Category: Uncategorized

THE STARS CAME BACK

Castalia House has been receiving an increasing number of submissions, so I didn’t think anything of it when Rolf Nelson sent me a copy of The Stars Came Back. He said that it had been self-published for several months, which wasn’t necessarily a problem, (although we tend to favor unpublished submissions), and provided a link to the Amazon site as well. I had a quick look at the book, as is my custom before deciding to which of our ten crack Readers I would send it; the First Line of Defense is fairly ruthless in their rejections of anything they believe does not fit the model. And my first thought was “what the hell is this?” This was apparently not the first time such a thought had been inspired by the book, for as it turned out, as all three Readers immediately came back to me expressing precisely the same sentiment before they’d really even started it.

One Reader threw up his hands and said he simply couldn’t deal with the script-style format. Another one read it and said that he loved the story and would recommend acceptance if it was rewritten in conventional format. The third, and I quote, said: “this story is like gold” and urged immediate acceptance as is.

Well, that’s tremendously helpful…. But it did indicate a closer look into the matter. So I went to Amazon to read through the… 55+ customer reviews? Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry has been selling very well and has only 31 reviews to date. Then I had the chance to read a bit more myself and the reason for the number of reviews began to make sense. Let’s just say that if Firefly still holds a warm place in your heart, you will very much enjoy Mr. Nelson’s work. Not that it is an imitation; it is not. But it hits a similar set of chords, only in a more intelligent manner.

Then it struck me: if so many people were enthusiastically reading this book despite its unusual format and a cover that tended to suggest “this book is self-published”, then we were obviously looking at a considerable story-telling talent. And at the end of the day, that is exactly what Castalia House wants in its novelists. So, I promptly called Mr. Nelson and offered him a contract, which he signed after consultation with his lawyer. As I mentioned in a previous post on Brad Torgersen’s paean to Baen, we look at Baen as an admirable model to follow and we are as interested in helping talented new authors like Mr. Nelson develop their talent as we are in publishing established authors like Mr. John C. Wright, who are already at the top of both their game and the SF genre.

Consider some of the reviews from those who have read The Stars Came Back:

  • Wow. It took about 5 pages to get used to the screenplay format. After
    that, the format really added to the mental images that the dialogue
    creates. The story is fast paced and physics used are consistent. By
    that I mean the physical laws the author imagines work the same way each
    time. That consistency definitely helps the storyline. Several of the
    other raters compare this to works by John Ringo, I would agree and
    probably add Larry Correia as well. Not only is The Stars Came Back
    enjoyable it is also thought provoking. 
  •  Without a doubt, the best read I have had in many a month – and I
    average four novels per week. I was deeply engrossed in this novel and
    was presently surprised by the content, the plot, and the editing. 
  •  The plot in this tale doesn’t just thicken, it twists through about
    seven different dimensions, but maintains a most compelling theme. In
    this imagined world, the attributes of humans that lead to the most
    success are exactly as one would hope would work in OUR world – honesty,
    independence, perseverance, reliability, morality. The protagonist
    isn’t a perfect person, and knows it, but strives to do right by those
    whose lives he touches, and to avoid having wrong done to him.
  •  I can’t say enough good things about this story. Excellent plot;
    interesting, plausible characters; great pacing and storyline
    development; and just fistfuls of nods to Star Wars, Star Trek,
    Firefly/Serenity, the Bolo series (and Hammer’s Slammers), Lovecraft
    mythos (kind of tangentially, but still there), The Forever War, and
    probably several other fictional sci-fi universes as well.
  •  The Stars Came Back is a good foray into the literary world. Lots of
    shades of Heinlein and Weber, and a dose of Firefly mixed with
    McCaffrey’s The Ship That Sang.

So, I would encourage you to pick up a copy and see for yourself why we were so enthusiastic about Mr. Nelson’s first book. It is only $3.99 for 589 pages of pure science fiction entertainment.

The curse of the Youtube song

Actually, according to Zerohedge, the number of banker suicides is now 11:

The financial world has been rattled by a rash of apparent suicides, with some of the best and brightest among the finance workers who have taken their lives since the start of the year. A majority of the eight suicides of 2014 have been very public demonstrations, which has suicide-prevention experts puzzled.

“Jumping is much less common as a method for suicide in general, so I am struck by the number that have occurred in recent months in this industry,” said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Perhaps it is because they are not suicides. I was somewhat dubious about the sudden rash of banker deaths, particularly after hearing about the guy who tortured himself with a nail gun. And the 11 deaths doesn’t include Jeffrey Corzine. Bankers have stolen homes and deposits from hundreds of thousands of people and ruined thousands of lives. It seems highly improbable that all of those people are now in a perfect state of Zen equilibrium and have no interest in seeking revenge.

Same as he ever was

You may recall that I previously demonstrated that John Scalzi’s claim to have 50,000 daily readers was a 12x exaggeration of his actual daily blog readership in 2013, which was 20,600 daily pageviews and 4,085 daily readers. As it turns out, this significant exaggeration of his site traffic and his influence was nothing new.  Consider this post from July 2009, in which he arrogantly claimed that he was more influential than the three major SF publications, Analog, Asimov’s, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, combined.

Brad Torgersen: “Unless the work you’re writing is not the sort that fits any of the
Big Three, why would you allow the format and method of submission to
stop you from sending to the three markets still considered to be the
Top Dogs in short F and SF fiction?”

John Scalzi: “Because it would cost me money to buy a printer, paper and ink, the
rate they pay is shite, and I can reach more people on my Web site in a
day than any two of them can in a month.”

 In July 2009, Whatever had 300,487 monthly pageviews, or 9,613 per day. That meant he had about 1,940 daily readers. In 2009, Analog’s monthly circulation was 25,418 and Asimov’s was 16,696. It will probably not escape the mathematically literate observer’s attention that 42,114 is more than 1,940. So, five years ago, he was exaggerating his site traffic by a factor of 21.7. His absurd 2013 claims are actually less exaggerated than his previous claims.

And, of course, he was aggressively policing his potential critics even then.

Just as a general note, as I’ve told Brad to move on from this thread, directing comments to him specifically will be frustrating for him, and will not get actual responses.

Those who have recently lost respect for John Scalzi were simply not paying sufficient attention to his antics before. He’s precisely the same narcissistic con man that he’s always been, the only difference is that now he is less able to successfully control the narrative and spin a self-serving web of deceit because an increasing number of people in the SF/F world are aware of the facts and are able to see through his incessantly fraudulent activity.

As Bernie Madoff learned, eventually people figure out the con. Mr. Scalzi may not yet have come to terms with the fact that the jig is up yet, but sooner or later, he will have to do so.

“WHEN YOU SEE FRAUD, SHOUT FRAUD.”
– Nassem Talib

Epic Gamma Fail

It’s always amusing to be lectured on feminist dogma by white-knighting gamma males desperate for female approval. A brief background:

  1. I wrote an Alpha Game post on the widely reported fact that most women who obtain computer science degrees don’t end up sticking with programming very long. I attributed this to the same reason women don’t write much hard science fiction; they are disinclined to put in the hard work required because they don’t enjoy it and it’s not a field where the usual trick of playing the “I’m just a little girl” card doesn’t get the men to do their work for them.
  2. A commenter added: “I think too many of these girls who get drafted in under the “MOAR
    GIRLS!” banner never see real work, then bail when they encounter it.
    Who will be at a technical conference debating the fine points of
    something technical, or the fine points of a pun, and who will be taking
    selfies in a mirror with a sign like “I am doing programming!”?
  3. Enter White Knight #1, who promptly took it to Twitter, encouraging male programmers to take pictures of themselves doing programming and posting them to Twitter with the hashtag #iamdoingprogramming.
  4. The gammas, sending the possibility of attracting some rare female attention, promptly committed the aforementioned epic gamma fail.
  5. One Ted Mielczarek ‏promptly declared the need for a Pink Programming Police. “We need some sort of HN-terrible-comment database that we can use as a “do not hire” blacklist.” He also threatened to never hire me. Oh, well, maybe I can find a job at Tor….

Apparently people with decades of experience in software development are simply supposed to ignore everything they have seen and heard while embracing the GIRLZ CAN 2 CODE movement. I have a better idea. Let’s take a scientific approach and simply mandate female employment on all mission-critical financial programming projects from now until the financial system collapses.

We know mass default and credit contraction is necessary to clear the system, so we may as well kill two birds with one stone.

On the knife’s edge

In belatedly going over the Q4 2013 Z1 report, I was a little surprised to see that total credit market debt picked up a bit, increasing $909 billion in the fourth quarter alone. At 1.57 percent, that’s still not enough to keep pace with the historical quarterly advance of 2.36 percent, so it’s still disinflation mode, but it is the third-highest quarterly credit growth seen since credit disinflation began in Q1-2008.

However, the Household sector remains flat and the State and Local Government sector has been deflating the last three quarters in a row and seven of the last eight. This means that the private economy is still contracting because State and Local is restricted by tax revenues. Nearly all the credit growth is taking place in the Corporate and Federal sectors.

In fact, of the $7,718.7 in credit growth since Z1 peaked and began deflating in Q1 2009, $7,078.7 is Federal borrowing. In other words, the private economy is right on the knife edge of debt-deflation and has been so for the last five years despite the vast inflationary efforts by the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve.

As for the credit demand gap, at $29.4 trillion, it has now reached nearly 50 percent of Z1. That is why money printing to fill the gap is simply not an option and any attempt to do so will necessarily go right to hyperinflation and failure.

SFF Net separates from SFWA

This is interesting news in light of the number of professional writers who have quietly been leaving SFWA:

Steven Gould, President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Jeffry Dwight, President of Greyware Automation Products, Inc. announced that they are severing the formal ties between the writer’s organization and the legacy SFWA discussion discussion boards still hosted at SFF Net (a Greyware service).

Gould said, “SFF Net was the host of SFWA’s online home for many years. We are incredibly grateful for the years of support from Jeffry and his team. When SFWA moved over to managing its own domain at sfwa.org in 2009, the organization continued to maintain the old discussion boards for a transition period. The SFWA board of directors were discussing the appropriate time to separate when I received Jeffry’s email on the same subject.”

Dwight said, “SFF Net initiated this separation. We have no immediate plans to shut off the private.sfwa hierarchy, nor to remove access from those who already have it. SFF Net will continue to offer discussion areas to professional writers, but based on each individual’s writing credentials rather than membership in SFWA or any similar groups. Our goal is for the transition from sff.private.sfwa to sff.private.pro to be both gradual and gentle, so that no one is disenfranchised.

It’s a smart move by SFF Net. Being tied to SFWA prevented non-SFWA writers like me and many others from participating on SFF Net’s formerly active pro writing forums. And many of the most experienced writers who were already there simply never migrated to the SFWA forums, which were mostly infested by the activist junior members who don’t actually write or publish much science fiction.

It won’t be surprising if within six months, there are two- or three-times as many pro writers active at SFF Net than there are in the SFWA forums. Even though their individual credential requirements will probably be more stringent as well. And thus SFWA’s slide into further irrelevance begins….

UPDATE: This book feature from SFWA.org says it all about the modern SFWA. It’s now the Romance Writers of America’s little league.

FEATURED BOOK: “Post-apocalyptic biopunk romance from the RWA RITA Award nominated author of GHOST PLANET. Coming from Tor in April 2014.

The end of the free love era

As socionomics predicts, with economic contraction comes war… and disease:

The CDC has issued a report detailing its findings in attempting to trace the increasing difficulty in treating gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that can cause severe discomfort, serious medical problems (such as sterility) for both genders and in very rare cases, death.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial disease that has been around for thousands of years, if not longer, plaguing human populations. In more recent times, it’s had to evolve to survive as humans learned to treat it using penicillin and other antibacterial agents. Over the past thirty years in particular, gonorrhea has evolved to the point that there are very few treatments left (ceftriaxone along with either azithromycin or doxycycline) and now, it looks like its poised to get the best of those as well, which will mean those who contract the disease in the very near future will find that doctors have no way to cure them…. The overriding conclusion of the researchers is that the world is now sitting on the precipice of losing the ability to fight a major bacterial infection.

AIDS was the warning and the medical and political establishments completely failed in their responsibilities in the face of the gay community acting up. One sincerely hopes they will do better the next time around. Because the next time does not appear to be very far off.

The Baen Brigade fires back

Another Baen author responds to John Scalzi’s attack on Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf:

Recently, Toni Weisskopf the publisher at Baen Books wrote a guest post at Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog, a re-post of an essay she posted on Baen’s Bar, a forum that requires registration so Sarah’s repost is the public link. 

This post has had a lot of responses ranging from acclaim to hate. That means that in some sense, it’s important.  IMHO, the most interesting response was by John Scalzi in his blog. It’s that post I want to try to comment on.  I choose to do it here rather than in the comments there because there’s a zillion comments on it already, and I’m writing to my friends, not his readers.

Scalzi summarizes Toni’s post as follows:

 “Once upon a time all the fractious lands of science fiction fandom were joined together, and worshiped at the altar of Heinlein. But in these fallen times, lo do many refuse to worship Heinlein, preferring instead their false idols and evil ways.”

Let me make myself perfectly clear. Of all the styles of argument that you can engage in, this sort of straw man argument pisses me off.  It offends me. It makes me want to stand up and scream. The problem is, John’s failed both at the art of summary and at intellectual honesty.  He’s set up a target that he claims is Toni’s work, and then shoots at it, but if you’re going to try to tear apart a writer’s work, it’s important to actually tear apart what they wrote.  John didn’t do that.  He exclusively comments, at length on his summary, not on what Toni wrote, never citing her words or thoughts. This is unjust and unfair.

This is all very well and good, but I think Mr. Boatright is forgetting something VERY important. You see, Mr. Scalzi possesses a BACHELOR’S DEGREE in PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE from THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. You can’t front on that! In the meantime, another Baen author, Brad Torgersen, explains why he went with Baen instead of certain other publishers who have been in the news of late for not bothering to talk to their authors for periods exceeding one year and whose senior editors are chiefly known for sexually harassing women or describing themselves as racists on LiveJournal.

One of the things I found most unsettling about the novel publishing landscape were the numerous first-person accounts I was getting, from authors not too much further down the tracks from myself, about how it was a feast or famine business. You either hit home runs immediately, or you got dumped. It didn’t seem to matter who you published with, if you couldn’t show a substantial profit for the publisher, and do it very quickly, you were done. Likewise, if you were on the midlist and you weren’t showing bottom-line numbers indicating you were trending towards bestseller status, you were done. And not always explicitly either. Often people knew they were dumped simply because responsiveness from editors dropped to little or nothing, and contracts which had been previously promised, never showed up. There was no door being slammed, rather the dumping was done quietly. Sort of like having your utilities turned off at the street.

There was one publisher, however, who was getting consistently good marks: Baen. Authors — even new authors — were reporting that this publisher didn’t expect immediate grand slams. Instead, this publisher would work with new authors over time to grow and develop an audience. Not having landslide sales your first time out of the gate was not going to ruin you. Likewise, this publisher had a very respectable and healthy midlist, while also having very good brand label loyalty among readers. The latter being rare in an era when almost all readers are either loyal to a specific author, or loyal to a specific series and/or franchise. Thus it would be easier (for me as a new guy) to develop an audience, and I wouldn’t necessarily be doomed if I wasn’t cracking the top ten on the New York Times list with each subsequent book. There was the promise of breathing room!

I certainly hope that in the future Castalia’s authors will have similar cause to speak so well of us. I consider Baen to be a model for success in the new era of publishing. And, do you know, I’m beginning to suspect that the Baen Brigade is not fooled by Mr. Scalzi’s patented two-step where first he punches someone in the mouth, then steps back, smiles, and pretends to be best friends with them. He’s just joshing with his very good pal Miss Weisskopf, just like he and good buddy John Ringo were only kidding around with each other about his Participation Hugo.

Sorry, Johnny, but you picked your side and everyone knows it. Now everyone can see the very angry little lefty underneath the clown makeup.

UPDATE: Larry Correia piles on, which if you know anything about Larry, is saying something:

Basically, I love my publishing house. I know a lot of other writers, and I know somebody with just about
every publishing house out there. Hang out with a bunch of writers long
enough and you’ll get to hear them gripe about their publishers and
their editors. And if they’re not a star or a golden boy with their
publisher, then you’ll really get to hear them bitch and vent.  After
five years of this stuff I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories, yet I’m
unable to commiserate with them because luckily for me, my editors
don’t suck, and I haven’t ever felt like my publisher is trying to screw
me over.

Editing complaints are the best. I don’t know how many times I’ve
heard stories, especially from the mid listers at one of the big houses
about how they’ve turned in a book and waited 6 months, 9 months, or a
YEAR to get any editorial feedback. Hell, at that point I’ve already
written another novel and have forgotten the prior one. Then when the
feedback comes back it is “Hey, throw away this half of the book and
write something entirely different, oh, and I need that by Thursday.”
Sorry. Can’t commiserate with you, buddy….
Let me give you an example of what doing business with Baen is like. When I first started out I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as far as business, and like I said, no agent to guide me (got rejected by pretty much all of them, which is funny because I’m betting they’d love to be getting 15% of this action now!) so when I signed my first contract, I gave over things like dramatic rights (movies and TV), audiobooks, and foreign rights to Baen. At that point in my career, I was just happy that anybody was reading my stuff at all, and I couldn’t imagine that people would want to listen to it or read it in other languages.

So then I got approached by my first movie producer. Wow. Didn’t see that coming. Uh oh, my contract turned all that over to my publishing house… The contract doesn’t specify percentage details for that kind of thing. Now, at this point many publishers would have just screwed me over. Nope. One phone call to Toni, she sticks Baen’s Hollywood agent onto it, we talk, and boom, no problem. I’m then getting an extremely large percent of any of that sort of thing. For the last three years I’ve been collecting option money.

POLL: Who is the Greatest Living SF Writer?

  1. Larry Niven, 222 votes, 21 percent
  2. Neal Stephenson, 193 votes, 18 percent
  3. Jerry Pournelle, 172 votes, 16 percent
  4. Orson Scott Card, 167 votes, 16 percent
  5. Gene Wolfe, 92 votes, 9 percent
  6. John C. Wright, 63 votes, 6 percent
  7. Robert Silverberg, 61 votes, 6 percent
  8. Lois McMaster Bujold, 60 votes, 6 percent
  9. China Mieville, 32 votes, 3 percent
  10. Michael Flynn, 12 votes, 1 percent

1,075 votes total. Larry Niven is the winner.

Congratulations to Larry Niven, who was voted the Greatest Living SF Writer by more than half as many people who vote for the Hugo awards and more than vote for the Nebulas. I’m a little shocked that China Mieville garnered so few votes, as I thought he was a fairly serious candidate; in retrospect, William Gibson should have been on the list rather than Michael Flynn.

I was somewhat bewildered by some of the writers suggested by people who missed out on the original discussion. David Weber? He is certainly a best-selling author and his books are indubitably entertaining but greatness is not measured in Mary Sues. Connie Willis? Well, she’s won a lot of awards, but literally zero people even brought her up in the nominations. Kim Stanley Robinson? A one-trick pony and the trick grew old several books ago, to say nothing of the fact that no one even mentioned him.

It was a surprising credible showing by Lois McMaster Bujold and somewhat disappointing by Robert Silverberg. I think Silverberg and Wolfe are probably not read as much by my generation and the following one. Card and Wright were about where I expected them to be; I wouldn’t be surprised if they switched places in another ten years. And it showed that Neal Stephenson is the best of the coming generation of SF elders.

Portrait of a Breakdown

The famous stalker of Asian women and rescuer of woodland animals appears to be going off the deep end. In addition to revealing his latest identity, “Nikola” of the copious comments on the Greatest SF Writer poll, he posted this on his blog:

Nina asked if anyone’s ever gotten pissy about being drawn and I suggested people who do probably don’t notice they’re being drawn and just assume they’re being stared at and I blamed people like the regulars on Vox Popoli and Alpha Game Plan for basically trying to sexually harass their way into de facto sex segregation. I should have explained the context better, in which Vox Day has been stalking and harassing people who write unfavorable reviews of his novels.

That would have been an amusing conversation to witness. It’s certainly ironic to see “Andrew Marston”, one of the most notorious trolls on the Internet, accusing anyone else of stalking and harassing people. But this is what they call “psychological projection”, I suppose. It is eminently clear that the guy is mentally unhinged. Consider:

Why I Want To Punch Matthew Bellamy.

This is why: Vox Day likes Muse. I once said I knew a few nice Muse fans. Here’s the thing, Vox Day is such a racist, misogynist pompous stuck-up giant twerp blogger scumbag fuckface dickhead asshole that it negates the few cool Muse fans out there.

That’s my superpower, actually. He has unmasked me: I am Divide by Zero, capable of negation at will. I find the experience of watching Marston to be fascinating; it’s rather like watching one of Maupassant’s protagonists as he disintegrates. It won’t surprise me if this guy eventually attacks one of the Asian women with whom he is even more obsessed than he is with me and “the Popoli”.

The more I see, the more I think the blogosphere has gotten gradually worse. Listen, Vox wrote a post defending (not quite advocating, I don’t think the blogosphere has sunk that low yet) sex trafficking. And one of the Popoli said some things but they’re more full of shit than Gene Belcher on Super Bowel Sunday. For one, Serena isn’t about me, it’s about some guy named Paul Trowe. The other thing she said was just an indecipherable, incoherent mess. Get over yourself, you’re not that important. 

(Nod, smile, back away slowly, one hand on the concealed .357 Ruger….)