to 8-12% for printed editions. I wonder if writers would prefer to sell a million digital editions or a million hardbacks if they ended up making more on the digital edition. I’m sure hardbacks will always be the most prestigious format. Or will it matter? I’ve bought hundreds of hardbacks I no longer own, maybe even over a thousand.

I’m starting to meet people that didn’t buy books before that are buying ebooks because they can read them on their iPhone. That might be a novelty thing, or it might be a trend. You have to carry your phone everywhere, but carrying a book everywhere can be a pain. And if you are in the mood for a book and don’t want to wait for Amazon to mail you one, or find it at a local bookstore, will you just take the easy way out and buy a digital copy?

But look what happened to audiobooks. Years ago about the only kind of audiobook that were for sale were miserable 2 and 4 cassette abridged editions that went for $25-35. If you wanted unabridged editions you had to pay $50-$150 from a specialty seller. Or rent them for $20-30. Now I get digital audiobooks, unabridged for $9.56 apiece. That’s how digital audiobooks have changed the economics. But I buy my audiobooks from Audible.com (owned by Amazon.com) in 24 credit packs. If I got them one a month they would be $16. Audible is forced to sell a few titles for 2 credits per book, but I won’t buy those books.

You have to be crazy to buy CD audiobooks nowadays.

I’m thinking ebooks will shake out the regular book business too. Non-fiction might hang in there because beautiful picture books look horrible on ebook readers, even the iPad. Bookstores might focus on non-fiction. And non-fiction books are the kind I like to see before I buy too. I’m more likely to buy non-fiction locally, rather than order from Amazon. Unless it’s $50 locally, and $22 from Amazon.

There are several economic revolutions going on at once with books. When they come out with a digital ebook reader that makes non-fiction books look better than paper, that will cause another revolution, especially with textbooks.

Amazon is making deals with writers to sell classic old books for $9.99 for the Kindle. Here’s a list of some titles to consider. These are famous literary titles like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie or The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. $9.99 seems too high for these old titles. But the cheapest paperback of the Mailer book is $12.24. Amazon also sells used paper editions starting at $4.86, but most sellers want $3.99 shipping.

Thus $9.99 becomes a very interesting price point. It’s cheaper than new paper, but slightly more expensive than used paper, but it conveniently goes on the Kindle. If I searched around at used bookstores I might find a copy for $2-3. But if I buy the $9.99 copy, Mailer’s estate gets a royalty, and Amazon and the publisher make money. It stimulates the economy. Plus it will sit patiently in my Kindle library not taking up any shelf space, not requiring any effort to move if I move, so it’s sort of appealing at $9.99.

Will low price and convenience kill off printed fiction? But then, with ebooks, fiction should never go out of print. In the end I predict ebooks will kill off the mass market paperback, seriously hurt sales of the trade edition, and hardback sales will be geared towards book collectors and libraries. Slowly, the used book trade will retool for selling to collectors. I think new books will sell for more than $9.99, that books that were sold as trade editions will sell for $9.99, and that as sales fall off ebooks will migrated down in price to be lower than the average cost of today’s mass market book. We’ll eventually see $.99 – $2.99 specials.

JWH – 8/10/10

Sherlock Holmes and Other Modern Myths

There are some fictional characters that have achieved a kind of immortality outside of the stories from where they were conceived, and they get interpreted over and over again in new books, television shows, plays and movies. These include Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Frankenstein, Superman, James Bond, and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the March sisters (aka Little Women), and so on. The list is surprisingly short compared to the millions of books that have been published. And it’s fascinating to note the fading of some of these characters, like Nick and Nora Charles, Dick Tracy, Perry Mason, etc.

One way to understand fictional immortality is to study how various Shakespeare’s plays have been in and out of fashion over the last four hundred years. We like to assume we’re getting the true Shakespeare when we read the plays, but are we? Read a play and then watch it performed. It comes to life with actor’s performances and the director’s interpretation. I have read that Shakespeare changes with the generations and centuries.

Another specific way to see mythmaking in action is to study Wyatt Earp. Sometimes a famous fictional character is based on a real human. Read a handful of Earp biographies and then watch several of the dozens of movies based on the Earp myth, especially the films with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell. You’ll begin to see how myths are created. Absolute facts don’t count, but the defining of a Platonic Form that makes the character recognizable no matter when and where he or she appears and in what guise. Wyatt Earp is still Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, even only a damn few facts remain. That’s the power of myth.

Many people hate when their favorite book is made into a movie because the filmmaker’s interpretation of their beloved character is different from how they brought the character to life in their mind. But everyone’s mental interpretation is different, so I don’t criticize movies for seeing characters different. In fact, I love seeing multiple interpretations, especially when moviemakers are trying to be faithful to the original story, or trying to tell the original story in a modern setting. I love when actors inhabit a character and make them come to life. I’m critical when a writer uses an iconic character for a stock performance, especially when they obviously don’t strive to add life to the character.

I found one source that said Sherlock Holmes has been played by 75 actors in 211 films, but it was dated 2005, so we know it’s at least 76 and 212 now, if not a good deal more. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the detective adventures of Sherlock Holmes, so there’s a wealth of literary history from which to define the Holmes mythology. And I think that’s what’s happening, our popular culture is giving life to modern myths. I wonder if this is how the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans gave life to their gods? We only see faint shadows of those ancient individuals today, and have no idea what their fully empowered identities were like.

Sherlock Holmes has been around since 1887, and Wikipedia has a fascinating summary about Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, which also backs up many of the details in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey, Jr. interpretation of the cerebral sleuth. I am not a rabid aficionado of Sherlock Holmes – I’ve read some of the original short stories and seen many different Holmes movies over the years, so I can’t accurately judge how Guy Ritchie treats the canon, but read Tom Richmond for a true fan’s view.

People who haven’t read Sherlock Holmes stories, or even seen any of the older Sherlock Holmes films will have a virgin impression of Holmes, and that’s fascinating by itself. If they are now inspired to read the stories or watch older interpretations they might be shocked and dislike the non-Robert Downey versions. Often filmgoers and readers imprint with the first encounter with a characterization, like ducklings to their mother, and find reasons to dislike any other performance. I think this is especially true of Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. For baby boomers and older folk, Basil Rathbone is the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. Such bonding is unfortunate because it restricts the evolution of the mythic character. Often the character must be reinvented for each generation.

I hope I live long enough to see the Harry Potter books get made into a second set of films – to be epic mythic a character needs to have been in dozens of films. Not that I don’t like the first productions, but I’m anxious to see new interpretations. I suppose this is why there are nearly a half a million fan-fiction retellings of the Harry Potter stories. I was very excited to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie hoping it would instill new life into the fading Baker Street citizens, and acquire a new generation of believers for the Holmes mythology.

But here’s my problem, even though I can buy Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes, and especially Jude Law as Watson, and love Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, I’m not sure I can buy the plot of the new movie as a standard Sherlock Holmes story. While watching the film I predicted how it would wrap up and I was satisfied with the direction the writers took, but think Ritchie went too overboard with the violence, explosions and especially the scene at the shipyard. I absolute adored the recreation of Victorian London. I would have been happy if the only action had been Holmes and Watson strolling for two hours around town and just chatted.

I bet the Sherlock Holmes virgins had a far more exciting time watching the new film than most of us older fans because they weren’t burden with worrying if the story disrupted the canon. Besides the first time is always the most memorable. Many Pride and Prejudice faithful can’t stand any of the film versions because they want to adhere to the purity of the novel, knowing any aspect of a film version can drown out content from the original story. Most people will always think of Tarzan as Johnny Weissmuller even though the original 26 Edgar Rice Burroughs books describes Tarzan very differently. I’m sure there are lots of kids that have never read the Harry Potter books but worship the films and they would be shocked to discover a very different Harry Potter described by his creator J. K. Rowling.

But I don’t think any of this matters. Everyone can tell a cat from all other animals even though they come in an endless variety of appearances. There seems to be an indescribable natural form that is the cat ideal. You can always spot a Tarzan in any TV show, movie, book, comic, video game, cartoon, or other fictional venue. Ditto for Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge and Frankenstein. In popular culture this is also becoming true for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, but isn’t as widespread as those already mentioned. I think the March sisters from Little Women have potential to evolve into 21st century famous fictional pop culture identities. They were major in the 19th century, and they maintained their fame since at a steady low level, but I sense a new surge. Pop culture prefers flesh and blood people to make famous, but it’s fascinating to see word and sentence people gain worldwide fame.

It will be fascinating to know if Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan, or even Harry Potter continue to exist one hundred, two hundred or a thousand years from now. Isis and Osiris are still around, but how many average kids know who they are. How many kids even know Odysseus or Gilgamesh.

JWH – 1/6/10

iStories: The Short Story Hit List 100 Weekly

Let’s face it, the heyday of the short story as a popular art form was decades ago, probably as far back as when F. Scott Fitzgerald got rich and famous selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Except for would-be writers, required reading for students, fan fiction fanatics and a damn few diehard short story lovers, the marketing of short stories is almost invisible to the average citizen of our pop culture country. Is the short story art form unpopular because readers don’t like them or because short stories are so poorly marketed?

The short story art form hangs on by a thread, like the art forms of poetry and playwriting. I expect the remaining for-profit scifi, fantasy, mystery and literary magazines to die off in the next 5-10 years unless something drastically changes. The question is, can a drastic change be made?

Is there anything that can be done to revive the short story art form to popularity? The first question to ask is: What do the popular art forms have that the unpopular ones don’t? Movies, television shows, songs, video games and novels are the most popular art forms in our world today, ranked roughly in that order. A single movie, TV show, song, game or book can be admired and loved by millions of fans, and wide consumption in these artistic endeavors are routine. When was the last time a short story was popular enough to have a 1,000 readers in one week? How many people actually read the short story in each issue of The New Yorker?

Besides legions of fans, the most important factor that popular art forms have and short stories don’t are Hit Lists. Movies, TV shows, songs, games and books are extremely well reviewed, charted, rated and ranked by sales and popularity. Each art has legions of critics working hard to stay current and teach how each example of their craft fits into an overall history.

Every week we are well informed about the most successful premieres of each art. Hell, weekend movie sales figures often get touted on the national morning news shows, and sometimes on the nightly news. Book readers all know about The New York Times Bestseller lists. We have the Nielsen ratings for TV shows and the Billboard 100 for pop songs. There are countless websites and magazines that track the success of computer games. And songs are marketed by hits on the radio and on online stores like iTunes.

As a culture we love keeping up with what’s popular, but is what’s popular just the stuff we track with Hit Lists? I think so. If short stories were ranked weekly would they gain popularity? I think they might, but many factors would have to come into play.

Most important, the Short Story Hit List 100 would have to be weekly and track all genres of short stories. Separating them out into story types is deadly. We don’t rank blockbuster movies or best selling books by topic. The Oscars and Emmys aren’t divided up by genre. It would be a total water cooler buzz kill to divide short stories out into special interest groupings. A hit story must be one that people want to read and talk about because of its popularity, not because it puts the reader into a sub-culture.

Next, its vitally important that short stories be sold as singles, and not part of albums (magazines or anthologies). Few people like to buy a magazine full of unknown short stories. It’s like getting a free music CD with a music magazine – most of the songs are mediocre and the CD is a disappointment. People want hits, and that has to apply to short stories too.

For short stories to make a comeback they need a marketing site like iTunes. They need to be sold for 99 cents in a standard digital format like MP3 songs. Unfortunately, ebook readers, smart phones and computers use a variety of ebook formats that hurt the concept of making short stories popular, so the iStories site needs to offer all the possible formats but hide the dirty details from the buyers. Fictionwise.com illustrates well how this is possible.

Ultimately, this universal format needs to be DRM free so short stories can be easily stolen and shared – or if they have to have a DRM, then it needs a mechanism for limited sharing between friends. Unfortunately, the unethical viral marketing of copyrighted material is too good of a selling tool to ignore. And I think in the future, this universal digital short story format should be roomy enough to contain graphics, music, video and audio readings. In other words readers can read the story, listen to the story read on audio, read with eyes and listen with ears at the same time, read the story with background music turned on or off, and see illustrations or photos to enhance the story. But this super ebook format isn’t an issue right now.

Short stories need to get away from printed formats as their premiere venues (but nice chapbook editions will make excellent marketing additions to the overall sales, and we can think anthology and story collection sales as long term publishing). The primary publishing format should be for ebook readers and smart phones. Like I said, short stories should be sold as singles with the goal of creating hits. Collections and anthologies should be left to the book world to market because they would hurt creating hit short stories.

The key to revitalizing the short story art form is creating hugely popular stories that will become the topic of conversation between people all over the nation. People share both the experience and love of movies, TV shows, books, song and video games. When was the last time you were in a conversation about a short story? When was the last time a group of people at your office discussed a short story they had all read? This happens all the time with movies and TV shows, and to a lesser extent books, songs and video games.

One of the major factors against marketing short stories is there are too many of them on the net for free. Free is incredibly bad for revitalizing the short story art form. Bad editors, no editors and no editing has created a glut of short stories on the Internet. No one likes to listen to amateur musicians or mediocre bands. Every time you play a song you want it to be a great song. When you go to the movies you expect to be blown away. When you read a book you want to find one that has deep emotional impact.

To revitalize the short story art form will require a seal of approval either attained by popularity or critics. Our imaginary iStories site cannot be a slush pile for the common reader to wade through. Nor should its editors have to select from a tremendous slush pile to find stories to promote on the site. Stories should be submitted by agents or professional editors that can be trusted. There needs to be some kind of farm team looking for talent to feed into the system. I would think existing print and online magazines could play the role as the iStories systems develops, but eventually I expect magazines to die off. Thus professional editors would become talent scouts and agents for stories.

A theoretical iStories site should also limit the number of new stories released each week, and find ways to publicize the best. New ways to promote stories should be invented. They need corporate backers like film studies or record companies but I doubt existing book publishers would take on this role. It might be left to magazines – so The New Yorker and Asimov’s Science Fiction would campaign to get their stories noticed, and bring attention back to their business.

We have to get away from depending on fiction magazine sales and magazine subscriptions because those marketing methods are no longer successful at making short stories popular. Buying a magazine is like buying an unknown album with the hope of finding a hit song, especially when you aren’t familiar with any of the artists. Buying a magazine subscription is like buying a bunch of unknown albums hoping to find several hit songs. 200 channels with nothing to read, huh? People want smash hits.

I doubt my ideas about revitalizing the short story art form will ever happen, but at least I’m making a point about creating a popular art form. Look at the short video and how YouTube is promoting them. Until there is a way to sell hit videos they will never become a major art form, but they could. Most people go to YouTube and similar sites and look at the most watched videos hoping to discover something really fun. Yesterday I discovered the Muppets version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” because almost six million people have watched it. That clue paid off because the video was excellent entertainment.

Back in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s short stories were popular enough that they were the topic of social discussions. If you watch the credits of old movies you’ll often see movies based on short stories. Newsstands were filled with hundreds of short story magazines. Short story reading was a popular evening pastime until radio slowed it down and television practically killed it off. In fact, television is what replaced the short story for people looking for after work diversion.

Short stories are not mini-novels. The best are jewels of intense fictional expression that are a unique art form. Sadly, they are a dying art form. Because of iPods, iPhones, Kindles, Nooks, and other electronic gadgets that people carry around, short stories have another chance to become popular again. Short stories can be read quietly anywhere on an iPhone, or even listened to in an audio edition. They must compete with songs, audio books, novels, movies, videos, computer games and television shows in this small venue, but there is room to compete well if short stories were marketed correctly.

And by correct marketing I mean as singles. Unless people are saying to their friends, “Have you read the new short story by so and so,” to their friends, short stories will be doomed to an ever shrinking fan base.

How to Start

If all the ebook sites, like Amazon’s Kindle home page, Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, and the general ebook fiction sites like Fictionwise.com, eBooks.com, eReader.com would create a section for short stories and a mechanism to track their sales, that would be a big start. It would help even more if they would offer spin-off sites that specialized in short stories.

Another angle of attack would be if online magazines maintained a hit list of their most popular stories ranked by web visitor hits. They might need to program mechanisms to keep authors or fans from constantly reloading the page to produce fake hits. And they need to track hits from all their backlog of stories and not just the current issue. It would be important to provide numbers so popularity could be gauged against stories at other online magazine sites. And like songs, and even movies, sometimes it takes weeks or months to have a breakout hit.

We’d also need critics that specialize in reviewing short stories, and ones that would be also willing to track many short story web sites and tally the numbers each week to give attention to the stories getting the most attention each week across the web.

If short story reading ever did catch on again, it would be fantastic if magazines like Entertainment Weekly devoted a section to them like the do movies, DVDs, books, music and television.

It would be a tremendous help if best of the year anthologists like those who compile the Best American Short Stories and the various yearly genre anthologies if they would maintain a blog about their ongoing efforts to select stories, even to the point of showing how they tally competing stories as they are discovering them. We need as much PR as possible on stories climbing the charts, so to speak.

Unfortunately, most fiction magazines are monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly, and hit stories need to be tracked weekly, or even in real time. Web sites that change their content less than weekly get ignored and forgotten.

It would help greatly if a social bookmarking site like StumbleUpon created a short fiction section for tracking popular short fiction reading. On the other hand such sites help promote free reading, and that competes with our goal.

The biggest success for revitalizing short stories is if a company would create a web site like Audible.com, or an online store like iTunes just for the sale of short stories. They should sell both ebook editions and audio narrated editions of short stories. I’d suggest a standard price too, 99 cents for either ebook editions for reading with the eyes, or audio editions for reading with the ears. Short story are longer than songs, so some marketing folk might want to price them higher, but they are usually experienced only once, so they should be far cheaper than renting a movie.

Readers can help too. If you read a great story share it with your friends. Talk about it. Tell them where to buy it. I know this might be painful, but get in the habit of buying short stories, and avoid free stories. If you read and enjoy free stories at online magazines at least donate money, but it would be better if you supported a paid-subscription site. Flooding the market with free stories ruins the market and hurts the art form. Don’t promote free stories, it dilutes the market for selling stories. Don’t read stories that haven’t been accepted by an editorial process and edited unless you’re part of a writing workshop group or critiquing stories for a friend. Even fan fiction could be improved by these rules.

Authors like providing free copies of their short stories on the web to help promote their work in general. This might be good for their career but it has produced so many professionally written short stories for free on the net that short story fans no longer want to buy stories. Many fans now expect to find a copy of any short story they want for free and there are web sites to track free fiction to help them.

Free stories are bad for the short story art form in the long run and maybe an additional reason why print magazines subscriptions are declining even faster in recent years. Maybe free stories should only be those that are older than one year, or five years, and don’t compete with new sales.

If you love short stories and want to promote the art form then do whatever you can to help short story writers and publishers make money. I tend to doubt the short story market will be revived, but now is the time to try because of the switch to Internet publishing and ebook reading.

JWH – 11/28/9

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them. At nineteen I felt like a grownup and wondered if rereading my favorite kid’s books would tell me something about how I was programmed. Between 10 and 19 I read whole libraries of science fiction books, and rereading the Oz books taught me that science fiction was often just Oz books for adults.

It was around this time, 1970, that I read Ringworld by Larry Niven for the first time. Now, almost forty years later, I’ve come back to Ringworld again, like my return to Oz. The whole time while listening to Ringworld on my Zune I kept thinking that Larry Niven had practically copied the structure and sense of wonder of an Oz book. Now, this can be seen as both praise or a curse. Oz books are like giving rug rats wordy psychedelics – the stories are so goddamn vivid that they put their tiny tyke imaginations into an overdrive that no Ritalin could ever break. I also think these books produce unrealistic expectations about reality. Yeah, I know, I sound a Puritan.

Our society underestimates the power of children’s minds. From an early age we have a desperate need to make sense of reality, and almost any input can be shaped into a belief system. I loved being a kid shooting up stories, but now that I’m older and examining some of my most ancient subroutines from my mental programming code, I have to wonder about the dangers of children’s books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to campaign against giving kids fantastic fiction, but I want to explore the idea of fantastic fiction on evolving minds.

I once read a shocking article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about how libraries banned the Oz books. I’d love to find that article again, because librarians believed the Oz books gave children unrealistic ideas about life. At that time, I felt their protests were complete bullshit. Banning the Oz books didn’t work, because writers like Robert A. Heinlein, who also grew up reading Oz books, went on to write even more books that gave kids unrealistic expectations about life. Fantasy and science fiction have become universal fictional addictions in our modern society. Does anyone worry about that?

Rereading Ringworld, I noticed it had the same structure as an Oz book. Oz books would introduce a handful of weird characters, quickly get them on a quest, and along their journey these characters would experience mind-blowing sights and meet far-out magical creatures. Then when enough pages were filled to equal a book, the story would be wrapped up. Oz books had little character development, and practically no rising plot action, definitely no climax or falling action, and very minimal resolution.

The Ringworld of Niven’s novel is his Oz, a magical place equal in scope to the Land of Oz. Like Oz, Niven barely scratched the surface of the Ringworld, leaving room for endless sequels. Nessus, the Pierson’s Puppeteer and the Kzinti, Speaker to Animals, are as colorful as any magical Oz character created by L. Frank Baum. Children reading the Oz books starting with the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in the year 1900, through Glinda of Oz in 1920, wanted to believe that Oz existed. I know in 1962 when I discovered the books I somehow wanted Oz to exist. I knew it didn’t, but wished it did. If I had found these books sooner, when I was seven or eight, I might not have been able to tell Oz from reality.

By age eleven I switched from fantasy books to science fiction, and even though I knew science fiction was also make-believe, I developed a life-long belief system based on science fictional ideas. Rereading Ringworld only reminded me that believing in science fiction is no different from a kid of ten believing in the Land of Oz. All fiction is fantasy. Even realistic books like those by Edith Wharton or James Joyce, still only produce fantasies of life in 19th century New York, or early 20th century Ireland, no more real than Oz or Ringworld.

Like I said, I have no intention of giving up fiction, it’s the vice that defines me, and an army of deprogrammers could never make a dent in my delusional addiction. When I’m alert and concentrating, I can face reality directly. I know my life would be more real if I spent my time hiking in the mountains, woodworking, or studying astronomy – or just washing dishes and changing the cat box. I’ve always felt sorry for Christians who hated this world and dreamed of Heaven, but is dreaming of Paradise any different from dreaming of Oz or Ringworld?

I guess those librarians who wanted to ban Oz books were right. I can see I used fiction as a drug to avoid life and living in reality. I understand that, and accept it, but it doesn’t invalidate that I love fiction more than reality.

If I had never gotten hooked on fiction would I have been a better person? Would I have been disciplined and realistic? Would I have been hard working and productive? Gee, I don’t know, maybe if I was lucky. There are billions of people living with their faces shoved into reality that have no happiness or escape, so I can’t complain about my fiction habit, because my life could suck and I might never have discovered the magic of make believe.

All I know at the moment, is tonight I want to read my paperback copy of Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak or go watch Heroes or Firefly on DVD and eat Phish Food ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s and Fresh Market chocolate chip cookies. I could do something real, I just choose not to.

JWH – 10/27/09

This essay was written fueled by playing “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show thirty or forty times. Music, the other addiction. Be sure and read “The Man Who Made Oz” over at Slate.

Where are the Wholesome TV Shows?

I’m wondering if the TV shows I watch make a statement about my personality, or even more, if they influence it. I constantly argue with my friends about the old nature versus nurture debate, with me believing biology is the stronger force, while my feminist friends holding firm to the power cultural influences. If my lady friends are right, then television programs us. If me and my males friends who side with biology are right, then television only reflects our baser instincts.

And I’m sure members of God’s flock will ask: Where do I, an atheist, get the moral authority to judge what’s wholesome about TV. Maybe I can define “wholesome TV” in a way that both the spiritual minded seeking moral goodness, and the secular wanting uplifting humanism, can agree. I’m afraid my definition will be tricky because it aims to be two things at once. Fiction is both a mirror to personality and a microscope examining culture. To question fiction’s purpose is akin to debugging one’s own programming.

My definition of “Wholesome Television Shows” are those teleplays that reflect positive cultural programming or ones that educate viewers about biology’s influence on human relations. Wholesome TV should provide inspiring role models and illuminate the weaknesses we should all seek to overcome. Wholesome fiction should constantly explore what it means to improve oneself and our species. Whether you are a fundamentalist or a humanist, the desire for wholesome entertainment is a desire to improve the whole.

TV shows from the 1950s often naively tried to do this, with each episode of “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” presenting a moral lesson, and reinforcing conservative beliefs. Creating wholesome fiction is not the goal of most TV writers, they seek to make money by entertaining. Most audiences find moralizing condescending. Uplifting is a very difficult trick to pull off.

The other night I watched an episode of Leave it to Beaver, and then rewatched my favorite science fiction movie, Gattaca. From my viewpoint, Gattaca is the perfect example of modern, adult wholesome entertainment. I wonder what Christian fundamentalists would make of my evidence? Just because I don’t see God in the universe doesn’t mean I don’t see the beauty of spiritually uplifting humanity. Vincent Freeman’s relentless drive to overcome the dictates of genetics is a uplifting spiritual quest.

The average TV viewer doesn’t want morality plays about improving their souls, they want high impact entertainment that provides fabulous escapism. In other words, Americans crave boob tube heroin, where they can kick back in their recliners and experience opium intense visions through their flat panel screens. This adult audience doesn’t want wholesome TV. Wholesome TV is primary a idealized concept that parents want for their children, and some adults want because they are tired of feeling like Romans at the Coliseum when turning on their TVs.

I’m too old to wonder what I’ll be when I grow up, but I have to wonder how kids today view their future. And if I was a proud parent, would I want my kids watching television? If my feminist friends are right, and cultural programming is the dominant influence on personality, then what kind of code are we loading into the brains of today’s rug rats? As a concession to my feminist friends, young women of 2009 are far different from young women of 1909 or 1809. I would argue they are the same because of biology, but freed of cultural repression, we are seeing more of their true instinct.

The overwhelming message to kids from modern television, is teaching them that if they aren’t extremely sexual active they are failures, losers and dorks. Following that, television illustrates that wealth is everything, that money equals sexual partners, freedom, and power. After that, the subtle message that’s constantly beaten into their heads is violence is the best solution. Is it any wonder I claim biology is the dominant influence on personality? Television constantly shows alpha males fighting for prized females, or females going to inhuman efforts to be sexual irresistible.

Don’t get me wrong, modern television does have it’s good messages about tolerance for diversity, preaching ecological education, promoting GLBT acceptance, often dealing with subtle ethical issues, while regularly championing societal underdogs, and exploring political controversial topics of the day. However, it seldom promotes hard work and discipline and usually sees the academic successful as the socially challenged. On TV, sarcasm is presented as the supreme method for demonstrating intelligence.

The television shows I like to watch reflect a deep addiction for fiction and escapism, but I can also imagine they could also represent moral failure. My top three favorite shows right now are Big Love, Dexter and True Blood, in that order. Critically I’d rate them A+, A+, A-, but none attempt to be Gattaca. None of them are wholesome, although, strangely enough, I might advocate Dexter, a sympathetic look at a serial killer, as the most wholesome of the bunch.

Dexter Morgan knows his genetic programming commands him to kill, but he constantly struggles with the ethics of being a serial killer, all the while trying to understand what it means to be a good human, because he knows he’s not. Don’t get me wrong, I would rate all my favorite shows M30. I’m not sure people under 30 should watch them. In fact, I can’t think of any primetime ABC, CBS, NBC show I’d recommend for the under 18 crowd. Over at Parents Television Council, they could only find one show they gave their Green light to, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. Most primetime broadcast TV shows are rated Red, and a few Yellow by the stoplight metaphor coding.

The most wholesome network show I watch is The Big Bang Theory, which the above group rates Red. I love this geek fest show, especially because it’s the only show on TV about scientists, but I’m not sure if it’s a flattering portrayal, and it gives a bad message to kids: Scientists are comic book reading dweebs, nothing but silly characters who can’t get laid, or worse still, don’t even think about getting laid. What if television producers create a show about JPL scientists that was realistic, dramatic, inspirational, and encourage kids to believe science was a tremendously exciting career? Television has totally failed at presenting science to the public. Science fiction is usually fantasy escapism, and shows like CSI lamely present a silly, simplistic, and inaccurate view of science and technology. CSI makes science look like slight-of-hand, only reinforcing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous comment, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Is all of this a failure of television, or really a failure of fiction? If we consider non-fiction, then there’s a true abundance of shows worthy of young people’s viewing. Fictional television fails at presenting role models, and its efforts of cultural programming are mixed. Nor is fictional programming that educational about burden of biology places on our personality. It amply illustrates the sex drive, but never reveals it as a burden. Television only reflects a worship of sex and never deconstructs sexual impulses. We all know rubbing our genitals together is pleasurable, but why is the quest to find the right frictional partner so common in storytelling? And if fiction isn’t about sex, it’s about conflict and violence. Would the Harry Potter books been as satisfying if they lacked all the killing?

Sex and death are natural parts of life, but fiction gives the illusion that sex and death are the most common aspects of life. By not watching the local news, my crime filled city seems peaceful. In real life I never see other people having sex. Mostly I see people struggling to get ahead at their education or work, or improving their house and lawn. Is the craving for fiction the urge to see what we don’t in normal life? Is my craving for wholesome television just a craving for what I don’t see in my life?

The defining moral and ethical issue of our lives is global warming. Will we be the generation that fiddles while Rome burns? Many scientists are now saying we only have one decade to transform ourselves before our habits push the environment past the point of now return. We are a generation of Noahs, but instead of building an ark and collecting animals, we’re watching television. As far as I’m concerned fiction has totally failed to address this issue.

If I had any backbone I’d beat my addiction to fiction and throw it off completely. I crave wholesome fiction, because I feel it’s a time in our culture when we need it. However, my addiction to sensational fiction is too great. It’s beauty is to powerful to ignore. However I am cutting back on my drug of choice by reading more non-fiction. Mostly I fix my fiction habit with television and movies, and leave reading to non-fiction, but I’m starting to watch ever more documentaries. If I was a parent, I’d urge my kids to watch quality documentaries, but there is a third force in the nature-nurture debate that may even be more powerful, and that’s peer pressure.

The young will find their own art to admire. We have no choice in the matter. The young are programmed by biology and fuel by pop culture. I can’t image what they will look back to in forty years and see in this decade as their wholesome television. Two and a Half Men is no Leave it to Beaver. And what kind of role models do Britney Spears, Fergie and Lady GaGa make for young women? Read this interview with Megan Fox to see an example of a contemporary thoroughly modern Millie.

The moral majority’s demand for wholesome TV is really a tempest in a teapot. Just watch ABC Family and Disney Channel TV shows. Are they really that wholesome? They might be cleaner, but are they uplifting? And are their shows improving this generation of children? Is Disney’s Britney Spears a reasonable example of a wholesome upbringing and current role model?

NBC’s ER was a reasonably good wholesome show because it was very positive about doctors and medicine, providing gritty, but realistic role models. Compare that to Gray’s Anatomy? Is there any show on TV now that have characters you’d want for your children to admire? I hate to say it, but Dexter the serial killer is at least aspiring to be a better human. I don’t even see that in most shows.

JWH – 8/13/9