I was out at the Southern Festival of Books last weekend, and came across a problem that I hadn’t encountered before. A book collector bought up a large amount of the stock and so some people were unable to get copies at the festival. While it’s nice to see your books in demand, you’d also prefer to see everyone have an opportunity to actually get a copy.

In any case, if you’re looking for signed copies of my books, you can order them from Expressions Bookstore in Paonia, CO. Stephanie Latourette is happy to ship orders for a reasonable fee. Her contact email is expressionsbooks (AT) yahoo.com.

As environmental ideas have entered the zeigeist, mostly thanks to global warming–and still mostly focused on that issue–plenty of technology companies are lining up to tell us how they’re helping green/save/clean the environment. Advertising agencies and PR firms are delighted to sell us any number of “green” gizmos and they’re throwing in some nice self-esteem blowjobs for all of us, using their persuasive talents to assure us that we’re enlightened and forward thinking because we just stuffed a green X into our Prius.

But green blowjobs aren’t really my gig…

There’s more in that line, so if you’re interested, check it out. But the other interesting thing to check out is that the interview got reposted over at io9, where it seems to have generated a roaring discussion.

I’m interested in the rage that the interview inspires in a lot of the readers. Big emotions around the ideas of population control, technology, and consumption. My personal favorite quote from a reader so far:

“Hey Paolo, Fuck you!”

Normally I have to write something like “Yellow Card Man” to get that response.

As an example, here’s the latest on the global warming front. (note: the link is changed to point directly to the Washington Post article as the MSNBC version expired) No big news, but here’s the money quote:

Steve Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change, said the studies highlight that the argument over global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”

When it comes to deciding how drastically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, O’Neill said, “in the end, this is a value judgment, it’s not a scientific question.” The idea of shifting to a carbon-free society, he added, “appears to be technically feasible. The question is whether it’s politically feasible or economically feasible.”

A lot of sci-fi focuses on the technical aspects of a problem. And completely ignores or soft-peddles the human aspects. If you’re going to write realistic optimistic science fiction story about global warming (for example), you have to jump past the bullshit test of human greed and short-sightedness.

It’s not impossible, but first you have to explain how all the yogacizing organic carrot munching Baby Bjorn wearing liberal types who drive four blocks to the video store to get another DVD rental (real person, btw) are going to wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, if a supposedly supportive person (She buys local organic, yay!!!) is still clueless and destructive, how are you going to get the coal miner with the “Piss on Hippies” bumper sticker on his 4×4 (another neighbor of mine) to think sustainably?

Sci-fi’s urge seems to mostly go after the consumer/tech solution, ie we’ll design a better product (we love you Prius) so that we can keep doing our same old destructive things… but now, automagically, it won’t be bad. Makes me think of artificial sweeteners. Sometimes it’s not a magic bullet, no matter how much we wish it was.

So I see the central problem of realistic optimistic sci-fi as being at least two-fold:

1. We’re all so self-serving.
2. We seem to be biologically wired not to deal with any problem that’s not an obvious and immediate threat.

These two things seem to apply across the board, the difference between a liberal greenie in a Prius and Redneck cowboy in pickup is basically zero. If you’re driving, it’s a problem. And the last time I checked… all of America is driving, regardless of our political leanings. I’ve met a few fringe people who really do make a pretty good stab at living sustainably, but even they get on airplanes. Myself, I’ve got four cross-country flights scheduled this year. How’s that for hypocrisy?

In order to surmount this, fictionally, it seems that one would either have to pretend that the majority of people are not in fact lazy, self-serving, and most importantly short-sighted (which seems difficult given that these aspects are precisely what has driven us to the edge of the cliff), or you have to come up with a plausible set of reasons for people to change. Kim Stanley Robinson does this by making global warming a crisis. But what if it’s actually a death of a thousand cuts?

I’d love to see good meaty sf that goes after the big questions about where we’re headed and how we’re going to sort it all out, but I have a hard time believing that it’s going to be done by techno-fix alone. And I have a very hard time believing that we’ll do anything before the damage is already enormous. After all, I’m writing this on a coal-burning computer, which will then be posted to a coal-burning web server, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’re reading it on a coal burning computer at your end, too.

At this point, writing realistic optimistic sf feels like another genre entirely– it feels like fantasy.

The downside is that it’s also more mortgage, more responsibility, and it exists two miles out of town… basically in that no-man’s land called ex-urban sprawl. I hate this kind of sprawl. The 1-acre and 2-acre and 5-acre subdivisions that eat up farmland and cut up a landscape. And frankly, I hate the feel of 1980′s subdivisions- even though the house we’re looking at has fairly groovy passive solar and decent insulation, it’s still very much a product of the eighties. Right now, we live right down in town in a cute little 1940′s bungalow. It’s two blocks from my writing office. It’s a small house so our utility footprint is pretty modest, for Americans, anyway, and we’re within walking distance of post office, grocery store, bank, and friends. And when I say walking distance, I mean it’s all about four blocks away. Then again, pretty much the whole town is four blocks away.

But I think the thing that bothers me the most is that it’s definitely a case where if we move, it will mean that we have to be more disciplined financially. Right now, we live on a $300/month mortgage in our tiny house, so we have a fair amount of breathing room to do stupid things like write novels and short stories. If we move, it means I’ll need to start writing epic fantasy or start shaking my military-sf money maker or something.

So anyway, I’m torn. As Arjun gets bigger, we’re more and more on top of each other here. But the thing about having bigger more expensive things like houses is that they pretty much enslave you to that whole money jobby-job thing I’ve alluded to above. I hate that treadmill. It’s why I keep quitting jobs to write.

But then, on the flip side, another appealing aspect of the house is that it has more space for gardening, and as spring approaches, I’m dying to get out and plant things. And it’s got interior sun rooms so I could plant things all year round. And even though it’s out of town, it’s still close enough that I can ride my bike so it won’t necessitate another car — but still, the thing about living away from the town center is that the car just naturally gets more of a workout; you drive for groceries instead of walking for them. I can go back and forth about this stuff all day. Actually, I’ve already been doing it for a month.

Basically this boils down the cost/benefit analysis of the American Dream. With the hunger for the fun and the toys and the rosy lifestyle on one side, and the more practical but somewhat less fun version where we accept a life with limits.