Author: VD

The 50 best SF/F books and/or series

After much discussion of NPR’s 100 greatest science fiction and fantasy works, I was moved to construct my own list of what I consider to be the top 50. As with all such lists this is somewhat arbitrary, nevertheless it should be taken as the complete, definitive, and conclusive final word on the matter. I see no purpose in honoring innovation for innovation’s sake when others have subsequently done it better, for example, John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have both been long surpassed as examples of their type, whereas the same is not true for Tolkien’s oft-imitated The Lord of the Rings or Orwell’s Animal Farm. In some cases, I have chosen to highlight a single book, Dune, for example, whereas in others I have chosen to judge a series as a whole. Night Watch is easily the best of Terry Pratchett’s books, but it cannot be judged fairly in isolation as one has to have a fuller understanding of Ankh-Morpork to fully appreciate the novel. I have paid zero attention to book sales or authorial reputation, I have read all of the books on the list, and I have tended to rate genuinely amusing books more highly than others might due to the additional degree of difficulty involved.

I further note that if you happen to disagree with the reverence shown to Mr. Ray Bradbury, you are clearly inhuman, possess no soul, and should consider returning to your home planet. If you have not read or heard of Tanith Lee, people should throw rocks at you on the street until you rectify the error. On the other hand, if you have not read Hesse, that is understandable since he’s not traditionally considered a genre author. But do yourself a favor and read the book anyhow. And yes, Edgar Allen Poe should by rights be on here somewhere near the top, but the metric is books and/or series, not authors and/or short stories.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Dune, Frank Herbert
3. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
4. The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
5. The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
6. Watership Down, Richard Adams
7. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
8. The Secret Books of Paradys, Tanith Lee
9. The Sprawl Trilogy, William Gibson
10. The Cthulhu Mythos, HP Lovecraft

Read the rest of the list at the Black Gate.

Don’t be casting no dispersions

The good ship Herman Cain has had an amusing run, but it should sink in today’s Iowa straw poll . And why wouldn’t he cast dispersions on Captain Underoos’s religion anyway? If I was a Republican candidate, I would totally demand that Mitt Romney show everyone his underwear. Does anyone remember how he answered CNN’s important “boxers or briefs” question?

The sad thing is that the Republican candidates simply don’t understand America. Ron Paul could have sewn up the nomination early if he’d simply answered “thong, baby, thong”.

1. Michele Bachmann 4,823 votes
2. Ron Paul 4,671
3. Tim Pawlenty 2,293
4. Rick Santorum 1,657
5. Herman Cain 1,465
6. Rick Perry 718 write-in votes
7. Mitt Romney 567
8. Newt Gingrich 385
9. Jon Huntsman 69
10. Thad McCotter 35

This effectively ends the Pawlenty campaign, unless he’s running for vice-president. It should also end the Romney campaign, but it won’t yet since he’s got all that money to spend. Paul will be ignored by the media unless he can manage to win something outright; pity he has moved in the wrong direction on immigration at precisely the wrong time.

Bachmann becomes the “Huckabee” candidate that the Establishment will throw to the social conservatives if necessary, but Perry becomes the de facto replacement for Romney as the chosen candidate. Cain will stay in as a sideshow, this really isn’t a bad showing for him. Santorum, Gingrich, Huntsman and McCotter all look pretty irrelevant now, not that some of them didn’t before.

UPDATE – Bingo: “Tim Pawlenty told supporters in a conference call this morning that he would be leaving the presidential race. “We needed a boost from Ames that didn’t happen,” he said, according to CNN.”

You CANNOT be serious!

The NPR readership’s top 100 SF/F novels:

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
3. Ender’s Game
4. Dune
5. A Song of Fire and Ice
6. 1984
7. Fahrenheit 451
8. The Foundation trilogy
9. Brave New World
10. American Gods

It’s a reasonable start, as you can list the top ten without having to bother mentioning the authors. But which one of these is not like the others? Neil Gaiman is good, but American Gods does not merit inclusion at that level. And either Dandelion Wine or The Illustrated Man should be in Fahrenheit 451‘s place. I think A Song of Fire and Ice is also overrated, especially in light of the way the series has declined over the last two books. Top 100 yes, top 10, no way. So is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; it’s top 50 material, not top 10. I quite like Douglas Adams, but I don’t see how anyone can possibly argue that Hitchhiker’s is better, in any way except that it is funnier, than Watership Down. In fact, I don’t even consider Hitchhiker’s to be Douglas Adams’s best work; his Dirk Gently novels are much superior.

The astonishing omissions, not from the top 10, but from the entire list, are The Chronicles of Narnia – absolute top 10, if not top 5 – Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Piers Anthony’s Xanth is far too low, and while Terry Pratchett shows up twice with two Discworld novels – why, when every other series is listed by series – the best Discworld novel by far is Night Watch. And no Lovecraft? Madness. No Silverberg? A little more explicable, but still. No Guy Gavriel Kay? Understandable, but still a serious omission. It was good to see Zelazny there, but I would rank his Lord of Light higher than Amber.

It was interesting to see both the Harry Potter and Twilight series missing from the list. I very much agree with leaving them off it, but I was still surprised they weren’t there. I was, however, mystified to see Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera on the list while The Dresden Files was omitted. I enjoyed the former, but there is no question that the latter is the better series. And how does The Silmarillion make the list while The Hobbit doesn’t? And finally, there is no way Robert Jordan’s ghastly The Wheel of Time series should be on the list at all, much less ranked at #12.

Worse than I thought

Karl Denninger notes that the big banks are presently trading at less than half book value:

The very acts that led to the crash of 2008 are back in play, and they’re doing the same thing to market volatility. Banks are still hiding derivative exposure, claiming that they need these “customized” products for customers (and refusing to exchange-trade all of them.) Banks are still holding assets on their balance sheets at what the market judges to be a fantasy value – not only is their stock price half of book value or less in many cases, but we know there’s nobody with actual money who believes the claimed valuations on the balance sheet are real, as if they did they’d buy up all the stock and get the assets at half price – an instant 100% (or more) capital gain.

Who wouldn’t do that, if they believed the banks? Every one of these institutions with deeply-underwater balance sheets – Bank of America and Citibank in particular – would be bought out tomorrow. The fact is that nobody believes these marks are real. Nobody. It would only take one “somebody” with money who would pounce on such an opportunity – if it was real. And there are lots of people with money.

I repeat: There is not one entity with funds that believes these banks are honestly reporting asset values. NOT ONE.

And here I was telling that nice Canadian anchorwoman just last week that based on the FDIC seizure reports, I estimated around $3 trillion of $7.6 trillion in reported big bank assets were completely nonexistent. Mea culpa. It would appear I was too optimistic by at least $800 billion.

Ah well, that’s close enough for biology, anyway.

Voxic Shock 1.8: Economist Steve Keen

In this week’s podcast, I interview Australian Post-Keynesian economist, Steve Keen, who is among the first economists – if not the very first – to systematically incorporate debt into a Keynesian macroeconomic model.  Interestingly, he appears to harbor even more contempt for the Neo-Keynesian likes of Krugman and Stiglitz than I do; he believes them to be little more than conventional neo-classicals subject to most of the same errors of assumption as their Chicago School rivals. He even goes so far as to state that if their Samuelsonian formulas are Keynesian, then he must be an Anatine economist.

Correcting the butterfly collector

As various studies have reported, biologists are the least intelligent of the science majors. And as a perusal of any biology major’s curriculum will show, most of them are completely uneducated in history, in logic, and in philosophy. There isn’t even much use of the actual scientific method in their “science”; there is a reason that hard scientists have long denigrated them as “butterfly collectors. While Richard Dawkins is the most notorious example of a biologist who foolishly attempts to opine outside his area of expertise, at least he usually appears to have some idea of what he is talking about when biological evolution is the subject. PZ Myers, on the other hand, is so intellectually undisciplined that he cannot keep even simple things straight when the subject he teaches at his community college is the topic at hand:

1. Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.

2. Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.

3. The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.

4. Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.

5. The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.

6. If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.

7. Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.

8. Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.

The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.

Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.

First, let me begin by addressing PZ’s remarkably foolish comment at the end. He knows perfectly well that I know the difference between hypothesis and data, this is just his characteristic posturing in a groundless attempt to argue from the lectern. His pretense that anyone, let alone a superintelligence of my confirmed cognitive capacity, might have any difficulty distinguishing the two concepts accomplishes little more than to imply he teaches a remarkably low caliber of student. Second, I will note that I don’t pretend to know better than real scientists, I often prove that I know better than they do.

Consider, for example, the public statements of the illustrious Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and 2008 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics versus Vox Day, level 72 Dwarf Hunter and one-time Pooyan world champion, concerning the price of gold in 2002, the housing market in 2005, the success of the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, the economic theory of the Austrian School, or even the historical expenditures of the Hoover administration in 1929-1933. Back when gold cost $325 per ounce, Krugman was declaring gold to be “just a metal” and pushing the Fed to create a housing bubble while I was writing columns urging readers to stay out of real estate and invest in “the barbarous relic” instead. Gold is now at $1,750. Case-Shiller is now at 125.41 and falling; it’s already below the 126.13 of Q3-2002. So you see, Dawkins and Myers are neither the first nor the last scientists to have been my bitches.

I have no need to rely upon any pretense of superior knowledge when I can cite numerous empirically confirmed demonstrations of it. PZ would have done much better to question if my proven ability “to know better than real scientists” translates from economics, economic history, and finance to evolutionary biology, global warming, and other quasi-scientific subjects. No doubt PZ considers himself a real scientist, so let’s see how he did with his seven specific points.

1. PZ failed to comprehend the point of what I wrote when I asked when any evolutionist has reconsidered the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions based upon it. Obviously, I am well aware of the existence of proposed “alternate mechanisms”, otherwise I would not openly mock the “Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow” aka TE(p)NSBMGDaGF in the Voxicon.

The point was not that no one has ever proposed an alternative method, but rather, that alternative methods, (or as I prefer to call them, evolutionary epicycles), are invariably proposed in lieu of contemplating the possibility that the basic hypothesis is simply wrong. When an astrophysicist or an economist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is usually that the hypothesis is incorrect. When an evolutionary biologist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is always that the hypothesis cannot possibly be to blame, there must be some missing factor that has not been properly taken into account. If evolution by natural selection has not taken place, then evolution by some other mechanism must have taken place; the logical conclusion that the core hypothesis is simply incorrect and evolution did not take place is seldom, if ever, considered an option.

2. PZ’s answer is completely irrelevant. There is zero evidence that abiogenesis ever took place, robustly imagined mechanisms for it notwithstanding. To claim that because there was no life before, but there is now, ergo abiogenesis occurred, is the very sort of philosophy that science has largely come to supplant. Evolutionists tend to wisely punt on the logically-dictated abiogenetic foundation upon which their materialist assumptions rest, but there is no reason anyone should permit them to do so. It’s rather like economists who attempt to leave debt out of their equations. The numbers may all add up nicely without it, but leaving out the most important element tends to call the entire model into question.

3. PZ could actually have claimed some very limited credit for evolutionary theory on the basis of Linus Pauling’s contribution to the discovery of DNA, but instead he demonstrates that he completely failed to comprehend the point. It is irrelevant that he believes “the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution”. That is surely true, but it doesn’t change the truth of my statement that evolutionary theory was not required for the development of DNA. In fact, it’s rather like saying the consequences of the beheading were profoundly important in their effects on the criminal’s future activities.

4. The timeline of Mendelian genetics, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, and the discovery of DNA are not relevant here. The salient point is that DNA, which required no assistance from evolutionary theory to develop although it did receive some as per Pauling’s aforementioned contribution, has exploded numerous decades-old assumptions by the evolutionists, including the Tree of Life and the very concept of speciation itself. As DNA is better understood, (which understanding requires absolutely nothing from evolutionary theory), there is a reasonable probability that it will eventually undermine the entire idea of evolution and not merely the natural selection mechanism. Still, the only reason evolution is still considered even remotely relevant to actual science that does not revolve around the increasingly futile efforts to provide a solid scientific foundation for a proof of evolution is due to the perceived connection between DNA and TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. No scientist attempting to improve DNA identification or unravel the mysteries of junk DNA finds it terribly useful to incorporate natural selection into their research. Indeed, to the extent that researchers concern themselves with the evolutionary utility of “junk DNA”, they are arguably hindering their research by chasing a rotting red herring. It’s rather like the way Keynesians avidly investigate global savings rates while paying no attention to the various debt/GDP ratios.

5. What a load of historically revisionist nonsense. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s can remember the pride of place that Archaeopteryx held in evolutionary theory. It was a “missing link”, it was cited as proof of evolution in our elementary school textbooks. It still has its own Wikipedia entry: “The first remains of Archaeopteryx were discovered just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin’s theories and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds, the transitional fossils debate, and confirmation of evolution.” Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs suggests that more dinosaurs had feathers, it doesn’t strengthen “the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs”, primarily for what should be the obvious reason that the significant avian is no longer avian.

6. PZ skates over the fact that the erstwhile bird is no longer a bird, but merely a another type of dinosaur, means that it is not the transitional species it was once believed to be. This not only serves to demolish the scientific importance of Archaeopteryx, but also undermines the confirmation of Darwin’s theories that its “first bird” claim once supported.

7. This is an absurd statement. PZ here illustrates why real scientists, whose predictive models are actually expected to perform to high degrees of accuracy, hold the butterfly collectors in scientific contempt. The reason Daniel Dennett was forced to appeal to astrophysics rather than evolutionary biology when he praises science is because the latter lacks the “amazingly accurate results” that has generated so much respect for the former. Evolutionary biology has simply never delivered any reasonable predictive results in over 150 years and has been responsible for an incredible number of frauds as well as false predictions. When Samuelsonian economists attempt to get away with margins of error measured in the billions of dollars – the most recent Q1-2011 revision of GDP amounted to a $225 billion error – people rightly conclude their models are fundamentally flawed. Given the similar scales involved, there is no reason evolutionary biologists should not be held to the same standard.

8. As I wrote in my previous post, this is just another demonstration of the intrinsic unfalsifiability of the butterfly collector’s art. When he’s wrong, when a bird is not a bird or a transitional species, but merely another dinosaur, it really means he’s more right than ever! This is ridiculous. When I said that Hillary Clinton would win the 2008 Democratic nomination, it did not make me more right than ever when Obama actually won it. It made me wrong.

As for the supposedly damning big picture, I am perfectly content to await further developments. I further note that as those “huge volumes of information” continue to expand, the evolutionary theorists have been forced to concoct ever more complicated and grandiose evolutionary epicycles to attempt to keep Darwin in the picture. Both the core concepts of “species” and “natural selection” have been increasingly called into question by advances in genetics, and it will not surprise me if further advances force the eventual junking of TENS in any of its reasonably recognizable forms.

Still, just to be clear, I am not, nor have I ever been, an evolution denier. I am merely a strong evolution skeptic, and it is worth noting that my perceptive and public doubts about natural selection are increasingly being supported by firm believers in TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. One of the many reasons that I remain confirmed in my skepticism to date is the constant historical revisionism of PZ Myers and many other True Believers in the cult of Darwin as well as their staunch refusal to abide by the same standards of evidence that even the practitioners of an arcane quasi-science like economics do.

As an added bonus, these three comments from the astute economic observers at Pharyngula will likely provide considerably entertainment to those who have read The Return of the Great Depression.

“Well, you gotta give him credit for consistency. He is all wrong about Keynesian economics, too. It is the neo-Keynsians, not the freshwater types, whose models have correctly predicted the economic mess we are in today. The evidence (completely ignored by what Krugman calls the “Very Serious People) is pretty clear about this.”
– SES

I’d trust Vox Day on economics as much as I do on science. Zero.
– Raven

One notes the comparison with pleasure. Keynesian economics, like evolutionary biology, has an outstanding record of success, and has become the foundation for a vast amount of productive work in its field.
– JRE

The myth of the atheist martyr

Although the movie has apparently come and gone without so much as registering a blip with anyone, Armarium Magnum’s detailed demolition of the Hypatia legend is still worth reading.

While Sagan is the best known propagator of the idea that Hypatia was a martyr for science, he was simply following a venerable polemical tradition that has its origin in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.”

Like Gibbon, Sagan links the story of the murder of Hypatia with the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was torched by another Christian mob. In fact, Sagan presents the two events as though they were subsequent, stating “[the Library’s] last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death” (p. 366) and that “when the mob came …. to burn the Library down there was nobody to stop them.” (p. 365)

In the hands of Sagan and others both the story of Hypatia’s murder and the Library’s destruction are a cautionary tale of what can happen if we let down our guards and allow mobs of fanatics to destroy the champions and repositories of reason.

This is certainly a powerful parable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t correspond very closely with actual history.

It is interesting how often atheists accuse Christians of believing fairy tales, considering how they are obviously prone to concocting their own. Is it projection or merely an ironic coincidence? And this is also a useful reminder that a lack of belief in God is not necessarily tantamount to believing unquestioningly in science while remaining completely innocent of history.

You couldn’t be more wrong

John Maynard Keynes on “the gold cage” and the benefits to Great Britain of exiting the gold standard:


My favorite part is when he announces that prices won’t rise as a result of going off the gold standard. The price of gold then was around £5. Today, it’s £1,095. And of course, as we all know, Great Britain is still the industrial powerhouse of the world….

History happens

James Delingpole provides an email that explains why it is more than a little perilous for those who aren’t familiar with London and its various boroughs to attempt to reach any reasonable conclusions about the recent riots on the sole basis of the media coverage:

Funniest interview ever on Sky. Female Sky reporter interviewing a white guy who has had his shops burned. He said to her, the arsonists/looters were all black. She said to him, you can’t say that, there must have been white guys there as well. He thought about and then said, ok they were not all black, i was the only white guy there. Is that ok to say?

This guy states this with a totally dead pan face without a hint of the pc faux pas.

She again corrects him and states nervously you just cant say they were all black, he responds, but they were i was there. Unbelievable. The interview describes the state of our society in a nut shell.

The reason that the multiculturalists and post-racialists and race deniers all consistently put themselves in such ludicrous positions is that they are fundamentally at war with observable reality. Their delusional left-wing allies in the media and government do their best to keep the raw facts from being presented without some sort of balance or spin, but eventually reality simply overwhelms it. And the multiculti position simply isn’t tenable in the long run; do they seriously think that people really aren’t ever going to notice that downtown suddenly looks like Mogadishu or that their cousin’s apartment building was burned to the ground?

Societies can only deny reality for a limited period of time. Eventually, the society will either expel the invaders, collapse entirely, or be conquered outright by the invaders. And the eventual outcome may well vary from nation to nation. It’s important for Americans to remember that mass immigration is a relatively new thing to modern England, it was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 that led to Enoch Powell’s prophetic “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Nor is the level of vibrancy anywhere nearly as high in Europe as it is in the United States, it’s merely more visible because it is so heavily concentrated in the large urban areas. But these changes take decades, sometimes even centuries, which is why the average individual is incapable of ever doing more than assuming that the present status quo will always continue, world without end, amen.

Incidents such as the three-day London riots are actually a positive sign that the multicultural end game will be reached long before most societies reach a point that would require civil war to resolve. Once the Euro and the European Union collapse, which could quite conceivably occur the next two years, the great transnational experiment of the last fifty years will have finally begun to reach its inevitable end and we can hope for a return to a healthy and relatively peaceful nationalism rather than the lethal and expansive form that was seen in Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s. The post-global nationalism should be very different than the pre-WWII version, since its focus will be internal rather than external.

This doesn’t mean that the globalists won’t be using the collapse of the transnational structures as an excuse to “fix” the problems it causes by pushing global centralization. That is the obvious and inevitable next step from their perspective. But because they are battling against reality as well as economic gravity, and because their arguments are so visibly absurd, there is no reason to assume they will be successful in their efforts. History merely happens, it does not progress.

Visitation

I don’t usually pay too much attention to the traffic here, but I am genuinely excited about the fact that we’re about to hit 11,111,111 visitors in a minute or two here. 31 more to go!

Next up, 22,222,222!