Category: Uncategorized

The abolition of America

Norway is already showing signs of following Switzerland’s lead to shut down the economic and societal castastrophe of mass immigration.

Mazyar Keshvari, immigration policy spokesman for the
anti-immigration Progress Party, told the VG newspaper that he believed
Norway should follow Switzerland’s example. “Norway should also have a referendum on immigration,” he said. “I am
quite sure that there is majority support for tightening immigration
across Norway’s political parties. The polls show that.”

No doubt this is one reason why. It simply IS NOT TRUE that mass immigration is good for the economy. It is an absolute lie.

The report, Sustainable Immigration, was put together by some of the party’s most vehemently anti-Islamic and anti-immigration figures, such as deputy leader Per Sandberg, and Oslo politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde. It cites figures that show that each non-Western immigrant costs the equivalent of 42 years of an average Norwegian’s tax payments, and calls for immigration from non-Western countries to be sharply reduced from from close to 20,000 a year to about 1,500 a year.

Meanwhile, the most retarded “economist” on the planet, an evil little man who makes Paul Krugman look like a paragon of coherency and decency, managed to further embarrass himself in response to the Swiss vote:

The Swiss just passed a referendum to restrict immigration from the EU.  Tyler thinks this shows that open borders is a hopeless cause.  When immigration gets too high, public opinion naturally turns against immigration.

“In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.”

But there’s a major problem with Tyler’s story: Swiss anti-immigration voting was highest in the places with the least immigrants!  This is no fluke.  In the U.S., anti-immigration sentiment is highest in the states with the least immigration – even if you assume that 100% of immigrants are pro-immigration.

The natural inference to draw, then, is the opposite of Tyler’s: The main hurdle to further immigration is insufficient immigration.  If countries could just get over the hump of status quo bias, anti-immigration attitudes would become as socially unacceptable as domestic racism.  Instead of coddling nativism with gradualism, we can, should, and must peacefully destroy nativism with abolitionism.

This is Hitlerian logic and it makes clear the evil objectives of the pro-immigrationists like Caplan. Switzerland already has a non-native born population pushing 30 percent, most of which lives around Zurich or in the French-speaking cantons. It is those previously naturalized immigrants, combined with the international business class, that supported open immigration, just as a pair of Jewish and Irish third-generation immigrants were primarily responsible for pushing the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act that demolished the USA’s demographics and made the dissolution of the union inevitable.

It’s the Denny Green syndrome writ large. Just as women always want to hire more women and blacks always want to bring in more blacks, immigrants always want to bring in more immigrants to make themselves feel more at home. I see this all the time, in fact, I’m one of the very few expats who doesn’t primarily socialize with people from my home country.

The voting phenomenon Caplan is observing is simply the national equivalent of “white flight”, and what he is advocating is nothing less than the invasion and demographic destruction of European nations.

Facebook fraud



How shocking that a thief like Zuckerberg would have built a massively fraudulent empire that rests on third worlders impersonating first worlders utilizing real products. If 1999 was tragedy, 2014 is pure financial farce.

The entire “social media” edifice is a giant variant on a Ponzi scheme. It’s Madoff economics.

SFWA petition

Well, they really can’t say I didn’t warn them…. I added my name to the petition as “Vox Day – Former life member of SFWA” but I assume they won’t want to add it. I find this more than a little amusing, considering that none of them other than Brad Torgersen were willing to speak out when the SFWA President, ex-President, and Board targeted me for purging. As I said at the time, there was never any chance that the shambling shoggoths of Pink SF were ever going to stop with me.

In light of the preceding correspondence we, the undersigned, object to the new SFWA requirements for editor of the SFWA Bulletin, as set forth on the SFWA website. Specifically, we have the following objections:

A “review board” implies a group of persons, as yet unnamed, who can veto content submitted by members if the board deems it “offensive” to a sub-group of SFWA. This opens the door to censorship of opinions that do not jibe with the personal beliefs of those on the review board, whereas SFWA should be open to the airing of many varieties of opinions, especially on such sensitive subjects as sexism, racism, religion, and politics.

The proposed requirements are so vague that they leave many critical questions unaddressed. Several among them: Given that it is our strong belief that there should be no “advisory” or “review” board, who would hypothetically sit on this board and how would they be chosen? Would advertising copy (book or magazine covers) be subject to review as well, especially in the high dollar advertising rates the Bulletin charges for its special Nebula issue?

The editor of the Bulletin should have discretion over its contents; that is why he or she is chosen as editor. There should be no advisory or review board. In view of these considerations, we ask that SFWA (1) withdraw this slate of requirements for the Bulletin and (2) open a discussion where all viewpoints can be considered on this matter before drafting any further sets of guidelines for SFWA publications.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the issue here is most decidedly not one of Left vs. Right. The only issue here is a First Amendment issue that both those on the political Left and Right should without hesitation embrace as one. What may happen to the Bulletin and SFWA as a viable organization if the current SFWA President has his way is unthinkable, especially as an organization of writers.

One thing the Bulletin should do is provide an outlet (its Letters column) for anyone to express his like or dislike with anything printed within its pages. This is the true essence of free speech. “Political correctness is tyranny with manners.― Charlton Heston, (actor, early civil rights activist who marched with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.)

It is our hope hope others will add their names to this call for SFWA President Steven Gould to kill any proposed advisory board or any other method designed to censor or infringe on any SFWA member their First Amendment right to freedom of speech in the pages of the SFWA Bulletin. Active or Associate SFWA members wishing to support this effort may send email directly to SFWA President Steven Gould at: president@sfwa.org.

Active or Associate SFWA members wishing to add their names to this petition may do so by sending an email to Dave Truesdale at: tangent.dt1@gmail.com. Signatories will be added to the list below.

Signed by
Cyd Athens
Gregory Benford– Nebula winner
David Brin– Nebula winner, Past SFWA Secretary
Amy Sterling Casil
C. J. Cherryh
Lillian Csernica
Jack Dann– Nebula winner, former Bulletin Managing & Asst. Editor, past memberof the Publicity Bureau, Nebula Rules Committee, and Grievance Committee; current member of the Anthology Committee
Harlan Ellison– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master, past SFWA V.P.
Sheila Finch– Nebula winner, past SFWA V.P, and Western Regional Director
David Gerrold– Nebula winner
Nancy Kress– Nebula winner
Mercedes Lackey
Dr. Paul Levinson– Past SFWA President
Barry N. Malzberg– Five time Nebula finalist, appearances in six of the annual Nebula volumes, editor of the Bulletin in 1969, Eastern Regional Director for two years in the late 70s and Grievance Committee 1980-1984.
Jack McDevitt– Nebula winner
Larry Niven– Nebula winner
Dr. Jerry Pournelle– Past SFWA President
Mike Resnick– Nebula winner, past SFWA ConAlert (8 yrs.) and Anthology Chairman (6 yrs.)
Chuck Rothman– Past SFWA Treasurer
Susan Shwartz– Five-time Nebula nominee, member of Nebula Jury (2 years); on
committee exploring reinstatement of film Nebula
Robert Silverberg– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master, Past SFWA President
Norman Spinrad– Past SFWA President (twice)
Allen Steele– Three time Nebula nominee, Past Eastern Regional Director
Brad R. Torgersen– Nebula nominee
Harry Turtledove– Double Nebula nominee, Past SFWA Treasurer
Gene Wolfe– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master

Of course, the idea that the SFWA has any commitment whatsoever to free speech after purging a Life Member of Color for a Twitter link to a perfectly reasonable blog post that gave its SWPL-heavy membership the fainting fits is risible, to say the least.

Forthcoming

I have not forgotten that I said there would be fewer Castalia House announcements here and more over there, but this one is simply too big to resist sharing with the Dread Ilk. Castalia House is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a Tom Kratman novella entitled Big Boys Don’t Cry, which is scheduled for release on 1 March 2014 and will be available in Kindle and epub format for $2.99.

If you are a Kratman fan and a native speaker of a non-English language, we will be very interested to hear from you and talk to you about translating Mr. Kratman’s work and thereby terrorizing the non-English speaking peoples of the Earth as well. I expect you will understand that the novella contains the occasional difference of opinion, settled, as one might anticipate, in the most civilized and peaceable of manners.

An irrationality of atheists

I find it encouraging that more of the concepts I introduced in TIA six years ago, like the argument that religion does not cause war and the hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of neurological abnormality, have gradually percolated into the mainstream discourse. In this New York Times article, the philosopher Gary Gutting interviews Alvin Platinga:

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

I’ll have to think more about that argument before I accept that it holds any water. But I was disappointed that Platinga readily ceded so much ground on “the so-called problem of evil”. He wrote: “The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and
maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some
strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given
the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is
fairly low.”

However, the observable existence of evil is not even the smallest problem for the varient of theism that is Christianity. Indeed, as I have pointed out repeatedly, the existence of real and material evil is an absolute prerequisite for Christianity.

Not bad for week one

Perhaps it’s not the biggest bestseller list to top, but one can’t help but regard this as an encouraging start to Castalia House’s entry into multilingual e-publishing. We may be small, but we’re already massive in Portugal. How do we profit from these bestselling free ebooks? The answer is simple. Volume.

Europe’s tide turns

Switzerland rejects the EU-imposed free movement of peoples required by Shengen:

Voters in Switzerland have
narrowly approved a rightwing proposal to curb immigration. It imposes
limits on the number of foreigners allowed in and may signal an end to
the country’s free movement accord with the European Union. The initiative was approved by just 50.3% of the votes and was passed by a majority of cantons.

The
move by the Swiss People’s Party – known for its anti-foreigner and
anti-EU agenda – will see the reintroduction of quotas, as well as a
national preference when filling job vacancies and restrictions of
immigrants’ rights to social benefits.

Critically, it also
stipulates that Switzerland will have to renegotiate its bilateral
accord with the EU on the free movement of people within three years or
revoke it. This in turn could threaten other bilateral agreements with
the EU.

This should mark the high water mark for mass immigration madness and perhaps the much needed reawakening of nationalism across the West as well. Switzerland is an excellent barometer in this regard because it is the only Western nation where the people have the ability to democratically overrule its representative leadership and the political games that allow the Western governments to ignore the democratic will of the people.

Mailvox: A brief history of the Reconquista

In which Toni corrects me concerning my observations concerning the Reconquista of Spain and the current invasion of European America:

You mention the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. You say: “Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was,” after mentioning a force of no more than 15,000 men.

Of course, those populations were smaller. But it was not a one-time event and that number greatly underestimates the whole inflow. The Muslims sent wave after wave against the peninsula.  You also mention that “the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them”. That’s not exactly the case. In a way, it’s worse than that.

In 711 AD, the peninsula was under Visigoth rule. Even before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, several Germanic tribes had invaded the peninsula (Suebi, Vandals, etc). Eventually, around 410 AD, one of these, the Visigoths (the Western Goths), managed to retain the control of the territory. Rome actually encouraged the Visigoths to pacify the peninsula against the other Germanic tribes.

But the Visigoths were a foreign minority (not more than 200,000) ruling over a larger and already diverse population. A demoralized and tired population that had recently gone through the fall of ‘their’ Empire (a few Roman emperors were actually from Hispania) and through successive invasions.

The Visigoth ruling elite was plagued by constant infighting. They had an elective monarchy and in late 710 AD they elected Rodrigo as their king. However, some Visigoth noblemen chose to side with Agila II instead. Agila II did effectively rule the Visigoth provinces of Iberia and Septimania, that is, the former Roman provinces of Tarraconense and Narbonense (northeastern Spain and southern France). Rodrigo ruled from Toledo, the Visigoth capital in the center of the peninsula.

The pro-Agila II faction sent envoys to North Africa to get military support in their fight against Rodrigo. In early 711 AD, Arab, Syrian, and Berber mercenaries crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa to fight for Agila II. These Muslim forces broke their agreement with Agila II and decided to stay in the peninsula.

It is not that the locals couldn’t tell the difference between trading ships and an invading army (one has to admire Muslim historiography). It’s that the invading army was originally fighting for one of the ruling factions. And most importantly, all ruling factions were made up of foreigners anyway. So:

  1. The locals had little to no attachment to their leaders.
  2. The leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to care for the people (they were not their people after all).
  3. The invaders were disloyal to the “king” that had hired them—a king who had been disloyal to his own rightful king. Compare this to the Roman attitude “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”.

About the size of the invasion:

The Muslim invasion received wave after wave of new blood both from Africa and Arabia. It usually went like this: some new Muslim leader appeared in North Africa advocating a purer observance of Islamic law. They set their eyes on Al-Andalus (the Muslim invaded Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal), a land of wealth, were the Muslim leaders often lived in decadence, corruption, and infighting in a soup of racial tensions between Arabs and Africans. The new sect got plenty of followers in North Africa and easily overthrew the Muslim elite in Al-Andalus, only to repeat the cycle… The newcomers were always numerous and ready to fight and far more fanatical.

In 1162, for instance, Abd-al-Mumin launched a new campaign from Africa to purify Al-Andalus and fight the Christians. Ibn Abi Zar says there were “300,000 horsemen, 80,000 volunteers, and 100,000 infantrymen.” In 1184, Abu Yakub Yusuf also crossed the Straits attempting to attack Lisbon with 100,000 men. In 1195, Yusuf II crossed the Straits with 300,000 men (mostly Berbers and black slave foot soldiers, archers, and Arab horsemen) and marched towards Toledo, Alfonso VII tried to stop them with his heavy cavalry of 10,000 men while reinforcements from Leon and Navarra were on their way. (That’s just a sample of about one million ‘”immigrants”” in less than 40 years in a context of almost 800 years). Etc…

When the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, the Franks led by Charles Martel very soon managed to stop them at the Battle of Poitiers in 733 AD. Then the Muslims had to abandon their goal of crushing the Christendom from the Western front and retreated back to the Iberian Peninsula. The Franks set a protectorate north and south of the Eastern Pyrenees, the Spanish March, in present-day Catalonia and southern France (roughly, what Agila II had controlled, and would later become the Crown of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain). And ‘Europe’ forgot about the peninsula. Indeed the peninsula looked like a lost cause to the European Christians, as local Christians retained only a few microscopic kingdoms up north in the cold mountain ridges that used to be Celtic.

So Europe, unlike Africa and Arabia, did not send wave after wave of new blood. Only when the Spanish and Portuguese Christians had managed to reconquer a significant size of the territory did some fellow Europeans join the fight, in Almeria and Lisbon, for example, but never in the overwhelming numbers of the relentless Muslim tide.

By the way, it is because of these difficulties that feudal serfdom never took root in Spain and Portugal. (Medieval Europe and Feudalism are not synonyms). Most of the Reconquista was actually achieved by dirt poor free men who rode southward to retake the plains and the towns, founded free cities and charter cities, years ahead of the royal armies, the religious orders, and even the hidalgos, who were exempt from paying taxes and had a right to bear arms because they fought.

Three final notes,

  1. A recurring topic in the history of (and prelude to) the Reconquista is infighting (first among the Visigoths, and then among the Christians Kingdoms and in Muslim Taifas). This is commonly referred to in Spain as “Reinos de Taifas”. As soon as 740 AD, the Muslims in the peninsula were fighting among themselves. (The Musa you mention was condemned to death by his superiors for taking too much booty for himself, the death sentence was commuted, but eventually he was murdered in a mosque in Damascus anyway in 716. His son married Rodrigo’s widow, converted to Catholicism, and was also murdered, his head sent to Damascus. Musa’s lieutenant, Tarik ibn Ziyad —Gibraltar is named after him, Jabal Tarik, Mountain of Tarik—was also murdered by his own people.)
  2. In 1492, when the Reconquista was completed with the liberation of Granada, the plan was to take the fight all the way to Mecca and rid the world of Islam. But in that same year the very same kings who rode into Granada also funded an expedition that stumbled into a New World, and then Christians decided that Islam was not such a big deal after all and that there were more exciting adventures ahead.
  3. As late as 1756, the Spanish navy was still fighting off Muslim pirates raiding the coast, without much help from anyone as usual. A thousand years had passed since the invasion of 711 AD.  Fifty years after that, an American president refused to pay the ransom that the Muslim African pirates were demanding to free the enslaved American mariners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War.

So there was a large native population being politically dominated by a small immigrant elite that encourages an invasion by a much larger group of immigrants that turns out to be disloyal to that elite. The historical analogy between 700s Spain and 2000s America may not be precise, but it is even more similar than the one I had previously drawn. In either case, it should be encouraging to traditional Americans to know that after 780 years of invasion and occupation, Spanish Christians were able to reconquer their own country.

Knock or die

Perhaps this ruling will help the police eager to dress up and play soldier to remember that it’s perfectly legal to shoot and kill anyone breaking into your house without warning, even SWAT team members:

In an astonishing ruling, a Texas grand jury declined to press capital murder charges against a man who shot and killed a law enforcement officer executing a no-knock raid on his home. A Burleson County SWAT team raided the man’s home near Snook on December 19th of last year.

28-year-old Henry Goedrich Magee said he shot and killed Burleson County Sgt. Adam Sowders, 31, because he thought he was being robbed and acted to protect his pregnant girlfriend and children.

“He did what a lot of people would have done […] He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home,” said Dick DeGuerin, Magee’s lawyer. The jury agreed, citing a lack of evidence Magee knew the invader was actually a law enforcement officer, they neglected to charge him despite his being a “cop killer.”

Warrants and procedural limits on police actions aren’t merely there to protect the innocent. They will also tend to protect the police from their own militarization.

Rules of Writing VII: know thyself

7. Thou shalt know who thou art as a writer

Just as there are various types of athletes, there are various types of writers. Some writers are prolific and can produce thousands of words a day for months on end. Others find it difficult to crank out a few hundred words a month. Some writers have a natural gift for prose and can make a shopping list read like a work of art. Others have a gift for mimicry and can rip off Shakespeare or Dashiell Hammett with equal ease.

The problem is that many writers have goals that are not in line with their talents or their experience. The results seldom work out much better than positioning a point guard in the paint, or lining up a 400-pound nose tackle at wide receiver. As an educational aside, I once saw the Minnesota Vikings attempt to execute a spectacularly ill-designed play that called for Cris Carter to block Reggie White as Randall Cunningham rolled out to his right. Carter was not small for a wide receiver, but White shoved him and sent him flying five yards backward in the air, right into Cunningham. Needless to say, we never saw that play called again.

If plotting is not your strength, don’t try to write murder mysteries. If you struggle to write more than a sentence or two on a daily basis, don’t even think about attempting epic fantasy. If you’re not interested in characters and how they feel, writing romance is probably not a good idea. If you have no idea how the magic phone in your pocket does all the amazing things it does and you have no interest in science, science fiction is not your ideal genre no matter how much you enjoy reading Asimov and Heinlein.

One of the biggest mistakes I see writers making is attempting to write books on the basis of what they enjoy reading rather than on the basis of what their literary strengths are. This makes no sense. It is rather like deciding that you’re going to write music like Van Halen even though you play the fiddle instead of the electric guitar. If you play the fiddle, you need to write music like Charlie Daniels or music that actually involves fiddles.

When I first started writing, my long-term objective was to write books like Umberto Eco’s books, because Umberto Eco was my favorite writer. There was one very significant problem there. Umberto Eco is a trained and accomplished medievalist. I am not. And it turned out that there is an even bigger problem. Umberto Eco is committed to an excruciatingly high level of detail and will devote an entire year to doing nothing but research before he starts writing a book. I can’t bother to put a basic outline together and prefer to approach a novel as a series of vignettes that are loosely arrayed in my imagination. So, what I have learned is that any attempt to write books in the Eco vein are doomed to certain failure.

But just because I don’t have Eco’s strengths doesn’t mean that I don’t have certain strengths of my own. I was raised in a military family, I am a lifelong wargamer, I read military history in two languages, and I have hundreds of hours of full-contact fighting experience. This permits me to provide considerably more strategic and tactical verisimilitude to the combat scenes in my book as well as what leads up to them; my first editor at Pocket Books successfully deduced I was a martial artist after having doubts about the description of one of the fight scenes from The War in Heaven and trying it out on her husband.

Recall this comment from a review of A Throne of Bones: “The final battle in the book was the end result of a chain of
dominoes first tipped over right at the start of the book. Kudos on
that, because it definitely has more impact when the battle literally
couldn’t exist without the prior 600+ pages setting it up.”

I can’t do pretty prose. I can’t do police procedurals. And I can’t do technical mysteries that involve complicated puzzles. But how many authors can successfully pull off a stunt like that? And if I lack literary artistry, I am fortunate to have a considerable amount of literary stamina. I can crank out 400,000 words in a year without it exhausting me in any way. I also have a reasonable knowledge of history, economics and political science. This all lends itself to writing epic fantasy, which is not actually one of my favorite genres to read, in part because it is so seldom done well, but has turned out to be one that I rather enjoy writing.

Another review, this one of A Magic Broken, mentioned that the story started slow and the opening line was considerably more bland and unexciting than the story turned out to be. A fair point, without question. But how misleading would it be to present what is essentially a 20,000-word short story with a noir-style start?

So, my conclusion is that the idea one should write what one loves or write one one knows is, for the most part, misguided. The author should instead write what is best suited to his talents. Now, it will obviously take some time for an author to learn what his literary strengths and weaknesses are. And it will take an amount of brutal self-honesty to admit that one’s abilities are not necessarily linked to one’s preferences. But this is a process that may actually be an integral part of the apocryphal quote concerning the need to write one million words of crap before one can expect to write anything worthy of public consumption.

The strange thing about writing is that many of those who dabble in it expect to find themselves to be accomplished writers without ever practicing. But the practice is necessary, not only so that one can develop one’s skills, but so one can discover the specific nature of those skills as well.

As for those who manage to hit one out of the park on their first effort, there is a word for such novelists: pseudo-biographers. It’s not an accident that so many first-time successes struggle to ever write anything that even approaches their debut work; if one is writing about oneself, one is not a true storyteller and it is a very rare individual whose life is so compelling that it merits more than one book about it.

Regardless, whether one is a pseudio-biographer, a storyteller, or a pure stylist, one’s chances of writing something others consider to be worth reading is considerably enhanced by knowing what you are, and then making your decisions on the basis of that knowledge.