I came up with these five big questions …

1. Is there a God?
2. If there is a God, what is he like?
3. What is my purpose in life?
4. What happens after death?
5. What is the nature of reality?

What do you think? What are your big five questions?

Thanks for reading,

Peter

http://www.peterkazmaier.com/

One of the nice things he said had to do with the plausibility of the science behind the plot. That was particularly gratifying since it was one of the things I worked hard to achieve. Here is what Rang said:

Reprinted with the gracious permission of FAITH TODAY

Notable Quote:

For his first novel, Kazmaier does well at quickly getting the plot in motion and describing the new world. The science makes good reading, too – perhaps no surprise, since Kazmaier is a working and teaching scientist. He makes dimension and time travel appear plausible and comprehensible. (No mean feat – the writers of the TV show Lost could’ve used his help.)

Lloyd Rang also gave some helpful advice about making the secondary characters more three dimensional which I will take to heart. If you want to peruse the review in its entirety, keep reading.

I started by recounting how, a few months ago, I’d had fellow science-fiction writers Robert Charles Wilson and James Alan Gardner over for pizza; at that dinner, I’d told Bob and Jim that I feared there was only a decade left in which anyone could make a comfortable living writing science-fiction novels, and urged them to plan their careers and finances accordingly.

If someone with Robert Sawyer’s achievements  makes this observation, then one ought to listen. Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered? What does this mean for novelists who are just starting out (like me)?

As part of my Materials Science research, I have worked on technologies related to e-books and reusable paper and so I was very interested in the impact of technology advances on the reading patterns of North Americans. A few years ago I attended a conference at Humber College that brought together authors, editors, publishers as well as technology companies to talk about the future of reading, printing and publishing. A number of observations articulated at this conference particularly struck me:

• Online retailers such as Amazon.com are able to maintain huge virtual inventories of books since in their Print-on-Demand (POD) business, they only print a book when a an order comes in. As a consequence a large fraction of their sales come from the long tail of the sales volume distribution where there are many titles with few sales. [A case in point - authors beware. Many authors have signed book agreements in which the rights of the book revert back to them once the book goes out of print. With virtual inventories, publishers are able to argue that the book has never gone out of print even though very few copies are being sold.]
• As people become more visual, and their attention span declines, reading has declined in favor of television.
• With the rise of radio, television, and the internet, people have come to expect content for free.

This last point is of particular interest to me since I sit on both sides of this fence. On the one hand since I know the enormous amount of work that goes into writing a novel, I would like to achieve remuneration commensurate with the effort expended. On the other hand I also see this problem from the consumer’s point of view. At least when I buy a book, I have something to put on my shelf and which I can lend to my friends. In the world of electronic publishing,  software, and digital movies, this is not so. The consumer never ends up owning anything. They are asked to expend considerable money in exchange for some constrained “right-to-use” which may completely vanish with the next software or hardware implementation.  I think this goes against our strong bent for ownership – we naturally think if we spend money we ought to own something at the end of that process. If this view that there is a natural antipathy to spending money for an ephemeral “right-to-use” is correct, then it seems to me that the move towards ever increasing Digital Rights Management software and hardware is wrong-headed especially in a declining market.

So what does it mean for authors and the publishing industry? Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?

I’m not sure. Certainly some new ideas for connecting with our reading public are required. It seems to me that however imperiled full-time novelists are in the next 10 years, publishers of novels and their cadre of workers such as acquisition editors have jobs that are in even greater peril. As Robert Sawyer has pointed out through his personal anecdotes, more and more expenses are being downloaded onto authors by the publishing industry. With respect to advertising and book promotion, authors are expected to  have a well-established platform for their work and also to assume the brunt of the responsibility for promoting their book. At some point the question will be asked by newer authors: “If I’m doing almost all the work myself anyway, why not up my margins and cut out all the middle men and publish the book myself?” I think the publishers would say that the quality of self-published books are inferior. This may be true to some extent because anyone can self-publish a poorly written work while not many can get someone else to pay for shoddy writing. Still reading is in part a matter of taste. There are many books that were a delight to some publishing house’s editor that I regret buying. Furthermore, I select most of my books by recommendations from friends in whose taste I trust. I don’t even consider whether the book is self-published or from a major publishing house. So a self-published book that receives those word-of-mouth recommendations to my mind is on the same playing field as others with a more established pedigree.

So where does that leave me? At the end of his blog Robert Sawyer points out:

Maybe we will all indeed still be smiling as writing sf shifts from a career to a hobby. Still, lengthy, ambitious, complex works — works that take years of full-time effort to produce such as, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, or, if I may be so bold, my own WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder — aren’t things that could have been produced in any kind of reasonable time by squeezing in an hour’s writing each day over one’s lunch break while working a nine-to-five job.

It is interesting that this is exactly where I find myself as I test the waters of novel writing. When I wrote The Halcyon Dislocation, I wrote it over four years on evenings and weekends since I had a demanding full-time job. I will be curious to know what the next 10 years hold for novelists and publishers and how many of these prognostications come true. What do you think?

Thanks for reading,

Peter

I conclude that the actions of the Black Bloc and other hooligans who infiltrate legitimate and peaceful protests are the real threat to our freedoms and liberty. Having tasted freedom, most people can only be driven into the hands of a dictator if their personal safety and the safety of their family is so threatened that they are willing to see their liberties and rights to peaceful protest curtailed in exchange for safety. Furthermore by infiltrating legitimate and peaceful public demonstrations, the hooligans undermine the message of the protest as well.

What about the police, did they react too aggressively or not aggressively enough? By the very fact that I’m hearing both charges simultaneously – that the police have been too aggressive and not aggressive enough – indicates to me that the police were in an impossible situation and probably responded about as well as one could under the circumstances.

If we really care about freedom and liberty, we need to prevent this hooliganism and protest organizers need to take steps to inhibit the hijacking of their movements by vandals. After all both society in general and these protest movements in particular suffer if all these protests end up doing is driving us into the hands of a tyrant who promises us safety in exchange for our liberties.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

“I thought I was finally able to see our universities the way American society does, as a good way of preparing us for our jobs, but not where we look to answers for our important questions.” [Page 3]

Sommerville amplifies this view on page 7.

“It seems that some time in the 1980’s accountancy became the queen of sciences. Universities are about money in a whole new way. They are now measured in terms of money – the size of their endowments, how much they can charge for tuition, and the return on that investment in the starting salaries of new graduates.”

Sommerville’s views lead to three questions:

1. Are universities becoming corporations?
2. If they are, is this a good or a bad thing?
3. If it is a bad thing, what can be done to reverse this trend?

Are Universities Becoming Corporations?

I have spent a good deal of my life in the university sector and in the corporate world and I hear many of the very same questions discussed in both spheres: How can we raise more money? How can we cut costs? What do we need to do  to satisfy our customers? I agree with Sommerville that many of the distinctions between the two have disappeared and that universities more and more are beginning to look like government or private corporations.

Is “Universities Becoming Corporations” a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Corporations bring us many valuable things. They build our cars, develop medicines, and they pay salaries and taxes. Corporations are all about delivering a product or service. But what keeps these entities from providing goods and services that are contrary to the public good? We look to our laws to define what corporations can and cannot do and we also look to the ethics and integrity of corporate decision makers to make judgments and decisions in favor of the public good even if laws don’t cover a particular loophole. That is to say, in a secular society we look to politics and ethics to guide our choices and ethics are personal. But where do our citizens develop values for the common good? Should universities not have a role in that? Can they have a role if they become corporations? As Sommerville points out (Page 6):

“You can see that money has moved all the way up to the top of our scale of values. It trumps all other values so it doesn’t have to justify itself. We can never have enough of it, because it is mistaken for an end in itself rather than a means to an end.”

Universities through their excellent training can show us how to make money, but as things stand they cannot teach with any conviction how we should spend that money.

As Sommerville puts it (Page 6):

“Surely we should reserve ultimate allegiance to something that takes the personal dimension into account, as money does not.  Any absolute or final goal or concept should personalize our concepts as religions do.”

What Can Be Done to Reverse This Trend?

I believe universities need to realize that materialism and the rationalism it engenders is ultimately destructive of values in any real and non-subjective sense. If universities want to be more than corporations that deliver trained students that can earn a high salary then they need to re-engage with religious ideas. As Sommerville put it on page 14:

“So my big point is that the university needs to consider religious voices, not just for their historical interest, but for the help we might gain from them. You may wonder if this is directly against the constitution of the secular university. Was the founder’s point in secularizing universities to open them to non-religious viewpoints, or to impose a non-religious viewpoint and single vision?”

In writing The Halcyon Dislocation, as part of other themes, I explore one possible outcome of imposing a secular point of view on students. It is interesting to me that a very real debate of this nature is going on. I think John Sommerville has made some very strong points about how we are losing our ability to explore values because anything religious in a secular university has become an anathema. Perhaps it is time to re-open the dialogue.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

I have to say this has not been my experience with one notable exception. I love C.S. Lewis’ Science Fiction Trilogy Out of the Silent Planet. However I could not get through the second volume Perelandra (or sometimes called Voyage to Venus). I started it three or four times and always bogged down in the same place and then skipped on to That Hideous Strength. Finally I read it all the way through and now it is indeed my favorite book in the series.

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I do re-read many books, but they are my favorites. Like old friends, even though I know the stories inside out, just to hear them say it again brings out an image, or a thought I had not seen before. By having the rest of the book in my mind because of many re-readings, I can often put together thoughts that could not have occurred to me on the first reading.

Perhaps I should take a cue from Jo Walton and try re-reading books I have abandoned.

Which books do you like well enough to re-read?

Thanks for reading,

Peter

http://peterkazmaier.com

This Saturday at 6:30 pm (March 27, 2010)  Zanele Poverty Relief Effort (ZPRE) is sponsoring a dinner/dance in Concord, Ontario (near Toronto) to raise money for this effort. Here are the details.

ZPRE’s 3rd Annual Dinner Dance will be held at at Le Parc, Concord on March 27, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. Le Parc is located at 20 North Rivermede Rd, Concord (Vaughan) and the tickets are $65.00 per person. Funds raised will support ZPRE’s programs in Zimbabwe.

As part of the fundraising effort at the event  The Halcyon Dislocation will be selling at the regular price with 50% of the proceeds going to Zanele. So if you are able to help out by attending this dinner and dance I’d be grateful. If you could also buy a book that would be even better.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

http://peterkazmaier.com/

‘This novel deals with important issues for older teens and undergrads. The Christian message is clear and unambiguous, and the author avoids anything graphic or explicit. Though a bit rough around the edges, with too much “show” and not enough “tell”, it is well enough written to be recommended to those who enjoy science fiction.’

Thanks for reading,

Peter

http://peterkazmaier.com/

That was well done! I definitely plan to see this movie several times so, consistent with my rating system, I give this it 5 stars.

So what didn’t I like?

I can only describe the term unobtainium as ‘hokey.’ I guess it was a poor Hollywood parody of the new temporary element names in the periodic table (for example element 118 Ununoctium). Still it sounds much too corny and to my mind mars the dialogue. Another annoying aspect were the “floating mountains.” I don’t mind having floating mountains, but when one sets aside the law of gravity, one ought to have an explanation. These defects were more irritants to me that genuine objections.

Philosophy, world view and politics

Aside from the discussion about the quality of the movie itself, there has been a whole other dimension to the discussion on the content and impact of this movie. Much of the focus has revolved around the political and world view implications of the movie itself. Some groups have even used Avatar as a metaphor for their own political aspirations. This is very interesting and deserves a separate post.

In summary Avatar is a movie well worth seeing (there are still some who haven’t seen it) and I wish James Cameron success with his Oscar nomination.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Http://peterkazmaier.com/

I asked a friend of mine who is an avid reader of both genres “What is the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction?” He answered: “Science Fiction talks about things that could happen. Fantasy does not. That’s why I like Science Fiction better.” So is this really the essential difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy?

At first blush this seems to be the case. Science Fiction asks: “what if …?” where the “what if” is a plausible scientific or technological development that dramatically changes the fictional world for the reader. On the other hand, The Lord of the Rings and other books in this genre deal with magic and dragons in a world before gunpowder. In SciFi one has blasters, beam weapons, and shields while in Fantasy combat is by sword and bow with prophecy and special abilities thrown in for good measure. So is the one plausible while the other is not?

I think it was C. S. Lewis who said that if you can imagine a different world, then it must be possible for it to exist somewhere. In his books The Chronicles of Narnia, the visitors from our world tell Prince Caspian that our earth is a globe hanging in space. Since Narnia is flat like a plate and surrounded by very, very high mountains this idea of a spherical world surprised Caspian but on reflection he remarks (and I paraphrase) “Yes, we have had people who have imagined worlds like that and you actually come from one.”

For my part I like both genres, but prefer Fantasy. I think much of Science Fiction is two dimensional because it is predicated on materialism, that is to say, a world in which the supernatural does not and indeed in the mind of the author cannot exist. Fantasy leaves much more scope for the imagination and I am much more at home in those worlds than in the austere, materialistic SF story.

So what did my friend conclude about The Halcyon Dislocation? He concluded it was Science Fiction because it could happen.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Http://peterkazmaier.com/