“They rose to suppose themselves kings over all things created–
To decree a new earth at a birth without labour or sorrow–
To declare: ‘We prepare it today and inherit tomorrow.’”
Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass, 1909.

It struck me, the other day, just how behind the wave most politicians were, particularly on the ‘let’s change things’ and ‘we, the state, can run things better than the people’ side of the spectrum. Of course this is really not surprising and multiplied in the publishing world, as I shall explain. Politics is essentially reactive. If you’re ahead of the curve you might be wonderful for your country’s future, its economics, etc etc. But you won’t be popular until they look back and say with 20:20 hindsight that they wish they hadn’t kicked you out. If you’re sticking to the trusted and true, despite the clamor, you’re yesterday’s men, until of course it proves that there was a reason to have stuck with that. And this is painfully true of writers. The bulk, soon forgotten, are at best 5 years behind the wave, and often 20 years. The few that are far enough ahead, or far enough behind, to be ahead of the next wave are rare.

The worm turns. Always. But it’s more like a worm screw on some vast heavy slow machine than a whip-worm. If you like, rather than a pendulum between political and social poles, a slow spiral. Tomorrow may be different, but if you look back a full turn, you’ll see different but similar – ergo my 1909 quote at the start. Oddly sometimes today’s conservative is yesterday’s revolutionary, which is why I’m quite wary about these titles. Yes, some values have remained through the turns. Others — what was once revolutionary — has become the status quo. It will turn again. To predict one has to look back, not forward.

The turn is imperceptible often for some time… and it may take some time and not go quite where you wish it to go. George W Bush and his advisers thought regime change would domino through all the dictators of the ME, when Saddam fell. They also thought it would come out in the US’s favor. Loud was the mocking when… there was no rapid fall of dominoes. Loud was the mocking when instead the Islamists and friends of Iran rose to the top of the muck-heap in Iraq, to the severe pain of secularists, moderates, women and Christians.

Oddly, the prediction has come true, and will for some time, I think. The ‘Arab Spring’ was what they foresaw. The rise to the top of the Nasties… not. But in my opinion, that too is a stage the slow turning worm. Almost without fail the countries concerned will become poorer, less stable… and their people have learned that change is possible, an idea they simply did not have before. Communication has slowly improved. Internet memes spread. They know — and desire — far more of the ‘Great Satan’ standards and ways than they did before — witness the steady stream of young people heading to the West, lured by a dream that they can somehow keep their cultural sources of their problems, remain people of wherever they came from, and have the wonderful social (ie. financial) support that their source culture does not provide.

The worm still turns… ever so slowly. Many people are camp-followers, wave followers, afraid, or too sheep-like to think for themselves. Yet under the surface of that mass of human water, the vast bulk is ready to turn. Had anyone said that the grip of Gadaffi, or Mubarak or… was not iron and infallible with the vast overwhelming bulk of their populace behind them, you’d have been laughed at a few years ago. Yet, when the wave came through, their support was revealed to be small. Small, dominant, brutal and very unpleasant, with a little pack of loud camp-followers who did well out of them, and will, forever, lament their passing and try to undermine the change. You can see them in Russia, in East Germany… and I foresee in time, in the Arab countries too. And of course in Publishing too.

The nasties who seized control are inevitably the extremists, better organized than the rest. Hastily they are persecuting many of their possible enemies. Christians are probably more persecuted now than for many centuries. Because politicians generally are reactive, and always far behind what is happening, this hasn’t really registered yet. They’re still loud in championing… the persecutors. This will change, eventually. In the fashion of politics, too late, when many of these people will have suffered the same fate as the Jews who suffered the earlier turn as scape-goats.

But there is one part of the equation the Islamists can’t kick out, and that is the women. And women’s liberation is finally creeping into the Arab world. Under the weight of the water, it’s been festering and slowly growing for generations. I think it’s going to be a lot messier than it was in 1910 in England to get there. The worm will turn slowly, and in time, when it’s too late and all over, Western politicians will finally be saying what a good thing it is to support. And lo, publishing too will finally start supporting women who really are in far more dire need than the occasional feminist author who can’t do science, but still feels she deserves to be on the TOC because she’s a woman.(Yes, she’s real. Stood up and said this at Worldcon in Melbourne.). By this time, actually to be forward looking, and not behind the wave they’ll really need to be support men (who will be going through much of what the West is now) and the ‘reformation’ form of Islam I foresee developing. They won’t of course, because politics has years of accumulated dead weight of ideas that were nearly out of date when those people entered politics and publishing, and inertia of this has to age out of the system. So, when today’s brave new generation of politicians, absorbing the current zeitgeist wave ideas (at 20-30 of age) – for example the reaction of the public to let’s say Islamists or emigrants… finally get into power in another 20-40 years, they’ll put that vision in place… Usually after reality has changed that situation, the worm, has moved. The next wave will already be moving through (and that is too far ahead for me to make any reasonable guess at much of it.)

We see far too many parallels in publishing, which is not surprising as there is always a fair amount of political idealism in publishing, despite the fact that this is supposed to be a money-making business. The fact that their ideas were formed by reading does sometimes send people this way too (sarcastic? Me? I am shocked. Next you’ll tell me there is gambling in Rick’s casino.). And here too it is often reactive. It would appear to me that much of the leadership is still back in… 1975. Look at the way they do business (where computerization makes second-to-second data available, payment fast… and yet royalties are oh at the we had to count the books in the warehouse by hand and then add the answers up on our fingers, and the results are appropriate to that, and are up to 18 months after fact), the causes and issues they champion, the attitudes they choose to reflect in their choices of authors to push. It’s like reading a 1975 avant-garde magazine – with issues that are already so tired they can barely wake up enough to read the obits to see if they’re there. Real, current problems like the mass of emigrants leaving the third world, language problems in schools and national cultures, the disaster area of single parent families (trust me: raising a good citizen to see to your future when you’re old is tough when there are two of you and you both give it your best. It’s a time-bomb, coming through.) or the vanishing of lower-level lower-skilled jobs as automation continues to eat away at them, barely get a mention, and if they do it is with the attitudes and positions of the late 1970’s, not those prevalent among the great mass of people. Their marchers and shouters – the camp followers – are still there, of course, but they don’t see that, as the worm-screw and the vast weight of machinery has turned slowly onward. Take woman’s liberation for example. Now I am a passionate supporter of equal work for equal pay, and, likewise equal access to opportunity (but not outcome. That’s up to you). And there was a time when women had very little access to a male dominated world of publishing. This is pretty stupid because if 50% of your population can’t find their way in… well neither are they very likely to be ardent supporters of your product. Gradually, and with a direct correlation, methinks, to college/university access the numbers have changed. (women overtook men some time ago, around 1990 IIRC, with cumulative female graduates now substantially outnumber male in the under 40’s and vastly so in the arts from which most writers and publishing industry people are drawn (gee, rocket science. Today’s assignment: work out if you have 1000 graduates, every year, and every year you shift the ratio gender ratio 1% and the working life of a graduate is 40 years, if at your start point the ratio at grad is 70:30, and work ratio is 80:20, how long before it reaches equilibrium? How long before the top is at equilibrium? Where is the middle, when the top is at equilibrium? )), A young male author… is now quite rare. A young male editor likewise. By the time the graduate dominance of the last 20 years comes through to the heads of publishing houses, the balance will have shifted. It already has in some areas. But instead of working out where this process has to end in 25 years time… they’re reacting to the historical situation, let alone today. So you still have ‘women only’ organizations in writing (having belonged to one of these will become like having been a member of the Apartheid-supporting party, at some future date. Believe it or not, there was a time when Afrikaaner Nationalists were rebels and, ‘cool’ too. And today’s loud ones will suddenly be as hard to find as people who supported Apartheid are now, but fortunately easier to backtrack on the internet), you still have strident calls for more women in the few areas – like hard sf – which are still mostly male.

The worm will turn again, and more currently viewed as ‘conservative’ views will eventually pass into sf and writing — probably when the worm has moved on again.

Sigh. If there is one thing I hope of Independent electronic publishing it is that it will free writers from this slow reactive chain. Where the vast mass of the zeitgeist-water can find voice NOW. Yes, sometimes the unexpected nasty — could be Amazon — will seize control. But it will not manage to hold it. Indy will make writing more powerful. It’ll also see that good, solid tried-and-tested can survive.

And with any luck, the eternally reactive politics can follow suite.
Because I think they’re actually, as Kipling put it, ‘fullest of wine and most flagrant in error’, on social and economic issues. If you know the poem you know what comes next. If you haven’t read The City of Brass, you should.

Talking of waves gone by: my publisher put one date on the release of THE STEAM MOLE and another on the one they supplied to Amazon.

(yes, the picture is a link. if you click on it, anything you then buy Amazon pays me another 6% commission. Considering that adds 60% to what I would be paid, I do hope you choose this option.)
So in fact, rather than my discovering the book was out on the 4th as listed on Amazon (and it does indeed appear to have shipped and arrived), it’s due for release on December the 11th.
If you want adventure, swash, buckle and a rather different take on… sexism, racism and indeed global warming (This is an anti-romanticism-of-steam (or rather anti-carbon-black AKA soot, a solvable problem, which has been dealt with quite effectively in the West, but not in China or India or the rest of the world who are demanding CO2 reductions, while avoiding this very real fixable problem) universe.) It pokes sacred cows in my subtle way. I am surprised it got published and would love the numbers to prove my point about what readers are looking for.If you feel like supporting that, thanks. It’s supposed to be YA, but I believe that unless you really need your fix of graphic sex, other people can enjoy it too. You can read a review here and here.

crossposted at Coal-Fired Cuttlefish