The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

William Wordsworth

I get resentful when I read a science fiction short story with some really ingenious aspect and feel annoyed that the author has had this phenomenal idea but chosen not to develop it very fully. As though there are an infinite number of phenomenally good ideas and they can be tossed out like tissue paper. Kurt Vonnegut was nice enough to indirectly dissuade me of this notion by saying something absolutely true, but too obvious for me to notice, about science fiction authors, which has always bothered me about most of them, which is that they are "joiners". This is completely true. Science fiction is exactly like he says, a big "lodge" like the Moose or Elks, which is not precisely bad, but certainly boring if you're not wholeheartedly into it.

Reading that about science fiction made me feel better. I've always felt a bit uneasy about defining myself as a science fiction writer because most science fiction writers are interesting or nice enough people but they're all burnt with an invisible peculiar brand that makes their skin regenerate in the same way.

This essay is being written after two days of either throwing up or trying to throw up, feeling too hot and too cold at the same time, and aching like a jar of jam. I asked for lime Jello and ginger-ale and feel like I'm about six years old. I keep having flashbacks to a big house I lived in then, on a good sized piece of land with a hill sloped for tobogganing and a little pine wood in front, when I was six. I was sick often then. In fact I've often been sick, and also like Kurt Vonnegut I never suspected a pill could make that much difference. I saw a new doctor a few months ago and he put me on an immune system booster that's had me almost exclusively well ever since.

Being sick like this right now is a novelty. I've been sick so often, but just sick enough to feel like I should be functional, but not, has been enormously wearing. It's been like carrying a heavy useless backpack all the time but not being sure how to unstrap it. It's made me feel stupid. I've had tests that say I'm not a stupid person, on the contrary, I'm an exceptionally not stupid person by their lights, which made it even worse. It made me feel as though those tests must be wrong, and that I was stupid in some way that was so staggeringly obscure that even the best tests couldn't detect it.

I always felt there were things I should and could be doing but wasn't able to follow through on. I'd start losing momentum partway through and suspect it was related to my genius for obscure stupidity. People accused me of not having confidence in myself. Now I know I was correct to not have confidence in myself: I was genuinely defective in a basic way. At least now medical science has caught up with my deficiencies. Other people accused me of being a very good writer. This also made me feel like I ought to be doing more, because I wanted to do more and I apparently have recognizable talent. Maybe now I'll be able to do something with that talent.

Fundamentally, my physical limitations notwithstanding, I don't have a genius for making money and I'm not happy that money is the benchmark of success. I like to feel that my work makes sense in some basic and simple manner and that it might make people think things they wouldn't normally think, or at least wouldn't normally admit they thought. I want to do as Tasmin Mandella did in Desolation Road, which is to raise my fist in a Concordat salute and say: "You are not property."