Robert Alley: Spectacularly good covers this time.  Very nice.  Your comments to Johnson: I think that the bit about exempting California-based scenarios from the usual rules of plausibility is a good one.  My understanding is that dodos were from Mauritius, a much smaller island than Madagascar that was roughly 500 miles to the east.  Madagascar did lose a lot of very interesting large lemur species and some very large flightless birds, some of them up to 900 pounds.  Based on very old and possibly faulty memory, introduced rats may have played a major role in wiping out dodos by eating their eggs.

Yeah, I’m guessing that Turtledove’s more recent books haven’t seen anywhere near the editing than his older ones did, and frankly some of them would be much stronger with some ruthless editing of the “lose these five sub-plots and cut out 150 pages” variety.  On the other hand, he is capable of writing a very good story, and based on what I saw of the way he interacted with people back on the old GEnie on-line network he seems like a very classy guy.  He does an enormous amount of research and it shows in a lot of subtle ways.

Your comments to Docimo: On the chance of another species developing intelligence (I assume meaning human level intelligence): I’m not entirely sure we would recognize a species that did so.  Part of the problem would be that the intelligence would be oriented toward better exploiting the ecological niches that the animal involved is capable of exploiting, and that may not result in anything that we would classify as intelligence.

Just as an example: How would a more intelligent terrestrial herbivore differ from the ones we have?  Well, let’s see.  It might develop some kind of grasping organ so it can manipulate things.  It might use that grasping organ to use simple tools, like maybe using sticks and branches to swat away flies.  It might develop the ability to locate water within digging distance and dig for it.  It might locate and mine salt, maybe even digging tunnels underground to do that.  It might develop some sort of long-distance communications system.  It might develop a very complex and powerful social system to protect offspring.  It might learn to use the alarm calls of other animals to detect predators.  It might develop the ability to alter ecological systems to suit it—maybe turning forests into savannahs.  It might develop a very impressive–even proverbial—memory.  In other words it might turn into an elephant.  Elephants already do or have all of those things.

 How does an elephant go beyond the current elephant level?  I don’t know.  Use of weapons?  A full grown elephant is a very effective weapon against anything short of a modern rifle.  A few human armies taught tame elephants to fight with swords, but I suspect that elephants were more effective just charging in and using multiple tons of weight and momentum to run over anything that they didn’t want around.  Digging sticks to help get to water?  What would they do that tusks don’t? 

What if elephants developed enough foresight to systematically hunt down and kill off humans in an area?  That’s a possibility, but it may not have been worth the effort until the advent of rifles, and after that it would probably just get a lot of elephants killed.  There are cases where elephants have gone on a rampage and destroyed villages.  That’s actually not a bad story idea.  Somehow elephants develop to the point that they wage war on humans in an area, or maybe some radical ecologist teaches some of them how to fight back against poachers.  Of course in an era of automatic weapons, tanks and planes that probably wouldn’t go so well for the elephants. 

Here’s a variation: What if some ancient world king search for and bred elephants that were particularly willing and able to fight and then discovered that those elephants had their own agenda?  Unlikely.  Elephant generations are so long that it would take longer than any one man would live to make much of a difference, and the logistics of selectively breeding elephants would be difficult to say the least.

What if elephant tamed fire?  What would that do for an elephant?  They don’t have much problem adapting to cold climates.  They don’t need to tenderize meat.  They don’t need it to hunt.  They do a pretty good job of modifying habitat without it.  Areas where elephants are hunted out tend to turn back from savannahs into thick forests.

What if elephants started encouraging favored plant species?  Elephant farms?  The mind boggles.  I don’t know if they favor certain food plants over others.  I doubt that anyone has ever seriously looked at the possibility that they do somehow encourage favored plant species.

A more intelligent carnivore, which is what you were actually looking at, is actually a bit more of a problem.  If you’ve ever tried to corner a dog or a cat that’s been chased much before you’ve probably noticed that they are very good at recognizing moves that would lead to you trapping them, probably better than most humans.  I suppose that doing the kind of coordination that would lead to them surrounding prey would be helpful to social carnivores.

I’d be interested in seeing how much of that already goes on.  I would think that being able to develop a theory of what is going on in the prey’s mind would help any carnivore.  I’m not sure how much of that goes on if any.  The only example I can think of where a carnivore seemed to be doing that was actually from one of the Australian monitor lizards, which supposedly went directly toward a pile of rocks which was the only feasible place of refuge, rather than following its prey on a zigzag course in that general direction.  I would think that a dog or cat would be capable of doing that too, but I can’t think of any examples where they’ve been observed doing it.

A couple of by-the-ways:  First, I may have mentioned this earlier, but according to a recent article in Natural History, monitor lizards tend to be somewhat convergent on mammal carnivores in terms of ecological niche and to some extent behavior.  Second, it doesn’t seem to take an awful lot of brain power to be a very effective carnivore.  For example, as some of you know I had a pet short-tailed opossum (gerbil-sized opossum from South and Central America) for several years.

 Some of the South and Central American opossums have pretty respectable brain sizes, but the short-tails aren’t among them.  At the same time, it was a very effective small predator.  I could put a handful of crickets in its cage and it would usually get all of them in an incredibly short time.  I generally avoided feeding it mice, but the few times I did it dispatched them very quickly and without giving them even the slightest chance to fight back.  The mice weren’t that much smaller than the opossum and I was a little afraid that they might hurt it, but they were just very obviously overmatched.  One lady I knew had both a short-tail opossum and gerbils.  When her short-tail got out, it somehow managed to get into the gerbil cage and kill and eat a gerbil.  That may not sound impressive, but the two animals would have been about the same size, and gerbils are extremely aggressive little fighters.  They’ll fight a strange gerbil to the death if you try to introduce it to their cage, and they’ll attack any other animal other than a human that tries to go into their territory.  That includes rats, guinea pigs, and even cats.  (Don’t ask how I know this.  No animals were harmed in finding it out, though I did get a couple of gerbil bites myself in trying to keep it that way—and when a gerbil bites they put their entire body into it.  I have vivid memories of having gerbils latched onto my finger and having to basically pry them off of me.)  A local pet store owner used to warn snake owners not to try feeding gerbils to pet snakes because the gerbils would fight back and eventually one would succeed in killing the snake.  Enough people didn’t believe him that the point got proven a number of times.

One of the limitations I did see in the opossum is that it didn’t seem to able to conceive of anything preying on it, at least not when it was in its cage.  Our Samoyed went up to its cage once and the opossum came up to the bars to check it out.  It was funny.  The dog barked and the opossum jumped straight in the air, but it didn’t run.  It actually came closer.  On the other hand the opossum was very wary and hard to catch the two times it escaped.

The not understanding being potential prey thing wasn’t true of my sugar glider (also a marsupial).  It is true of gerbils though.  A gerbil that has never encountered a cat will go right up to it and sometimes even attack it.  They learn quickly though.  I had two or three gerbils escape in an apartment with a cat that was an avid hunter and they all survived, though one had a limp and shorter tail after the experience and the another one had a scratch all the way down its back. 

As far as true carnivores with extra brainpower goes, there may actually be one with a Great Ape-class brain, at least in terms of size.  I’ve seen a couple of listing of sun bear brain size that puts a sun bear brain in the same class with that of a chimp, and they are very close to the same body size.  If a sun bear does have a chimp-sized brain, what does it use it for?  I don’t know.  I don’t think anyone else does.  They’ve never been studied in the wild.

Brain sizes or even brain sizes as a proportion of body weight don’t necessarily correlate with anything that we would call intelligence though.  Part of the problem is how do you compare animals of different sizes?  A mouse has just as large of a brain in proportion to its body size as a man does.  An elephant has a much larger brain than a man.  About 30 years ago a guy by the name of Jerison looked at brain sizes and body weights of a variety of mammals and reptiles and concluded that on average brain size went up roughly two-thirds as fast as body size. He turned that into an equation called EQ. Other authors varied that formula a little.  The problem was that within groups with both larger and smaller animals, the brain size went up only one-third as fast as body weight.  That meant that a house cat had a considerably higher EQ than a lion, and a chimp had a much higher EQ than a gorilla.  There is no reason to believe that either of those animals are brighter than their larger relatives, so EQ probably doesn’t really capture the brain/intelligence relationship.

At the same time, brains are expensive in terms of energy and nutrients needed to support them, so if an animal has a large brain it almost certainly is using it for something, which probably means that it has some kind of out-of-the ordinary memory storage or processing needs.  The other option would be that it has a rich enough diet that having a large brain is relatively less expensive for it than for other animals its size.  For example, generally leaf-eating monkeys don’t have very large brains compared to fruit eating ones of the same body sizes.
 
One theory on the origin of large ape and monkey brains is that they are the result of competition for ripe fruit.  A large primate like a chimp or orang has to have a large territory with a lot of different species of fruiting trees.  They have to get to those trees when the fruit is ripe and before birds, squirrels, and other apes and monkeys eat it all.  Knowing which trees are going to have ripe fruit when and plotting an efficient course between those trees takes a lot of storage and processing power.  Those capabilities later proved useful for a lot of other things.

Actually, my candidates for an alternate intelligent species of land animals (other than the great apes and extinct variations of man) would be:

• Some kind of off-shoot of baboons—maybe a semi-carnivorous one.  Baboons do tend to become more carnivorous in areas where lions and leopards have been shot out, partly because there are more vulnerable animals and carcasses around without the big cats there to clean up, and partly because the big cats aren’t there to take away any baboon-caught prey.
• Some kind of off-shoot of the capuchin monkeys of South America.  In a lot of ways capuchins are much more comparable mentally to chimps than they are to other monkeys.  I’m not sure how you get from where they are to human-level intelligence, but they have a lot shorter distance to travel than a dog would.
• An off-shoot of one of the extinct large South American spider monkeys.  There were actually at least two varieties, one of which was apparently a rather dull leaf-eater, but the other one actually had a notably large brain even for a spider monkey, and most spider monkeys have rather large brains for their sizes.

If I get time I may put together a few numbers on brain sizes of various animals and commentary on what they mean.

Your comments to me: I would guess that if Germany got bogged down in France, Stalin would take advantage of the situation to start cherry-picking in the Balkans and probably the Middle East.  Historically the Soviets did take a major hunk of Romania in June 1940, mostly stuff the Romanians took from them after World War I.  If the Germans and Allies were locked in a long-term fight in France, I would expect that to be just the first move in a Soviet takeover of Romania.  Who would be able to stop them?  Romania?  They got their clocks cleaned in the skirmishes that preceded the Soviet takeover of the border provinces.  Italy?  They might try because they got most of their oil from Romania, but they were nowhere near strong enough to challenge the Soviets.  Stalin would probably also take advantage of the stalemate to move into at least the northern part of Iran.  The Soviets had long had their eyes on that territory and who would have stopped them?  The Iranian army certainly couldn’t have.

Another aspect of prolonged French resistance would be that the French would run themselves out of gold and foreign exchange just like the British did, though it would take a bit longer if I recall correctly.  The Brits ran out in early 1941 historically.  Would there still be a third Roosevelt term and sufficient US urgency to get Lend-Lease going, or would the US just let the Allies run out of money to import raw materials and US-made weapons?  I’m guessing that some sort of loan arrangement would be worked out—partly because French and British arms orders were pulling the US out of the depression.  On the other hand, France defaulted on several billion in US loans after World War I, so the US might have a problem with more loans, especially if the military situation didn’t look particularly threatening.

The financial aspect makes a long war unlikely in the absence of US financial help for the Allies.  There is also the question of how the Germans would pay for raw materials they didn’t have domestically.  As you noted, Stalin wasn’t overly forthcoming with supplies to Hitler when he didn’t have to be, and by 1940 (actually quite a bit earlier) Hitler had essentially used up Germany’s gold and hard currency reserves.  My understanding is that much of the oil for the German offensive in May 1940 came from bartering captured Polish military equipment to Romania and the Soviet Union at what amounted to very cut-rate prices.  The Germans could sub in synfuels and other ersatz materials for some things, but how would they pay for all of the Balkan and Turkish raw materials that they needed?

By the way, the financial aspect also explains a lot of things postwar.  Britain used up its gold and foreign currency reserves before Lend-lease kicked in.  The French didn’t, and most of their gold reserves remained safe for the duration in either Canada or the US (can’t remember which).  When World War II ended and the US abruptly cut off Lend-Lease, the British government was essentially bankrupt, and as a result of the terms of Lend-Lease, the US had taken over most of their traditional export markets, especially in Latin America.  The Brits could only have held onto their empire if the US had supported them financially in doing so, and given US anti-colonialism that wasn’t going to happen in 1945-46 even if the Atlee administration had wanted it to.  In 1945-46 all the US had to do was to not loan money to the Brits and large parts of their economy would have had to shut down because they couldn’t afford to import raw materials.  The Brits initially jettisoned the most expensive and troublesome parts of their empire and kept the rest, but the continued economic decline through the fifties and early sixties forced them to gradually give up more and more until there was very little left.

 On the other hand, while France was physically devastated, it still had a billion or two in hard currency reserves, which was a pretty substantial amount at the time, and that gave them a lot more autonomy in the short-term.  In the longer term, they were able to merge their colonial wars with the Cold War and get some US help that way.  France actually held onto a lot of political, economic, and military power in many of its nominally independent African former colonies until just a few years ago when the economic burden of tying local currencies to the Franc became too great.

On US attitudes toward France: if you compare French casualties in the five or six weeks of fighting to the US casualties in eight years of Vietnam it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of Frenchmen fought and died in those few weeks.  A lot fewer Germans did, but from old and possibly faulty memory I believe that they lost on the order of half a Vietnam worth of soldiers in those five weeks (not to mention over a thousand planes).

On whether or not civilization would have happened if the ice age hadn’t ended:  I’m not sure one way or the other, but one potential problem would be the stability of the weather.  Were ice age climates stable enough that a potential farmer could put seed into the ground with a reasonable expectation of getting a crop year after year for the thousand or so years that it would take to make the transition from hunting and gathering?  If at any given location climate changed enough during that thousand or so years that the potential farmer didn’t get a return for enough years in a row, farming wouldn’t develop.

On alternatives to dogs: The Indians did have dogs, and they were the same species as ours.  There may have been some experiments toward domesticating one of the South American canids before and shortly after Columbus.  The thylacine is an unlikely candidate for domestication, but individual Englishmen in Tasmania did develop a fondness for them as pets and in some cases trained them to walk on a leash.  My understanding is that Thylacines may have hunted in family groups (male, female and offspring) at times, though I’m afraid I can’t recall where I read that.  As to lack of success in breeding them in captivity, a lot of animals didn’t breed in zoos of the twenties and thirties, at least partly because the diet was appallingly bad and the environment (a small cage) quickly left them bored and often neurotic.  Under better conditions the same species breed freely.  On the other hand some species—cheetahs and pandas come to mind—are just extremely fussy about when and where they breed.

By the way, zoos used to put the darnedest animals together.  One of their experiments: Baboons and wombats.  Not a good combination.  At feeding time the wombats just waded in and ate while the baboons had an elaborate hierarchy of who got to eat first and second and so on.  That bit of culture clash led to the wombats getting harassed a lot, but rarely bitten because baboons quickly discovered that wombats could dish out more than they got in the bite department.

On computer alternatives: I may have mentioned this earlier, but there are an increasing number of “hobby” operating systems out there.  Some of the more advanced ones are Syllable (an off-shoot of Atheos which in turn started out as an AmigaDos clone), Minuet (an all Assembler OS that fits a reasonably complete operating system, including a GUI on a floppy disk), and SkyOS.  There are also a whole slew of Unix-like systems, of which Linux and the various BSD versions are the most prominent, and several BEOS offshoots.  There are also groups  trying to replicate and extend various orphaned or semi-orphaned operating systems like OS/2, the Amiga or the Atari ST.  Then there are the bizarre ones like a multi-tasking replacement operating system for the C64.

The development of a substantial body of Open Source software makes some of these operating systems somewhat more potentially viable because if a large enough number of people get interested they can port the likes of GIMP and PovRay and AbiWord to their operating system, rather than writing something from scratch or depending on software companies to invest in development.  Open Source has buoyed the Mac a bit too as an alternative to Windows.
 
Dale Cozort: That’s one heck of a lot of Char in last issue.  I hope it wasn’t too overwhelming for you.  Twenty-two pages is a bigger chunk than I normally like to ask people to plow through in an issue.  As you may have noticed, my “France in North Africa” scenario is progressing rather slowly.  I’m not sure why but I’m having trouble getting excited about it.  You may also have noticed that I need to work on the names of people and places in Mars Looks Different.  I was excited about the idea and jumped into writing the story before I had all my ducks in a row and it is starting to show more and more.  I hope people didn’t overlook the reprints at the end of the zine.  Good stuff there if I do say so myself.

Tom Cron: No zine so no comments. (NZSNC)

Anthony Docimo: NZSNC.  However I do want to clear up one thing.  If you had Kawato’s permission to do an MS3K on his story, then I withdraw my objection. 

James E. Fulkerson: Might want to rename Major Healy so that those of us who remember I Dream of Jeannie can take him more seriously.  Other than that, let’s see: we beat the Soviets into orbit, which means that we don’t go all “Got to beat the Commies” after Sputnik, which means that we take the “flying into orbit” approach instead of the “use a rocket to send off a tin can” approach.  Some butterfly effect causes Kennedy to end up married to Marilyn Monroe instead of Jackie.  Not a bad premise, though I kind of groaned at the Marilyn bit.  The story itself grabbed me and made me want to read more, which is a good thing, obviously.  I do have a couple of minor nitpicks: on page 10, third paragraph from the bottom you might want to look at pronoun usage.  You’re talking about the ship and then you say “he” a couple of times.  You may also have a was/were problem in the first sentence of the last paragraph on page 14.  Other than that, it looks good.  I enjoyed it.

Robert Gill: Your reality seed on the US Supreme Court ruling in favor of the copyright holders in 1984 caught my attention because that fight is still being waged bitterly.  In my opinion, if the copyright holders had won in 1984, the US film and record industry would be a lot smaller and poorer than it is now.  In all likelihood videodisc would have taken off to a much greater extent than it did, especially the cheap but limited RCA version that bombed historically.  I could see videodisc rental stores springing up in larger cities, but the penetration would never be as high as it was historically because a lot of the initial appeal of the VCR was the time-shifting, with the rental and buying of videotapes becoming feasible once the population of VCRs became large enough.

On Robert McNamara being tried as a war criminal if the Japanese won, how about this: A fanatical group of diehard Japanese militarists start tracking down and kidnapping the people involved in the decision to firebomb and nuke Japan.  They then try these people in a secret courtroom and execute them.  McNamara probably wouldn’t be real high on their list, but let’s say they get him.  Given my opinion of McNamara, I would bet on that being a very good thing for the US on a lot of levels.

I enjoyed your review of Bubba Hotep.  Another illustration that even the most absurd premise can work in the right hands.  I also enjoyed your review of Butterfly Effect.  I haven’t seen that one yet, but I probably will soon.

David Johnson: On your comments to Docimo on Oliver the sort-of chimp: I saw a story on-line a few weeks ago about a macaque in a zoo somewhere that came down with a very bad case of stomach flu and started walking upright essentially all of the time after it recovered.

Your comments to me: I’ve read about the extremely old dates for domesticated dogs, but I’m skeptical of them.  One reason for that skepticism is the initial lack of dogs accompanying aborigines to Australia.  I suppose that could be due to a small, accidental founding population that just didn’t happen to have dogs, or it could be that the relationship wasn’t tight enough initially for people to take dogs in boats with them.  In any case, dogs didn’t make it to Australia until around 4000 BP if I recall correctly. 

That actually leads to an interesting alternative.  Get dogs to Australia along with the first wave of aborigines and what do you get?  The best current guesses on when the aborigines first arrive are between 40,000 and 60,000 BP, with the earlier date gradually becoming more accepted.  How would dingos have developed in that kind of time?  How much more damage would having to face aborigines and a modern predator at the same time have done to the Australian fauna.  On the other hand, the marsupials that survived the initial onslaught would have had maybe over fifty-thousand additional years to adapt to a modern predator through going to higher birth rates or developing various defense mechanisms.  Some marginal species might not survive, but the ones that did would probably be somewhat more capable of dealing with all of the new species that Europeans brought over.  The Thylacine probably wouldn’t survive, and the Tasmanian Devil probably wouldn’t either.  On the other hand, Tasmania and probably some of the other offshore islands would have ten thousand years of isolation to develop their own very strange breeds of dogs.

Your points on Magic and Religion were very helpful.  Thank you.  I’ll take them into account in a revision of the story.

I’m glad to see that you are still toying with the TrolleyWorld storyline.  I hope you finish it up someday.

Wesley Kawato: You may be right about the Bev/Pat plotline in Mars being unnecessary.  I intended it to give kind of an ordinary person’s-eye view of what is going on, and I think it does that.  At the same time I don’t think it is carrying its weight so far and will do so less in future installments.  I’m trying to figure out how to tweak that plotline so that it work more effectively with the rest of the story.

Gerson Lodi Ribeiro: NZSNC.  I would like to pick your brain on the Brazilian aspects of my Brazilian gold rush scenario at some point. 
 
Christopher Nuttall: I see two main problems with your German defeat in Sea Lion scenario.  First,  during this time-frame (the immediate aftermath of a failed Sea Lion) the Italians would probably resist any German effort to get involved in North Africa.  They were still pursuing the illusion of parallel wars, where the Italians took care of things in a Balkan and North African sphere of influence while the Germans dealt with other areas.  The Greek fiasco and the massive Italian defeats in North Africa in late 1940 forced the Italians to seek German help, but before that they were not convinced that they needed it, or at least they weren’t willing to admit that they needed it.  Second, in this scenario the Germans would still face the same logistics problem they faced historically.  Neither they nor the Italians had enough shipping to support large armies in North Africa.  Once supplies got to North Africa the Axis didn’t have the logistics capabilities to get those supplies to the armies once those armies advanced beyond a certain point.  They would have needed more harbor facilities, more railroads, and more trucks.  At the high point of the German advances historically, fuel trucks were actually consuming more oil getting from the harbor to the front than they delivered.  More German troops in North Africa just meant more logistics problems unless those problems were addressed, and that would have taken time.

I have the Germans taking Egypt in one of my scenarios, but only by living off of captured British logistics.  Larger German forces just wouldn’t be supportable in the short term.

Your comments to me: You’re right about the “Monday Morning General” challenge being more enjoyable without my solution being immediately available.  I took that to heart in my challenge for this issue.  (Saving the Inca empire).


Luke: NZSNC.  BTW: If I haven’t congratulated you on the swimming triumphs, congrats.

Steven Silver: This is your conscience speaking…  Okay, well maybe it’s just someone who would like to see more of your stuff.  In either case, I hope to see more from you.  You write well.

Kurt Sidaway: Congratulation on joining the Sideways panel.  Your comments on Mars Looks Different: Yeah, I think that the background has the potential for a great SF/adventure pulp.  I’m not sure that the characters and plot quite do the setting justice yet, but I’m working on that.
 
Dale Speirs: Another take on Island California.  Interesting.  AH-lite can be a lot of fun.  As to Captain Cozort, all I can say is “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay…”  To which you probably say “Loose the Rittenhaus devils.”

On the decline of reading: There may actually be a problem with the World Wide Web and the plethora of cable channels in that there is less and less of a common view of what reality actually is economically, politically, and militarily.  People can and do choose news sources that fit into and reinforce their existing views to a much greater extent than was previously possible, and as a result they aren’t exposed to or even aware to any great extent of opposing views or uncomfortable facts.  If you only watch CNN and read the New York Times you will end up with a whole different view of what actual facts are and what they mean than you will if you only watch Fox News and read Drudge Report.  That probably will tend to make political dialog outside of a person’s own political viewpoint more and more difficult.

Your journal article summaries were useful as usual.  On Canada in World War II: Yeah, the Commonwealth countries rarely receive the recognition that their contributions should warrant.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to some extent South Africa and India all made great sacrifices and contributed a lot, especially in the first couple of years.

On the closing of science fiction bookstores: I suspect that the Internet has played multiple roles in speeding that along—by diverting reader time and attention away from books, by allowing companies like Amazon.com to offer an essentially comprehensive booklist, and probably to some extent by allowing Internet-based specialty stores to compete with brick-and-mortar ones.  By the way, I attended a writers’ seminar given by one of the established science fiction authors and he claimed that essentially all of the major US publishing chains that have anything to do with Science Fiction have been bought up by one bloodsucking, take no chances on new idea, bottom line is all German conglomerate.  He mimed spitting after every time he said the company’s name.  He also said that some smaller independent publishers are growing quickly due to the fact that they actually still produce good stuff.
 
The same guy claimed that the US is effectively a much smaller market for books than its population would suggest because so much of the US population simply doesn’t read books.  I forget the exact figures but the vast majority of books in the US are bought by a tiny fraction—under twenty percent—of the population.  That percentage is dwindling, partly because there are so many other options for people who in earlier times would have been readers.  Books compete with video games, DVDs, Internet sites, multi-user on-line role-playing games, and as many as five hundred channels of TV.  That’s formidable competition for a limited number of leisure hours per day.  Even television is feeling the competition, especially for younger and more affluent viewers.