Category: Uncategorized

SFWA Platform: the first five points

As some of you already know, I have declared myself to be a candidate for the SFWA president in the next election, which takes place this spring.  Here are the first five points of my platform; I’m interested in any ideas for improving them:

  1. SPLIT THE NEBULA AWARDS: Science
    fiction is not fantasy. Fantasy is not science fiction. I propose
    doubling the number of Nebula Awards, and presenting awards for Best
    Novel, Best Novella, Best Novellette, Best Short Story, and Best
    Script in two categories, Science Fiction and Fantasy.
  2. AWARD A CASH PRIZE FOR BOTH BEST
    NOVEL AWARDS: A $5,000 prize will be awarded to the winner of Best
    Novel:Science Fiction as well as to the winner of Best
    Novel:Fantasy. The long term goal will be to work towards making
    the winning of a Nebula a more prestigious and financially valuable
    event than winning the Man Booker Prize.
  3. EXPAND THE MEMBERSHIP: The right
    to SFWA membership will be granted to all self-published and small
    press-published authors who have sold more than a specified number
    of ebooks to be determined, eligibility number to be confirmed via
    official Amazon report. It will also be granted to all SF/F-related
    computer game lead designers, senior designers, and writers with
    primary credits on two or more SF/F-related games.
  4. ELIMINATE THE APPEARANCE OF
    CORRUPTION IN THE AWARD PROCESS: Closing the nomination process to
    the membership and the public made the appearance of corruption
    worse, not better. Reducing the number of recommendations to reduce
    logrolling was a good idea, hiding the results from the membership
    created more harm than good.
  5. EMPOWERING THE NEBULA JURIES: The
    most prestigious and lucrative literary prizes are awarded by
    juries. The Nebulas should be no different if they are to attain
    equal prestige. I am entirely open to a debate about the best way
    to ensure jury integrity, but my initial thought is to randomly
    select the juries from the membership, with jurors barred from
    voting for works published by their publishers. In situations where
    the latter bar would lead to an obvious injustice being done, the
    SFWA President and Vice-President would have the ability to release
    a juror from the bar on a case-by-case basis if they both agreed
    such an act was justified by the quality of the work in question.

They will not pay

Karl Denninger exhorts today’s youth and tomorrow’s debt-holders:

You have committed no crime.  You thus cannot be compelled to either slavery or involuntary servitude.  And until your 18th birthday, you cannot lawfully consent to servitude.  It is only upon your 18th birthday that you can consent.

So I say to you today, that it is your right to stand as American Citizens, irrespective of your age who have not yet consented, and say in a loud, clear voice:

I WILL NOT PAY

You should and indeed must say it to your parents.  You should and indeed must say it in your schools.  You should and indeed must pass this letter around to your friends and others in your class and those who you associate and hang out with.  And you must say this every day, in a louder and more-cohesive voice — today, tomorrow, the next day and every day thereafter, until we the “old geezers”, realize that you’re serious.

We, the “old geezers”, never had the right to try to force you to pay $180,000 of your money that you would earn tomorrow, an amount that has almost tripled in the last ten years and will triple again if you don’t put your foot down and demand it stop.

There is only one way to make sure it stops, and that is to make very clear to everyone the following:

YOU WILL NOT PAY

You must say it, and you must mean it.  You must convince all those around you, especially the adults around you, that you mean it. 

You must do it now, because if you don’t, or worse you take any act that confirms that you’re ok with that $180,000 in debt that was forced upon you then you will be forced to pay not only that but the hundreds of thousands more that will be added over the next decades. 

Of course, it doesn’t actually matter whether they warn their parents and grandparents or not.  They will not pay.  They will not pay because they will not be able to pay.

Book review by Jonathan Moeller

Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, reviews A THRONE OF BONES:

A THRONE OF BONES, by Vox Day, is one of the more ambitious epic fantasy novels I have read…. I enjoyed the historical verisimilitude of the novel, especially the depiction of the Amorran republican legions. (It is in my opinion a bit fallacious to argue for historical “realism” in fantasy novels – if a book has characters that can shoot lightning bolts from their fingers, the writer have taken realism out back to be shot. Historical verisimilitude is then the best the writer can reach for, then, something I’ve done myself.)  In that vein, battle scenes are very well done. Additionally, none of the characters are caricatures. All of the nobles involved in, say, the Amorran civil war, have completely understandable motives for their actions, and none of the (human) characters are villainous so much as they hold incompatible views of how the world should work.

The author deliberately wrote the book in response to the moral nihilism of many contemporary epic fantasy novels. Many elements, in particular the civil war between noble families, seems to owe its inspiration to George R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (though SONG was based on the War of the Roses, and A THRONE OF BONES seems based on the Social War of the Roman Republic.) The character of Corvus, for example, seems similar to Ned Stark in SONG, and like Ned Stark, makes a honorable but nonetheless stupid decision that has long-reaching bad consequences….

Read the rest of the review at Jonathan’s site.  He has some interesting comments about the way the technologically-empowered bypassing of the conventional gatekeepers is likely to improve fiction.

The Orwellian U.S. courts

Black is white.  War is peace.  Non-compliance is compliance.  Concealment is disclosure:

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed most of two lawsuits seeking disclosure of US government documents related to the Obama administration’s claim of legal authority to order the killing of American citizens overseas….

At issue was whether the administration would be ordered under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to disclose to the public legal memos written by government lawyers defending the targeted killing of US citizens overseas who were suspected of involvement in terror operations.

“This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests,” McMahon said.

She added that the government thus could not be “compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Got that?  The Government has not violated FOIA by violating FOIA. That is, if nothing else, a violation of Aristotelian logic.  The fact is that regardless of what the captive courts declare, the Obama administration has absolutely no authority to order the killing of American citizens without trial or due process, overseas or within the borders of the States. The fact that the courts are too corrupt to even hold them accountable is further evidence of the ongoing decline of the United States into historical irrelevance.

The left side of the arc

A number of readers have commented that A THRONE OF BONES is significantly improved, in terms of their perception of its literary quality, over my previous novels.  I myself have the sense that I know what I’m doing now in a way that I simply did not 10 years ago, and that while I feel too jaded and indifferent to be writing what could be described as “angry young man” commentary anymore – hence the column retirement – I feel extraordinarily energetic with regards to the novel writing.  Producing 7,500 words of fiction per week comes relatively easily now, whereas the weekly 750-word columns that used to flow like water had increasingly become difficult.

So, I found Steve Sailer’s analysis of PG Wodehouse to be very interesting in this regard, as it seems to indicates that one’s forties, fifties, and even sixties are the writer’s prime novel-writing season.

The consistency of ratings over time is the most striking fact. But a
few temporal patterns can be discerned due to the huge sample sizes of
raters. My Man Jeeves at age 37 was a rookie effort, falling 0.13
points below his career mean. Wodehouse hit a long peak from his early
40s into his early 60s with six straight Jeeves novels rated above his
career average, but his ratings slip only marginally in his old age….

The peak is probably 1938’s (age 56) The Code of the Woosters. The
topical political satire of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union
of Fascist Blackshirts, as Bertie’s nemesis Sir Roderick Spode, leader
of the Blackshorts, makes the book stand out. 
The next novel was 1946’s (age 64) Jeeves in the Morning (formerly Joy in the Morning),
which Wodehouse had a lot of time to work on while he was interned by
the Nazis (he was caught at his beach home in France in 1940). It has
equally high ratings as Code of the Woosters, although fewer raters. In 1982, Alexander Cockburn designated Code and Morning to be the peaks of the series.
Ring for Jeeves (age 71) is the most obvious dud, but Wodehouse rebounded well. For example, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, published when he was about age 81, garnered above average ratings from over 3,000 raters. That’s pretty extraordinary.

On the one hand, one could argue that I started writing novels too early.  Or, at least, publishing them too early.  Wasn’t it Hemingway who said that everyone had a million worthless words inside them that they had to get out before writing anything decent?  I’m finally past that point now, and it is encouraging to know that I’m likely on the left side of the career arc, and so long as I put in the effort, can anticipate continued improvement over the next twenty years.

Abolish the death penalty

It’s not often that I agree with a New York Times editorial, but I, too, oppose the death penalty.  I don’t oppose it because there are not criminals who merit death, but rather because I do not trust the state to be able to carry it out responsibly and in a strictly limited manner, a doubt that the historical and scientific evidence tends to strongly bolster:

Thanks to the Innocence Project
and the overturning of 18 wrongful convictions of death-row inmates
with DNA evidence and the exonerations of 16 others charged with capital
crimes, the American public is increasingly aware that the system makes
terrible mistakes. Since 1973, a total of 142 people have been freed
from death row after being exonerated with DNA or other kinds of
evidence.
All of these factors have led the states to retreat from the death
penalty in recent years — in both law and in practice. In 2012,
Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish the penalty.
Nine states executed inmates, the fewest in two decades. Three-fourths
of the 43 executions in 2012 were carried out in only four states. The
number of new death sentences remained low at 77 — about one-third the
number in 2000 — with just four states accounting for almost two-thirds
of those sentences. While 33 states retain the death penalty on their
books, 13 of them have not executed anyone for at least five years.

It is always important to keep in mind that murder and other capital crimes are far less significant problems than mass murder by government.  The very last thing any libertarian should support is a government that wants to confiscate firearms being empowered with life and death over its citizens.  Moreover, a death penalty ban should also include a ban on the Obama administration’s claim of a power of secret president-ordered assassinations.

If the federal government cannot execute a citizen with a trial, it bloody well can’t assassinate him without one either.

How you like them sour grapes?

I’ve never quite understood those who genuinely appear to believe that I have any reason to be jealous of John Scalzi.  Yes, I am presently running for the SFWA position he is vacating, and sure, I do regularly lay the metaphorical crosshairs on him, but anyone who can fail to see the vast amusement that is regularly to be had with the author of l’affaire Rapey McRaperson falls very well short of being my ideal reader.  But be that as it may, the one thing to which various observers inevitably draw attention is something I’d always assumed was at least partially true, which is the assumption that Scalzi’s blog readership at Whatever is significantly larger than mine at VP and AG.  Longtime readers will recall that fans of PZ Myers also used to make a habit of pointing this out vis-a-vis Pharyngula, although we don’t seem to have heard much of that since the establishment of FreeThoughtBlogs and the inception of the low grade civil war presently raging between the anti-feminist New Atheists and the pro-feminist New New Atheists.

So it was informative to read this post, in which the SFWA president is impressed with the growing size of his blog readership.

“[H]ere are the stats for Whatever for 2012. WordPress’ stats software recorded 8.165 million views last year, which is up from 5.409 million in 2011, which is up roughly 50% over the previous year. That’s a pretty good jump for the year; as a contrast, the jump from 2010 to 2011 was 5.4 percent. I attribute the jump this year to a number of  blockbuster posts, most notably “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The month with the largest number of views was May, with 1.1 million (not coincidentally the month of the “Straight White Male” post); The lowest number of views were in February, with 436,000….  To add to the confusion, Google Analytics (which I also have tracking Whatever) consistently reports lower numbers of views than WordPress; for example, in December, WordPress has Whatever getting 749,000 views; Google has it at 718,000.”

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Interestingly enough, the lowest number of combined views all year was in June, with 570,971.  In February, Vox Popoli alone had 494,534 views; combined views were 596,181.  Not only were both numbers considerably higher than Whatever’s 436,000 WordPress views for the same month, but on the basis of the reported December ratio, Whatever’s more directly comparable estimated Google views were probably in the vicinity of 418,000.  So, prior to the monster post in May that temporarily more than doubled Whatever’s traffic, this marginal “pit of manstink” appears to have had a readership that was 40 percent larger than the Great Hutch of the Rabbit People.  Moreover, last year traffic grew at a rate of 30.3%, from 5,969,066 in 2011 to 7,777,620 in 2012.

Doesn’t quite fit the rabbity narrative, does it?  In fairness to McRapey, I have to point out that he has never once attempted to play the traffic card himself, and on one or two occasions he has even attempted to explain to some of his more imaginative fans that the readership here, for all that it supposedly dwells in “the land of epistemic closure” is not quite as inconsiderable as some of them would like to pretend it is.  The reason for the mistaken perception on everyone’s part is innocent enough, though, as it appears to be based on the fact that WordPress offers the most generous view calculations while Sitemeter’s are the most stingy, combined with the fact that I make my Sitemeter numbers public while Scalzi only reports his WordPress numbers on an annual basis.  But Sitemeter is known to be at least a little unreliable; for example, there were several days earlier this year when I saw that it recorded no traffic at all.

So, corrected for the WordPress/Google ratio, here is how the annual traffic compares on the basis of Scalzi’s reported Whatever traffic and the Google numbers for VP (2009 through Feb 11) and VP+AG (Mar 11 through 2012):

The data indicates that Whatever needed that monster post just to keep pace with the continued growth of VP+AG.  I now await with no little interest to hear how the “sour grapes” theorists will explain that I am jealous of the traffic and exposure of a blog whose readership numbers my blog appears to have first passed up more than a year ago.  Now, it must be pointed out that Whatever did end up with 50k more total views in 2012, thanks to the aforementioned blockbuster post, but it should be readily apparent that VP+AG now have a bigger and more reliable readership base than Whatever.

By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google pageviews.  And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would given the higher level of interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1 million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.

Molon labe, m————

Karl Denninger and his readers echo Leonidas:

“President Obama has said that his push to effectively delete the Second Amendment will face “significant resistance.”  It is time to show him and those in Congress how much resistance there is for any sort of additional gun bans and/or registration requirements in a peaceful and lawful manner.  Print copies of this and dispatch them to your Congresspeople, The White House, and staple them to telephone poles and other locations across the country.”

This image should be placed everywhere that will remind everyone Americans will never, ever, lay down their guns or accept any limits on their right to bear arms.  The politicians are hopelessly out of touch and they have no idea just how significant American resistance will be or they wouldn’t dream of even hinting at the subject.  I find it very hard to believe they will be foolish enough to declare war on the American people and attempt to forcibly disarm them, but if they do pursue that war, they damn sure are not going to win it.

No limits.  No restrictions.  No laws.  Nothing that infringes, even in the smallest and most seemingly sensible way, on the right to bear arms.  No compromise.

The irrelevant Republicans

Apparently we’ve reached the point where Republicans aren’t even pretending to slow down the rapid increase of central government expansion:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the last-minute fiscal cliff deal reached by congressional leaders and President Barack Obama cuts only $15 billion in spending while increasing tax revenues by $620 billion—a 41:1 ratio of tax increases to spending cuts.

Needless to say, this will not fix anything.  And the distance with which the can is kicked down the road keeps getting shorter and shorter.

Pray for one of the best of us

Bart comments:

Happy new year. This is to let you know that last Friday Beau had a minor stroke. he is in the  hospital
in Albq. New Mexico. Beau was taking me to the va hospital for tests.
We had been talking about how some people are simply to selfish to let
other people to have their way in anything. About this time Beau started
having his Tia. Proving to me that he is too selfish to allow me to
have my way. Please pray for Beau. He is hopefully coming home
tomorrow.

Beau is more than the Christian conscience of the Dread Ilk, he is what every Christian man should aspire to be.  I hope and pray that he has many years of service to his Savior left in him, but if not, I can’t think of anyone I know who is better prepared to meet his Maker.