ABSTRACT
Science writers-alone of the tribe of scribes-usually have a new story to tell. This is their strength, but it may also be part of their problem. Humans may be novelty-seekers, but many of them are not at all comfortable with the new, the untested, and the unknown. Editors, publishers, and readers, on the whole, prefer the familiar. There is always pressure on a successful thriller writer to keep writing the same kind of successful thriller. Nobody thanks a popular comic novelist for suddenly attempting a tragedy in verse. Sports writers enjoy spectacles that ultimately can end in one of only two ways and this suits their readers too. Political reporters too, seem to be witnesses to the democratic drama as soap opera in which the same plots recur, and in which characters seem to keep coming back. Economics correspondents chart the rise and fall in a nation’s, or a region’s, or an industry’s fortunes, without ever being expected to depart from their diffi cult, but still limited, brief.
