Consider the humble single family house. In my town, Cambridge, single family houses are relatively rare: only 14% of the housing stock consists of them.  In Manhattan, obviously, the number is far lower.  But in much of the United States, single-family houses are the order of the day.

On my shelves are a number of architectural field guides. One I've used, both for touring and for realistic portrayal of period houses in fiction, is Virginia and Lee McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses.

When you look through it, you see specific regions and periods of style that architects and builders worked within.  Some of this was based on the requirements of local climate (rain, snow, heat, etc.), as well as local material (brick, stone, wood), but much of it was just style.  One builder trained with another, clients saw houses they liked and demanded ones that were similar. And these styles lasted for quite some time.  You see a Greek Revival house in my neighborhood, you can peg it to the 1830s or 40s.  An elaborate Queen Anne Revival from the 1880s to the turn of the century.  What I learned to call a foursquare ("Vernacular Prairie Style" according to the McAlesters) is more common in the Midwest, where I grew up, than here in New England, but you're looking at something from the turn of the century through the 1920s.

The book peters out after the Second World War, leaving what the book somewhat wanly calls "Neoeclectic".  And so it has been ever since.

Now, I'm not writing this to bemoan the loss of classifiable domestic archictetural styles (or at least, not primarily). it's just that, once you see the consistency of these styles specific to certain times and places, their disappearance is worthy of comment.

That's not to say that a tract house in 1955 is the same as one in 2005.  Clearly there are differences.  But they are mostly in terms of size (both of living space and garage space) and function (bathroom equipment, indoor gyms, entertainment centers). The applique ornament of pediments, columns, and mansard roofs gets smeared on in pretty much the same way over that time.  Not a single one of these house's is worth a second's detour to look at--and I am an avid architectural hobbyist.

Fashions change more and more quickly as time goes by.  The reason there are so many "revival" styles in our popular culture, is that in the past a style had a few years to elaborate, sink into people's lives, get associated with events and personalities, and appear in literature, books, and movies. Do styles now change too quickly to influence houses?  You can get rid of a pair of jeans of outdated cut or a poster of a forgotten band, but what do you do with a house? It continues to proclaim your outdated taste for decades.  Better to have a generic non-style, one that has cut itself loose from any specific history.

Or is there some larger cultural change at work? Does architecture no longer speak of us to ourselves, and of ourselves to others?  If so, why?  Is it because we spend most of our time inside watching one screen or another?

Where do I live? The house I own was built in the 1930s and is of no particular style that I can detect.  It has side gables, and a slight overhang on the roof.  My invaluable Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge:  Northwest Cambridge classifies the houses on my little street as "suburban homes built in the Depression years", which isn't much more than I already know.

Before the house, I lived on the third floor of a 1920s triple decker (a local form of multifamily housing that has served as the first dwelling for many new families).  It had square columns separating the living and dining rooms, hexagonal panes in the bowfronts, elaborate door and window trim, and a built-in hutch (another common local feature). It was the most beautiful place I have ever lived, but too small for our growing family.  I love my little house, which I've done a lot of work on, but I still think of that sun-washed apartment.  An elegant space is not to be undervalued as a source of happiness.

But I don't see a collapse of that sort as a near-term possibility. The Rome I fear we are actually like is that of the 1st century BCE: the late Republic.  That Rome remained strong on the periphery, and collapsed in the center through vicious infighting through what was once called the Roman Revolution.  The old ramshackle republican system was replaced by a military dictatorship where "the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence". That collapse doesn't have the clean (if misleading) visuals of barbarians streaming through the gates, and so doesn't get used as journalistic shorthand for what we face.

Interestingly, our fiction is more cognizant of the resemblance than our journalism.  Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Robert Harris's Cicero novels, Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and the TV series Rome have all been popular, and speak of the corruption and downfall that characterized the period.

Was the Roman Revolution inevitable?  Did the Republic have to end?  Was the price paid for the Republic's dissolution a good one?  Many citizens, cut off from public participation in any event, certainly must have thought the price was more than fair, giving them prosperity and personal security.

The growing deadlock of our own representative republic, with its gargantuan yet petty squabbles over self-inflicted wounds like absurd healthcare financing structures, unsustainable entitlement programs, and increasingly untouchable public sector employees, certainly seems bound for some tour de force "solution" that will lead to a state none of us expect, or want.

Reading about the pompous Marius, the sinister Sulla, the smart-then-surprisingly-dumb Pompey won't provide any kind of specific guide to our era, though it's fascinating. But it's important to see how choices can get made by default, how people can put exaggerated faith in institutions that don't maintain themselves without work, and how a loss of freedom can be greeted with relief by a people who don't see themselves as giving anything important up.

To succeed, a long SF series has to keep showing you new facets of the world. Sure, people like to settle in with familiar characters, and, to some extent, relive past adventures. Still, a good SF series is more like a work of architecture, rather than a painting (I wish I'd thought of this while on the panel). You can't see it all from one vantage point. You have to move through it, and while you are seeing it from one angle, there are things you can't see, though you might remember them.

The totality of that integration is a genuine aesthetic pleasure, one that gets shared on a narrative basis with an integrated multivolume work like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The first three books of the quartet show you the same time and place from different points of view, all of which are to some extent incompatible. You read them in order, so each one denounces and corrects the previous version.  It's all about love, one says. No, you got it all wrong, Balthazar says in his "great interlinear". No, it was actually all about politics says the third. Then the fourth book goes on, accepting all that but never resolving the various strands. It is that last element that is not like a work of science fiction.

Science fiction books provide the basic equation that moving through plot means acquiring knowledge, and that the knowledge translates into the power to move to another level, where you may well acquire more knowledge. SF narratives tend to have that open-ended structure, as each answer entails further questions.  That is one reason some personalities find it so compelling.

This penchant for systematic investigation does have its downsides. Systematizing science fiction authors often reach a state of hypersystematization, where, like conspiracy cranks, everything needs to be explained in terms of everything else. Isaac Asimov, for example, reached this phase late in his career, when he felt the need for a unified field theory of Isaac Asimov:  he tried to make out that every single one of his novels was actually a facet of a single universe.

Larry Niven seemed to get trapped inside his own creation of Known Space, and has long depended on collaborators to help him find a way out.  So science fiction is also the home of shared worlds, where collections of writers play in a single universe, sometimes created collaboratively, sometimes leased from a single writer, like Niven, who has grown tired of pushing narrative through the increasingly narrow holes left in his own creation.

And you do get clubs, cults, collections of obsessive fans. That's just the nature of the root psychology of our field. The prototype is probably fans of Sherlock Holmes, with their finicky attention to the Canon, and the contradictions in it. The commentary on Star Trek, Tolkein, etc., dwarf all other commentaries in literature. You could establish entire civilizations based on them.

So, in SF, long series are not just a lazy way of reusing a background that took a lot of work. They are a different literary experience, one that seems long, but is actually thick.  I don't think I have the stamina for doing one, but admire those who can manage it. It is a different type of work.

But I don't have to pay to maintain the thing, install modern fire-control equipment, remove asbestos, or try to rent to finicky commercial tenants who care more about the conformation of the space they lease than they do about architectural detail.

So I found the discussion about the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, on one of my favorite sites, Shorpy, extremely enlightening.  The building was torn down in 1961, in one of those fits of urban renewal that characterized the era.  One hates the soul-sucking monstrosity that replaced it (as posted in a comment by bipto), while understanding the gigantic expense that would have been required to keep it operational, as pointed out by Minnie A. Politan and Anonymous Tipster.  If you've ever done even minor work on your house, you know how much things like that can run.

So I am a bit chastened, after my rambling rant yesterday about the beauty of cities.  No wonder city centers of older cities are somewhat theme-park-like.  How else can you pay to maintain all those old facades, while removing dangerously obsolete wiring and keeping the roof from falling in?  You have the pimp the buildings out to preserve them. No matter what structure you see, anywhere in the world, you have to reflect that the world is doing its best to destroy it. Keeping it standing takes vigilance, and money.  A lot of money. The struggle is eternal.

As my friend James Patrick Kelly pointed out on our Boskone panel about cities, most science fiction writers don't know any economics.  If you really want beauty, you have to be willing to pay for it.

Of course, in that era, rulers had to do that to make sure cities were inhabited at all, because their death rates were so much higher than that of the surrounding countryside.  If there wasn't in-migration, their populations would have dropped.

So I really am thinking about the possibility of being able to escape to a jurisdiction with another economic system without having to migrate to some other continent.  It's the ultimate in diversity.  But, of course, cities are never purely economic entitities.  And, despite what some extreme libertarians would like to think, you can't build a public life on purely economic relations. Politics--power--always raises its head.  Coalitions form.  People regulate each other.  Each group tries to zone for the lifestyle it considers ideal. A successful city without significant political power seems unlikely.

And this is all to ignore the notion of the city as aesthetic object, which is an significant omission.  We have forgotten, since cities were always objects of power and of wealth, but are now seldom objects of beauty, save in fugitive and chance ways.  Beauty involves making a set of consistent choices, and that implies that other choices are not made.  There are many diverse beautiful objects, but each beautiful object is jealously non-diverse.  Just as, in the pre-modern era, tyrannies tended to permit women more freedom than democracies, so beauty depends, at least in part, in a constriction of freedom.

Of course, that might imply that there have been, somewhere, unfree cities that were beautiful.  I can't think of any.  Kim Jong-il's Pyongyang?  Ceaucescu's Bucharest? Stalin's Moscow?  Not promising notions.  Still, I think there is something to a constriction that requires a theme-and-variations approach to structure.  But it can't be imposed by some external force.  It may be a choice that can no longer be made.

Or is it just the need to deal with cars?  If so, that's another choice we're stuck with.  No one's building any cities that can't accommodate cars.  That would be like building a beautiful house without indoor plumbing.  And I say this as someone who seldom drives.

So, cities of wealth, cities of power, cities of culture.  A lot to play with here.

Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with my actual life. I earn very little from my writing. I don't have a freelancer's temperament. And while my spouse does many things, earn enough money to support the family is definitely not one of them.  I admire and respect those who make it on their art, whether it's writing, or sculpture, or music.  It's just that, after many years, I've been forced to admit that I'm not one of them.

So I have a real day job.  I am a marketing director for a financial services firm.  It's a small firm, and I lost my one staff member in a recent budget cut.  I'm good at my job, and try to devote my days to fulfilling its requirements, and selling our company's products. To all appearances, I am a regular middle-class office worker who keeps regular hours and goes to the gym at lunch.

For a long time I was...I wouldn't say resentful of the need for a day job...but certainly not delighted by it. I figured that real artists, if they did have a day job, got one that indicated their denial of its necessity. They worked in a bookstore, or did fill-in design work, or something like that. They lived like graduate students and didn't give in.

I need to feed my children, have health insurance, and lay away money so I'm not impoverished in my declining years.  And I...OK, I might as well admit it...like living well.  I like not worrying about money, I like being able to go to out to dinner with friends, I like being able to afford car repairs, I like taking a vacation now and then.  So, I suspect, do you.

I also want to work on what's intimately important to me--in my case, my writing.  So (most likely, if you are reading this) do you.

Here's what I can tell you: it can be done. You can work a real grownup day job, with responsibilities, fellow employees who rely on your work, a 401(k), standing committees, office politics, and not enough time off.  And you can feel the passionate joy of creation.  I won't pretend it's easy. The occasional bout of despair is inescapable.

I just wanted to let you know you are not alone.

A topic I did not raise was the Charter City, as proposed by Paul Romer, in Prospect . Nations are often stuck in development hell because of bad institutions. But because of skewed incentives, there is no way to incrementally improve those institutions.  You're stuck in a kind of local minimum, which takes too much energy to jump out of. Romer's proposal is to allow extraterritorial cities with good institutions (profit motive, rule of law, security of property rights, the kinds of things we take for granted and can afford to take lightly) to operate within territorial nations.  Allow free migration between those cities and their mainland, and see what happens.

Now we've really created a plot engine.  Because there is nothing straightforward about this.  Is this neocolonialism under another label?  Violations of national sovereignty "for your own good" are rightly regarded with suspicion.  But I'm a fiction writer, not a development economist. As far as a writer is concerned, a contradiction in a concept is a plot twist, not a bug.

I suppose the city of Todos Santos in Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is, in a sense, a predecessor to this concept (I actually found the book dull and never finished it--but now that I'm thinking about it I will try again).  But there are any number of voluntary systems that could be set up, and set into competition.  Of course, national governments would play along, until such time as it did not benefit them to do so.

The model is Hong Kong, sitting right on the border of China and showing the benefits of capitalism. For one reason or another, it was never forcibly brought into the Chinese sphere. It did have the advantage of a well-structured state (thought given to occasional paroxisms like the Cultural Revolution) to serve as counterparty, not a failed or warlord state.

One interesting suggestion in the comments to the Romer article was to allow such a voluntary city near New Orleans, in the United States.  I think that makes perfect sense.  All jurisdictions should face the prospect of competition. If we are sponsoring charter cities abroad, we should accept them within our own national boundaries as well.

The issue, of course, is the use of coercion and force, when the territorial government loses that competition. States like to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, and they use it against entities that damage their interest. Stalin forced the collectivization of farming not because he thought it would increase productivity, but in order to assure political control of the countryside. He could extort enough food to feed the potentially volatile cities, and rely on the dispersed peasants to be unable to organize to resist. That there were alternative models that would have made everyone materially better off was not relevant to him.  Successful charter cities would face expropriation, invasion, blockade, and deliberately incented immigration, among other threats.

But wealthy, successfuly charter cities would also face the temptation to intervene in the territorial government to get themselves a better deal, instead of just outcompeting it. A capitalist is someone who competes to earn a profit so that he can afford to buy a way out of competition. The system that prevents businesspeople from being able to buy a pass from competition without also taking away the incentives to competition is a delicately balanced one. Subconscious cultuarl assumptions play a big role in how the balance is maintained.

So here's the story:  The Franchise State.  There are several collections of cities (Chinese state-guided development model, North American free competition model, maybe even a European social democracy model, plus a grab bag of other schemes) sometimes right next to each other.  They recruit not only from their hinterland, but from other areas as well, subverting immigration control.  Someone will need to protect them, and keep them from being taken over by conspiracies, combinations, cartels, and other extra-market organizations, as would be inevitable otherwise.  The wealthy city would be tempted to bribe local strongmen for protection, since maintaining your own military is expensive.  Such a city is like a natural resource, and would encourage rent-seeking and stationary bandits, recapitulating the rise of government in the first place.

Refugees crowd the approaches to the city, which has become fussy about who it lets in. Standards have increased, and those who got aboard first are anxious to maintain their favorable position. One can hypothesize a guild of Disruptors, secret officials specifically trained to break down cartels and mutual backscratching arrangements in favor of naked competition.

This all provides an alternate model to the national territorial state, which we have all be indoctrinated to value. But seeing the charter city folks as pure-of-heart libertarians devoted to pure competition runs up against the inevitable temptations of success.  On the panel I set down a challenge: can anyone right a genuinely complex science fictional city?  I think Romer's Charter City concept provides a good template for one, if not for an actual city existing in some actual location.

What was interesting about the discussion was that we were either talking about SF cities from long long ago (like Asimov's Trantor), or more recent fantasy cities (New Crobuzon, Ambergris).  SF cities seem sterile planned Brazilias and Canberras, while fantasy cities manifest history, diversity, and conflict.

But the world is rapidly urbanizing.  We spoke in Boston, a cute, tiny, obsolete town, hedged with development restrictions and out of the main flow of global capital (and a place I love).  What could our experience there tell us about gigantic new Chinese cities springing up seemingly overnight, or giant slum of Kibera, near Nairobi, which has a population of over a million?  Those are crucial urban experiences of the 21st century, and will influence events.

We can't leave thinking and writing about these sorts of things to Bruce Sterling.  He can't do everything, and lately has prefered the Balkans.  I'm not Bruce, but I think it's time I gave it a try.

Genre (whether film noir, or jazz, or chili) is a good topic to argue about, because there is no bright-line rule dividing it from other examples of the form.  There is always ambiguity.  It is always, in some sense, statistical, and there are any number of edge conditions that those who favor liminal situations and ambiguity are naturally drawn to.

I've been thinking about genre lately.  I write SF, but don't read a lot of it.  I tend to read mysteries, when I read fiction--and Brain Thief is a mystery novel, perhaps before it is a science fiction novel.  But, at least at this point in my attempt to get some clarity, bootlegging yet another genre into the discussion probably is not helpful.

One thing about genre is that you can't understand it without understanding who consumes it.  And the audience is only implicit.  You can watch any number of Busby Berkeley production numbers or Disease of the Week movies without really being able to figure out who they were made for. And every artist is conscious of his or her audience.

And, no matter what its literary pretensions, there is a core audience for science fiction, a rationalist, slightly Aspergers, system-loving, covertly romantic, optimistic group. The core group consumes vast quantities of its favored product.  It's not the same audience in 2010 as it was in 1950, but certainly has some long-term similarities with it.  For example, this audience has always enjoyed communicating within itself.  It has new methods of doing it, but the drive has always been there.

I think understanding this core audience and its responses is the first step to understanding this genre.  When someone claims Margaret Atwood, say, has never written science fiction (she's said this herself), what he really means is, what Atwood has written does fulfil this core audience's needs.  It doesn't matter if the book is set in the future or whatever.  The core audience has a need for mental integration, for underlying system, for extrapolation, for daring and romance, for sacrifice and visual drama, that that particular book does not provide.

This is not the key or the solution.  But without taking the audience into account, and discussing only what is on the page, it's easy to go wrong.  It's the first step to understanding genre.