Author: VD

Technopocalypticals rejoice!

Sweet Vernor Vinge, alert the media!  Thomas Friedman has gone singular! Someone finally figured out that the famous New York Times columnist IS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!  And now we can tap directly into it:

An interesting thought occurred to me
today—what if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me
and ironed out some real solutions to our health insurance crisis?
With the election season over, maybe
you’ve forgotten about health insurance, but I certainly haven’t. It
would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines
are constantly splashed with the violence in Brazil, the authoritarian
crackdown in Cape Verde and the still-unstable democratic transition in
Saudi Arabia. But the health insurance problem is growing, and
politicians are more divided than ever. Republicans seem to think that
health insurance can just be ignored. Democratic politicians like Dianne
Feinstein, on the other hand, seem to think that shrill rhetoric will
substitute for a compromise.
But the Democratic party of Dianne
Feinstein is not the Democratic party of Bill Clinton. Clinton wouldn’t
refuse to budge, he’d compromise because he’d understand that the fate
of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting
solution to the problem of health insurance.

 I may have ended my WND column too soon.  All I had to do was log into THOMAS once a week and let it all do the work.  Step two: profit!

A candidacy is announced

Yesterday, I sent a notice to the SFWA’s head of the election committee, announcing that I am running for the office of president of the organization.  It is highly unlikely that I will win, of course, but I would like to be able to say that I at least attempted to do my part to salvage an organization that is speeding rapidly into irrelevance.

One reason I am running is to restore the independence of what appears to have become a captive house award that Tor Books authors give themselves on an annual basis.  This may not be the case, but the statistical evidence suggests that there has been considerable corruption in the awards process in the past and that the 2010 rules changes have actually made the problem worse.

The other reason can be seen in these two quotes by its current president, the Tor Books author John Scalzi.  He condemned himself in the very words with which he criticized his predecessor, Michael Capobianco back in 2007.

“Simply put, the professional organization of speculative fiction should
not be headed by people who believe their job is to hold back the
future. I believe strongly that Michael Capobianco sees it as his role
to hold back the future and to maintain the status quo in publishing and
in speculative fiction. That battle has already been lost; the
publishing world has already irrevocably changed from when Mr.
Capobianco last published. It’s time that SFWA moves forward with
leadership who understands this….  


[T]he answer to whether I support membership in SFWA for people who are
not published writers is no.* That’s not going to change. I don’t think
it’s useful and I don’t think it’s needed. SFWA should certainly make
itself useful in helping aspiring SFWAns make the transition into
published status, and to a good extent, it does that now. But at the end
of the day it’s an organization for professional writers, and needs to
be composed of professional writers.” 

Scalzi is a dinosaur.  He fails to understand that “professionally published” has been rendered a meaningless term by technological development and that science fiction writing now goes well beyond the simple medium of printed books.  The most influential science fiction writers don’t even write books, they write games.  Scalzi should know this, considering that he very recently got involved working for a company in the industry in which I have been active for 22 years.  And under the current qualification requirements, some bestselling SF/F novelists, whose work outsells most SFWA members, cannot qualify.

Scalzi is also a fascist ideologue who actively attempts to shut down all debate he personally finds distressing at every opportunity.  Consider the way in which he proudly declared that in 2012, he managed to avoid permitting anyone to present facts or arguments that might have disturbed the tender sensitivities of the rabbity readers at Whatever.


This year I also managed to arouse the ire of a whole stack of racist, sexist, homophobic dipshits with the above posts as well as several others. If I did nothing else with my year, this would have made it delightful to me. They also gave the Mallet of Loving Correction plenty of use when they would drop by the site and learn to their surprise that the sort of smug trollery that passes for thought in the land of epistemic closure doesn’t get past the door here. This is not a delight to me — trolls are always irritating — but whacking them so that the conversational level here remains high has its own grim level of satisfaction.


There is something deeply amusing about a man who claims that people pointing and laughing at him in contempt somehow translates to “ire”.  But it is deeply problematic for an organization to have someone who actively prides himself on the overt and intentional silencing of dissent – and is either delusional or dishonest enough to project his own closed-minded perspective on his critics – as its head.


As proof that it is John Scalzi who dwells in the land of epistemic closure and not those who disagree with him, I note the subsequent comment from one of his readers: “Thanks again for making this a safe place to visit and comment.”  Whatever is a safe place for the Rabbit People to visit and comment precisely because Scalzi practices the very epistemic closure that he feigns to decry. The quoted statement is virtually a textbook illustration of psychological projection.  He sees ire on the part of those who feel none because he is angry with them.  He sees closed minds and smugness in others because he is smug and his mind is closed to competing ideas.  He can’t conceive of honest dissent because he is himself dishonest and inclined towards conformity.

Now, it should be made clear that John Scalzi is not the problem with the SFWA, he is merely one of the symptoms of the ideological disease that has been gradually killing science fiction and fantasy in the print world for the last thirty years.  Thanks to technology, SF/F will survive, but not in its traditional form if its self-appointed gatekeepers continue to stress mediocrity and ideological conformity over the dangerous new visions that once characterized it.


It is unlikely that I will win the election; even if I win it is unlikely that I can do anything to salvage the situation.  The myopic Neo-Luddism and anti-intellectual ideology in the organization appears to be both deep and wide.  But I will present my platform to the membership on February 1st so that at least no one will be able to say that things could not have been different if the organization, and the literary genre, continues its downward spiral.

NebulaGate: the 2012 winner responds

Jo Walton, winner of the 2012 Best Novel Award for Among Others, writes at Black Gate: “I am not a member of SFWA and never have been.  I think that disposes of your accusations of my logrolling for a Nebula.”

I responded thusly: “I never made any such accusation. Furthermore, your non-membership in SFWA says absolutely nothing about the possibility of others logrolling on your behalf, especially given that the nomination process was a closed one. The fact that your book was published by Tor Books is enough to make
its Nebula Award suspicious on its face, given that the SFWA President
and Vice-President are both closely associated with Tor.


Dating back to its first Nebula nomination in 1986, Tor Books has
accounted for 24.4% of all Nebula Best Novel nominations. No other
publisher has even half that many.


Now, it is certainly possible that Tor is simply an excellent
publisher. However, given the unusually heavy involvement of its
authors in the awards process, their representation in the
organization’s offices and the confirmed logrolling in the recent past,
logic suggests that Tor has been gaming the awards system for a
long time.  In 1990, for example, 5 of 6 Nebula-nominated novels were published
by Tor. Only 2 of 5 Hugo-nominated novels and 1 of 5 World Fantasy
Award-nominated novels were.”

I have not yet read Among Others, so I cannot say that its victory over China Mieville’s Embassytown was unjustified.  I will read it, review it, and opine on the matter in January.  I don’t have to read it to know that it merited beating out George Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, and is not Ms Walton’s fault that her affiliation with Tor Books renders her award suspicious in a way that it would not have been if it had been published by another, less-decorated publisher.  That being said, the reviews of her book indicate that readers who read the book after hearing of its award-winning status tended to find it to be less than expected, a pattern that has been observed with past Best Novel-winners whose awards are known to be questionable.

The behemoth lives

I haven’t had the chance to see it yet, but Jamsco was kind enough to send me a picture of the hardcover.  Interesting to see the progression from the days of teaming up with the OC to write a little paperback.  It would be nice to think that the quality has improved in line with the quantity.

Free will and fiction

Mike Duran lists the top five cliches of the Christian writer:

Having frequented Christian writing circles for some time now, I’ve
heard all the spiritualized slogans we believers like to regurgitate. Here’s my Top 5 clichés that Christian writers use.

5.) “God’s called me to write.” — Funny
how God never “calls” Christians to be sales assistants, lay reviewers,
work in circulation, be an advertising manager, or write obituaries for
the local newspaper. You’d think that writing novels was the top of the
Christian publishing holiness hierarchy.
4.) “It just wasn’t God’s will that I… (fill in the blank).” –
“God’s will” is a favorite “out” for Christian writers. Most often, the
saying is followed by things like “find an agent,” “sell a lot of
books,” “finish the manuscript,” or “advertize aggressively.” Poor God. I
wish He’d get His act together so your career can finally flourish.

I find the public profession of “God’s call” to be about as credible, in most circumstances, as the way in which people who recall their past lives always seem to have been some Egyptian princess or European queen; no one ever used to be a peasant girl who died of malnutrition and smallpox at the age of twelve.  It’s remarkable how often God is said to call people to do what they quite clearly want to do of their own accord.

As for God’s will, in this, as in so many things, we see the idea of divine omniderigence tends to remove both agency and accountability from the individual. 

Writing fiction is, in its own small way, an act of creation.  The author is the god of his own little world, which may be why the idea of writing fiction is so much more appealing to many would-be novelists than the actual act of writing it.  And yet, even the human author, who has complete and total control over his characters, often finds his control constricted by the desire to make them behave in a self-consistent manner.

In like manner, perhaps an all-powerful God might find Himself constrained, not by any external limits on His power, but rather by His desire for artistic consistency and aesthetic integrity.

The pig, she flies!

In which I actually agree with Ed Brayton for once:

I tend to bristle at the idea of judging a blog by its
comment section. As Jamie Kilstein said a few months ago, the comment
section at PZ’s blog is the 7th circle of hell. The one here is often
scarcely better. Even I cringe at what is clearly — yes — tribalism that
goes on in the comments section. It’s just the nature of the beast and
it’s happened to me on both ends. A quick story:

A few years ago I criticized Richard Dawkins for signing a petition
that would make it illegal for parents to teach their kids about
religion. The comment section was descended upon by hundreds of his
acolytes, saving me up one side and down the other. I was
misinterpreting the petition, they said, and how dare I criticize
someone who had done so much for atheism when I was just a lowly
blogger, and so forth. After a while Dawkins himself showed up and said I
was right, that he hadn’t read the petition closely enough, that he did
not favor such a law and he’d asked them to remove his name from the
petition. Even after that, many of his followers continued to excoriate
me.

I’ve had the same thing happen here on the other side, where someone
has shown up in the comments and criticized something I wrote. They were
hammered like mad by many of my readers and I had to jump in and say,
“Wait a minute, he’s actually got a point.” That makes me even more
uncomfortable than being on the receiving end of it. We are all prone to
tribalism and to shallow thinking, including those who regard ourselves
as skeptics who are above that sort of thing.

I’m not keen on judging a blog by its comment section either, except in that one can judge the character and self-confidence of the blogger by how he manages his comment section.  Here at VP, for example, there is actual debate among people who disagree with each other and with me.  In the posts this week alone, there are numerous regulars disagreeing with me about the limits of the Constitution’s ability to guarantee God-given rights as well as a vigorous debate on the permissibility of gun control between commenters.

PZ, as far as I have seen, is actually quite good about permitting critics to comment freely at Pharyngula, the problem there is not that he cannot bear dissension, but rather that his commenters are such a clueless collection of mid-witted ideologues that most critics stop uselessly banging their head against the wall of idiocy there before long.  I actually respect him much more than many other bloggers in that particular regard.

But Brayton is entirely correct to point out that the self-styled skeptics are every bit as tribal and superficial as those they make a habit of denigrating.  This is a point I have been making for literally years, and it is good to see that some of the more vocal members of the skeptic community are willing to openly acknowledge it.

More fun with Twitter

This exchange resulted from my tweet in response to Piers Morgan’s statement concerning his view of the constitutionality of Congressional arms bans.

voxday: Yes, Piers, wanting America to ban assault weapons & high-capacity magazines is ‘anti-constitutional’. #GunControlNow #AdiosPiersMorgan

DonaldJChump: So is trying to punish somebody who is using his/her right to free speech, more so even #hypocrisy

voxday: He’s not an American. He’s British. He has no right to free speech or any other freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

DonaldJChump: So free speech is a right reserved only for Americans? And we wonder why the rest of the world us as ignorant

voxday: Do you believe Piers Morgan has the right to vote, bear arms, or run for the Senate? Do you think the UK has free speech?

DonaldJChump: Rights are imaginary, as the internment camps & that petition prove. Cause of Americans like you they are privileges & nothing more

voxday: If rights are imaginary, then why are you appealing to them? Your argument is totally incoherent.

DonaldJChump: more incoherent than the petition. It’s fighting for a right while while taking another one, showing that rights aren’t rights

voxday: You’re still missing the point. The British don’t have US Constitution-guaranteed rights. Neither do the Chinese.

Shout them down again

It’s time to begin cranking up the volume and sending the anti-gun politicians scurrying back under their rocks again:

In January, Senator Feinstein will introduce a bill to stop the sale,
transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault
weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devises.

  • Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:
    • 120 specifically-named firearms
    • Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can
      accept a detachable magazine and have one military characteristic
    • Semiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds

We all knew it was coming.  You know the drill.  If there is even the slightest squishiness on the part of your elected official, squeeze him until he squeals like an NRA piggy.

Amazon, the SFWA and authorial corruption

Amazon is entirely correct to limit author reviews on its site:

Scores of authors in Britain and across the Atlantic have recently reported
that their reviews have either mysteriously disappeared or were never
published. Amazon has now admitted that it has introduced a ban on authors leaving
reviews about other people’s books in the same genre because they may pose a
“conflict of interest” and cannot be impartial about their rivals.

This means that thriller writers are prevented from commenting on works by
other authors who write similar books. Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and
are experts on novels. 

Now, I can quite reasonably argue that I am one of the most impartial author-reviewers to have written a book review in the last 20 years.  My integrity as a reviewer is literally unquestioned; I was the only active game developer permitted to write computer game reviews in Computer Gaming World, and I was allowed to do so under two different editors because they knew I would never sacrifice my credibility as a reviewer for any reason.  Many readers know that I have quite favorably reviewed books by individuals whose politics I consider loathsome, whose opinions I consider idiotic, and whose characters I consider to be contemptible.  To my eyes, a book stands alone; its provenance is irrelevant.

Unlike the vast majority of book reviewers in the SF/F industry, I simply do not permit my subjective opinions to color my objective reviews.  It’s not that I don’t have any opinions, I simply refuse to take them into account when reviewing a book, a game, or a movie.

And yet, I not only don’t write reviews on Amazon, I fully support Amazon’s decision to bar authors from reviewing books and assigning them stars there.  Why?  Because for the last ten years, I have been privy to the corruption that is absolutely rife within the organization of the SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Organization, as well as to the ideological corruption of the SF/F industry on the part of the publishers, the reviewers, and even the bloggers.

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

UPDATE: An SFWA insider confirms my observations: “[Vox] is correct when it comes to the inbred logrolling. As SFWA Bulletin editor from 1999-2002 I can attest to this first hand. A small clique and their “in” friends control quite a bit of what goes on in SFWA (at least it did back then and I have no reason to doubt that things have changed).”

UPDATE 2: I would be remiss if I left off this reviewer’s hilarious description of the Nebula award-winning Quantum Rose: “Kamoj Quanta Argali is the 18 yr old governor of a planet of former
slaves. When a newcomer on the world Havyrl arrives to recover from an
ordeal which left him half mad, he spies Kamoj taking a bath in a river
and falls for her. Impulsively Havryl offers to marry her which causes
strife and conflict throughout the region, as Kamoj’s spurned fiancee
vows revenge.”

Ye cats!  The punchline?  That’s from a reader who actually thought the book was all right and gave it three stars!  It  also appears Asaro is from the Isaac Asimov school of nomenclature.

Running down John Scalzi

John Scalzi  is understandably pleased by Whatever’s 8 million views in 2012.

Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013.  But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck.  Thank you.

He is, of course, welcome, as a few of them came from various posts here.  Eight million is a certainly a lot of pageviews. It is an impressive number and clearly there must be a lot of Rabbit People who are fascinated by what McRapey has to say about life, the universe, and everything, or are at least interested in currying favor with the current president of the SFWA.  It will be interesting to see if his traffic continues to increase once he steps down from office.

What I found most interesting was his post about Whatever’s views from previous years:

2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000

Here is why I found it interesting about those numbers.  The combined Sitemeter pageviews for Vox Popoli and Alpha Game for 2012 were 5,023,130. (Sitemeter visits were 3,412,014).

2008: 2,713,293
2009: 3,396,001 +25.2%
2010: 3,713,218 +9.3%
2011: 4,463,247 +20.2%
2012: 5,023,130 +12.5%

Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to the Whatever readership?  No, I don’t think so.  I think Scalzi is using the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”.  Since, like many other bloggers, he elects to hide his statistics rather than permitting Sitemeter or some other service to display them openly, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples here.  Clearly some sort of scientific experiment is in order, which will require me to become president of the SFWA as well as the author of a NYT best-selling science fiction novel derived from a cancelled television show.  Does anyone have any ideas?  I’m thinking either ALF or CHiPs.

For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA.  Vox Popoli is 29,426.  Alpha Game is 73,183. Which makes it very clear that in the grand scheme of things, we are all more or less irrelevant.