Category: Uncategorized

Daniel Day-Lewis accepts the Oscar

Perhaps he didn’t give this speech, but really, he damned well should have:

Tonight I had the great honor of receiving the Academy Award for Best Actor for my performance in the film Lincoln. It is my immense privilege to receive an Oscar for the third time in my career, especially for portraying such an historic figure. And as I look back on this role, I can only feel deeply honored and humbled for the praise and respect I’ve received, even though I personally believe that Abraham Lincoln was an American traitor who deserved to die.

Honestly, this award truly is a tremendous thrill for me. And the fact that I’m being awarded for portraying a liar, a fraud, and an enemy of justice whose murder was fully justified doesn’t change that.

After all, just because you play a character in a movie doesn’t mean you have to agree with the views and actions of the character you’re portraying. Far from it! In fact, I saw this role as a real actor’s challenge considering my own deeply held belief that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant and a hypocrite and that the South should have won the war. It has always been my strong opinion that the Confederate forces had a political and moral imperative to defeat the Union army and that America’s 16th president was a monster who deserved to be murdered in front of his wife, so just imagine what a test it was for me to try to humanize this repulsive figure. All of which makes this third Oscar win particularly satisfying.

It still amazes me that no one in the South ever stopped and thought, you know, since Lincoln is about the only one hell-bent on this war, and nearly everyone else seems to accept the Constitutional concept of allowing the various sovereign states to express their self-determination and go their separate ways, how about we shoot him instead of tens of thousands of immigrant German farm boys being forced to fight against us?  How is assassinating a single dictator somehow considered out of bounds when the alternative is butchering hundreds of thousands of innocents whose only crime was to get drafted into military service?

SF/F Corruption: Part II

I had intended to continue on the SFWA theme with which I began the Corruption in Science Fiction series, but a pair of articles concerning the legitimacy of the bestseller lists caught my attention after being featured on Slashdot over the weekend:

The other day, I received an unexpected phone call from Jeff Trachtenberg, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He said he wanted to talk about my bestselling book, Leapfrogging. At first, I was thrilled. Any first-time author would jump at the chance to speak with such a high-profile publication. But it turned out Trachtenberg didn’t want to discuss what was in my book. He was interested in how it had made it onto his paper’s bestseller list. As he accurately noted, Leapfrogging had, well, leapt onto the Journal’s list at #3 the first week it debuted, and then promptly disappeared the following Friday.

Suddenly, I wasn’t so thrilled anymore. I was just about to sit down to dinner with my family and now I was being put on the spot to discuss my role in perhaps one of the most controversial practices in the book publishing industry. I was tempted to make an excuse and plead the 5th. But I wound up talking to Trachtenberg several times over the next few days….

Trachtenberg asked me about my experience with a company called ResultSource,
the firm I had hired to help me hit the bestseller list from day one.
Trachtenberg said he had contacted all of the major New York publishers,
but no one would speak to him about the firm or the role of so-called
“bestseller campaigns” in helping authors reach the coveted status. No
comment. Dead silence.

I can’t say I was eager to be the first person to go on the record
about the topic. But then I realized something – Trachtenberg’s
surprising phone call was an opportunity to live up to what I urge my
readers to do in my book Leapfrogging.  I’ve seen the phenomenon of corporate silence repeatedly in my
career. There’s a big, smelly, ten thousand pound elephant in the
conference room. Everybody knows it’s there, but no one’s willing to
take the risk and point it out. As Trachtenberg was discovering,
bestseller campaigns are the unacknowledged pachyderm of the book
business.

There’s good reason why most industry insiders would prefer that the
wider book-buying public didn’t learn about these campaigns. Put
bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to
buy their way onto bestseller lists. And they benefit all the key
players of the book world. Publishers profit on them. Authors gain
credibility from bestseller status, which can launch consulting or
speaking careers and give a big boost to keynote presentation fees. And
the marketing firms that run the campaigns don’t do so bad either.

This sort of thing is hardly a new practice; the Scientologists kept L. Ron Hubbard’s books on the bestseller lists for years this way.  Nor is it a surprise to know that there is some hinky business going on behind the scenes at the New York Times; there usually is, and the NYT has gone to great lengths to keep hidden the method it uses to determine its bestsellers.  But it is a little surprising to see that all of the major New York publishers appear to be involved in this practice, at least to the extent that they are unwilling to openly deny that they utilize such tactics in order to market their books.

Now, upon reading this, my thoughts immediately went to a particular publisher of science fiction and fantasy, which just happens to be a publisher that appears to place an inordinate energy of effort into winning awards.  It also loves bestseller lists; here is Tor congratulating itself on its many bestseller listings in 2010 and 2011.

Tor was particularly pleased by its 2011 showing, in which its “30 New York Times bestselling books this year” annihilated their “2010 release list of 20 bestsellers”.  Interestingly enough, however, the Publishers Weekly list of the 115 bestselling fiction novels for 2011 shows precisely one Tor book on its list: The Omen Machine. Terry Goodkind. Tor (108,809).

After reading this, it also occurred to me that despite McRapey’s tale of the starship ensigns who were expendable hitting #15 on the New York Times bestseller list, Redshirts not only didn’t show up in PW’s list of science fiction bestsellers for last year, it’s only #6 on Tor’s own list of its top sellers, behind the immortal Imager’s Battalion by L. E. Modesitt, presently ranked 19,446 on Amazon a month after its release.  And despite being “a New York Times bestseller”, according to Publisher’s Weekly, Redshirts didn’t even make the top ten in the science fiction category in 2012, coming in behind at least three other Tor novels and a novel published in 1965.

Science Fiction

1. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Tor. 100,387
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Broadway. 50,593
3. Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. Lucas Books. 31,543
4. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Del Rey. 27,220
5. Star Wars: Apocalypse by Troy Denning. Lucas Books. 26,140
6. Dune by Frank Herbert. Ace. 25,532
7. A Rising Thunder by David Weber. Baen Books. 25,348
8. HALO: The Thursday War by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,936
9. HALO: Glasslands by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,932
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Ballantine. 24,120

That doesn’t denigrate McRapey’s achievement in selling so many copies of a derivative and mediocre novel, but merely points to the varying degrees of what is claimed to be a “bestseller”.  (One can, indeed, one should have contempt for McRapey as an SF author, but he is without question the finest self-marketer and stunt writer in SF/F today, even if he hasn’t reached the mainstream heights of AJ Jacobs.)  On a tangential note, it’s a fascinating snapshot of the sickly state of science fiction to see how many of its current and confirmed bestsellers are either works derived from games and movies or original works first published between 30 and 50 years ago.  Regardless, the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller.  They appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week, never to make another appearance there again.

Here is another observable anomaly.  According to John Scalzi himself, Redshirts sold 26,604 copies in 2012.  That’s very good by today’s standards, especially for a hardcover, but it falls considerably short of the 100,047 copies of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde sold, which novel PW reports as being the 115th-bestselling book of 2011.  And yet, Reamde spent only one more week in the top portion of the NYT bestseller list than Redshirts, (ranking 4 and 12 vs 15) despite selling nearly four times more copies.  Is the latter ranking credible, especially in light of what we now know about major publishers gaming the bestseller lists?  And how did Tor/Forge manage to produce “30 New York Times bestselling books” when only one was listed among the top-selling 115 books published that year?

Keep in mind that The War in Heaven sold 35,000 copies and I never thought that it was anything remotely close to a bestseller.  (It probably could have sold more, thanks to the brilliant Rowena cover, but that was the print run, which sold out.  I’m still convinced that what killed that series was Pocket’s foolish decision to do their own imitation Left Behind cover for Shadow rather than leaving it up to Rowena and me.  I still have the sketch somewhere; it was going to be an awesome painting of Mariel and Melusine in combat.) 

None of this conclusively proves that Tor Books is engaging in the questionable marketing tactics mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article, but it certainly raises some serious questions about the legitimacy of its claimed “bestsellers”, just as there are serious questions about the literary legitimacy of its infrequently reviewed, modestly-selling Nebula-nominated novels, such as, for example, its two 2012 nominees: Ironskin (64 reviews, 3.5 rating, #35,470 in Books) and Glamour in Glass (18 reviews, 4.3 rating, #409,451 in Books).

Because, after all, nothing says “science fiction” like tedious derivatives of Jane Eyre and Jane Austen.

Scientists are stupidshort-sighted

And biologists are the dumbest of the lot.  Seriously, given their constant yammering about how America so desperately needs “moar science edification”, it is abundantly clear that the sort of individuals who go into the life sciences don’t even understand the most simple basics of supply and demand.  Keep that in mind the next time you’re hearing someone wax eloquent about the supposed brilliance of Richard Dawkins or, for crying out loud, the Fowl Atheist, PZ Myers:

How seriously can you possibly take people who are dumb enough to spend more than seven years and go into serious student loan debt in order to have a less than one in five chance at getting a job doing what they’ve studied for?  And since the chart goes back to 1991, these scientific geniuses don’t even have the excuse of claiming that they had no way of knowing that there was no significant employment demand for their highly educated services.

If you ever wondered why the Pharyngulans seemed unusually bitter for a blog readership, even a heavily atheist one, the chart above explains why.  They put their faith in an education god, who proved to be a false and unreliable idol.

The fact of the matter is that America needs LESS science education.  I’ve pointed out that it is ridiculous to teach evolution to kids who can’t read and write properly, but it is even more absurd to give out PhDs to people who, despite nearly 20 years of formal schooling, remain entirely innocent of the concepts of supply and demand.

How long can this go on?

According to Zero Hedge, somewhere between 10 months and four years:

As we showed last week,
the rate at which NIM goes negative and the above feedback loops begins
would be at approximately 4.5% on December 31, 2013. The “breakeven”
rate unleashing the inflationary cycle would then decline by about 1%
each year assuming the Fed’s balance sheet continues rising at a pace of
$1 trillion per year.

So the good news for all those who have been wondering just how much
longer the Fed can continue doing more of the same while providing a
free lunch for all is that we now know there is a temporal bound: the
longer the Fed does nothing to change the status quo, the lower its
“rate buffer.”

Of course, there is a resolution: the Fed simply begins to sell its
assets, and in doing so, destroys the reserves created when said assets
were onboarded on the Fed’s balance sheet. But there lies the rub:
because the second the Fed enters open deleveraging mode, everyone will
sell everything they can to lock in the profits generated from the past
4+ years of Fed balance sheet expansion. Furthermore, at that moment,
the market will begin pricing in the unwind of some or all of the $15
trillion in central bank liquidity which is the only reason the S&P
is where it is today. The result would be a market crash so epic it
would make the market response to Lehman and AIG’s failure seem like a
walk in the park by comparison.

Which is where you come in dear retail investor, and the
whole myth of the “Great Rotation.” Because unless there is someone who
will start providing a bid into which the banks can offload their
securities in exchange for cold hard cash, as was explained earlier,
the entire stock market ramp of the past 4 years will have been for
nothing. It is also why day in and day out the media bombards everyone,
as it has in the beginning of every year for the past three, that the
time to enter the market is now, and there has never been a better time
(ignoring that the market is now more expensive on a forward multiple basis than it was at the last market peak in 2007). 

What concerns me is that the Federal Reserve and its figureheads appear to have given up on the repeated “green shoots” announcements and shifted into half-hearted “it’s not our fault” mode.  This makes me suspect that the implosion date will be closer to 10 months than four years.  I don’t think it will be hyperinflationary, as will soon be discussed in detail, in part due to the nature of the financial system, but also because it should be perfectly clear that the Federal Reserve is not going to sacrifice itself and the interests of its owners for the economy or for the federal government.

She’s doomed

Between all the media hype and the Nationwide at Daytona crash, it appears that Danica Patrick is a prime example of Hultgreen-Curie syndrome just waiting to happen:

It was guaranteed that Patrick’s arrival this year as the first female
to compete fulltime in NASCAR’s premier division would generate a
tremendous amount of attention. She already had developed a loyal fan
following based on her accomplishments in the Indianapolis 500 (two
top-five finishes) as well as her appearances in numerous television
commercials for primary sponsor GoDaddy.  Then she went out and won the
pole position for Sunday’s running of the Daytona 500, and the hype
machine shifted into overdrive.

Suddenly this has become more than just another auto race. It is a
full-blown event, coated with larger social implications. Patrick isn’t
being compared just to Janet Guthrie, the driver who motored past gender
barriers in the 1970s by qualifying for both the Daytona 500 and the
Indianapolis 500. She is evoking memories of Billie Jean King, who won
the famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match with Bobby Riggs in 1973,
striking a highly publicized blow for female equality.

Patrick has become a symbol of success for little girls, a high-speed, high-profile example of all that is possible in life.

Patrick seems nice enough and I don’t wish her a fiery death on the track or anything like that.  But I can’t say that I’ll be shocked if something goes very, very wrong at the Daytona 500.  And it should be kept in mind that as a leading symbol of equalitarianism, Danica Patrick has become a totem for the evil that is infesting Western civilization and eating away at its foundations.

Inflation: gasoline prices

Now, this should not be considered a response to Nate’s post on inflation, as it is not an integral part of the great inflation-deflation debate, but rather tangential to it.  It is simply an off-shoot of some research I was doing that is not going to be part of my core argument.  But I’m posting it nevertheless because it is interesting and should help put in context precisely where we happen to be at the moment with regards to recent price movements.  We could, of course, use CPI, but I don’t pay much attention to it since with all of its hedonic adjustments and so forth, I regard it to be as about as relevant to reality as the average science fiction novel.  And while I am very well aware of the various shortcomings of using a commodity price such as gasoline as an inflation metric, given the inevitable effects of supply and demand, it nevertheless can be readily observed that the price of gasoline is an even more “inflationary” one than than simply relying upon CPI.  Which is to say, using gasoline as a metric instead of CPI will tend to be a more favorable one to the inflationary case for those contemplating the inflation/deflation question.

To the best of my knowledge, the price of gasoline was $0.12 in 1913.  Another reference cites $0.25 in 1918, but I will go with the lower and older one as it is less favorable from the perspective of my deflationary position.  Utilizing the CPI, this provides an estimated equivalent price of $2.79, which is much lower than the current national average price of $3.74.

Now, given the massive amount of M2 money creation that has taken place since the financial crisis hit in Q3 2008, we would expect that at least an amount of that $3.62 increase in price per gallon has taken place since then.  But look at the 60-month history of gasoline prices, which actually fell dramatically in the first six months post-crisis, from $4.12 at the onset of the crisis to $1.61.

Prices have gradually worked their way up since then, but from an inflationary perspective, things have remained essentially flat over the last five years, which the observant reader will recall tends to be considerably more in line with the flat state of total credit market debt outstanding than with the continued expansion of M2.

Please note that I am not claiming that this proves anything yet, I am simply pointing it out to counteract the common assumption that price inflation is as rampant as it is presently perceived to be due to gasoline prices threatening to return to their previous all-time highs.

Mailvox: still relevant

While I tend to largely forget about past books in favor of a) the most recent one, and, b) those I’m currently writing, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that people are still reading the older ones.  SA writes of his recent encounter with TIA:

Nietzsche’s famous response to his critics was, “Swallow your poison; for you need it badly.” There are realizations that begin by tasting a bit like poison, but end up being just the medicine we need. Vox Day’s book is like that — atheists will instinctively hate it at first, not just because of its content but also because of its ironic writing style. “Poison pen” it may sometimes be; but it’s exactly the sort of “poison” they really need. As anyone who can think philosophically, or even anyone with an ounce of common sense knows, atheism is inherently irrational, since it depends on claiming certainty about a matter it obviously could never know for certain.

Day calls the atheist bluff. Teeing off on some of the chief proponents of irrational atheism today — Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Onfray in particular — the author debunks their empty rhetoric with the simplest of weapons: facts. Particularly good is the author’s treatment of the old canard “religion causes wars,” for which he provides so much counter-evidence that the reader is left wondering why anyone ever thinks such a thing is true. He simply takes the atheists at their word, and tests their claims against the available evidence.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that Day resorts so often to the ironic tone, because opponents will be all too quick to jump on that stylistic feature and claim the author is a mere stylist without substance. That charge would be untrue, and a more calm tone might prevent that, showcasing the evidence rather than the rhetorical flourishes. However, flamboyancy and irony of tone have never stopped atheists from loving Nietzsche or uncritically embracing the random rhetoric of mere stylists like Harris or Dawkins, so their objections might be a trifle hypocritical.

On the good side, Day’s book is immensely readable, and at times is simply laugh-out-loud entertaining. You can dash through it in a night, and indeed, it’s hard to stop reading once you start. The central argument is not a scholarly approach so much as a popularly-accessible one; but that does not diminish the ultimate seriousness of the arguments advanced therein. Anyone who is already a theist, or anyone who is still seriously thinking about the atheism-theism debate can find in this book a helpful resource for casual debate. But the atheist “faithful” who have already closed their minds to the evidence may simply find it teeth-grindingly irritating.

It probably won’t escape anyone’s attention that the New Atheism is done, having mutated into helpless silence in the face of Islam on the one hand and A+ feminism on the other.  It’s remarkable to see that women can even ruin atheism; it’s a tactic that we theists should have utilized long ago.  After all, the sort of mind that is prone to atheism in the first place is going to be particular susceptible to cries of “sexism” and “racism”, and there are few groups more male and white than a gathering of atheists.

SA’s point that rhetorical flourishes can detract from the dialectic arguments is an accurate one, but the problem is that they are necessary for the majority who are not capable of following the dialectic arguments.  What TIA exposes, in crossing the rhetorical divide, is that there is very little but rhetoric in most of the New Atheist arguments, which is why a dispassionate dialectical critique would have been an error and left its atheist readers unmoved.  The venom and the spite with which so many atheist reviewers have responded to TIA over the years is proof of its effectiveness in that regard.

It’s also good to see SA single out what has probably been the primary accomplishment of TIA, which was the conclusive debunking of the “religion causes war” line.  We’ve seen less and less of that ever since TIA came out, and the historical evidence has even begun to creep into scientific journals such as Nature.  While I have no doubt that the Left will do everything it can to be sure I am never credited with having successfully demolished that line of attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular, (it’s amusing to see all the references to a $300 encyclopedia that it is perfectly clear no one has even seen, let alone read), I’m very pleased to see that mendacious, but rhetorically effective argument increasingly absent from the atheism-religion discourse.

And SA’s email is a useful reminder that as long as atheists attempt to rely upon the arguments it criticizes, TIA will remain relevant.

The Great Inflation-Deflation Debate

Nate forces my hand by kicking it off on his own blog:

It appears to me that there seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what the money supply is doing.  Is it growing?  is it shrinking?  Inflation?  Deflation?  Stagflation?   Obviously I am a hyper-inflationist…   Our buddy Vox is a deflationist.  So what gives?  Does it matter?

Well… if we’re going to talk about this we’re going to have to establish some kind of basic vocabulary.  For example… what is money?  I know… you’re thinking dollar bills and coins.  Yes and no.  Money is an exchange medium that is used to complete a transaction.  The critical characteristic of money is that it does not require any additional transactions to satisfy the terms of the exchange.  You got your money… and that’s good enough.  Lets look at gold for example.  Gold is money.  It always has been money.  You want some of my cattle… you give me a small amount of gold… and we’re done.  Modern cash is similar.  You give me cash.. I give you a cow or two… we’re done.  Cash is money.

What about debit cards?  I swipe your debit card… I give you cows…  we’re not done.  Your bank has to send money to my bank.  That’s an additional transaction.  Debit cards aren’t money.   Same for checks.  Checks aren’t money either.  They are IOUs for money.

Go to his place.  Read the whole thing.  If it doesn’t make sense, read it again.  Grok it in its fullness.  I will respond here within one week.

Umberto Eco on the death of the dream of Europe

I like and admire Umberto Eco for many reasons, but I firmly believe that the great humanist is absolutely on the wrong side of history with regards to the great post-WWII neo-fascist enterprise of the European Union.  And so, it is very satisfying indeed to read of the increasing despair of the bien-pensant intellectuals, and to hear the cri-de-coeur of an elite that is increasingly conscious of its failure concerning an endeavor where, for one brief shining moment around the turn of the millenium, it believed it had succeeded.

These are hard times for those who
believe in the European Union: from Cameron, who calls his compatriots
to decide if they still want it (or if they never had the will), from
Berlusconi who one day declares himself a Europeist but the next,
if he doesn’t make a visceral connection to the old Fascists, says
returning to the lira would be better, to the Lega Nord and its
hyperprovincialism. In summary, one can say that – at a distance
of more than fifty years – the bones of the founding fathers of
Europe United are turning in their graves.
Nevertheless everyone should know that
in the course of the Second World War 41 million Europeans died, (I
say only Europeans, not including the Americans and the Asians), massacred one after the other, and afterwards, saving the tragic
Balkan episode, Europe has known 68 years of peace.  If one
recounts to the young, (who maybe would appreciate it more if they spent a year working in another country on the continent with the Erasmus program, and perhaps at the end of this experience would find a twin spirit with those who speak another language than their own), that the French might today defend the Maginot
line to resist the Germans, that the Italians would want to expand
their borders to incorporate Greece, that Belgium could be invaded, that English
airplanes could bombard Milan, these youth would believe we were
inventing a science fiction novel. It is only the adults who
understand that instead of crossing borders without passports, their
fathers and their grandfathers vacationed with rifles in hand.
But is it really true that the idea of
Europe is unsuccessful in attracting the Europeans? Bernard-Henri
Lévy recently released a passionate manifesto in defense of a
European identity. “Europe or Chaos” begins with a disturbing
threat. “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as in
the territory, naturally. But Europe, the Idea. The Europe that is
a dream and a project.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo
Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater,
Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris,
Gÿorgy Konrád and Salman Rushdie (who is not European but has found
in Europe his primary refuge from the start of his persecution. I
also signed it with some other co-signers, a few days ago, when I was
at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a little debate. One of
the themes that quickly emerged, one that I found amply consequential, is
that there exists a consciousness of a European identity. It
occurred to me to cite the pages of Remembrance of Things Past by
Proust when, in Paris during the time of the bombardment by the
German Zeppelins, the intellectuals continue to speak and to write of
Goethe or of Schiller as an integrated part of their culture.
But this sense of a European
identity, certainly very strong among the elite
intellectuals, is it also among the common people? It occurred to me
to reflect on the fact that even today, in every European country, they
celebrate (in school and in their public festivals), real heroes, who
are all men who have valorously slain other Europeans, from the part of
that Arminius who exterminated the legions of Varo, to Joan of Arc,
the Cid, (because the Muslims against whom he fought were of the
European centuries), to various Italian and Hungarian heroes of the
Risogimento, who fell against the Austrian enemy. Is there no European hero of whom we can speak? Did none ever exist? What about Byron and Santorre di Santarosa, who advanced and fought for the cause of Greek liberty,
to say nothing of the not-insignificant numbers of little Schindlers,
who saved the lives of thousands of Jews without concern for what
nation they belonged to. What about the non-martial heroes, such as De
Gasperi, Monnet, Schuman, Adenuauer, Spinelli? And could not
searching into the recesses of history expose others, of whom we could speak
to the children, (and to the adults)? Is it truly possible that we cannot
find a European Asterix of whom we can speak about the Europe of
tomorrow?
The fall of the fraud-imposed European Union will be difficult and painful for many, just as the collapse of its force-imposed American counterpart will cause considerable chaos and suffering.  But in both cases, the pain will be a relatively small price to pay, because the alternative is the material imposition of Orwell’s metaphorical boot-on-the-human-face forever. 
The answer to his question is no.  There can never be a European Asterix.  Asterix is a hero to millions of Europeans because he represents the independent human spirit resisting the force of Empire.  And as such, the new Asterixes of the future will be those who courageously resisted the bureaucratic stormtroopers of the failing Union, not those who marched in their ranks.  The EU is in the imperial tradition of Augustus, Napoleon, and Hitler, and as such, it can never command the loyalty of an Asterix.
The intellectual elite always loves Empire.  They are its parasites, its remoras.  And how they hate that it is so often those men who stand against them and their will to rule that are loved and lionized by generation after generation of the common people.

On the radio

I was on Brian Greenberg’s Philadelphia radio show last night, where we talked all about McRapey, and how terribly persecuted I am, and how bravely and ingeniously I’ve handled being persecuted, and how my books aren’t derivative ripoffs AT ALL.  It was a very courageous performance by me and I feel much better about myself now that my feelings have been affirmed by a sympathetic media figure.

You’re going to want to hear it, because I also gave some important hints about my totally all-original next book!  That’s right, you can squee now!  Here’s a hint: my inspiration rhymes with Why Zack Does Improv and it’s a “reboot” of a certain science fiction classic, only instead of predicting the collapse of the Galactic Empire, Mary Spelltown proves mathematically that by switching over to a matriarchal system of rule by lesbian Empresses of color, the Empire will become even more vibrant and fabulous and fair, thanks to the invisible guidance of a secret dance club of mutant, mind-reading, mixed-race homosexuals that is founded by the brilliant, (and woman!) hard scientist.

And here is the best part.  They communicate by farting!  That’s right.  You may as well pencil in my 2014 Nebula Award for Best Tor Novel right now!