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Pink SF vs Blue SF

A few people have asked me what I mean by differentiating between Pink SF and Blue SF.  Pink SF is the dominant form of science fiction today. Or rather, more properly, the currently dominant form of SyFy. It is necrobestial love triangles. It is using the superficial trappings of science fiction or fantasy or war fiction to tell exactly the same sort of goopy, narcissistic female-oriented story that has already been told in ten thousand Harlequin novels and children’s tales and Hollywood comeuppance fantasies.

Pink SF primarily concerns a) choosing between two lovers, b) being true to yourself, or c) enacting ex post facto revenge upon the badthinkers and meanies who made the author feel bad about herself at school. Pink SF is about feelings rather than ideas or actions.

Pink SF is an invasion. Pink SF is a cancer. Pink SF is a parasitical perversion. Pink SF is the little death that kills every literary subgenre. And Pink SF isn’t limited to SF; there is a very good reason the Sports Guy’s meme “Women Ruin Everything” applies so perfectly to most forms of literature. The one exception is the One True Female Genre, which is the Pillow Book. Read Murasaki Shikibu or Sei Shonagon; women have been writing the same thing over and over for more than 1,000 years now and very, very few do it as well as the Lady Murasaki did. Pink SF is the girls coming to play in the boys’ sandbox and then shitting in it like cats.

Consider the way Pink SF has now invaded even that most masculine of subgenres, War Fiction. Books 1, 3, and 5 on Amazon’s War Fiction Top 100 free list are not genuine “war fiction” any more than Pink SF is actual science fiction. It’s WereSEAL porn. It’s 50 Shades of Sexy Soldiers.

So what, in contrast, is Blue SF? Blue SF is a return to the manly adventure fiction of the past. Blue SF says “fuck that” to strong independent female protagonists who ride rainbow-farting unicorns and flex their nonexistent muscles when they aren’t being mounted by corpses and canids.  Blue SF says “fuck that” to sexual equality, salutes la difference, and doesn’t deign to throw bones to women who might feelbad that their oh-so-tender feelingses isn’t being gently massaged. And Blue SF says “fuck off” to every idiot of either sex who whines about it being too this or not enough that.

Blue SF does not apologize for being male, for being insufficiently inclusive, or for refusing to fall in line with the dynamic demand for character quotas concerning sex, race, religion, and sexual preferences. Unlike Pink SF, Blue SF is sufficiently confident to be what it is rather than deceptively market itself as what it manifestly is not. Can you even imagine genuine science fiction trying to sneak into the romance market and pretending that it’s all proper romance when actually there is little more than action and technology and ideas under a very thin and superficial veil of romantic intrigue and self-centered drama?

At the Baen Bar, a retired airborne infantry master sergeant left a comment about QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted that perhaps is not irrelevant in this regard: “I read it and enjoyed it greatly. Baen might want to talk to the authors because they would fit right in. These guys like guns and prefer big guns. Guns that leave big body counts and lots of wreckage. They like hand-carried particle beams, lasers, slug throwers and vehicle-mounted missiles, cannons and chain guns. MCID would fit right in with Monster Hunters International only with better weapons. But the attitude is there. The simple arrest in the park is an all-time classic. I’ll buy the sequels.”

That’s right. Quantum Mortis actually outgunned Larry Correia. And that, in a nutshell, is what Blue SF is all about. Masculine ideas. Masculine challenges. Masculine action. Masculine energy. And, of course, masculine competition.

Pink SF, on the other hand, is the female equivalent of writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and somehow failing to realize that it is a parody.

We have an answer

The Chateau’s response to the brain study is about as calm and understated as one would expect….

As is so often the case, though, there is something hard and logical beneath the savage provocation. I very strongly suspect, as, I think, Heartiste does as well, that the wiring of Gamma brains will show up differently on brain scans than other male brains.

Here is my scientific hypothesis: The reason Gamma male thought processes and conclusions tend have more in common with female thought processes and conclusions than with normal male thought processes and conclusions is because they have more of the inter-hemisphere connections and less of the intra-hemisphere connections than normal men.

Retreat and revolution

The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:

After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”

Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”

Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”

“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”

The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”

As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.

And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.

I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.

They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.

Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.

Sex differences are hard-wired

This research on brain connections won’t come as any surprise to anyone who isn’t ideologically bound to the idea that sex differences are cultural, but it should suffice to explode any last vestiges of biology-based sexual equalitarianism:

“What we’ve identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are
connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and
women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out
certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain,”
Professor Verma said.

The research was carried out on 949
individuals – 521 females and 428 males – aged between 8 and 22. The
brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after
adolescence, the study found.

A special brain-scanning technique
called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water
along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between
nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain
called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said.

“It tells you
whether one region of the brain is physically connected to another part
of the brain and you can get significant differences between two
populations,” Professor Verma said. “In women most of the
connections go between left and right across the two hemispheres while
in men most of the connections go between the front and the back of the
brain,” she said.

Because the female connections link the left
hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right,
which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women
tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.

It’s amusing how they can’t help but describe their findings in a futile attempt to appeal to women rather than to offend them. It’s not the map-reading that is relevant; the real takeaway here is that women are less logical on average because their right hemisphere interferes with the ability of their left hemisphere to logically process information. It’s never been any secret that women are less logical; among other things, that’s why women weren’t permitted to vote in the first place. But now, thanks to science, we are beginning to understand that limits such as these weren’t set out of simple prejudice, but rather out of the straightforward desire for societal self-preservation.

And, as the consequences have demonstrated, the West violated those limits at its peril, a mistake for which we are all, men and women alike, paying the price.

It should be fascinating to see what happens when similar studies begin providing unavoidable scientific explanations for the differences between various human population groups that everyone observes, but affects to either deny or explain away.

Book Review: Escape from Tekmar I

HC provides the first review of Kiti Lappi’s Escape from Tekmar, the seventh book to be presented in the Lions Den series.

Rahan and Ryn are partners on assignment for an interstellar agency that monitors the health of ecosystems on terraformed planets. In any other circumstance, one might consider Rahan a badass. Unfortunately, his superior officer, Ryn, is one of the genetically engineered Shemasharra. He’s stronger, faster, smarter, and better looking. He’s also a near mind-reading Boy Scout: honest, fair, ready to help old ladies and inferior men alike to cross dangerous intersections, neither asking nor accepting any reward. Little wonder Rahan finds him so irritating.

The two men are forced to make an unscheduled stop for repairs on Tekmar, a financially and technologically poor world with a paranoid police state and a xenophobic populace. To minimize the potential for conflict, Ryn remains on board the ship, while Rahan deals with the locals. While absorbing a little local culture, he meets a girl named Lida, and they spend several days together sight-seeing. Of course, Lida has an ulterior motive: she’s a member of a revolutionary group that wants to destroy Tekmar’s rigid feudalism. The organization is in desperate need of cash, and there are people who will pay a high price for a live Shemasharra. Rahan and Ryn are kidnapped by a faction of the revolutionaries led by a man named Kerrin who intends to sell them to a mysterious group of off-worlders. Fisticuffs, cyborgs, shootouts, dogfights, and races against time follow.

The Good: Escape from Tekmar is a good adventure story with a suspenseful plot and several secondaries involving the relationships of Rahan with Ryn, Rahan with Lida, and Lida with Kerrin. Lappi portrayed some aspects of those relationships well. For example, Rahan resents Ryn for being superior and for being patient and patronizing. Rahan comes across like a spoiled teenager acting out in passive aggressive rebellion, and I think that’s precisely what Lappi intended the reader to see.

There are several exciting and suspenseful sequences. One of the best scenes is a fight between Rahan and Kerrin, whose cybernetically enhanced skeleton and musculature can’t quite make up for his lack of imagination. Later, Rahan pilots an aged sports flyer and has to outwit surveillance drones and police cruisers.

On the more cerebral side, the author indulges in some interesting speculation on space travel and colonization, genetic engineering, terraforming, politics, and more. Most of that is interesting and worth discussing over a few beers.

The Bad: Tekmar is a good concept piece and rough first draft, but it’s a long way from publication readiness. Almost all of the flaws can be traced to two insufficiencies with which I’m reasonably sure the author will agree:

Lack of depth in the English language

Before I say anything else, Lappi’s native language is Finnish, and I have nothing but respect for someone who attempts to write fiction in a foreign language. Especially in English, the linguistic Borg. I once possessed a familiarity with conversational Russian, but I couldn’t keep up with her alcohol consumption. She left me for a more attentive linguist. I’ve also picked up bits and pieces of half a dozen other languages over the years. Here’s what I finally learned: Effective communication in a foreign tongue is very difficult. Ms. Lappi has that down. Artistic communication, on the other hand, is virtually impossible for most people as they can’t even hope to accomplish it in their own language.

Ms. Lappi’s vocabulary is very simple, but that is only a problem if her target audience is adults. It’s spot on for a mid-grade audience. If she wants to write for adults, I recommend she starts reading Ursula LeGuin, Walter Miller Jr., or Dan Simmons with a dictionary at her side, looking up every interesting or unfamiliar word. (A related word of advice for all writers: Ignore readability tests. Any test that tells you Ray Bradbury wrote at a fifth grade level is worthless.)

Tekmar also has a significant number of punctuation errors, run-on sentences, double words, and awkward constructions, probably cultural and linguistic artifacts. (Let me know if you want specific examples.) Another odd thing: every instance of the character string “aining”, such as in “training” and “raining,” seems to have been replaced by “Amarng,” which looks oddly like a problem with optical character recognition software. On the plus side, there are very few spelling errors compared to most self-published work.


Lack of discipline in storytelling.

The greatest flaw in Tekmar is excessive exposition. The opening scene is fatally interrupted by pages of rambling history, disrupting the flow and dramatic tension. Many readers won’t get past the third or fourth page. Throughout the story, Ms. Lappi commits the cardinal literary sin of “telling, not showing” with abandon.

The characters are shallow. It seemed to me that Rahan and Ryn behave more like women in the secretarial pool than masculine adventurers. The Shemasharra are too perfect. That helped me sympathize with Rahan at the start, but before long I found myself hoping Ms. Lappi would kill Ryn off early. On the other hand, Kerrin was too despicable. Every bad guy needs to be admirable in some way, but he was just a low-IQ strong man with a jealous, vindictive streak. His only positive quality was surgically implanted and admittedly third rate technology. I kept looking for the mysterious slave traders to take over his role.

Finally, I was mildly annoyed with some of the technological anachronisms. For example, how can an organization that possesses artificial intelligence capable of infiltrating an entire planet’s police and military networks not have the data processing capacity to handle the incoming data from its scattered survey missions? They can build FTL starships, but they can’t make a hideable security camera? I can believe this is possible, but I’d like some kind of explanation. (But show me. Don’t tell me.) This is a very common problem in science fiction, and only the best writers are able to overcome it in a way that satisfies me.

Kiti Lappi has written a fun, middle-grade adventure story, but it needs to be tightened up. If she chooses to rework it, the next draft will likely take much more time and effort than she has spent to date. The challenges aren’t insurmountable, but they are significant.

The parasites are fleeing the host

It would appear that the theory of the 21st Century belonging to China is rapidly going the way that the Japan that could say no did or there is war on the horizon:

It’s one of the largest and most rapid wealth migrations of our time: hundreds of billions of dollars, and waves of millionaires flowing out of China to overseas destinations. According to WealthInsight, the Chinese wealthy now have about $658 billion stashed in offshore assets. Boston Consulting Group puts the number lower, at around $450 billion, but says offshore investments are expected to double in the next three years. A study from Bain Consulting found that half of China’s ultrawealthy—those with $16 million or more in wealth—now have investments overseas.

And it’s not just the money that’s exiting the country. The wealthy are increasingly following their money overseas. A study by Hurun and Bank of China found that more than half of China’s millionaires are considering emigrating or have already taken steps to move overseas.

One wonders why? Mere internal unrest of the sort that has riddled Chinese history or it is something more serious? The sabres are already rattling over the Philippines and Abe is in the process of removing the peace planks from the Japanese constitution.

Things also look problematic for the USA, but there probably isn’t too much to worry about until the Wall Street bankers begin emigrating. If you want to know what is likely to happen in the near future, watch the rich.

An amusing revelation

Keep in mind that Alex from London is the sort of Englishman who invariably mocks American ignorance of the world:

This is the terrifying moment a trio of gunmen stormed into a disco and opened fire on a crowd of terrified dancers.CCTV captured the moment when the men pull out their guns and push past bouncers to get inside the disco in Cali, Colombia, before they start spraying bullets around the room.The victims’ blood flowed out of the nightclub and into the street after the gruesome 20-minute long attack.

 Alex, London, United Kingdom, 2 hours ago
“Absolutely horrific! Hopefully Obama will be able to change their gun law. It can’t carry on the way it is.”

It should certainly be fascinating to see what Obama can accomplish with regards to the gun crime in Cali, Colombia. This should take place not long after David Cameron deals with the pressing issue of the undercapitalized banks in Athens, Greece.

Free stuff: QM and Selenoth

To further celebrate the release of the first two QUANTUM MORTIS novels, JartStar, the cover artist of the newly published Gravity Kills, has created a wallpaper from the cover image and offered it to any VP readers who might be interested in downloading it. It presently adorns my desktop, and if you’d like to download it, just click on the image to the left, then right-click on the full-size image and “Save Image As”.

As I mentioned yesterday, the first 25 reviewers of the two QUANTUM MORTIS books will receive a free audiobook code from Audible. Make that 24 now, as Sensei was the first to claim one. But don’t rush through the books, I’m sure you’ll want to linger over every savory moment of the delicate, deliciously enchanting prose that dances across the pages with all the ethereal grace of a half-starved Russian ballerina.

Ah, who am I kidding? There are explosions and guns and futuristic technologies and guns and artificial intelligences and guns and Meteor air-to-air missiles and collateral damage and twin Degroet Tactical M165 20mm cannons. There are also, as it happens, guns. And possibly a mystery or two.

If you want pages and pages of thickly sensuous prose concerning which side of the pillow is more palatable to the semi-conscious senses, read Proust. If you are looking for deep insight into the psychology of the human mind, read Dostoevsky. If you would like a grand and sweeping tale of epic scope and grandeur combined with intelligent commentary on the human condition, read Tolstoy. If you seek snarky, sparkly adolescent dialogue and the inevitable triumph of the gamma male’s wit, read Scalzi.

But if you like murder mysteries and old school Mil-SF where the hero wouldn’t recognize self-doubt if he saw it and would shoot it on sight if he did, you might enjoy QUANTUM MORTIS.

Did I mention the guns? To quote one confirmed gun porn enthusiast whose blurb for A Man Disrupted was, regrettably, deemed to be a bit too enthusiastic by the publisher:

“That was a seriously satisfying ending. I loved every second of this. I sincerely did.  I think it’s more
enjoyable than A THRONE OF BONES… and I think it has broader market appeal. Seriously. Standing fucking ovation.”

Speaking of Selenoth, if you are interested, you may wish to note that the following three books are free on Amazon today:

This concludes the commercial portion of the flight.

The December verdict

As some will recall, on November 2nd Porky predicted that all the suckers were wrong and that the political supergenius and giant leap forward in human evolution that is Obama was simply luring everyone in with his suspiciously underachieving web site before leaping like a tiger and making his critics look like fools again:

Suckered again, I see. Are you incapable of seeing that the Obamacare rollout was a planned failure? Do you not understand the progressive tactic of lowered expectations?

The website will be functioning reasonably well by December (I suspect they’ve had the fix all along) at which time Obama will announce his glorious Christmas gift to humanity is “not perfect, but it’s improving every day and children and pregnant women are safe now.” The argument will have been successfully shifted from “should there even be socialized medicine” to “how can we make socialized medicine work.”

Mission accomplished. Another brilliant progressive tactic made possible by the type of foolishness we see in the OP. Call ’em savages if you want to. But they are playing this game like a grandmaster plays a patzer.  What’s that old saying about looking for the sucker in the room? If you don’t see him it’s probably you.

A readily testable prediction. It is now December. And how is the glorious Christmas gift to humanity doing? According to CNN, not so well.

GEORGE HOWELL, HOST: We know the first thing you have to do when you
go to this website you have to select your state. Is that working?
ALISON
KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: And what’s funny is I was talking
with Matt, and, yeah, that seemed to work, right, when you logged on.
But then came the road blocks. So tell me about what happened, because
we’re getting another error message here, and it’s supposed to be
running smoothly. We’re just not seeing that.
MATT SLOANE, CNN MEDICAL PRODUCER: Yeah, so, you know, we’ve been
trying to get into the site since October 1 on and off again. I have to
say it did work a lot more smoothly this morning. I got through. I
picked my state. I put in all of my information and I got through the
whole process in eight minutes. And then it said my status was in
progress. So I went to refresh it and I got the error message.

Ah, but it is entirely obvious that the progressives at CNN must be in on the great critic-trap! The fact that it is December and the website still isn’t working is only further proof of the superlative strategic brilliance of the progressive masterminds whose fearsome capabilities it is futile to resist, doubt, or even question.

In any event, this should suffice to demolish Porky’s tedious political wise-man act. Let that be a lesson to all: if you’re going to insist on calling everyone suckers and fools, and strike poses as if you are the only one who has cracked the code of American politics, then you run the risk of drawing my attention long enough for me to systematically destroy your credibility and expose your pretensions.

It’s only fair. I’m held accountable for all of my failed predictions, which is why I no longer attempt to predict how Americans will vote or the specific timing of expected economic events no matter how many people ask me to do so. I’ll stick to those areas where my predictions have been reliable. Now, if you think you know what’s going on, by all means, share your opinion with everyone here. If you have a new take on current events or an original hypothesis, I hope you will run it by us. But if you’re so convinced you, and only you, are correct that you’re constantly sneering and denigrating others, well, then you had better actually be correct.

QUANTUM MORTIS live on Amazon

The first two ebooks in the Quantum Mortis series are now available from Amazon. QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted retails for $4.99. If you’re interested in obtaining it in epub format, you should be able to find it at Barnes & Noble or Kobo soon. Otherwise, if you send me an email with a copy of the Amazon receipt, I will send you an epub copy in return. QUANTUM MORTIS: Gravity Kills retails for $2.99 and is available only from Amazon. If you want the epub, send me a copy of the Amazon receipt and I will sent you your favored format. You can also just use Calibre to convert the file since the books are not DRM-protected.

In order to celebrate the introduction of the new Mil-SF mystery series, all three Selenoth novellas, A Magic Broken, The Wardog’s Coin, and The Last Witchking will be free on Amazon for the next two days, beginning tomorrow. So, if you don’t have all of them yet, this would be an excellent chance to complete the set.

And since ACX and Marcher Lord were so gracious as to give me 25 free audiobook download codes for A Magic Broken, I will be giving them away to the first 25 reviewers of either QM:AMD or QM:GK. (NB: this offer includes the early reviewers who received a review copy last week so long as they review the other book.) Send me an email with a link to your review and I will send you the download code.

You’ll need to have an Amazon account to use the code, but since you’ll need one to post a review there, that shouldn’t be a problem. And just to be clear, the free audiobook code is not contingent upon the nature of the review. As always, I encourage honest and serious reviews, I do not seek mindless flattery any more than I approve of witless criticism.

Baen Books author Tom Kratman, who most of you are aware comments here from time to time, provided QM:AMD with a blurb that is featured on the back of the book. He described the book thusly:


“What are we going to do when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, self-willed, and maybe stark raving mad? The question matters because that day is coming…fast. With approximately as many twists and turns as China’s Tianmen Mountain Road, QUANTUM MORTIS starts fast and then accelerates, leading to a conclusion both shattering…and more than a little heart warming.”
—TOM KRATMAN, author of A Desert Called Peace

As for QUANTUM MORTIS: Gravity Kills, being a pure ebook it has no blurbs, but the first reviewers on Amazon appear to have enjoyed the novella. Keep in mind that the first GK reviewers have not read AMD and vice-versa.

“This story is an effective and entertaining rework of several of my favorite SF and Mystery themes, with a result greater and more original than the sum of its parts. Let’s start with the homeworld, which is also a refuge for a thousand plus governments in exile. To quote Agent K from “Men in Black”, “It’s like Casablanca, but with no Nazis”. Like “Casablanca” and “Men in Black”, but unlike that prize turkey, “Barb Wire”, the authors make this trope a proper background to the story itself…. The result, shaken not stirred, is an entertaining story, which combines the best aspects of hard SF and ‘Tec novels. The best thing, though, is that this world shows the possibility of many more such stories. I am looking forward to them.”
—BERNARD BRANDT