by Eric Flint
I always urge every author who tries to argue with me on the significance of so-called "electronic piracy" to do a little experiment. Go to your nearest big bookstore and plant yourself somewhere that gives you a good view of the shelves where your book or books are located. Then, simply count the number of browsers in the course of an hour or two who don't even glance at one of your titles. Forget taking it off the shelves, looking at the back cover, etc. etc, and then putting it back. I'm talking about the potential customers who ignore you completely.
Try it sometime. What you'll discover is that for every potential customer who takes even a couple of seconds to consider your title, dozens will pass your books by without so much as a glance.
That's the opacity of the book market at work. The real problem faced by authors isn't theft, it's invisibility. For the overwhelming majority of their potential customers, they simply don't exist.
This is even true, by the way, for the best-selling authors, although not to the same degree. Just about every literate person today has heard of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or Tom Clancy or Nora Roberts or John Grisham. But what percentage of their potential customers has never actually read them?
The answer is 90% and up, for even the best-selling authors. For one reason or another, even though potential readers have heard of the author —in many cases, in fact, because of what they've heard of that author—most of them simply don't consider buying their titles. And, in many cases, based on information which is completely inaccurate.
To go back to my experiment, what you will discover is that every author loses more potential sales in one day due to the opacity of the market than they'd lose from "electronic piracy" in the course of an entire year. That being so, it's simply common sense to look for any methods that improve your visibility in the market— and steer clear of any that make the opacity of the market even worse.
Like DRM.
I'll explore this further in my next essay, where I'll go into considerable detail showing how fair use has always been the author's best friend, when it comes to promoting themselves and their works. And I will demonstrate that:
1) There is nothing that is "new" or "unparalleled" about the so-called danger of "electronic piracy."
2) From the standpoint of the narrow economic self-interest of an author (or publisher), a generous and expansive attitude toward fair use is every bit as beneficial as it is to society as a whole.
3) Any author or publisher who supports DRM is, even in the narrowest terms of their own selfish interests . . .
Logically challenged. Most polite term I can use.
In the meantime, contemplate "invisibility" for the next two months. Try my little experiment— and then go online and spend the same hour or so trying to find pirated copies of your work.
And then, do some simple arithmetic, comparing your losses in one column to those in the other and extrapolating the result across a period of months and years. If you're still deeply fretful about "online piracy" at the end, I can only hope you never get caught in a burning building— since you'll obviously spend your time worrying about whether you're wearing the right color socks to be seen in public rather than getting out of the fire.
* * *
Overtaken
Written by Barry N. Malzberg
Here was Plan The First for this installment. I would undertake a synopsis of James Tiptree's 1978 novelette, "Slow Music," a fully achieved and heartbreaking work (John Clute called it "The last great Tiptree story") which would, after a brisk and celebratory two hundred words or so, lead into a mournful elegy for the author (Alice B. Sheldon, of course) whose brightness fell so shockingly from the air almost exactly twenty years ago. That elegy would proceed then to muse on the abandoned and ruined Earth depicted in the story and the way in which all human aspiration and possibility of love is subsumed and destroyed by the Great Other. Away go the protagonist and the woman he loves, the last people on the planet, the last holdouts against the aliens who came in their great ships to escort them to the River of All Passage. In thrall, they join already departed humanity in the incumbent and overreaching darkness. So much for hope.
And so much for humanity. We have been utterly overtaken. Step by grim step, that quick march into the tumbling, grey, barren rush of the river. Their hands are parted, they are alone, descending alone into the illimitable sea of loss. Of wandering and the Earth again. Embraced by the river, under the cold stars, forever.
So much for ad astra per aspera. The story leaves us with nothing. "When I finished this I was completely empty," Alice Sheldon is reported to have said. "I had nothing more inside." "Slow Music" is possibly the best story of this matchless writer and—one way of looking at a blackbird—may be the best story to come out of science fiction in the century's last quarter. It is a savage put-on of the post-apocalyptic genre in general and of Alfred Bester's 1961 story, "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" in particular.
The Bester is another last man/last woman scenario which depicts human love and sexual passion manifest even as the aliens occupy. A man and woman seemingly stripped of all desire fall passionately into one another against the sounds of the ordnance of the aliens' approach. This Bester story, of course, is itself a put-on of the old Adam-and-Eve ploy. It took no small talent to put on a put-on and Tiptree, savage in her own loss, spares no one in "Slow Music." Not even herself. (She makes a cameo appearance in drag, a magnificently mustached fellow whose genitals are not exactly as expected.)
So my column—an unwritten, unmailed letter from this particular Zemblan House of Detention—would have celebrated Tiptree's savage envoi even as it mourned the fifty years of science fiction from which it was a true departure . . . the aliens and their mighty River trivializing all technology, hope, device. A narrative of the utterly overtaken.
That seemed good enough in the abstract. Then it occurred to me that with all of its excellence, "Slow Music" is not, after all, thematically unusual. The story is simply (as was the case with most of Tiptree) more intense than its influences. In fact, science fiction could be called a Literature Of Overtaking; so many of its originating concepts and central works have had that at the center. The wasted economy overtakes the populace. ("The Midas Plague," by Fred Pohl.) Time travel overtakes the life of the protagonist. (Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" or Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.") The aliens overtake human existence. (Fredric Brown's "Martians Go Home," Robert Silverberg's "Passengers," Gordon Dickson's The Way Of The Pilgrim.) Nuclear disaster overtakes everyone. (Ward Moore's "Lot," John Christopher's No Blade of Grass, Richard Wilson's "Mother To The World" and hundreds of other rodomontades. Science fiction, the literature of overtaking, shows the individual or society swept away or overcome by extrinsic forces. Meddling aliens, nuclear fission, climatological change: so much for the rounds of human existence. Tiptree's alien River consumes everything utterly off the face of the Earth. Only in science fiction, in fact, can this occur in a fashion utterly central to narrative and character. In that sense, the originating situation is itself the protagonist. Its struggle against being overtaken is the central conflict.
Maybe this is why science fiction makes so many readers nervous and gives mainstream literary critics the vapours. Tiptree thought so; in her Afterword to "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" in Final Stage, the original anthology in which it first appeared in 1974 she put the issue bluntly. "Oh tell us, please," she wrote, "that it is our swimming pools, our adultery, our mid-century angst which is making us so unhappy and ruining our lives, give us that comfort."
But science fiction would not give that comfort. Alien invasion, nuclear catastrophe, rampant disease, post-technological breakdown and riot, ah, these were what Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought to us so suddenly and completely. Hiroshima Mon Amour made it clear that there were forces outside which were less controllable and more malevolent than suburban angst. The disorders of the swap club or the Grey Flannel Suit might be conquerable through the powers of positive t
hinking . . . but positive thinking was not likely to do much against busloads of giggling Martians or the automotive escape riot on I-80 East when the Big One hit Los Angeles.
This means—to engage in that circularity which pleases literary critics pleased by Cheever or Updike annals of angst—that "Slow Music" is not thematically exceptional. It is stylistically exceptional, deep into that far region which only Tiptree and a few other of our greatest writers could apprehend, but its greatness does not reside in originality. All of us entered this literature of overtaking a little over eight decades ago and, overtaken at this moment, we must not confuse our vulnerability with control lest we end in Cheever Country; stumbling through the cold, shuddering in the encroaching dark, staggering past the empty swimming pools in the barren land of the dying country toward that place which long ago we so disastrously confused with our own.
—May 2006: New Jersey
The Tiniest Assassins
Written by Mike Resnick
Okay, boiled down, it comes to this: the Martians come here, do a little serious devastation, scare the hell out of us, and then catch colds and die.
Never gonna happen. For one thing, given the weaponry that H. G. Wells and the movie give them, they'll never have to emerge from their ships before they've destroyed every last one of us and the battle is over—and as long as they stay in their ships, they're immune to the one indefensible weapon we have: our peculiarly human viruses.
And there's something else to consider. Let's not forget that Wells lived before the era of modern medicine. I think it's only logical to assume that any creatures, benevolent or hostile, that can traverse the void and reach planet Earth have doubtless developed their science—and especially their medical science—to the point where they can pinpoint and identify any dangerous germs in our atmosphere, and either develop some form of immunization to them, or create some way to annihilate them at the source, which is to say Earth, before invading us.
It's just common sense. You wouldn't invade the waters off the coast of Australia unless you had some protection against the great white shark. You wouldn't wander through a pride of hungry lions without protection. Hell, we don't send our soldiers into battle these days without protection against bullets, chemical agents, biological agents, everything we can think of.
So I think it's fair to say that our germs are not going to kill any extraterrestrial invaders once they get here.
Nope. We're going to kill them long before they get here. And by the very same means that we (or Earth, if you prefer) used to kill Wells' Martian invaders.
How?
Well, as likely as not, it'll be by accident.
You see, in recent years NASA has been examining ships, rovers, orbiters, everything that we send into space.
And guess what?
Neither the cold of space nor the heat of re-entry nor the direct gamma radiation from the sun kills every living thing on those objects.
Oh, there's nothing there that'll bother us—at least not so far. But that doesn't mean an alien race with an alien physiology isn't looking down a barrel loaded with newly-identified microbes from good old Planet Earth.
We've even got names for them.
For example, there's Bacillus Odysseyi, which has been found on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Why is this noteworthy? Because the damned thing has been orbiting Mars for close to four years. It survived the 40-million-mile trip, it survived three years in orbit, it survived gamma radiation, and it's doing just fine, thank you.
Now, no one's ever been killed by B. Odysseyi, and probably no one ever will be. But that's not to say that it couldn't wipe out a squad of Wells' Martians or Edgar Rice Burroughs' green Tharks in an afternoon, depending on what particular germs they're vulnerable to.
Then there's Bacillus Safensis. This baby is not only found in the Jet Propulsion Lab's Spacecraft Assembly Facility (known as SAF, which gave it its name), but it is alive and well today on Spirit and Opportunity, the current Mars rovers.
So what do these—and a dozen other viruses that have survived the heat and cold and radiation of spaceflight—actually do?
Nothing much. They tend to go forth and multiply, like every other living thing, but they're not harmful to us. Hell, they've even been found in the water supply of the Mir space station. Astronauts drank it. They all survived.
But they're human astronauts, not Martian or Centaurian or Antarean astronauts. Or citizens.
Right. Citizens. Don't forget: we've sent out a few deep space probes, and we'll send out more. A couple have already left the solar system. They're not traveling fast, not by galactic standards, and it could take them a hundred thousand or even a million years to make planetfall somewhere out there—but they're going to arrive with a zillionth generation of perfectly healthy microbes and bacilli ready to find new homes.
Maybe the planet they touch down on won't have any life on it at all. (Which is okay by the fellow travelers; they can wait a billion years until some comes along.) Maybe it'll have life that's as unbothered by exposure to them as we are.
And maybe it will have life that finds them to be pure poison—life that, unlike the hypothetical invaders we discussed, is totally unprepared for a visit by microscopic creatures than can wipe them out, that will never know what hit them, that might indeed have been the friendliest folk in the galaxy.
All right. That's the non-fiction side of it. Those bacilli are out there, some of them aren't coming back, and sooner or later they're going to make contact with something.
Now let's look at the possibilities, science fictional today, but perhaps less so in the future.
We've got a million dedicated computer hackers, plus some truly powerful equipment in the hands of experts, searching the heavens every night for signals from other worlds—SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. They're probably not going to discover any in my lifetime or yours, but sooner or later they're going to latch on to some signals, because we're finding out that just about every star in the galaxy has planets, and with tens of millions of G-type stars out there, the odds are that an awful lot of them have, or once had, or someday will have life. And some of it will be sentient. And some of that will be searching the skies for signs of life just the way we do.
So eventually we're going to make contact with them. If we like what they have to say, fine. If we don't . . . well, if we can trace their signals back to their source, we can send them a little present. Not the microbes that are living on the Mars rovers today, but rather some of the most powerful stuff we can whip up (after we lie to them about our physiology and hope they're telling us the truth about theirs.)
And even if we don't know what their motives are, if meeting them at a neutral point in space is kind of like a blind date on a grand scale, it doesn't mean we won't go armed. Not with guns or lasers or any of that movie garbage; they'll be able to detect it from a light-year away. But with the most subtle weapons imaginable—Men, each carrying germs and viruses that we are immune to, each ready to transmit them by the simple act of breathing in and out.
Sounds pretty crude and heartless, I realize, and hopefully it will never come to that—but if your world is at risk, a visionary named Wells showed you that there is a far more efficient way of attacking the enemy than with a new generation of weapons, which history teaches us will be obsolete in a few years' time.
Much better to use a weapon neither Time nor heat nor cold nor radiation has been able to kill. There are going to be some alien immune systems that can't kill it either.
So how do we avoid killing off a friendly alien population?
We're working on it right now. NASA is aware that if enough of the bacilli I mentioned take root on Mars (or Venus, or Io, or any other world or moon in the solar system), we might one day discover life there, and if the bacilli have evolved or mutated enough, we'll never know that it came from Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So some of the NASA scientists have been given the taking learning how to
terminate these microscopic agents that space can't kill.
They already know that if they hit them with a few million degrees of heat they can't survive—but neither can the equipment they live on, and it's counter-productive to melt a spaceship before it ever takes off just to make sure that it doesn't take any microscopic travelers with it.
But they're learning, and before long they'll find a method. And that's absolutely vital, because although Wells didn't know he was telling the truth, we already have the ability to destroy the bad aliens. Now we have to make sure we don't kill the good ones by accident.
* * *
June 2007
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
Listen as Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick, David B. Coe, Edmund R. Schubert, Davey Beauchamp and Randal L. Schwartz describe many of the technological and social changes which will alter your life during the coming years.