Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: the sorry state of SF

I thought this email from RC was interesting, as it demonstrates how Gresham’s Law applies to science fiction, with Pink SF tending to drive out Blue. Hey, even if Tor Books can’t be bothered to read your emails, at least I do:

I am writing to you today regarding the lack of professionalism of certain staff at Tor books.  I know others have contacted you regarding the contempt in which some staffers hold certain authors and a large part of your customer base.  What I wish to address is the editors’ contempt for the genre itself, and their incompetence at one of the essential tasks of producing SCIENCE fiction: getting the science right.  I am certain these are related.  The upshot is that Tor is printing a lot of stuff which ticks all the fashionable social and political check-boxes, but stinks on ice as SF.

An egregious example which I encountered recently is in the first of the Ender’s Game prequels, Earth Unaware.  There are a host of glaring faults in the orbital mechanics among other things, but they are too involved to detail in a short letter.  I will instead quote a concise example from page 261:

“The ship scoops up hydrogen atoms, which at near-lightspeed would be gamma radiation, then the rockets shoot this gamma plasma out the back for thrust.”

There is no such thing as a “gamma plasma”.  Gamma rays are photons, not atoms or parts of atoms.  Plasmas are a mixture of ionized matter and free electrons.  A high-energy proton is not a gamma ray; many cosmic rays are high-energy protons, but that does not make this phrase remotely acceptable in a science fiction book.  A well-read middle school science geek could have caught this error; I should know, I was one.

Shortly after this comes another one (p. 269):

“If it’s sucking up hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed and taking in all this radiation….”

This is part of a plotline that plays for weeks, between a mining ship plying the Kuiper belt and Earth.  The Kuiper belt extends from about 30 astronomical units to 55 AU from the Sun (earth orbits at 1 AU).  Light travels 1 AU in roughly 500 seconds, so an object travelling at “near-lightspeed” would cover 55 AU in not much more than 27,500 seconds; on the order of 8 hours.  Even if the initial speed of the object is reduced to 25% of c and it decelerates linearly, the transit time is less than 3 days.  The whole plotline is nonsense because the author (Johnston, I’m sure; Card does better work) couldn’t be bothered to read a basic science book.  This is lousy even for fan-fiction.  Why did this ever make it to print?  More to the point, why do the editors have such contempt for the genre and its fans as to allow it, to the point of commissioning a lightweight like Johnston to play in Card’s universe in the first place?

I could not but help but notice that Earth Unaware got all the “we are the world”, social justice, anti-corporate messages lined up front and center.  The priorities are literally that obvious.  That’s why I’ve not bothered to read the other two prequels.  I don’t waste my time on dreck. I spotted this trend quite some time ago, but it was only after the highly-publicized outbursts of certain senior Tor staff that I realized that it wasn’t due to the times, but was a matter of policy.

Well, we all make mistakes from time to time, authors and editors alike (cough, tunnel), but it is pretty egregious to combine SJW message fiction with a major plot foul-up of the sort one RC describes. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t testify to the accuracy of his critique, but it does sound like a rather impressive howler.

As for the total number of emails sent, based on the CC’s Peter and I received, around 2,300 emails were sent by 765 different people that we know of. And there were others being sent as well, although we can’t possibly know how many. Regardless, I expect that enough were sent to make it clear to Macmillan that the excuses given by the senior Tor employees for the emails that they previously received was a false one.

Those senior employees have publicly attacked Tor-published authors, Tor published-works, and Tor customers. They have needlessly antagonized tens of thousands of book-buyers in pursuit of their ideological agenda. They’ve now been caught lying to their superiors about the extent of the consequences of their unprofessional behavior and violations of the Macmillan code of conduct. And that is why, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Macmillan cleans house even more thoroughly than people have been demanding. I certainly would if I were in their shoes.

Then again, for all we know the Macmillan executives are fanatic SJWs whose instinct will be to dig in and defend the actions of Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. If that’s the case, Peter Grant has made it clear that the boycott, which for no particular reason at all may be christened TORDROP, will begin at noon on Friday, June 19th. And since no one has received any sort of response at all from Macmillan or Tom Doherty as yet, this is a good time to take a picture of your books published by Tor Books and tally up the total of the books and ebooks you have purchased from them. The truth is that we’re not asking for much, only that the senior employees at Tor Books be held to the same professional standard expected of a retail sales clerk or a fry cook at McDonalds.

SJWs respond

Chris S on June 15, 2015 at 6:42 am said:

I’ve emailed the poor sods over at Tor. Spoiler: it’s probably not what VD wanted me to say. I did ask them to reconsider their relationship with JCW when the current contract ends.

 [18 minutes later, he added this.]
I did say Irene Gallo’s comments were intemperate, and the use of “neo-nazi” wasn’t justified. It was also in a comment to a Facebook post. But JCW’s continuous spewing of homophobia and misogyny is utterly beyond the pale. It’s not just an offhand comment, it is continuous, on his blog, in his writing, and in his interactions with, well, just about anyone. He also hasn’t apologized for anything he said.

The two are not remotely comparable, in my mind.

In other words, he believes that Tor Books should police its various authors’ opinions, but should not hold its employees responsible for direct attacks on the quality of its own books and on the character of its customers. Fascinating.

And George Rape Rape Martin is concerned, deeply concerned, about the wounds that are being inflicted in this, the most savage civil war in the history of science fiction. RapeSquared was so upset this morning that it put him off writing his daily rape scene, which was a pity as he had a real corker in mind involving Sansa Stark, Wun Wun the giant, four dire wolves, a Wildling wight, and Hodor being warged by Bran Stark.

By now, everyone has bruises. And I fear we will all have more by the time this is done. Did you really think fandom was going to lie back and thank you for gaming the Hugo awards and pissing on fifty years of tradition?

A writer of my acquaintance, older and wiser than myself, has told me that this is worst fight he has ever seen, the nastiest and most divisive war in the long history of our field. Worse than the Exclusion Act. Worse than the Cosmic Circle crap. Worse than the Breendoggle, than the Old Wave/ New Wave struggle, than the competing Vietnam War ads. The wounds will take a long time healing… if indeed they ever heal.

Bruises? Healing? I expect a set of twelve silvered SJW skulls for my dinner table by the time this is over. My dear George, I have had Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Toad of Tor taking shots at me for 10 years now. I put up with moronic SJWs telling lies about me for years before I finally bothered to do something about it. You think this is war? We’ve barely finished warming up. It’s only been three months since the Hugo shortlist was announced. It will be another 9 years and 9 months of us taking shots at you before we can even begin to consider calling it even.

That reminds me, I still haven’t seen a single person apologize for falsely accusing me of gaming the awards last year. I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Finally, Tintinaus demonstrates why the SJWs keep miscalculating in such an amusingly inept manner. I can’t decide if they are simply innumerate or if their devotion to The Narrative renders basic mathematics inoperative in the event of a contradiction.

From memory Beale said the reason why he was so late in reading TBP was publishers had stopped sending him review copies. He then went on to point out since his blog gets more traffic than Scalzi’s they were cutting their own throats. Of course he used his site figures for April where most of the traffic was people going to check out his slate post after the nominations announcement.

Most of the traffic? Now it’s true, there was a nice traffic increase in April, from 1,583,104 in March to 1,907,664. It slipped back a bit to 1,737,320 in May, and should be right around there again in June. Meanwhile, Scalzi’s best-ever traffic month was 1,027,644 in May 2012, thanks to numerous sites linking his “Easiest Difficulty Setting” post. I’ve averaged more monthly traffic than Scalzi ever had for 26 straight months now. It’s not even close.

I find it amusing that the SJWs keep looking at #Gamergate, or bot-nets, or anything besides what Occam’s Razor dictates. But their problem is that it’s not just me that they’re facing, it’s the Dread Ilk, the Ilk, the Sad Puppies, the Rabid Puppies, and the Evil Legion of Evil. And, most terrible of all, the Vile Faceless Minions.

Waco II

It looks like something might be more than a little awry in the investigation of the Waco shootings that took place last month:

Four weeks after the deadly May 17th shooting incident outside a Waco Twin Peaks restaurant, more details have come out concerning the incident, but significant questions still remain about the actions taken by law enforcement and the police’s account of what transpired.

Although the national mainstream media has largely moved on from the Waco story, if critics of the police are correct, the incident represents an unprecedented civil rights violation and media cover-up campaign by the Waco authorities.

Police in Waco still have yet to state how many bikers, if any, were killed by the police, or to explain why the police showed up in force at all prior to the meeting on May 17th.

In a statement on Friday, the police said that of 16 officers that were in the parking lot, only three fired a total of 12 shots.  However, the statement still didn’t clarify how many of the bikers were killed by police. Authorities say they have not recieved final autopsy results that would clarify ballistics….

The Morning News piece quotes friends of Kirschner who praise him as a
gentle family man, but also includes a quote from “Lori,” a friend of
Kirschner, who echoed some of the rumors swirling as more doubts are
raised about the police account of the Twin Peaks incident.

In fact, Lori said, the biker community is rife with
reports about witnesses who heard the discharge of lots of high-powered
weaponry after a few initial pop-pop sounds of handguns. The reports
sounded like they came from “muzzled or suppressed high-powered
weapons,” said Lori, though she wasn’t there. The theory is that the
heavy fire came from tactical police officers.

I don’t believe the police version for one very simple reason: police are usually a) trigger-happy, and b) terrible shots. In one incident in Minneapolis, police fired 41 shots at a man in the skyway – which means absolutely no cover at all – and somehow managed to score zero hits.

The key is probably to be found in the statement “of 16 officers that were in the parking lot”. Fine, setting aside one’s skepticism that three police opening fire would only pull the trigger an average of four times each, there were a lot more than 16 police officers on the scene who were not in the parking lot. How many shots did the rest of them fire?

We Are Real People

Tor Books author John Wright repeats the call:

I have received more messages, publicly and privately, from fans who
enjoy and buy my works but who, deeply offended at at least four,
perhaps more, of the ranking officers of my publisher, have told me they
can no longer buy my works.

This is unprecedented, or, I should
say, at least I have never heard of readers disavowing books based not
on the content or author, but the publisher. Some have likewise written to Tor books to express their displeasure at this high handed and unprofessional treatment.

However, the latest slander issued from the enemy is that these readers do not exist.

They
are trying to blank you out of their minds. You are unpersons. The
claim is that the emails and letters sent to Tor expressing the
displeasure of the customer are said to be faked, counterfeit, written
by robots.

As does Peter Grant:

I’m sure you’ve been reading my posts about the Tor debacle over the past days.  It’s time for action, and I’d be very grateful if each of you would please help by sending one e-mail separately to three different addresses tomorrow.

Vox Day came up with the idea.  Note that I’m not one of his ‘Rabid
Puppies’ or ‘minions’.  I’ll simply take allies where I can get them,
thank you very much!  I’m aware that some SJW’s regard him as being in
league with the Devil.  To that I can only make common cause with
Winston Churchill:  “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”  So, Vox, this is my best Churchillian imitation!

As does Tor Books author L. Jagi Lamplighter:

Appalled to see posts suggesting that the emails to Tor—many of which, I am led to understand, are arriving with photos of the reader’s Tor book collections, in some cases, collections worth thousands of dollars—were not legitimate but were sent from automated bots.

Tor Folks:  You may disagree with the Sad/Rabid Puppies, or feel loyalty to your co-workers—but please! Don’t insult our readers by claiming they don’t exist!

Readers:  I realize that, in the age of electronics,this is an unprecedented request, but: if you have a strong opinion that you wish to be heard, it might help if you committed it to physical paper—perhaps along with a printout of your photo of your Tor book collection—and snail mailed it to Tor and Macmillan.

Meanwhile, George Martin demonstrates the truth of the aphorism: “SJWs always lie”:

I have spoken out against name-calling from the first, Brad. It is the
Puppies and their supporters who started it, and who keep dialing it up.
I will concede that you yourself have been mostly civil, but read the
comments in your own blog, or Correia’s, or even on FILE 770, and it is
all venom and epithets.

No, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick Nielsen Hayden started the name-calling back in March 2005. Martin then goes on to do more of what SJWs always do, which, of course, is lie:

The vast majority of customers have no idea about any of this. The
“unhappiness” here is a campaign orchestrated by the odious Mr. Beale,
and once again you Sad Puppies have lined up behind the Rabids. Early in
this debate, I heard a lot of stuff from your side about careers being
threatened and your opponents saying “you will never work in this town
again” and similar crap. Not one instance of that was ever
substantiated. But now we are seeing a deliberate internet campaign to
cost someone their career — and it is coming from VD, with the full
howling support of Puppies of all stripes. No one on “my side” ever threatened anyone’s livelihood or career. Your side is doing just that. In public.

Emphasis added. That’s an absolutely absurd lie. Look at the post below for starters. Or look at this list of victims of the ongoing SJW witch patrol. And even if we limit Martin’s claim to the small world of science fiction publishing, Charles Stross warned me that I’d somehow managed to unwittingly make “a career-limiting move” by writing an opinion column as a nationally syndicated opinion columnist ten years ago. Martin is not telling the truth. Look, we all know that if Irene Gallo had called Tor’s customers “half-savages” or “hymies” or “faggots” instead of “racist, sexist, homophobic neo-Nazis”, she’d have been disappeared that same day. Are some customers less equal than others in the eyes of Tor Books? Are they less valued?

Note that we’ve seen a Nobel laureate and a principal in Florida banished from the commons in just the two weeks since Ms Gallo’s public attack on Tor customers and Tor authors was first brought to Mr. Doherty’s attention. George Martin’s side has been waging war against people’s livelihoods and careers for years, if not decades. And his side knows it. Hence this little warning ten years ago:

“The people who live and work and pitch their tents in this field have long memories. You’ll have to share the same field with them for a long time — decades, maybe — if you want to be in it at all. And you’ve just offended 75% of them? This is Not Clever. You may not need them now, but you have no idea what your circumstances will look like in ten years’ time…. In a corporate environment it’s sometimes termed a career-limiting move. I think you just made a career-limiting move.”
– Charles Stross, March 5, 2005

In any event, the increased hysteria from the other side means that they know the pressure on Tor Books is growing, from above and from below. Their position is totally indefensible and they know it. So have you sent your three emails yet today? If not, why are you still reading this? If you oppose what you’ve been seeing, then it’s time to get out of the stands and get in the game. It’s time to tell Macmillan that you are a real person and your opinion counts.

  1. tom.dohertyATtor.com
  2. andrew.weberATmacmillan.com
  3. rhonda.brownATmacmillan.com 

So much for that theory that there is no other side. Not only has this nonexistent other side, as per Mr. Martin, never done nothing to nobody, but they’re emailing Tor Books and Macmillan too. Because they are also real people who do “not want the community to
reflect the views of Theodore Beale and his rabid puppies.” Of course, they’re missing the central point, which is that it is not the job of anyone at Tor Books to play thought-police and eliminate those views from the community.

      Downfall of a Nobel Laureate

      Sir Tim Hunt and his wife describe how the SJW witch patrol suckered and burned him:

      As jokes go, Sir Tim Hunt’s brief standup routine about women in science last week must rank as one of the worst acts of academic self-harm in history. As he reveals to the Observer, reaction to his remarks about the alleged lachrymose tendencies of female researchers has virtually finished off the 72-year-old Nobel laureate’s career as a senior scientific adviser.

      What he said was wrong, he acknowledges, but the price he and his wife have had to pay for his mistakes has been extreme and unfair. “I have been hung out to dry,” says Hunt.

      His wife, Professor Mary Collins, one of Britain’s most senior immunologists, is similarly indignant. She believes that University College London – where both scientists had posts – has acted in “an utterly unacceptable” way in pressuring both researchers and in failing to support their causes. Certainly the speed of the dispatch of Hunt – who won the 2001 Nobel
      prize in physiology for his work on cell division – from his various
      academic posts is startling….

      “I was told by a senior that Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked – though I was told it would be treated as a low-key affair. Tim duly emailed his resignation when he got home. The university promptly announced his resignation on its website and started tweeting that they had got rid of him. Essentially, they had hung both of us out to dry. They certainly did not treat it as a low-key affair. I got no warning about the announcement and no offer of help, even though I have worked there for nearly 20 years. It has done me lasting damage. What they did was unacceptable.”

      The story appeared in newspapers round the world under headlines that said that Hunt had been sacked by UCL for sexism. Worse was to follow. The European Research Council (ERC) – Hunt served on its science committee – decided to force him to stand down in view of his resignation from UCL….

      Hunt is under no illusions about the consequences. “I am finished,” he
      says. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this
      country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have
      become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have
      not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.”

      Hunt’s crime? He said this: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.”

      I wonder what would have happened if he said the women who worked in his lab were racist neo-Nazis who produced bad-to-reprehensible work?

      Of course, Hunt made two grievous errors. His first error: he apologized when he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Unlike Irene Gallo, there was nothing wrong with what he said. It was a joke. And it was a joke based on the reality of his long experience. Sure, it was probably a foolish one to make in today’s hyperpoliticized environment, but Dr. Hunt presumably thought that his Nobel Prize and his standing in the field of science would be sufficient to protect him. He was wrong. His second error: he resigned. The university couldn’t possibly have fired him for what he said, but the SJWs lied to his wife and convinced her to convince him to make it easy for them.

      Now contrast this incident with the Gallo affair. Irene Gallo neither apologized for her indefensible statements nor recanted them. She has not resigned. And, unlike the unfortunate Dr. Hunt, she has given her employer more than sufficient reason to fire her for cause.

      Locking and loading

      Given the false defense presently being offered by Tor’s senior executives, which is that they are not being contacted by large numbers of unhappy science fiction readers but are instead being spammed by a bot-net at my disposal, their response to a prospective boycott is entirely predictable. If Macmillan does not act on the basis of the considerable evidence it will have acquired by now and we find it necessary to proceed to the boycott that Peter Grant and others have contemplated, Tor’s senior executives will undoubtedly claim that those threatening a boycott are not customers of Tor Books.

      There is, of course, an easy way to anticipate and disprove their expected lies.

      As you can see in the photo to the left, I currently have 38 hardcovers and 15 paperbacks published by Tor Books that retail for a cumulative $1,019.64. Some of them were sent to me by Tor, many of them were bought by me. This does not count any of the Tor ebooks that I have purchased, or any of the many Tor paperbacks I got rid of in a move some years ago, which I recall included at least six Wheel of Time books and a number of Orson Scott Card novels, among others. I figure that I would be wise to not lay claim to have had any books that I cannot prove I presently possess, but I estimate that I have probably spent an additional $500 more on Tor books than I can demonstrate today. As it happens, I have been a Tor Books customer since 1986, when I was still in high school and I bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Edge of Tomorrow from B. Dalton’s. I still have it; you can see it third from the bottom on the right.

      I can’t pretend to be a Tor Books fanboy. In rooting through my collection, I learned that I appear to harbor a very strong predilection for Del Rey, as I have more than 1,000 Del Rey books. But I have probably bought more than 100 books from Tor Books over the years, which should suffice to demonstrate that something happened at some point in time to turn me against the organization. If you look closely at the titles, you will be able to discern that the newest copyright date on any of the books is 2005. I wonder what might have happened in 2005 to turn a loyal customer of 19 years standing against Tor Books and its editors?

      If you happen to own any Tor books, I recommend that you gather them together and take a similar picture. Then add up their total retail value. Go through your Amazon account and list how many Tor ebooks you have purchased, calculate the total retail value, and then add the print and Kindle totals together. And do it now, so that you’ll have everything prepared to preemptively counteract the likely lies of Tor’s SJWs if events proceed in the way that some are anticipating.

      UPDATE: Tor Books author Mary Robinette Kowal tempts fate on Twitter:

      Mary Robinette Kowal
      ‏ @RizziWorld @ClaireRousseau @jimchines @torbooks Fair enough. I do want to be fair here and say that I have inside info. She won’t be fired.
      5:20 PM – 10 Jun 2015

      Mary Robinette Kowal
      ‏ @RizziWorld How about this. If they fire Irene, I will return the advances on my next two books and pull them.
      7:23 AM – 14 Jun 2015

      It would be more efficient

      It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:

      Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.

      CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”

      The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.

      “They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”

      Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”

      Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.

      “A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”

      Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.

      The outrage is not manufactured

      Peter Grant hears from a second Tor employee:

      It appears that there’s immense anger and bitterness among some senior personnel at Tor.  They reportedly believe the current backlash against that company is basically ‘manufactured outrage’, deliberately stirred up by Vox Day (whose name is allegedly an expletive there now).  Some have even asserted that the thousands of e-mails complaining about Irene Gallo’s statement aren’t genuine, but the product of a bot-net, a manufactured wave of pseudo-indignation that has no foundation in reality.  Apparently Macmillan and others involved aren’t so sure about that, but it’s a defense the SJW’s are using with might and main.  It’s also apparently why almost none of us have had any acknowledgment of our complaints, not even a notification that our e-mails have been received.  (Some correspondents who requested confirmation when their e-mails were opened have received it;  others have not.)

      A major cause of the bitterness among the senior SJW’s at Tor is that Macmillan is allegedly taking a much greater role in formulating Tor’s policies and enforcing adherence to them.  The company is said to have a new social media policy that’s been described as ‘Draconian’, and individuals have allegedly been warned that any further violations will be a terminally bad idea, career-wise….

      They’re worried about their own futures.  They say that any serious
      boycott of Tor will have very damaging effects, very quickly, because
      the company’s margins are not good.

      What the people at Tor don’t understand is that this is not merely a backlash of momentary outrage at a few recent actions by Tor’s senior SJWs. This is an expression of righteous fury for the way in which thousands of us have been routinely deprecated, insulted, denigrated, and marginalized by a very small group of individuals who believe they have the right and the duty to thought-police the world of science fiction and banish badthinkers from it.

      They have been the gatekeepers and they have abused their positions in the most shameless and unprofessional of ways. I may have been the chief target of their leader, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, but only because I happened to be a) the most visible, being a nationally syndicated libertarian op/ed columnist, b) the most irritating, being a published science fiction novelist and professional SFWA colleague, and c) the most stubborn. They despised conservatives and Republicans who don’t publish science fiction novels every bit as much as they despised me.

      But none of those people ever had a means of striking back at the people at Tor Books who were raining contempt on them at every given opportunity before. All I have done is provide tens of thousands of people with an opportunity to hit back at the very small number of individuals they know to hate and despise them. The outrage is not manufactured, it is merely directed. I can’t make people angry at Tor Books because they already are.

      So, now it is time to demonstrate that we are not bots. Now it is time to let Macmillan know that we truly exist and we do NOT approve of the senior SJWs at Tor Books who have been publicly attacking us for more than a decade.

      It is time to prove to Macmillan that the senior SJWs at Tor are lying to them by sending ONE email apiece to the following people on MONDAY morning. (Emphasis added as a result of already seeing emails in my inbox.) Send the emails separately, do not CC them or send out one email to the three email addresses at the same time. The point is to make it clear that you are NOT a bot, you are a human being, and therefore the people at Tor Books are lying to their superiors at Macmillan.

      1. tom.dohertyATtor.com
      2. andrew.weberATmacmillan.com
      3. rhonda.brownATmacmillan.com

      The three emails should be short, straightforward, polite, and respectful. It should have I AM A REAL PERSON in the subject, CC voxdayATgmail.com, and address the following points:

      • I am a real person and not a bot.
      • I do not approve of the behavior of the senior people at Tor Books, specifically Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, and Irene Gallo.
      • I am requesting you to require Irene Gallo to resign from her positions at Tor Books and Tor.com as a consequence of her egregiously unprofessional public attack on science fiction readers and writers.
      • I request a response to confirm that my email has been received and read.

      Something to that effect, anyway. There is no need to mention any possibility of a boycott, tell them how many books you buy in a year, or anything else. The people at Macmillan are smart, they are professional, and they know what is at stake. What they do not know is something we are going to have to demonstrate to them: SJWs always lie.

      There is no bot-net. No one is spamming them. The wave of indignation is not manufactured and the indignation is not pseudo. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the others are lying to them. What I would encourage the executives at Macmillan to ask themselves are these two questions:

      1. WHY has Vox Day deliberately taken advantage of this mass hostility towards the senior people at Tor Books? 
      2. WHO has put Macmillan in this situation?

      Am I a complete lunatic who, after 19 years of being an unassuming customer of Tor Books, suddenly developed an irrational hatred for Tom Doherty, a man who is by all accounts a very nice and decent guy? Or is absolutely everything I have said completely true and readily verifiable, and I have been the subject of unprovoked, unprofessional, ideologically-driven public attacks by Tor’s senior employees for more than ten years?

      Why not talk to the people at Pocket Books, at Simon & Schuster, at Random House, at Regnery, at BenBella Books, at Thomas Nelson, and at WND Books who know me? Ask them if they have ever had any problem whatsoever with me. Ask them if I have ever been less than entirely professional in my relations with them. And then ask yourselves why I am so uniquely and implacably hostile to a single publishing house with which I have never had any professional contact, to which I have never so much as submitted a single short story.

      And then I would also encourage the executives at Macmillan to ask themselves why thousands of people are so ready and willing to be stirred up into action against Tor Books and not against DAW, Del Rey, Orbit, Gollancz, Pocket Books, Random House, Golden Gryphon, or any other publishing house in the genre. What is it about Tor Books that causes so many people to regard it as an enemy?

      I’ll give them a hint. The answer starts with “P”.

      Unequally gifted

      It’s a real mystery. What a shame that the teachers in Sarasota and Manatee Counties are so racist:

      Only one in 50 black students and one in 15 Hispanic students are identified as gifted, compared with about one in seven white students. Overall, Sarasota County has the fourth-lowest rate of black students identified as gifted in the state, behind the less populated Martin, St. Johns and Wakulla counties.

      The picture is similar in Manatee County, where about one in 12 white students are singled out as gifted, compared with one of every 42 black students and one in 32 Hispanic students.

      Perhaps they should consider taking action to affirm that black students and Hispanic students are every bit as gifted as white students. Surely assigning more black and Hispanic students to the gifted courses will prove that those students are every bit as capable of excelling in those courses as the white students who test into them.

      I mean, there can’t possibly be any other explanation than teacher racism for this otherwise inexplicable racial gap.

      Wait, I have a better idea! Why not quiz the gifted white students to determine how many of them are transracial. After all, we know that 10 percent of all people are transracial, so correcting for transrace should go a long way towards addressing this dreadful inequality.

      Phil Sandifer explains the PhD lottery

      And why it is best avoided. Let it not be said that the man has never written anything sensible:

      At the end of my last class of the semester, one of my best students – one who, out of some tragically misguided instinct, actually took a class with me a second time because he enjoyed it – came up to tell me that he’d had a good semester but didn’t think he was going to re-enroll next semester. I asked why, and he explained that he had a job lined up in the family business and just couldn’t justify the loans.

      Years of defending academia and the value of a college education reared up inside of me, ready to make an impassioned speech. I wanted to tell him not to. And… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Because he was right. I could not in good conscience tell one of my best students that it was worth the loans. And in hindsight, that was the moment I decided I was well and truly done with academia.

      I had been going to take one last stab at the job market this fall. With the Flood book done and maybe one or two more articles in process, and maybe even a book deal on an edited version of my dissertation. Just to answer the question, one last time, of whether I could make it in academia.

      Which is, as it happens, terribly silly. Academia is not a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, in which the grand prize – a tenure track position – is dangled over the heads of everybody so that we agree to work for the appalling wages that adjunct faculty get…. Meanwhile, the odds on tenure track appointments are astonishingly grim. It’s not unusual for a job to get five hundred applicants. There were, last year, maybe two dozen jobs in my field.

      This lack of employability also tends to explain why educated SJWs have so much time to comment so prolifically at File 770 and elsewhere.

      I find it very interesting that both Dr. Sandifer and I have reached precisely the same conclusion about higher education, despite our vastly different perspectives. Then again, we probably have very different ideas about the solution, as his likely involves increasing the demand whereas mine would involve eliminating the larger portion of the supply.

      In any case, the best way to be done with academia is to avoid starting with it unless it is necessary for your job.