Donald E. Westlake is the funniest writer alive. No better palliative could be given to a terminal patient than a collection of his books, particularly his Dortmunder series. I myself might well have checked out long ago if it hadn't been for his effect on my morale. Unlike Carl Hiaasen, a funny writer whose punch lines are punches and whose laughter is always bitter, Mr. Westlake generally manages a kind of humour that makes it possible to hope.

There've been exceptions. He once began a comic novel about people stealing a trainload of coffee from Idi Amin. In researching it, he quickly realized that while Mr. Amin was in one sense hilarious, he was also in a profound sense Not Funny At All. Kahawa became a deadly serious novel -- with, Westlake being Westlake, some unforgettable comic touches.

And there've been other Westlake titles (Humans) where the humour gets a bit dark. But generally you can depend on him not to bring you down.

His latest book, The Hook, is about publishing today. Wayne Prentice is what's called a "midlist" writer: fairly, not hugely, successful. But publishing has, in the last 10 years, become just another business, with computers making all the decisions. If a midlist writer's sales slip by even a few per cent, the computer decides he's a loser -- and makes the prophecy self-fulfilling by shipping fewer copies of his next work. This disaster has befallen Wayne: After decades of modest success, he's suddenly unpublishable. Editors agree his writing is as good as ever, but they cannot buy it, at any price: The computer forbids it.

Naturally, Wayne tries a pseudonym. But that only works if the publisher really doesn't know it's him. It's hard to maintain a persona that is never available for an editorial phone call, and in any case, after only three books, Wayne's alter ego, too, has been killed by the computer.

He then meets Bryce Proctorr, who's not a midlist writer, but one of the gods, above such worries: a King/Clancy/Grisham. His worries are a bitter, expensive divorce, and intractable writer's block. So he makes Wayne a proposition. Wayne has a novel he can't sell; Bryce has a megabuck contract for a book he can't write. It's simple, he says: We'll publish your book under my name, we'll split the money down the middle, and all you have to do is murder my wife, okay?

I don't want to give away anything, so I'll just say here that I am myself a midlist writer, and I hope with all my heart nobody ever makes me such an offer.

That's how bad it is in publishing, these days. Even Mr. Westlake, well above midlist, feels the pain. Every colleague I know who is not at Bryce Proctorr level is running scared.

The publisher's computer isn't the only one we're scared of, either. Yours has us spooked. We've been hearing for years now that the Internet will kill us all, and there are signs of that prophecy coming true. Right now my trade organization, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, is fighting cyberscum: soi-disant "anarchists," who are stealing copyrighted fiction and posting it on pirate websites in Russia, or in public newsgroups. It promises to be a long, ugly battle -- and one we may well lose, de jure or de facto.

A similar, quiet terror prevails among those of my acquaintances who are professional musicians. It begins to look like MP3 technology and its ilk may, indeed, spell doom for the recording industry as we know it, before very long. And none of the audio-terrorists responsible has yet proposed any alternative system of keeping musicians alive to work. The thinking -- if any takes place -- seems to be that musicians record for the sheer joy, and will continue to do so for free, happily starving for the privilege of entertaining thieves. Musicians know better. There's never been much money in live performance: If recording goes away, too, it's time to get a haircut, type a résumé of lies, and try to sneak back into the world of day jobs.

Writers and musicians may be among the first artists to feel the fear -- but we won't be the last. Go to the Teletoon Channel, and check out Starship Troopers or Max Steel. I happened across both yesterday while surfing, and was stunned. The computer animation on both is better than I imagined possible -- and for all I know, may not be anywhere near state of the art.

I'm not talking about cartoon figures like those in Toy Story or Antz, but simulated human beings, to such a high degree of realism that I estimate they're only about a generation and a half away from persuading you that you're looking at video of actual events. The credits went by far too fast to be read (another modern trend that has artists terrified), but it was clear this miracle was produced by a mere skeleton crew of animators.

Animators are scared now. But in a few years, the actors will all wake up and start bleating in terror, too. Because I'm not kidding, there are characters on Max Steel as cute, beguiling, intriguing and charismatic as any live actor you care to name. They can do stunts that would kill any human. And not one of them demands $20-million a picture, or throws tantrums on the set, or comes to work stoned, or . . .

As for dancers and choreographers, they've always functioned in an environment of fear. There's never been a time when dance was a sane career choice, even for the great ones -- and the economics of the profession are currently, surprise, worse than ever. Furthermore, Canadian choreographers are now legally forbidden to cast their own works, and must employ whomever some bonehead judge decides. Henceforth, plum roles will go to the dancer with the best laywers.

Artists are society's canaries. We are choking on our fear. See us falling off our perches, all around you. And have the wit to fear for yourself. If nothing else, you're in for some damned depressing "entertainment."

B.C. science-fiction writer Spider Robinson's new novel Callahan's Key will be released in hardcover by Bantam Books in July.

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