You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.
Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots.
The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
What man has done, man can aspire to do.
You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it’s all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that’s another story.
That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.
The Aztecs believe they started up in what’s now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That’s a weird legend.
And that’s another piece of advice I’ll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
Everything takes longer and costs more.
Paradoxically, the few eras of peace were times when men of war had high influence. The Pax Romana was enforced by Caesar’s Legions. The Pax Brittanica was enforced by the Royal Navy and His Majesty’s Forces.
The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.
A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn’t it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.
Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.
The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.
Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.
It’s the nature of government, to build enduring institutions, structures that stay long after their purpose is over. If you pay people to help the poor, you have people who won’t be paid if there aren’t any poor, so they’ll be sure to find some.
I’ve noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.
It’s not only possible, but likely that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly everything fundamental.