I used to attend monthly futurist meetings in Santa Monica California, run by John Smart.  They were great get togethers – a pile of people interested in talking about the future.  Eclectic.  It was scientists and techs from JPL and the local universities, people off the street, students, business people, consultants, etc.  Often up to fifty of sixty at a time.  We’d talk about books and the accelerating pace of change (which is, of course, even faster now).  I actually designed other trips so the timing would coincide with these meetings.

Well, now we’re testing the waters in Seattle to see if there are people interested here.  We did a few meetings a few years ago, but then life intervened and the meetings stopped.  So we’re trying to re-start them again.  There’s a Yahoo group, the SeaFuture Group, which you can sign up for if you’re interested in attending.  We’re planning to set up a meetup group.

We have a date and a time and a topic. That’s February 19th (a Friday) at Park Place Books in Kirkland from 6:30 to 8:00.  It’s a great location.  The people at Park Place are nice, and there are a ton of great restaurants right there in the shopping center, including Luccia, Purple, and Rikki Rikki.    We want to talk about the new design revolution.  We science fiction writers have been interested in fabricators, or machines that can make stuff out of raw materials and  a computer program, for some time.  Well, with 3D printing, this is starting to become possible.  For background reading, we’re suggesting this month’s issue of Wired Magazine.

I’ll blog more about this, but in the meantime, mark your calendar!

Jan Vandenbos is the other moderator and group leader.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I have two rather long stories out and available right now, which is a lovely way to start the new year.

One is “The Robot’s Girl” which is in the April issue of Analog (on sale now at newsstands and for the Kindle).  I’ve received three notes from people who’ve read it so far and like it.  This usually happens for books, but not so much for short stories, so I’m really pleased.  The story originated when I read an article about some people in Japan being disturbed by robots being designed to help watch children.

The second story is titled “Riding in Mexico” and is online at Jetse Devries’ new magazine, Daybreak.  I write a lot set in the Yucatan Peninsula, and this is also set partly there (and partly on a near-future version of the University of Washington campus).  Jetse did a really beautiful job matching up photos to the story, which I think make it more readable.

More writing news coming soon – I’m waiting for a few signed contracts to show up.  In the meantime, I hope you like these two stories.

And as a small postscript — the books are back on Amazon.  Geez.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I saw them back available (I swear I did), but now they’re not. Sigh. I guess it’s a waiting game. I’m willing to wait with Macmillan, since I still need them to win.

The odd thing is, I’ve been fighting them becasue I want my books on the kindle. I still do. I get asked why they aren’t there all the time. I live in Amazon Country.

Maybe when it’s over I can have both – physical books on Amazon and ebooks on Kindle. And BTW, I’m fine with the ebook release date being after the hardcover release. But it should be by or before the mass market.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

And what a silly weekend it was.

At least at the moment, my books are once again available at Amazon. They remain unavailable on the Kindle.

I sell content.  I like to call that content stories.  In general, I don’t control availability or format or price.

I want to wake up in a world where the stories I tell are available in print (via Amazon and my local Indie bookstore and in the local chain), on the Kindle, on the Sony eReader, on the Nook, on the iPad, in as many formats as possible.  This should be possible at a price fair to me, to my publishers, to distributors, and to readers.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

If you are a fan and want a copy, try indie bookstores.  I know you can order through a number of them.  Powell’s.com is one example.

I plan to strip links when I have time and re-point them to other stores or to Indie-bound.

In the meantime, I’m seriously saddened that the easiest place to find my books at this moment is not available to readers.

In general, the argument is about control of pricing (not about a particular price point for ebooks). It is between one of the largest publisher’s of physical books and one of the largest sellers of physical and electronic books.  It was probably prompted by Apple and the iPad.

For those of you who are interested in understanding the current kerfuffle, here are a few good links:

Tobias Buckell’s “Why my Books are No Longer for Sale Via Amazon.”

Charlie Stross also did an excellent job, in his post titled  “Amazon, Macmillan:  an outsider’s guide to the fight.”

My own simpler version is in the post below.

The longest discussion anywhere is surely the one at Whatever, which is John Scalzi’s blog. It’s up to about 274 comments at the moment.

Of interest, many people were already mad at Amazon for the ability to take books away (remember the removal of the book 1984 in what can’t have been an accidental statement that they can be big brother?) and for Amazon’s “mistake” regarding GLBT books.  In spite of those things, I’ve been really loyal to Amazon for a long time.  I like their recommendation engine.  I like the convenience of being a Prime customer and I like it that I can order books with my food via Amazon Fresh.  I live close to their headquarters and I spend a lot of money with them.  I like my Kindle (and yes, I want an iPad too – but I’m a tech geek and an early adopter with a Kindle, an iPhone, a fitbit and two iPods, not to mention numerous computers).

I’m reading two books on the Kindle right now and went to sleep reading it even though I’m furious with Amazon for this move.  This might be the straw that breaks my loyalty.  I woke up dreaming of smashing my Kindle on the sidewalk and talking a picture of it and posting that on YouTube.  If I do that, I will be greatly saddened by the act.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

The current #Amazonfail is about them pulling all of the Macmillan books off of Amazon (the last one -if you remember – was pulling a rankings off of gay and lesbian themed books).  The apparent issue is about price control.  For those who find this news new, John Scalzi has a good summary of the issue.  As an author, and someone who’s always been loyal to Amazon,  I’m pretty pissed off.

Here are the business model points as  I understand them.

Today, in print, the publishers have full control of the price.  The books are pre-ordered by bookstores and cannot be discounted (except for things which are almost surely in contracts between major chains and the publishers like the B & N loyalty program).  They can be – and often are – returned.  The super deal books you see (for example, at Half Price Books) are usually overstock the publisher has sold a very steep discount rather than paying to have it destroyed. This model has flaws, but it results in dependable pricing and a lower inventory carrying risk for bookstores.

If publishers lose all control of the price with ebooks, then a few things happen.  One is that ebook prices may approach zero (the is bad for publishers and authors and even bad for readers in the long run).  If ebooks go too low too fast, the bookstores go belly up too fast to adapt to the market.

Bookstores will go the way of record stores some day; sad but nearly inevitable.  If Amazon wins, this will happen much faster.  If they don’t, some stores and chains will be able to adapt and live.

iTunes means I buy about three times as much music as I used to.  Maybe iBooks will have the same affect, especially if it’s available widely and not just for Apple products (remains to be seen).  Kindle has driven me to buy more, too, by the way.  I like my Kindle.

But if Amazon wins the ebook price war and publishers lose complete control (whether that’s me – I’ve published some of my back list stories on Kindle — or that’s Macmillan/Tor who owns all of my novel print rights) then many of things we need in this industry will go away completely.  Publishing is changing, and we need publishers to change, too.  But this is one battle I want them to win, as a reader and an author.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I was lucky enough to be an invited speaker and guest at the 2010 Mad Scientist Future Technology Center, put on by TRADOC G-2, which is part of the US Army.  Other attendees were from various armed forces (including some form different countries), other science fiction writers, and subject matter experts in various science and technology areas.  The primary purpose of the seminar was to provide input to the Army as they plan for future force development.   This took place Wednesday through Friday of last week.

I only feel comfortable talking about parts of the experience (maybe I’m still processing – I live in personal world where I don’t spend much time – and particularly not three straight days – worrying about seriously bad threats to hope, health, and humanity).  I am glad there are people who watch our borders for a living, and I can see how it might be tough for them to maintain a sunny world view.  Since the next book in my series will need a lot more military characters, this will be good for my writing.

There were no lines for the women’s rooms.  Participation was primarily white males, many with grey hair.  This wasn’t a surprising demographic for this conference although I think some more youth (such as a few open-source maker-bot user types) and a few more women would have been nice to add.  There was some diversity in race, color, gender, and age, but any analysis would have yielded over half in a single basic demographic. That said, it was certainly a smart, thoughtful, and driven group of people.  I liked them.

We started off with a presentation from England by Ian Pearson, who made up diabolical potential weapons of mass destruction based on the anticipated capabilities of future technology. Next, Peter Bishop talked about future secenario building in general (more for me to learn) and I talked about near-term hard science fiction as one door to the future and gave some reading recommendations.  The last talk was a rapid-fire run-down of numerous current and likely future threats, setting the stage to drive us off to explore ways we might use science and technology, ways they might be used against us, counters for those, and so on.  After that, we spent a day and a half working in small groups and then reported out.

I am usually a positive futurist.  These three days were pretty chilling, and I now have a wild urge to get together a bunch of people at the same level to brainstorm ways to use science and technology to make a happier society.  Of course, there is an army to feed the threats to, and I’m not sure who to feed the glass-half-full scenarios to.  Maybe that’s what we do with our stories.

Some of the biggest threats include EMP weapons  (destroying the ability of our electronics to work, Bio-weapons and bio-nano weapons – imagine a blended biological and manufactured goo that corrodes metals, and serious economic warfare.  There was a lot more technology talked about – all of it available in open literature today – and maybe some of it will sneak into my stories or into one of my Futurismic columns.

On the whole, I came away with slightly more of a few things than I went in.  I came out more scared.  I came out more full of ideas I can incorporate in my current and future series.  I came out happy that a lot of things I do reference in the Silver Ship and the Sea series make sense in light of the military tech being discussed today.  And for the week’s surprise, I came out with more respect for the military than I went in with.  I didn’t go in disrespectful by any means – maybe just ignorant.  But I found the men and women who were at the Mad Scientist 2010 Conference were smart, concerned, brave, worried, and pretty realistic as well.  They see many of the same trends we civilian futurists do – that our power balance against other large economies is unsteady, our education system needs serious help, and the next few decades are going to be risky for us and for the world.

I took slight comfort from the fact that on the flight out, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” which is a positive alternative history relating to the nuclear bomb.  Which, by the way, is a lovely story.

I’m glad I went.  And yes, I asked if it was okay to blog about it before I posted this!

What do you think we need to worry about for the next twenty years?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Congratulations to Cherie Priest for winning the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award for Boneshaker.  There is an article in the Seattle Times, and here is a link to my reading recommendation for the book.

The linkage between man and machine is growing every day.  I call it “The Tender Mashup” in this month’s installment of my column, Today’s Tomorrow’s over at Futurismic.

I’ll be heading to the east coast (Newport news, Virginia) next week for a conference, and stopping for a day in Arizona on the way back.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Places you can find me at Rustycon (Seattle Airport Marriott) this Saturday:

10:00, Moderating the panel, Palaces and Prisons? Urban Development in the 22nd Century in Evergreen I
Is technology accelerating the divide between rich and poor? Will it make sense to live closer together in high-density zones optimized for transit and pedestrians, or will ever-longer commutes require even bigger and more comfortable cars? Will residential towers bring every indulgence to the wealthy, or simply warehouse the permanently unemployed?

Noon , talking on a panel about “Schools of the Future: From Science Fiction to Reality.” In Evergreen H
Will students sit in front of computers learning from teaching AI routines? With all the crimes in school should we continue to house students in crowded environments with a lack of adequate supervision? What will the classroom and teaching environments of the future look like?

1:00 PM, Reading in Evergreen I
1:30 PM, Autographing in Evergreen I

3:00 PM, Moderating the panel “Retro Futurism: Steam Punk and Alternate Realities” in Washington E.
What is Retro Futurism? What is the fascination with Steampunk?

5:00 PM, Moderating the panel “Have Engineering Degree, Will Travel,” in Evergreen H.
Does truly hard science fiction miss the target with the average reader? Do we care? Is this the answer to finding a new view of the future? Perhaps more collaboration between those who are hard science writers with the writers of space opera will make the resulting book something exciting technology speaking and yet of interest to the average reader

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I often get asked what makes me a futurist.  Fair question, since I don’t have the formal training many futurists have.  Mostly I read, and then I think.  I talk to other people.  I am not an expert in any one field (except maybe writing science fiction) but being a generalist has it’s uses.  Anyway, today’s paper had some great futurist fodder.  Here goes:

The best – the must read – is a transcript of Paul Hawken’s commencement address from May of last year to the University of Portland.  It’s moving, brilliant, and meaningful.  I think I will cut it out so I can read it again in the future.  Yes, I read a physical paper.   A small quote, just to get you hungry to go read the whole thing:  “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future my answer is always the same:  If you look at the science of what is happening with the earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data.  But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”

Yesterday I talked about what we could be doing.  One was work on education, where I cited the abysmal literacy statistics for women in Afghanistan, and talked about water.  In the times today, two articles address these same issues.  On the front page there is “Building a Future for Girls Amid War,” by Hal Bernton.  A small quote from that article is “‘If we send our children to these schools, then the Taliban, they will come to our homes at night and kill us,’  said a Pashtun elder in an Arghandab village, where a large modern school built with Japanese aid now stands empty.” In the NW Arts & Life section, there is a review of the book “Water:  The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, by Steven Soloman and reviewed by Alan Moores. Notable short quote?  “One in five people worldwide lack access to at least one gallon of safe water to drink per day.”

And then there is the pleasure of the Sunday funnies.  Here is  a great futurist strip from Sally Forth.  Note it’s the January 3rd entry if you go look for this at a later date.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

This is the third part of my futures post series for January 2010.  The first one evaluated my results for 2009. The second talked about what I think will happen in 2010.   This is the “what could we do” post.  There are a lot of things, but I’m going to pick four.

Reform the way we make decisions in this country.  Why?  We and many of our elected representatives are abysmal listeners, easily spun by the people with money (corporations, lobbyists). We are easily affected by sound-bites with zero substance, and too fast to position on the red or blue lines of our two-party system.    Here are a few ideas:

• As far as I can tell, both parties have lost the center.  One option is happening – more people calling themselves independents.  Another option might be a third party.  The tough question is around who or what.
• We could be teaching critical thinking and listening skills more at all levels, and re-teaching to adults.  We have classes in business about organizational dynamics and project management – but not very many about thinking clearly.  Maybe there’s a business idea there.
• The surest way is real campaign reform that sharply limits the amount of money anyone can give anyone.

Why did I pick this one first?  I mean, really, it’s hard to measure, hard to affect, hard to change.  But our current way of making decisions is clearly broken, and if we can’t fix that, we won’t be able to fix the other problems coming our way.

Get real about energy.  Planning for a future with fossil fuels as a main source of power shows a criminal lack of imagination.  No matter what you believe about the role of fossil fuel or humans in climate change, it’s a geopolitical nightmare that reduces our safety and the extraction and transportation process endangers our fragile home.  It’s going to take a while to re-tool our power grid, our transportation options, and phase oil out of many of the products it’s an integral part of.  But given that world population is going to keep increasing for at least the next four decades and most of the world will keep modernizing, we can’t just drive less or ride our bike or the bus to work.  We must do more, faster.  Let’s built the modern energy infrastructure of the future now, and go all-out on our options.  Let’s get creative with wind and sun and solar arrays in space, with tide and waterfall, and with thorium-based nuclear plants.

This we can measure, we can change fairly easily, and we can use to build economic strength.   The primary tool?  A government with more willpower than the oil lobbyists have.  And that willpower can come from us, the people.

Provide an excellent education to everyone.  This includes here, in the United States, but I think even more leverage over world problems (and thus our problems) can happen if we educate others.  The literacy rate in Afghanistan in most areas is below 50% and for Afghan women it is around 15%.   We know a lot about education.  It has ties to increased income and decreased family size, to increased health and increased power.  How many of the people in congress have no high school diploma?  Most people running businesses and supporting themselves and contributing more than they take from their own societies have a basic level of education.  We could be investing as much in the education system in Afghanistan as we are in the fighting force there.

Outcomes in education like students in school, students graduating various level, and literacy rates are measurable.  This task will secure our children’s future.

Put enough healthy food and water into the right places. This planet can feed all of us.  We can all have enough healthy water to drink.  We need to stop the hijack of aid delivered to poor countries, and we need to deliver more.  And with it we need to deliver tools and ideas and education so they can produce it.  Because we know climate change is going to lead to migrations (if not from where to where, and when), we need stock and plan for emergencies.  Estimates say over one billion people are undernourished worldwide.

Also measurable.  There are so many people working on this problem that if everyone added just a little leverage (money, time, writing), we could save a few hundred thousand lives this year.

There’s a simple statement here.  With enough education and energy, the basics of existence, and a little critical thought and respect for different points of view, we can thrive in the midst of all of the myriad forces of change buffeting us.  If not?  Maybe it will be a miracle if we survive.  I’d rather thrive.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

After evaluating my predictions from last year (which were in three separate posts to start with), I decided to keep it simple.  Remember that futurists have no crystal ball and I can no more tell you what a stock will be on a given day than a séance leader can.  We can see trends. We usually can’t see the things that knock us off our expectations (like Twitter).  But hey, this is a bit of fun to have.  Put keep in mind – this an educated guess at what will happen, and it’s not exactly what should happen (that’s another post).

Technology trends:

• Even more social networking.   Plus, social networking gets more synched with physical space (geo-aware applications like Foursquare but more useful).  Immediate opportunities to help a neighbor, great business deals close to where I am standing, someone with interests a lot like mine in the same coffee shop. Etc.
• The cloud takes over more of our personal storage and backup, but doesn’t make it very far into the enterprise yet.  We enterprise CIO’s watch it and poke it and maybe try a bit here and there, but we don’t drink the kool-aid.  Yet.  We will.  Just not so much in 2010.
• I know I said this last year, but I think people will choose to be chipped in certain situations, like when they are travelling overseas, when they have certain medical conditions, etc.  Soldiers and criminals may get chipped, too.
• The apple tablet will actually appear (and I’ll buy one).  It will have been at least slightly over-hyped but as apps get released it will be well-loved by gamers, readers, students, and field people.  It won’t replace the netbook or the notebook generally, but it might be a great substitute for the Kindle.
• eBooks will be near 10% of book sales by the end of the year.  This is a phenomenal amount of growth -  they are about 1.5% of the market now.  BTW – I think it growth in this sector might slow down again for a bit after that.

Society and Government

• The hard-line Iranian government will fall, and some confusion will follow.  This will help in Iran, although it won’t solve all of the problems.
• China will see more protests about a variety of things (not sure, though, what they will do about it – I don’t see an Iran-like situation but more continued flexibility).
• The US will have tighter working relationships with Canada, and maybe with Mexico.   Changes to NAFTA may be talked about seriously and tied loosely to immigration discussions
• Once Health care is passed (or not), attention will be split between changes in energy use and more anti-terrorism measures.  These are, of course, tightly linked.  People will begin to see the linkage more clearly.
• Iraq will feel like a memory, but Afghanistan – not so much.  The usual war-hungry republicans will try to take Obama down through his position on Afghanistan, but what they’ll really do is save him from immolation by the democrats for his position of Afghanistan.  In other words, politics as usual.  Whatever the party in power is doing will be slammed by the party that’s out of power, even if it’s their usual MO.   We will stay ridiculously divided across senseless lines of red and blue light.

Climate Change / related topics

• While we’ll probably continue to flail politically, green business will rise out of the recession and start to make it less of a political issue.  After all, who needs to mandate things people are making money on?  Success stories:  conservation, green transportation (smaller and electric cars), and – at least in 2010 – less needless consumption.
• I’m going to re-make last year’s prediction.  In some areas at least, things will get worse.  I don’t know if it will be drought, hurricanes, ocean carbon, or ice melt, but the Earth is reacting faster than we expect it to.  More extremes.
• Smart grid will be the buzzword of the year, and a big business opportunity.  Mostly still in large projects and on corporate campuses, rather than on the national public grid.
• The percent of people who believe climate change is happening will rise again, approaching 70% again (as of October 2009, it was measured at 57%).

What do you think will happen?  What did I miss or get wrong?  Anyone got a different number for ebooks?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I’m not as much of a predictive futurist as some of my friends and colleagues, and I do like to play in the space once a year – right about now.  I’m going to do this in three steps. Evaluate last year’s predictions, make this year’s predictions, talk about what we need to do this year but that I’m not predicting we will do.  So here is step one, a look at what I predicted last year and how close I came.

What I said about the economy: Don’t look for magic bullets.  There is no one bailout big enough to make us well- at least not in the form of money. We need hope.  Actually, we need a bit of economic magic, a bit of luck, a lot of hope, and to be prepared to grit our teeth. I expect a down year in the first part of 2009 (and so does everybody else), and some up after that. I strongly suspect we’re in for more swings. We’re still getting the hang of a fast, vast, and electronic economy. In 2008, the financial sector fell like a house of cards. We could see it teetering before that, but almost no one saw the speed and depth of the fall. Expect at least one more event like that: American automakers? China?   Airframe makers?  Widespread local government failures? I don’t mean struggles, I mean falls. Expect one, maybe two. Speaking of hope, I hope I’m wrong.

How did I do?  Looks like I was wrong about there being another event out there, but right about the general activity and tone of the year.

My outlook on war and peace: By the end of the year, I think there will be more calm in Iraq, and MAYBE real progress in Afghanistan. We won’t be out of either place, but could have a severely reduced role in Iraq. Expect more conflicts globally, though.  The brighter side? We’ll see better and less unilateral diplomacy.

How did I do?  Well on a calmer Iraq, and less on the progress in Afghanistan. The world does not feel more stable to me now than it did at the end of 2008.  We’re playing whack-a-mole.  We are not closer to peace. Our diplomacy is more inclusive and less bullying, but there has been no breakthrough anywhere, really.

My technology prediction was: It’s another year of building the all-mobile world that knows where it is. We’ll see better and more useful geo-aware applications and a lot of new designs. We’ll start to see chips in people – maybe just in travelers (particularly kids) in unsafe places, or criminals we can’t afford to house, but the technology will become more widespread in 2009.  We’ll see more personal GPS devices and more acceptance of the idea that others will know where we are.

How did I do?  Well on the mobile world. Specific examples are iphone apps like Foursquare, the introduction of Google Goggles and the like. But this was an easy prediction, and getting it wrong would have been more of a surprise than getting it right. On the chip – I missed it (but I think I was just too early).  It looks like it might start in medicine when it does get here.  It’s even FDA-approved. Yes, there are more personal GPS devices.

My predictions about Barak Obama’s First year: He has two wars (or more if you count Gaza), a failing economy, a failed Health Care system, and the list goes on. None of these problems are small.  None of them will be solved in the first hundred days. Most of them won’t be solved by the end of the first year.

The entire world has hung so many expectations on this guy that we will be disappointed. But if we can be patient, this is the best chance we’ve had in eight or more years for real, fundamental change for the better in American politics.

How did I do? I think I hit this right. We have progress on the economy and health care, progress in Iraq (started under Bush) and a stated direction for Afghanistan.   I frankly think he’s done well.  And yes, many people are disappointed (see the vituperative comments after the Copenhagen climate talks apparently failed).  I was hoping for more, too. But the expectations were too high for superman.

My climate change predictions (and I made a lot, so I’m commenting briefly after each one):

• More wild weather in the form of more extremes for local areas. More drought, more snow, more rain, more cold, more heat – expect surprises.  Climate change is chaotic.  It’s not going to feel gentle.  If I look at the NOAA site, I was correct, although events were milder than I thought they’d be. With the exception of North America, we were again on a warming trend globally, and the year 2009 is expected to be one of the top ten warmest on record.
• Bellweather losses (species, ice, ground at sea level,) and indicators (methane release, dead zones in the sea) will, once again, happen faster than predicted. We will start changing the models, so by the end of the year, we may have some pretty dire predictions to deal with.  Greenland is losing ice faster than we thought, and so is the Antarctic.  The polar bear is considered highly endangered by many, but they are only the spokes-species.  The sea-level rise in now predicted to be more and faster than we thought.  But it was not a year of runaway events, and the perceived  accuracy of climate models was threatened by climate email-gate.
• Resource wars will intensify (primarily oil and water and food, but there may be surprise shortages, if not in 2009, then in the next few years after that). That’s worldwide, but we’ll see it here as well, even though the battleground in the US may largely be the courts in ‘09.
  I missed this one.  I didn’t see court battles or resources wars (unless you want to consider all of the Mideast a resource war, but that wasn’t what I meant when I made this prediction).  The conflicts in Africa might also qualify, but they are not new and didn’t seem to escalate based primarily on new shortages.
• We’ll finally begin really acknowledging the cost of our oil dependence. Because the economy will lurch forward and back some for most of the year, we won’t make as much progress as we’d like, but more people will actually start changing behavior in meaningful ways. Examples include reduced one-driver gas car commutes, a tendency to buy and waste less, which will be supported by the economy anyway, and new buying patterns that seek sustainable products.  Much of this happened, but I attribute a lot to the economy.  Meaning we didn’t change to be green, we changed because we felt poorer.  Here in Seattle, we are seeing more smart cars and electric cars and more momentum.
• Climate change will feel more immediate to a lot more people – because the physical manifestations will keep mounting and so its affect on us and our immediate children will become clearer.  Not so much. At least a few of the statistics I’ve seen suggest we have gone backwards here and that fewer people believe climate change is a real problem, or even real, than when we started the year.
• In the US and other first-world countries, there will be more social stigma about conspicuous consumption.  We already feel embarrassed for people who drive Hummers, but that will expand to include out-sized housing and other excesses.  I haven’t seen much of this– have you?  I did notice it’s getting harder to buy old-style light bulbs (there’s less shelf-space anyway).

So how do I do overall on climate change?  I’d say I got the trends wrong, but I expected more of everything than we actually got – more wild weather, more catastrophes, and more action.

Overall, I predicted: A rough year, maybe rougher than we expect. But we’ll also see some progress, and some fundamental changes in how we think. We’ll feel more respected and included by our leaders.  Since we’re Americans, we’ll still whine, but we’ll also start to make better choices.

How did I do overall?  Well, it was a rough year.  We have seen some progress.  I feel more included and less disenfranchised with the political process, but I’m not sure how to measure that in the populace at large.  But it’s far less of a change in business-as-usual in Washington than I wanted.  The money is still winning.  For an example of that, see the embarrassing health care debate.

Note that these predictions were originally in three separate posts and I condensed them some.

Watch this space for my 2010 outlook, and have a good new year.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I got a new ipod for Christmas with radio, which meant that while I was at the gym yesterday I watched the news.

Obama got it exactly right.  He said the government needs to investigate and learn and get better.  The government’s part is pretty much what you do anytime you have a failure, whether you’re in government or business.  You look for lessons learned and try to do better next time. Yes, the information needed to keep that guy off the plane existed, and it either didn’t get to the right people at the right time or didn’t get used.  We could have stopped 9/11, too.  So we should strive to get better at distributing information.  But I believe there is too much complexity to ever get perfect at it, even though we should keep trying.

Before that part about investigation, he said we all need to be vigilant.  He’s exactly right there, too.   There are a lot of us.  Really, really a lot of us.  Do we want a government that knows every little detail about every one of us?  Conversely, is there anything about our public life (like where we fly and when) that should be hidden from the government?  I’d say no to both concepts.  We need to be watched by the government and we need to watch them back.  Heck, I work for a small government and I get to look both ways.  But the complexity of modern life has far outstripped the government’s ability to watchdog perfectly.  And short of creating a society I don’t want to live in, and probably not even then, it’s not possible for them to protect us all from each other all of the time.

They’ve done a pretty good job lately.  They missed one.  They’ll investigate.  Hopefully they’ll get better.  But Christmas Day was saved for those passengers because of regular people acting watchful, and maybe a little luck since from what I can tell the bomber wasn’t fully competent with his underwear full of explosives.  Let’s hear it for vigilant citizens.

Back to the ipod.  The news last night was mostly people verbally attacking each other.   I get a little tired of trying to fix blame for the sake of looking like you’re right, which was what a lot of the news commentary felt like it was about.   Maybe next time I work out I’ll listen to music.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

In general, writing is pushing an edge for me – a new technology, a new type of character, an attempt at a new voice.  But sometimes it’s more like a hot cocoa by the fire.  I spent years grabbing the newest Mercedes Lackey books from the shelf as soon as they came out.  When I got older, I often handed the Valdemar books to teens who needed a good place to read about.

Valdemar is a fantasy kingdom with real (and usually clear) good and evil, a fairly safe place from which Mercedes Lackey often write about unsafe issues.  For example, when the Last Herald Mage series came out starting in 1990, people weren’t generally writing bestselling books with gay main characters.

So I am very lucky now that I’m a grown-up writer to be able to tell stories inside this world.  The latest one I got to tell is in the new DAW collection, Changing the World, All-New Tales of Valdemar.  I am always grateful when I get invited to play in a place I spent so many hours reading and re-reading novel-size stories about.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Fair warning – this is not a genre book, not fast paced, not adventure, almost but not quite devoid of plot twists.

But there are other things for books to do.  One of those is to comment on who we are, to use story as a way to teach.

I have been in awe of Barbara Kingsolver’s writing ability since I read The Poisonwood Bible (which you might note is still in print and available in almost every possible edition even though it’s now almost 12 years old).  If you haven’t read it, you should.  Anyway, I know I’m in capable hands with Barbara’s work.  So when I saw The Lacuna a day or two after it came out in a great big happy stack of blue books with yellow covers, I grabbed it without even bothering to read the dust jacket.

It took a few weeks start to finish, and at one point I wished she were writing form the POV of some of the other characters (I wanted to know more, for example, about Frida Kahlo).  nevertheless, in the end I was in awe of the work, and felt I learned a lot about our current times from her exploration of our history.  I highly recommend this for those who want a thoughtful read with exquisite line by line writing.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

My futurismic column for this month deals with animal intelligence –it’s entitled “What are the Animals Becoming?”  I just popped over to Nancy Kress’s blog to see how she’s doing, and it turns out she just blogged on the same topic (or at least mentioned the prevalence of stories about genetically altered animals in her blog entry titled Good Stories).

I have a novel about that (The Downbelow Girls) which doesn’t yet have a pub date, and I’ve tried multiple times to write stories about border collies with opposable thumbs.  There is one in the novel, but I haven’t pulled off a good short yet.

It does seem to be a theme in current work.  Maybe because the animals really are getting smarter, or maybe because we really, really want them to.   Maybe both.

I have noticed that often a topic seems to attract a lot of us writers  at once.  Maybe a hundredth monkey thing.  Maybe a bit of magic, or maybe it’s just in the air.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I don’t know how many of you out there are listening to science fiction podcasts.  I’ve been listening to audiobooks for years, particularly on long drives. or long weekends in the garden.  When the narration is done well, it’s great entertainment.   So podcasts wasn’t much of a jump.  Here are the ones I listen to:

Escape Pod is great for short fiction – the last two I chose were about 45 minute programs, and about 40 minutes of them were fiction.  That’s perfect for my current winter workout at the gym.   The two shorts that I’ve liked the most in the last month or so are “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store” by Robin Sloan, which is a lovely fable that’s very, very timely, and “His Master’s Voice,” by  Hannu Rajaniemi, which appealed to the dog-lover in me.  I’m not suggesting they are the best on Escape Pod – they put out more stories than I have time to listen to – but I think these are both worth your time.

For SF news and discussion,  I like the Sofanauts over at Starship Sofa and I like Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing (By Shaun Farrell). I’ve been on the Sofanauts, which was fun, and harder than I thought it would be.  I guess audio is a little like pictures – you come out sounding different than you think.  But it was really fun, and it prodded me into getting good headphones and getting set up for Skype, which I’ve since had other reasons to use.

For a pretty full audio magazine, I like StarShip Sofa itself.  Tony C. Smith, the producer, has a voice and an accent that’s easy to listen to and each episode usually includes a short story, a piece of flash fiction, a poem (yeah for all venues that do poetry) and rather a lot of friendly chat and commentary.   These are usually long, and my favorite places to listen to them are long drives, long outside chores (I keep weeding until the podcast is done) and housecleaning.

We also have a local podcast in the Seattle area called SeattleGeekly that covers sf, gaming, and a pretty wide range of other stuff that appeals to many of us technology/sf types over here in the Emerald City.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I’ve been listening to the health care debate for some time now.  Health care is one of the top things we need to fix to improve our economy (the others are education, broadband, and – most importantly – preservation of the world we live in).

I’m not enough of an expert to write intelligently on the details of any one type of coverage.  I suspect that we need certain elements like removing the profit motive from basic care and insurance, and  from at least parts of the rest of the system, cutting paperwork and overhead, and tort reform.  There are many systems which are better than ours; none is perfect.  Those are the intellectualized things I’ve gotten from listening to various arguments on the topic.

But the most visceral lesson is one I’ve heard.  It started as a vague thing I noticed, and then I started listening for it.

It’s all about fairness versus fear.

When people in other countries with universal health care of one type or another are interviewed, the arguments for their systems (and many of them defend their systems quite passionately) are primarily about fairness.  They are about making the wait the same for the rich and the poor.  They are about all babies having access to well-child care.  They are about all seniors being able to afford the basic drugs they need.

When Americans talk about health care, we talk about what care might be limited or how long a line for a non-critical procedure might be.  We talk about fear that we might have to wait to see a doctor.  We fear medicare will change.  We fear death panels.  We see universal health care as  a dangerous step down the road to socialism, which is one of the most emotionally charged words in today’s political scene.

It sounds like we are afraid that we’ll lose some of what it means to be American if we figure out a way to give everyone health care.  We sound selfish, frankly.  Me first, me in all cases, me no matter what.

Obviously, this is a generalization, these are the most common threads I’ve heard in a debate that raged from rational to irrational, from one end of the globe to another, and that has fixated on one tiny distraction after another.

Maybe it’s time for us to grow up and learn to share,  to decide that the rich can wait for a non-critical procedure while a poor person’s life is saved, to agree to some inconveniences that would keep the total cost of health care down so we can all have enough.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

Sometimes old favorites need to be revisited.  I won’t tell you how long ago I first read Siddhartha, but it was published in 1922, which is before I was published.

At any rate, I chose to listen to it on my way down to Orycon (the drive is from Seattle to Portland, or 3 hours and change) and back.  I think partly out of yearning for something beloved and familiar, even though I haven’t read or heard it in a decade and maybe for two.

I’m pretty sure this is my third time through this book, and that each time it has seemed even more relevant to my life than the time before.  This time, the insight is that Siddhartha chose so many different paths to walk, with nearly complete re-inventions all along the way.  It seems to me that we do that in modern life.  I have been three or four different careers by now, and have spent long years celibate and long years not, and chosen different teachers at different times in my life.

It reminds me how classic fiction resonates as true to the human condition and transcends time.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.