We're having a very interesting discussion on a recent blog post of mine about which modern authors will stick around to become classics. Do give us your thoughts.

Oh, and just to keep things fair, let's classify 'modern authors' as being people who have released new material within the last thirty years, and are still alive or only recently passed.

Very good stuff via Marginal Revolution -

In 1929, The Guardian polled its readers to find out which British authors they thought would still be popular in 100 years. Well, the century isn't quite up, but someone's unearthed this poll, and it's a cautionary tale for leading literary lights.

Here's The Guardian now:

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

Great War Fiction, where apparently somebody still reads this stuff, has some commentary:

Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.

And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.

The list looks a little better once we get out of the Top Ten, with some more familiar names popping up:

George Moore - 165 votes
Bernard Shaw - 110 votes
Conan Doyle - 101 votes
R.H.Mottram - 79 votes
John Buchan - 63 votes
D.H.Lawrence - 61 votes
Chesterton - 60 votes
Aldous Huxley - 50 votes

Garnering only one vote is the still very popular P.G. Wodehouse. And getting absolutely no votes is a British writer who is far more widely read today than anyone else on this list: Agatha Christie.

Just yesterday I was reading a very good article by Eric D. Snider talking about the 50's John Wayne-John Ford western The Searchers, a middling hit when it was released that somehow morphed into a classic twenty-five years later. This largely unheralded film is now hailed as inspiration by two generations of filmmakers.

The fact is that books and movies that the popularity of a book or movie in it's 'moment' seems to have little bearing on its relevance to posterity. I think if you survey many of the landmark author with classic books that are a century old or older, you'll find that very few of them were immensely popular in their time. Many in fact toiled in near obscurity, only to be 'discovered' well after their deaths.

It's probable that there's a large element of chance in these things - if you're lucky some influential critic digs up one of your books thirty years after you're gone and gives it a new lease on life. There's no control over something like that.

But all the 'classic' literature tends to have a few things in common: either it deals in Big Themes or centers on some truly Memorable Characters. Stylistic choices, cultural relevance, progressive thinking - these generally don't speak to people fifty years on. They may sell books (or movies) at the time, but they also date those same works badly.

But who can really say what will stand the test of time?

How 'bout it? Anyone care to wager on what modern authors will still be read in 100 years time?

I am still ploughing through Katherine Kerr's Deverry series (which I wrote about here and here). I'm on, what, the twelfth book? Thirteenth? I am losing count. At any rate, there's only a couple to go, and one of those unpublished as yet.

Katherine Kerr continues to work her page-turning ensorclement on me. I just can't put these things down. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, although I have some theories.

( Some ruminations on the art of page turning... )

That said, I am getting slightly less enamored of these later books. A certain world-weariness seems to grip all the characters. Not that this has ever been a series about shiny, happy people but I could do with a little less existential angst. The series seems in general darker and less joyful. Meanwhile many of my favorite characters have died off and the ones that remain, well, they don't endear themselves to me with their frequent stupid decision making.

I'm still scratching my head over why I'm supposed to like the female wizard who left her husband for an arrogant elf-spirit.

The funny thing is, I don't find that these flaws are specific to Kerr's series in particular. This disenchantment seems to follow me into any series that runs longer than three or four books. Or really, any long-form storytelling at all - I don't think I've stayed with many TV shows past their third season (sorry 'Lost', sorry 'House).

Of course the obvious explanation is that familiarity breeds contempt. Even the shiniest, most original new author will repeat themselves over time. Eventually the unique stylistic flourishes or cleverly deployed plot devices or endearing characterizations seem old hat, and we begin to see the man behind the curtain, as it were. Certainly, that's a factor.

But another thing I've noticed is that authors who write long-lasting series seem to have trouble resisting the urge to 'go dark'. Each book in a series feels a bit more grim then the last. There are fewer moments of levity, catharsis gets harder to find, and vanquishing the villains seems to come at a higher and higher cost. Meanwhile the characters get more flawed, more world-weary, more mired in existential angst.

On the one hand, it seems realistic, right? Maybe these are just signs of a maturing author, one less willing to take the easy out and cook up a false happy ending. Fair enough. Real life is hard, and short on happy endings.

But, if you want to talk realism, you should consider the positives too: humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt to difficult situations and to draw strength and joy from little things. People who go through difficult times do pick up scars, but they also often learn and grow and become more themselves, in some sense.

But my sense is that it isn't a question of characters becoming more 'real'. Rather, over time authors have a tendency to turn their characters into sounding boards for their own personal philosophies and into soapboxes for their pet issues. Which is within their rights, I suppose, but possibly detrimental to the reader's enjoyment. Loyal readers will stick with you 'til the end, no matter who you kill off and what Obvious Parallels you draw between your world and the real world. But there are some of us who silently shake our heads and turn away and go find newer stories to enter into.

In Kerr's case, she hasn't quite driven me away yet. And with only two books left, she's going to have to try really hard at this point. Plus, she keeps adding dragons to the story, and I'm just a sucker for that.

Audience Participation: I am curious if other people tend to get disenchanted by long-form serial stories. And if so, why?

I've always had a slight distaste for 'Banned Books Week'. At the root of my unease is the fact that I don't see a lot of government censorship of books going on nowadays. Who in fact is banning these books that we're supposed to be reading?

It turns out, almost no one. The vast majority of the list is books that have been 'challenged', virtually always by private citizens and virtually always unsuccessfully. Which, last time I checked, did not constitute censorship in any sense of the word*. And in the light that this editorial throws on it, Banned Books Week starts to look a lot more like a powerful, secretive lobby making fun of concerned parents.

A celebration of Banned Books is a great idea if it actually addresses a problem. For instance, if it was raising awareness about books banned in, I don't know, say Iran. That would be cool. But when it's a bunch of librarian activists getting huffy because old Mrs. Tweedle is worried about Harry Potter, it starts to smack of self-righteousness to me.

Mind you, I'm in favor of lots of books being available. I'm in favor of parents doing the job of okaying what their parents read and not waiting on schools or libraries to do it. If that's what this is about, fine.

But calling it 'Banned Books Week' just seems a little disingenuous.

* And these are librarians. Shouldn't they know what a word means?

I'm telling you, you need to give Katherine Kerr's Deverry novels a fighting chance.

I just blew through number three, The Bristling Wood in less than 24 hours. Up next: re-reading* The Dragon Revenant.

One of the best things about Kerr's mythology of destiny and reincarnation is that it makes the history of her world really come alive. Like any fantasy author worth their salt, Kerr's land of Deverry has a rich and detailed backstory/history, complete with kings, wars and dynasties.

But this fantasy history is actually interesting, rather than just eye-glazing, because it is populated by familiar characters. Not just Nevyn, the extremely long-lived sorcerer at the heart of all the stories, but the rest of the cast of characters also reappears over and over in various (re)incarnations.

So whether it's the story of an ancient clan blood feud, a savage warrior priestess leading an army to its doom, or a civil war tearing the land apart, we're on board for the whole thing because we know we're going to see some familiar faces: Brangwen, the spirited lass with a warrior's soul; Gerraent, an unsurpassed swordsman who bears a dark passion for her; Blaen, the beloved warrior who also loves Brangwen wholeheartedly; and others - mothers, brothers, sons, popping up again and again in the annals of this lost history.

It's a great plot device, and I look forward to encountering many more iterations of these characters over the course of the long story arc!

* Dragon was actually the first book I read in the series, and the one that made me decide that Kerr was an author who deserved a second look. But I was jumping in very much in media res, and I want to read it again in its proper place in the narrative.

---

In other news, I have once more fallen off the wagon. Currently watching Season 6 of Project Runway, courtesy of my friend Dorion's On Demand.

What I miss: New York. Sorry LA, Runway just belongs in the Big Apple.
What's still good: the crazy personalities and the amazing talents.
What's the drama: in the 'team challenge' two weeks ago, the guy who got kicked off was on the winning team. SO AWESOME.
Is everyone still gay: oh heck yes.

Currently reading: The City & The City, by China Mieville.
Currently wondering: if it's going to start making sense soon.

One thing I really hate is visiting a place and then finding out later that I missed some key attraction. It does gall so!

For instance, I was in King's Cross several times in early July and it never occurred to me that I could visit platform 9 3/4.

I'm not even that into Harry Potter, but c'mon!

Fantasy is perhaps my first love. Fantasy novels are the door through which I fell in love with reading as a child. Many of the books I return to year after year are fantasy.

For all that, I don't pick up a lot of fantasy books. The old adage that '90% of everything is crap' seems to hold doubly true for the genre. While perhaps no other genre is able to approach mythological proportions and assume a hallowed place in mass consciousness, perhaps only 1% of 1% of fantasy novels actually achieve this.

I think that writing fantasy is trickier than many authors understand. It's hard to put your finger on what makes a work of fantasy significant. A genre like science fiction has its formula clearly mapped out: SF asks what if?

On the other hand, people see fantasy as more of a recipe: take a handful of elves, dwarves and powerful artifacts, knead together with an implacable evil until dough-y, add magic to taste. But none of these elements guarantee that your fantasy novel will have anything to say, whether it be about morality or life or the human spirit or any other topic which ostensibly should be the concern of great literature.

So I've really enjoyed discovering the novels of Katherine Kerr, which quietly map out a compelling study of human nature without making a lot of noise or screaming EPIC!!! with every overwrought sentence. That's not to say they aren't page-turners. They are!

I stumbled upon Kerr's Deverry Cycle about half way through. I read one of the books, thought it was well done, but definitely had the impression that I had come in late. I gave another two books a shot and really enjoyed them, but increasingly realized that I was missing something. So I decided to go back to the beginning of the series (a daunting task, as it currently encompasses a dozen novels) and start from book one, Daggerspell.

Good decision.

The Deverry novels concern a feudal kingdom of Gaulish warriors. The unique conceit or 'twist' that Kerr brings to the table is that in this world men and women each have a sort of destiny or fate, and they are reincarnated over and over again until they achieve that destiny or redress the wrongs they have done. It's karma for the pseudo-historical fantasy set.

The same characters are born into different bodies, different lives - in one they might be a noble, in another common; in one two people might be brother and sister, and then again father and daughter. You never know. Of course each time 'round they have no memory of their past lives or exactly what they're supposed to be doing...

Kerr writes that one of the major themes of the books are "the profound effect that the Past has on the Present." This is very much present in Daggerspell, where we find a very complicated love triangle (or maybe even a love pentagram?) being enacted over and over again through the centuries.

In days of yore a young woman named Brangwen was supposed to marry an apprentice mage named Nevyn and learn the ways of 'dweomer', or magic, herself. That was her destiny. But due to the usual human complications of selfishness, greed and lust things went very wrong. The young mage was exiled, two of her suitors slain and Brangwen herself came to a tragic end.

But the story doesn't end there. The young mage swears that he will not rest until he has set things right, and the gods hear his vow. Rather then succumbing to his mortality, he lives for hundreds of years, constantly seeking out the reincarnated players in this tragedy so that he can try to smooth out the tangled karmic webs they've all woven and help them each to fulfill their destinies.

Daggerspell begins with Nevyn learning that his beloved has once again been born into the world. This time she is the daughter of a wandering mercenary, a hard man who was very much part of her original tragedy in their past lives. She has a suitor too, a powerful young noble whose destiny is entangled with the fate of the kingdom. Nevyn would have a difficult enough time untangling this love knot even if someone wasn't using dark sorcery to raise a rebel army and drive the kingdom into chaos. Which they are.

It's a very good book, and having 'read ahead', as it were, I can vouch that the series as a whole is worth getting into.

Via Freakonomics:

I posted about the possibilities of instantaneous book printing machines way back in 2007. Two years is an era in technology time. Print-on-demand machines have arrived.

It looks like at the moment these machines are ideal for out-of-print works that are in the public domain, but deals with modern publishers will be soon to follow. Also soon to come: your book. These machines don't mess around -

... printing over 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article. The quality of the paperback was beyond dispute: the text clear, unsmudged and justified, the paper thick, the jacket smart, if initially a little tacky to the touch.

Apparently the pricing is not yet pinned down, but is expected to be competitive with traditional books.

So. Does this change everything?

Also: am I the only one who wants to see these in airports?

Okay, this is pretty cute: Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook news feed.

I hadn't heard this: Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell are going to play Sherlock Holmes and Watson in a new film.

This does not thrill me.

I love Sherlock Holmes. I have two fat paperbacks which collect the entirety of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works on the iconic character. I reread them almost as frequently as I reread Lord of the Rings.

I definitely think that the World's Greatest Detective is overdue for a fresh film interpretation. But not a comedic one. With the modern mania for 'dark' interpretations of classic characters, it surprises me that Holmes has never gotten the treatment. After all, the character was dark before dark was cool.

The fact that TV's Dr. House is explicitly modeled on Sherlock Holmes should give you an idea of the reality of the character the way Doyle wrote him. Holmes was a sociopathic genius, an adrenaline junky with a drug problem, a man whose brilliance at everything he turned his mind to was eclipsed only by his total inability to form personal connections with people. Never has a character cried out more for a serious dramatic treatment.

It doesn't sound like he will be getting it in the short term.

The good news, though, is that most of the Sherlock Holmes stories have passed into the public domain. So there's no exclusive rights on making movies about him. So there's plenty of room for some other filmmaker to step up to the plate and come up with a fresh interpretation.

In the meantime, we still have Dr. House!

Audience participation: who would you pick to play Sherlock in a fresh film adaptation?

The Big Stack is slowly dwindling. I am working my way through a fantasy paperback I picked up on a whim for my last plane trip. I spotted the name Sean Russell on the book shelves and vaguely recalled previously enjoying a book by him. This one sounded interesting, so I grabbed it. And now that I'm finally getting around to reading it, I'm finding it enormously compelling.

Most fantasy novels take place in some sort of alternate-Middle Ages. World Without End is refreshing because it takes place in an alternate Age of Enlightenment. In the kingdom of Farrland, reason reigns as men increasingly turn to science to understand the natural order. Tales of powerful mages in ages past are dismissed as superstition. The heroes of the day are philosophers and naturalists.

Into this intriguing setup stumbles young naturalist, Tristam Flattery. Although he is the scion of a family of noted eccentrics, Tristam has a highly scientific mind and is set to follow in the footsteps of his hero and mentor, Professor Dandish. All his beliefs and faculties will be challenged, however, when he is unexpectedly summoned to the Royal Palace and put in charge of tending a rare shrub that may have miraculous healing powers.

Almost immediately, he's also plunged into a byzantine web of intrigue, as rival factions at court vie for his allegiance. Young Flattery can't decide which is worse - that he has no idea why he's so important to these people, or that deep down he's secretly enjoying the game. He'd better watch his step, though - this is a game with dark secrets which people will kill over, and it turns out that even his old mentor was not immune to its seductive charms...

Wow, I should write book copy. Anyway, I'm enjoying this tremendously and if this sounds like your thing I'd encourage you to check this author out. Sea Without a Shore is going onto my Amazon.com wishlist yesterday.

---

It's highly technical in parts, but I found this lovely breakdown of the many, many problems with so called "Internet Addiction Disorder". By a psychiatrist, no less. Vindication!

Some key bits:

Do some people have problems with spending too much time online? Sure they do. Some people also spend too much time reading, watching television, and working, and ignore family, friendships, and social activities. But do we have TV addiction disorder, book addiction, and work addiction being suggested as legitimate mental disorders in the same category as schizophrenia and depression? I think not. It's the tendency of some mental health professionals and researchers to want to label everything they see as potentially harmful with a new diagnostic category. Unfortunately, this causes more harm than it helps people.

...

Research done in a particular area should also agree about certain very basic things after a time. Years have gone by and there are more than a few studies out there looking at Internet addiction. Yet none of them agree on a single definition for this problem, and all of them vary widely in their reported results of how much time an "addict" spends online. If they can't even get these basics down, it is not surprising the research quality still suffers.

...

Since the aspects of the Internet where people are spending the greatest amount of time online have to do with social interactions, it would appear that socialization is what makes the Internet so "addicting." That's right -- plain old hanging out with other people and talking with them. Whether it's via e-mail, a discussion forum, chat, or a game online (such as a MUD), people are spending this time exchanging information, support, and chit-chat with other people like themselves.

Would we ever characterize any time spent in the real world with friends as "addicting?" Of course not. Teenagers talk on the phone for hours on end, with people they see everyday! Do we say they are addicted to the telephone? Of course not. People lose hours at a time, immersed in a book, ignoring friends and family, and often not even picking up the phone when it rings. Do we say they are addicted to the book? Of course not. If some clinicians and researchers are now going to start defining addiction as social interactions, then every real-world social relationship I have is an addictive one.

*exit stage right singing Might as well admit it I'm addicted to love...*

My first thought when I started reading Daniel Tammet's memoir Born on a Blue Day was that there was no way he could have written it himself. I mean, we're talking about someone who can spend hours entertaining himself by counting and whose idea of a good time is collecting acorns. Even though Tammet has Asperger's, which is on the high-function end of the autistic scale, it seemed hard for me to credit that such a person could write so cohesively and engagingly. But he did, and continues to do so on his blog. A recent entry even includes a poem he wrote. I don't mean to be condescending, but I really was surprised. You learn something every day.

To me, the fact that someone whose mind works on such a different level could learn to communicate so effectively with the rest of us is extremely impressive. Yes, Tammet holds the record for reciting the most digits of pi, speaks eleven languages, and could calculate 82x82x82x82 in his head at age 9, but I think the fact that he bridges the divide so effectively is his most important achievement. It's no wonder that researchers have flocked to him in an effort to better understand people with Asperger's in general.

Daniel Tammet's brain is different from yours and mine in two important ways: one, obviously, is that the has Asperger's Syndrome; the other is that he has synaesthesia, the real actual deal. Numbers and words take on a whole new significance in his mind - they have their own colors, their own shapes, and even their own personalities. It's apparently this unique condition that gives him his remarkable powers of memory and calculation. When he performs multiplication in his mind, he simply watches the two numbers, each with their own unique character, perform a sort of dance until they form a third number, the result.

In another book I recently read, The Black Swan, the author points out that the (normal) human mind is basically an analyzing engine which we simply cannot turn off, even when it actively inhibits our understanding of something. We tend to always see the forest, but never the individual trees. Tammet's brain, on the other hand, lacks this analyzing function, at least to some degree. This is both a blessing and a curse. He sees details in amazing, often painful clarity, but feels overwhelmed by the larger picture. So goes the theory, at least.

Coincidentally, there is a report out this week that backs this up. Researchers claim to have been able to use trans-cranial magnetic stimulation to 'turn off' the analytical side of the brain, freeing

the brain’s number estimator to act on raw sensory data, without it having already been automatically grouped together into patterns or shapes.

In other words, many of us would be savants if we could just get our temporal lobe to shut up for a minute! Speaking as someone whose brain doesn't shut up, ever, I am extremely sympathetic to this.

I'm still reading Born on a Blue Day and I'm sure I'll have more thoughts when I'm finished. But in the meantime it's interesting that there's such a trade-off for cognitive abilities. While I don't know if I care that much about having a preternatural affinity for prime numbers, I would love to have Tammet's ability to absorb new languages, apparently effortlessly. It would also be cool to be a natural at chess. But would it be worth it to lose the ability to easily be aware of and interact with the society around you?

What do you think?

I have an obscene amount of books to read through right now. It's really kind of embarrassing. It's partly the fault of being flooded with wishlist items for my birthday and partly the fault of me buying books for trips I had to take before that blessed event. The upshot, though, is that I've got a LOT of reading to catch up on!

Here is a list (incomplete, since I'm working from memory) -

Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945 by Max Hastings

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet

The Secret Country by Pamela Dean

Powers by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Glass Castle: a Memoir by Jeanette Walls

Ventus by Karl Schroeder

India by Michael Wood

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

World Without End by Sean Russell

What's So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey

I'm currently working my way through Retribution, but it's thick (but fascinating!). Once I'm through I need to kick it into high gear on some of this other stuff. Oh and I have a list of books I want to get once I get through this lot. Oh yes...

What are you reading? What do you want to read?

And now, something I didn't like.

I don't usually bother with Amazon.com reviews but in this case I felt like a beloved author was putting one over on his fans. I Had To Warn Others. The author is Iain M. Banks, the book is Matter.

( Anti-matter... )

Now, don't get me wrong. Banks on a bad day is still better than most sci-fi authors at their best. Nonetheless, enjoyment of this particular book may rest entirely on how big of a sci-fi geek you are. If breathtaking descriptions of alien species and exotic homeworlds are what get you up in the morning, there may be something for you here. But I shudder to think what the SF newcomer will make of the endless parade of insectile aliens, exotic spaceships and people jetting around on rocket packs.

EDIT: For those looking for some GOOD Banks, I would recommend either The Player of Games or Look to Windward, among others.

I'm stealing this from the blog of Writtenwyrd -

I've never read Eragon, first part of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance trilogy, mostly because it sounded like the usual generic, derivative fantasy clap-trap. It turns out I was wrong, as a critic demonstrates that it is in fact super-derivative fantasy clap-trap.

Besides demonstrating why there are no child prodigies among writers, the article raises the important distinction between being derivative following archtypes. The Matrix, Star Wars, Earthsea, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings all follow the classic Hero Cycle described by Joseph Campbell in Hero of a Thousand Faces.

( Why all stories should be alike, but different, plus some authors to check out... )

It's coming. I told you it was.

UPDATE: note that I didn't say it was here yet. But I would say that this is a definite first step towards cheap, fast POD book-machines in stores.

DamnInteresting.com's article for this week is on the search for life on other worlds. The article in itself isn't especially astonishing (although it does contain a fun little app that will calculate the probability of intelligent life in our galaxy based on your inputs) but the lively discussion thread that follows it is full of food for thought.

Briefly, the Fermi Paradox and Drake's Equation predict that there is almost certainly intelligent life in the universe apart from ourselves, in fact there's probably LOTS of it. The idea is based on two assumptions: 1) the universe is unfathomably immense, so even if the chance of intelligent life developing is tiny, there's plenty of room for that chance to have happened more than once; and 2) that there is nothing particularly extraordinary about our circumstances or ourselves that would prevent our success at achieving intelligence and building a civilization from being duplicated elsewhere.

For the kinds of people who think about these things (Star Trek fans and IT engineers) this would be the Optimistic Viewpoint.

The opposing argument is known as the 'rare earth' argument. It takes major issue with the second premise up there, that our little slice of the cosmos is nothing special in terms of its ability to support and encourage life. Under the rare earth premise, if I understand it correctly, the universe is a dark and hostile place, brimming with stray asteroids and killer radiation, and we're remarkably lucky to be here. Alas for us, however, that we are likely to be alone in the universe - lightning is unlikely to strike twice.

We'll call this the Pessimistic Viewpoint.

The pessimists have a lot going for them, in my opinion (and isn't that always the way it works?). But even if you accept that old Drake was onto something with his equation it's still pretty unlikely that we'll be shaking tentacles with our extraterrestrial brethren anytime soon. There are huge questions of When and Where that call into question whether we'll ever flash the ol' LL&P at the Vulcans. For starters, they could be on the other side of the galaxy, which means we'd need warp drive or something like it to have a hope of running into them in the next million years. But distance is only half the problem. Time is also an enemy, as the universe has been around long enough for alien civilizations to have come and gone a million times over. We probably have a better chance of stumbling across alien ruins then aliens themselves.

There are a number of other classic sci-fi scenarios that explain why ET has yet to phone home. For the SERIOUS pessimists in the crowd, there's always the chance that something is out to get us. Authors Alistair Reynolds and Jack McDevitt both postulate a series of all-consuming machines designed to stamp out civilizations once they reach a certain level of sophistication. So that would suck. But hey, at least we would know there was someone else out there.

If you're a real Trekkie optimist, you know of course that the Vulcans are already out there and that they're just waiting for us to settle down, stop killing each other and develop warp drive. Then they'll drop in and welcome us to the neighborhood with a technological pie fresh from the oven. Gee, that sounds nice! But honestly, I think we can file that one under 'too good to be true'.

In Arthur C. Clarke's classic Childhood's End, characters see visions of distant intelligent life, include a race of sentient crystals for whom a single thought might take an entire millennium. This brings up another major concern - what if there IS intelligent life, but it exists in a form where it is unable to recognize us (or we it)? We wouldn't even be blips on the radar of beings that think in terms of eons. A planet-sized intelligence might give us no more thought than it would a single-celled organism. Conversely, if intelligent life showed up amoeba-sized, we would probably never notice. There's no guarantee that sentient beings will look just like us, only with more ridges on their forehead.

Other possibilities exist. Maybe civilizations have a natural life-span, and ours too will succumb to an inevitable collapse long before we Make Contact. Maybe intelligence isn't the pinnacle of life after all, and the life forms we find out there won't have bothered to develop it. Or maybe we're just the first species to achieve intelligence - after all, somebody has to be.

As an aspiring science fiction writer I have to admit that it's fun to imagine a whole ecology of alien civilizations, and the possibilities that brings. The universe seems a lot more adventurous if you imagine it being littered with alien ruins the way Greece is littered with headless statues. But is it realistic to believe that? I'm not so sure.

What do you think, sports fans? Are you pessimists or optimists? And if you do think there's life out there, what form might it take?

Imagine this scenario: you got to your local Barnes & Nobles, hoping to find the latest bestseller from noted sci-fi author Thomas Braun (hush, you!). "Excuse me," you ask the girl at the desk. "Do you have Thomas Braun's latest?" The girl smiles sweetly: "Well of course we do!" She leads you over to a machine. On a touch display screen she punches in the author's name. A list of all his books comes up. You select the one you want. The girl looks at you expectantly. "Your credit card," she coughs. "Oh, sorry," you mumble, and swipe it through the reader on the side. Then there is a soft whirring and the smell of hot ink. With a thud, a warm, quivering paperback drops into the slot. It's the very book you requested, and it was printed just now for you.

Barry Eisler is doing a three part post (here, here and one to come) on the future of book selling. This is, essentially, the world he envisions: Print-on-Demand becomes the de-facto default for distributing books. I strongly suspect that he's right.

People talk about digital books, but in the short term the paper-based book is not going anywhere. In fact, barring some technology breakthrough that's true in the medium term as well. See, the thing is that a book is really hard to beat. It's highly portable, easy on the eyes, completely self contained, easy to access at any point and harnesses, to steal a phrase from Penny Arcade, 'the awesome power of available light'.

Various electronic readers have come out in recent years, but none of them are as simple yet effective as a book.

When I envision a replacement for the book, I imagine a flexible, lightweight square of plastic material. You give it a shake and the surface glows with characters. It's a touch screen! You select something to read, a language and a font size, lean back and away you go. That's nice, but it's a little ways off. In the meantime, we have PoD.

Eisler points out that PoD could be the salvation of independent bookstores. If every store, no matter how small, is basically Amazon.com, then humongous chains lose that advantage over their smaller brethren. Booksellers would be more about marketing, and less about having specific books. Well, they might still have them, but they'll be show-pieces. Something to browse before you make your decision.

Paperbacks are easiest with this system. Folks who insist on hardback might become a special, secondary market. Those books will be a bit more complicated to bind, and so they may still have to come from a nearby physical plant with more capability than a booth in the mall. It should still be relatively quick to get one, although it may not be 'while you wait'.

I don't know how far away any of these futures are. I know for sure that price-wise, PoD is getting pretty reasonable for 'undiscovered' authors. But a kiosk that prints while you wait? Time will tell.

Still, my guess is that it's coming sooner than we think.

Okay, here is my response to the essay prompt -

I was a reader from a very young age. From the time at five or six when I forced my mom, practically at gunpoint, to read the Chronicles of Narnia aloud to me I loved books. To be a young reader is a great thing, because every story becomes so much larger than life when you're a kid. But there was one that became larger than all the others.

After finish with the Chronicles for the second or third or seventh time I scanned my parents book shelves for fresh worlds to explore. I spotted the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was particularly drawn to the illustration on the yellowed Two Towers paperback: a forest of darkness, receding endlessly into the dark. I felt sure that that forest must hold wonderful mysteries. I wanted to go there.

But I didn't, at that time, because when I asked about it my parents assured me that Tolkien was over my six or seven-year-old head (strangely, this is what they had told me about the Chronicles). But I would get my chance soon.

When I was eight we took a rare trip up to Minnesota to see extended extended family. I met boys my age who were second and third cousins and lived on farms, which was quite wonderous for a city boy like myself. I had a great time with them, but the end of the trip found my parents visiting an adult cousin in the Twin Cities. I was bored to distraction. So the cousin pulled out a copy of The Hobbit and told me to read it, saying "This should keep him out of trouble."

It certainly did. After two days we had to fly home. Being nowhere near finished, I was desperate to keep reading. The cousin relented and the book came home with me, where I had devoured it within the week. Then I wanted more. Fortunately, there were three more books in the series on my dad's book shelf...

My parents remained unconvinced that I would understand the actual Lord of the Rings trilogy, a much more adult and complicated work than the book. But I persuaded them to at least let me try.

It definitely proved a more daunting task than The Hobbit. It took me, I think, about two months to get Frodo all the way from Bilbo Baggins' party to the Grey Havens. And that was reading every spare moment I got. But it was well worth it. I ate it up. I wanted to live in Middle Earth more than anything, and for a while I almost did.

Somewhere in there I persuaded my BFF Scott to dive in with me, and so I had a companion on the journey. We would compare notes about where we were in the books whenever we met, and during 'big church' on Sundays we would illustrate our favorite scenes in notebooks. We would make up further stories and adventures set in Middle Earth, although we preferred Sam as our hero over Frodo.

When that was done, I was determined to read The Silmarillion. This time, promised my dad, it really WILL be over your head. Of course I was allowed to try anyway. In fact, this time he was right - while I slogged through The Sil out of pure stubbornness, I really understood very little of it. But that was okay. A vast new world, as big as my imagination, had already opened before my eyes, and I would return to it throughout my life.

What really spoke to me about The Lord of the Rings were the vast, uncharted spaces. Even today I've never read any other books that felt so much like a journey through a real world, one virtually untouched by the hand of man. I wanted to be lost in the forest of Mirkwood, and look up to see the Misty Mountains on the horizon. I wanted to travel along an abandoned highway and stay at strange inn with the sign of a prancing pony over its door. I still do.

I have some natural writing talent, but writing is hard, and I don't think I would be so committed to it if I hadn't felt the true power of storytelling when I was very young. Tolkien's novels to me represent the most pure example of this. I've still never met any books that are their equal for their power to transport the reader to another place and time.