It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.
I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.
Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.
I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.
I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.
Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.
It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.
I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…
For a few months now I’ve been getting odd emails. They start out reading like fan mail, and fan mail from some unusually perceptive reader who gets exactly what I’m trying to do. Flattering (and yes, I am not above being flattered, being just another pixel-stained techno-peasant working in the fields of fiction). So I am flattered for the first two to four paragraphs.
And then it becomes clear that these are sales pitches.
The first one I received was for Petty Treason, and mentioned the characters and the plot the the sense of place, and seemed to get what I was trying to do with the book, and to appreciate it. “Why don’t more people know this book?” she asked–a fine question, although of course with the number of books out there, how does anyone have the chance to find a book except through serendipity and marketing? And it turned out that the author of the letter was pitching her marketing services. As I was, at that time, in the process of re-issuing all three of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries (of which Petty Treason is the second) I was intrigued. I loathe marketing chores, and would have been willing to throw a bit of money to someone who would take on the task. So I wrote back, asking what she had in mind.
We exchanged two or three more emails, with proposed programs and low-cost, medium cost, and wotthehell let’s have it all cost options (no actual numbers were given). So I wrote back to find out what was included in each of the programs, and what the price tag was, and then… she vanished. Ghosted me.
Meanwhile, back at my inbox, I’d gotten another such email, effusive and flattering about Sold for Endless Rue, my retelling of Rapunzel. The writer called out the research (of which I’d done a ton, and it’s nice to have it noticed, see above re: being flattered) and the characters and the feminist underpinnings of the story. This time the sender wasn’t in marketing, but “managed” a group of 2000 avid readers who would positively swoon over my book, and write reviews in all the places that reviews get written and posted. But by this time my spider sense was tingling and I began to doubt that there was an actual human at the other end of the emails.
Why? The language of the approach emails is very polished, but more sales oriented than pure fan mail (I mean, “It’s rare to find historical fiction that feels both so authentically of its time and yet so urgently relevant today…”. Really?) And the emails focused on the things in the books that I was proudest of. And I began to imagine the person at the other end of the emails saying “Hey ChatGPT!” (Or Claude, or Grok, or whatever) “Write a marketing-approach letter that the author of Petty Treason will find hard to resist!”
“Ah!” my less cynical side murmured. “But how would ChatGPT/Claude/Grok know anything about Petty Treason and its author?”
And my increasingly sour side responded, Because Petty Treason and Sold for Endless Rue and The Stone War and Point of Honour (for all of which I have now received similar approach emails) were all scraped and used for Large Language Model training for AIs. As are all sorts of reviews and literary analyses and suchlike. I know this because I’m one of thousands of authors whose work is part of the Anthropic settlement (the first in a series of cases where the Authors Guild and other organizations have filed suit against AI companies that carelessly used other people’s intellectual property because it was there and they could).
So now these emails go into the trash. I’m not the only one who’s getting them–John Scalzi mentioned getting several a day, and if there is anyone who doesn’t need to pay for “a managed group of 2000 dedicated readers” to write reviews of his work, it’s Scalzi.
An academic I’m on a panel with in a few weeks (talking about Medievalism) just asked for suggestions of fantasy novels for undergraduate teaching of genre. I had some suggestions, as did a number of other people. The most suggested novel was The Witcher, which is, technically science fiction, not fantasy. I was told this by a group of upset Polish fans when I described it as fantasy in a talk I gave them. Some lessons are taught through error: when I looked more closely, the fans were quite right and I was wrong. The style of the novels and many of the themes are fantasy, but the built world is a future planet-linked-to-Earth-in-strange-ways.
The Witcher could be taught as a fantasy novel, but I suspect the teacher would have to explain that the world building uses humans from our world plus strange SFnal crossovers. We agreed (the fans and I) that it could be mistaken for fantasy because it has quite a few traits that are more fantastical and science fictional. So I was wrong, but forgiven because it was an understandable error from someone who didn’t know the world very well.
All this got me wondering: what novel would you suggest?
If you were giving a 20-year-old just one fantasy novel (and not a long one, so no Gene Wolfe and no Lord of the Rings, and certainly no Game of Thrones) to get them thinking and fascinated, what novel would you give them? And if you were to give them five they needed to read to really get the hang of fantasy novels, what five would you choose? They don’t need to be well-known novels. They need to be perfect to lure the student into learning.
This is an excuse to find out about really good novels that miss being seen. I plan to read all those you suggest that I have not already read, of course.
I have never been a fan of The Great Gatsby, considering it incredibly overrated. Fitzgerald wrote lovely sentences, but he and the others of his era (most notably Hemingway) who were competing – in their own little circles – to see who could write The Great American Novel were not nearly as important and influential as they and some English teachers like to proclaim.
I’ve always thought that, in rating male American writers of the first half of the 20th Century, neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway could hold a candle to Dashiell Hammett. And if there is a Great American Novel, it’s Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
But there is some value in Gatsby, as the recent Gatsby-themed party thrown by the grifter currently occupying our White House makes clear. Anyone who has read the book would consider holding that event particularly tone-deaf, particularly when the party was scheduled for the day that SNAP benefits were running out.
I have read the book, twice in fact. Once when I was young and again about a dozen years ago when it was being raved about once again by the literati on the occasion of it entering the public domain. I wasn’t impressed either time by the book, though I deplored the culture it described in both cases.
Many of the reports on the party – and not a few people on social media – have quoted one of the great lines from the book:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It is a wonderful sentence and a true indictment of many of the wealthy people in the United States, not just those who, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, came from relatively old money, but also the newly minted oligarchs we see today.
It’s not a surprise that the author of the book about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg called it Careless People. We have a lot of those in positions of power these days.
But nobody is talking much about Jay Gatsby himself. Gatsby is putting on a great show, but he is a criminal, a true thug. He came from nothing and stole his way to wealth and almost to respectability. He was not careless, at least not until the end when he saw he was not going to get everything he wanted and threw it all away. Continue reading “The Problem With The Great Gatsby“…
As energy use rises and the planet warms, you might have dreamed of an energy source that works 24/7, rain or shine, quietly powering homes, industries and even entire cities without the ups and downs of solar or wind – and with little contribution to climate change.
The promise of new engineering techniques for geothermal energy – heat from the Earth itself – has attracted rising levels of investment to this reliable, low-emission power source that can provide continuous electricity almost anywhere on the planet. That includes ways to harness geothermal energy from idle or abandoned oil and gas wells. In the first quarter of 2025, North American geothermal installations attracted US$1.7 billion in public funding – compared with $2 billion for all of 2024, which itself was a significant increase from previous years, according to an industry analysis from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
As an exploration geophysicist and energy engineer, I’ve studied geothermal systems’ resource potential and operational trade-offs firsthand. From the investment and technological advances I’m seeing, I believe geothermal energy is poised to become a significant contributor to the energy mix in the U.S. and around the world, especially when integrated with other renewable sources.
A May 2025 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey found that geothermal sources just in the Great Basin, a region that encompasses Nevada and parts of neighboring states, have the potential to meet as much as 10% of the electricity demand of the whole nation – and even more as technology to harness geothermal energy advances. And the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, geothermal energy could provide as much as 15% of the world’s electricity needs.
For generations, Maori people in New Zealand, and other people elsewhere around the world, have made use of the Earth’s heat, as in hot springs, where these people are cooking food in the hot water. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Why geothermal energy is unique
Geothermal energy taps into heat beneath the Earth’s surface to generate electricity or provide direct heating. Unlike solar or wind, it never stops. It runs around the clock, providing consistent, reliable power with closed-loop water systems and few emissions.
Geothermal is capable of providing significant quantities of energy. For instance, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station project in Utah is reportedly on track to deliver 100 megawatts of baseload, carbon-free geothermal power by 2026. That’s less than the amount of power generated by the average coal plant in the U.S., but more than the average natural gas plant produces.
There are several ways to get energy from deep within the Earth.
Hydrothermal systems tap into underground hot water and steam to generate electricity. These resources are concentrated in geologically active areas where heat, water and permeable rock naturally coincide. In the U.S., that’s generally California, Nevada and Utah. Internationally, most hydrothermal energy is in Iceland and the Philippines.
A drilling rig sits outside a home in White Plains, N.Y., where a geothermal heat pump is being installed. AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson
Enhanced geothermal systems effectively create electricity-generating hydrothermal processes just about anywhere on the planet. In places where there is not enough water in the ground or where the rock is too dense to move heat naturally, these installations drill deep holes and inject fluid into the hot rocks, creating new fractures and opening existing ones, much like hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas production.
A system like this uses more than one well. In one, it pumps cold water down, which collects heat from the rocks and then is pumped back up through another well, where the heat drives turbines. In recent years, academic and corporate research has dramatically improved drilling speed and lowered costs.
Ground source heat pumps do not require drilling holes as deep, but instead take advantage of the fact that the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable just below the surface, even just 6 or8 feet down (1.8 to 2.4 meters) – and it’s hotter hundreds of feet lower.
These systems don’t generate electricity but rather circulate fluid in underground pipes, exchanging heat with the soil, extracting warmth from the ground in winter and transferring warmth to the ground in summer. These systems are similar but more efficient thanair-source heat pumps, sometimes called minisplits, which are becoming widespread across the U.S. for heating and cooling. Geothermal heat pump systems can serve individual homes, commercial buildings and even neighborhood or business developments.
Enhanced geothermal systems can be built almost anywhere and can take advantage of existing wells to save the time and money of drilling new holes deep into the ground. U.S. Geological Survey
And converting abandoned oil and gas wells for enhanced geothermal systems could significantly increase the amount of energy available and its geographic spread.
Those projects include repurposing idle oil or gas wells, which is relatively straightforward: Engineers identify wells that reach deep, hot rock formations and circulate water or another fluid in a closed loop to capture heat to generate electricity or provide direct heating. This method does not require drilling new wells, which significantly reduces setup costs and environmental disruption and accelerates deployment.
Despite its challenges, geothermal energy’s reliability, low emissions and scalability make it a vital complement to solar and wind – and a cornerstone of a stable, low-carbon energy future.
I am late, even for the US timezones. It’s still Monday in Hawaii, though, so I shall consider this post not too late. My reason is one that I find hilarious, every single time it happens. The US has elections the first Tuesday in November… Australia has a horse race. I usually write my posts for US time, which means often it’s Tuesday my time and today… I forgot. Last night I knew I had to write it, but things happened last night and I went to bed thinking “What haven’t I done?” And then I ate strawberries and cherries and chocolate with friends, as I do every year and turned home and made dinner and then realised I had nearly missed Monday. The cherries are important, because they are new season’s, just in time for the first time we normally eat them, which is the first Tuesday in November.
This fits with my current thoughts. I’m trying to work out why, right now, so many of us do not see the lives of others. We place our own life or our own assumptions about their lives onto the life we think they have. This does not actually help get rid of the really nasty bigotry I see in the world. I need to think more about the paths we walk and how to remember to look over and see and respectfully appreciate the paths of others. When I do, I may post about it. What I want to do is write a book, but the reason I keep being late and forgetting time is ME/CFS and I’m rather lucky I finished both my thesis and the last book before my current relapse, because it’s more severe than it’s been for a while. I can do more than I thought, but writing a whole new book from scratch is currently not possible.
What is even more fun than being publicly Jewish in a country that is lapsing into extreme racism? Being publicly Jewish with chronic fatigue.
Expect some of this to appear in my next novel… when the fatigue is sufficiently diminished to finish it. My brain is working on it even when my body can’t, so that piece of writing is still happening, just not on paper yet.
Since most of you who read this blog are from the US, I want to wish you the very best with your Tuesday elections. Every Melbourne Cup I want to talk about how elections and horse races are so similar and yet so different, but not this year. This year you have enough to deal with. You do not need additional bad jokes. Good luck!
