I sent out 30 review copies on Friday, so by my count, at least seven reviewers have not yet completed either their reading or their review. Now, I understand more reviews might seem superfluous, especially of such a relatively small book, but believe it or not, the number of reviews has been observed to make a significant amount of difference in the willingness of Amazon customers to give a book a chance.
Now, if you absolutely hated the novella and are simply being gracious by neglecting to share your opinion with the reading public, it’s perfectly fine with me if you choose not to favor the world with your verdict. I have been known to be circumspect in similar circumstances myself, so if that’s the case, please feel free to ignore this reminder. But if you are one of the reviewers who did read it and just haven’t gotten around to writing your review yet, it would be great if you would see about posting it at your earliest convenience.
And for the 23 of you who did read and review the book on such short notice, I really appreciated your time and effort, and I’m very pleased to see that so many of you enjoyed it. Also, thanks very much to those who purchased A MAGIC BROKEN, and for a brief while, turned it into a top 25 book in the Epic category. It was rather fun to see my name in between George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson instead of Michael Lewis and FA von Hayek.
I try to keep the two blogs fairly separate these days, since a relatively small number of people are interested in both econ/religion/politics/literature on the one side and intersexual relations on the other. Also, the intellectually ruthless approach utilized here tends to work better on matters more objective than the socio-sexual hierarchy. However, there are times when the two perspectives come together as one, which was the case with a question from GK concerning why women have suddenly begun turning towards Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
My thought is based around one of the keys to understanding female behavior, which is that it is often aversion-based. Men find this difficult to understand because their behavior tends to be positive, in the sense of “I want X, therefore I will do Y.” The aversion-based female pattern tends to be more oriented towards “I don’t want X, therefore I will do Y”. The increased female support for Romney has little to do with Romney himself, much with less his policies or Obama’s policies, but rather the collective socio-sexual fury of a group of women duped.
People with zero affiliations with — or even knowledge of — particular groups are publicly made members of them without their consent. All it takes is a friend putting you in a group, and then you are in it without your consent….
There is something downright Orwellian about this, and if you don’t think it can be used for Orwellian political purposes, imagine yourself working in an office with Facebook friends who include supporters of a presidential candidate for whom you don’t intend to vote. If that “friend” puts you in, say, an “I’M VOTING FOR JILL STEIN!” Facebook group, then you are in it, and you have to un-join. Suppose your supervisor or next door neighbor put you in it? The implications are as obvious as they are odious; not all of us are political junkies with the balls to issue public statements about whom we support or don’t support, and not all of us are so public that we might find something like this amusing enough to write a blog post about the experience.
Now, I’m not active on Facebook. While I do use Twitter, I only belong to most social media groups in order to prevent my more creative critics from attempting to pass themselves off as me. But I am a registered user there, and so every day I am the recipient of spam from groups like Friends of Protection For Men. Not only is the constant barrage of email annoying, but it has the counterproductive result of making me feel entirely unsympathetic to the Friends of Protection For Men. Every time I see another stupid piece of mail from them it makes me want to kick the sender in the teeth. Not that I often see one, of course, since my spam filter is cranked up to 11, which is why I occasionally fail to receive legitimate emails from readers attempting to contact me. But I just looked in my Junk folder, and sure enough, there are a pair of emails from the wretched Friends that arrived this morning.
So, for the first time in ages, I logged onto Facebook and removed myself from the various groups into which others have conscripted me. But, as Miss Hoyt points out, I shoudn’t have to do that. Opt-out is reprehensible and opt-in should always be the standard.
I appreciate that Facebook and other social media can be a useful means of contacting individuals and organizing groups. But don’t ever sign people up for causes that you believe to be worthy, even if you are 100 percent sure that they agree with the goals of that group. It’s just obnoxious, and to be honest, Mark Zuckerberg should be repeatedly punched in that flat, stupid, thieving face of his for his refusal to prevent Faceborg from assimilating others.
Since so many people here were involved, I asked the cover artist, Kirk DouPonce, to share his perspective on the occasionally contentious process of creating the cover for A THRONE OF BONES. It turned out to be so interesting that I suggested posting it at Black Gate to John O’Neill, who readily concurred:
Over the past 17 years, I’ve gotten to design a pile of book covers, well over a thousand if my math is correct. And if I learned anything at art school, it was math. So when I say A Throne of Bones is my favorite cover so far, it does mean something….
Scientifically speaking, women read approximately a lot more books than men do. This is especially true when it comes to fiction. So when I design fiction covers for publishers, no matter what the genre, I know how important the female demographic is. Covers need to appeal to women. Simple enough.
Or not. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning of the process.
It hasn’t exactly been any great mystery, but I am happy to finally be able to share exactly what I’ve been up to for the last year. Last summer, after finishing A Dance with Dragons, I found myself deeply disappointed with what Mr. Martin, whose earlier work in the series I so enjoyed, had produced after making us all wait six years. “Good Lord, even I could do better than that”, I thought, which may not, strictly speaking, actually be true, but regardless, that was the thought that struck me after slogging through 1,100 pages of tedious river journeys, Tyrion “humorously” falling off pigs, and being subjected to Important New Characters for approximately the 4,853rd time. Being somewhat despondent about George Martin’s descent into Robert Jordan territory, I turned to other so-called epic writers, including Joe Abercrombie, R. Scott Bakker, Steve Erikson, Daniel Abraham, and Brandon Sanderson. Some of their books were quite good, others somewhat less so, but in no case did any of them provide me with that same sense of EPIC and wanting to experience the depths of the world that Martin presented so effectively in the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire.
So, I decided that I would write an epic novel and I would do it in one year. It would be the same length as A Game of Thrones, it would be loosely based upon an interesting period in military history, (in case you didn’t realize it, the Wars of the Roses are the starting point for Martin’s series, Stark = York and Lannister = Lancaster), and its focus would be on story, world, and character. Nothing else. No cleverness, no preaching, no subtexts, no reinventing wheels, no larger lessons, no deep philosophical insights. In reading all the various would-be epics, I realized that most of them suffered from trying to do more than simply tell a fascinating story, which was also a problem with most of my previously published fiction. I assumed I would self-publish it, since obviously no one would want to publish such a monster, and I would set it in the world of Summa Elvetica since I rather liked that world, as did most of those who read that flawed, but interesting failure of an esoteric literary exercise. However, to do so, I needed to get the permission of Marcher Lord Press, the publisher of Summa, and much to my surprise, Jeff not only loved the idea of an epic series set in Selenoth, he insisted that he would publish it, even if it turned out to be more than 1,000 pages.
Umberto Eco once said that he wrote The Name of the Rose because he wanted to murder a monk. I decided to do him one better and begin by killing the Holy Father. That sets the stage for a story that is large and sprawling and is inspired by the Roman Social War, which is a little known quasi-civil war that was arguably the most perilous situation the Roman Republic faced in between the Gauls laying siege to the Capitoline Hill in 390 BC and Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Amorr isn’t Rome, of course, but the historical scenario provides the novel with a certain amount of structural verisimilitude that I have often found to be lacking in other books.
So, I’m very pleased to announce A THRONE OF BONES, the first novel in the series entitled Arts of Dark and Light, which will be published by Marcher Lord Press on December 1, 2012. We’re not sure of the final page count yet, but at 295,000 words, I expect it to be well over 750 pages. It will be available for $4.99 in ebook format and $34.99 in hardcover. There will be no paperbacks, trade or mass-market. Marcher Lord is accepting preorders for the hardcovers starting today; those who preorder will pay only $29.99 for the hardcover and they will also receive the ebook on December 1st. (We can’t say precisely when the hardcovers will ship, except that it is expected to arrive with time to spare for Christmas.) This preorder offer will be run from October 15th until November 30th. Also, since I wanted to provide those who are potentially interested in the book a less esoteric introduction to the world of Selenoth than the one provided by Summa Elvetica, I am pleased to announce the publication today of A MAGIC BROKEN, which is a 50-page novella featuring two of the perspective characters from the novel.
A MAGIC BROKEN is available from Amazon for 99 cents and the reviews to date are mostly positive. If you think you might be interested in A Throne of Bones, I would encourage giving the novella a whirl in the meantime. Here are a few of the comments from the first reviewers:
“a sword and sorcery tale with a cerebral bent”
“the two main characters are likable in their non-perfection”
“an entertaining, fast paced read”
“I found the story line to be unpredictable”
“The environment and characters are on par with the best of George R.R. Martin”
“Despite the number of twists it remains coherent and believable as they unfold”
“a masterful act of guile and misdirection reminiscent of the style of Umberto Eco”
“The world has a depth not found in much writing today.”
“the promise of it all leading somewhere grand and exciting is what interests me more than anything else”
Also, and I would argue this is a strong point in its favor, there are no river journeys, no “amusing” porcine-related pratfalls, and no whining. Actually, come to think of it, there is a little whining, but rest assured that the whiner speedily meets with a literary device that I devoutly wish Robert Jordan had utilized with regards to his character Rand al’Thor at an early stage in The Wheel of Time. In my opinion, Chapter One would have been about right.
Thanks are in order to JartStar, who created the cover for A Magic Broken and may even do the map for A Throne of Bones if I ever get my act together and get him the information he needs, as well as Jamsco, whose determined interest in Lodi not only inspired the novella, but his inclusion in the larger work as well. Thanks to Markku and the Original Cyberpunk, who between them made my foray into ebooks viable and without whom these books would never have been conceived. I also appreciate the reviewers, 15 20 of whom managed to read the novella and post their reviews over the weekend. I’m very appreciative of Kirk DouPounce, who somehow managed to surpass the very high standard he’d set with Summa – about which more later – of Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord, who was enthusiastic about taking on yet another ludicrous literary risk, and most of all, of Spacebunny and her encouragement of my efforts.
In my previous column on the flaws of free trade theory, I concentrated primarily on the theoretical aspects and the errors in the historical arguments that have been made for it. In this column, I will focus on the practical side and show how free trade, if implemented in a genuine manner, will necessarily result in the complete destruction of the United States of America as we know it.
Stephen J. takes a logical approach in arguing for evolution by natural selection:
While this question is going to sound snarky, I can only ask our host to believe it is meant as a genuine inquiry and hope it is answered.
1) Let us take as evidentially established the fact that species which existed in the past now exist no longer and are extinct.
2) Let us take as evidentially established the fact that not all species now extant existed at all times throughout the history of organic life; if nothing else, we know for a fact Homo sapiens did not.
3) Therefore, it must be possible for species which did not exist to come into existence by some mechanism, just as species which do exist can go extinct by any variety of mechanisms.
4) If it is a fact that new species can come into existence while others go extinct, by what mechanism other than evolution through natural selection are these species proposed to arise, and does that proposed mechanism explain more of the observed evidence than TeNS?
I don’t think it sounds snarky at all. In fact, this is one of the first rationally competent attempts to defend evolution that I’ve ever seen presented on this blog. Let’s look at his postulates and his logic and see where it leads us.
1) I concur. We know from historical documentary evidence that there are species that previously existed and are now extinct. We can also infer from fossil evidence that there were a number of other species that previously existed and went extinct prior to the historical record.
2) I tend to agree and am willing to concur here for the sake of argument and on the basis of Occam’s Razor. We certainly believe that homo sapiens sapiens did not exist from the beginning of the history of organic life on the basis of our current understanding of the geological and fossil records, but we cannot say that with the same degree of confidence that it is a fact in the sense that we say the Dodo is now extinct. The problem is that there appear to be an increasing number of indications that the current geological and biological timelines are not going to hold up to future evidence, the claimed 521-year half-life of DNA being one of them.
3) I concur, assuming (2) holds true.
4) Intelligent Genetic Manipulation is the mechanism that I propose. And yes, I believe that explains more of the observed evidence than TENS, since IGM is a scientific proposition, a readily observed action, and a successful predictive model, whereas TENS is a philosophical proposition, an unobserved process, and an unsuccessful predictive model.
Now, this does not provide any basis for assuming the existence of a Creator God, or even declaring that TENS did not actually take place. The logical fact of the matter is that even if TENS can be conclusively demonstrated to have taken place in various species, which has not happened despite more than 150 years of trying, that doesn’t necessarily mean the process was sufficient to produce Man. If one contemplates the biological differences between ape and man, the vast leap in cognitive capacity taking place in a relatively small sum of generational cycles from the proposed common ancestor in comparison with the timelines supposedly required for other, less complicated evolutionary changes, the logic suggests – though it does not prove – that some degree of purposeful genetic manipulation has likely taken place at various points in the origin of the species and the development of homo sapiens sapiens.
I’m not talking about Intelligent Design, but rather intelligent editing. And the interesting thing is that IGM should be an increasingly falsifiable concept as genetic science continues to improve. Only recently have we learned that junk DNA serves a purpose; even though we have sequenced various genomes, we haven’t yet understood how the code works or fully comprehended the various ways it can be manipulated. As our understanding grows, we should be able to develop an ability to recognize patterns that indicate purposeful alterations in the code have been made.
Now, I realize how crazy this probably sounds, especially in light of my argument that Man cannot easily distinguish between God, god, demon, and alien. But that is where Stephen’s reasonably sound logic takes us.
The second Toyota Blowout of the Week for the Meerkats in a row kept the Churchians winless, while the Hangmen got their first win of the season against the Banksters. Dare we hope this is an omen for society at large? Fromundah still looks dominant, however, staying undefeated as the Marauders fell from perfection in a big way, putting up only 37 points on the week.
It’s strange, isn’t it, that so many organizations formed for the advancement of women’s rights were established by left-wing parties like the Fascist Party in Italy and the Communist Party in China.
They are articles about single, professional women published on the Web site of China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation. The Communist Party founded the Women’s Federation in 1949 to “protect women’s rights and interests.”
It must be a coincidence. But these days, it isn’t hard to imagine either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama agreeing to establish a state feminist agency, assuming of course that Housing and Urban Development doesn’t already qualify.
I do rather like the idea of referring to unmarried women over the age of 27 as sheng nu, however. Especially since comes with the imprimatur of an official international State Feminist Agency. It would really be sexist to refer to them any other way. However, looking at it from the long-term perspective, it is ominous that China has been actively seeking to encourage its best and brightest women to breed instead of pursue an education since 2007.
Iran is doing this. China is doing this. The USA and the nations of the West, on the other hand, are encouraging their best and brightest women to sterilize themselves. Which societies would you bet on in the long run?
