Category: Uncategorized

The End of an Era

Life is not a 1980s fantasy novel. Sometimes, the Dark Lord triumphs. After giving up writing science fiction in favor of cat porn, my onetime blog traffic rival, John Scalzi, has laid down his blog pen and passed on the Whatever torch.

In 2012, John Scalzi’s blog was the place to be for anyone interested in science fiction. His blog popularity and traffic as an influencer led to him getting massive multi-million dollar contracts at Tor Books and industry insiders giving him multiple Hugo Awards. In 2016, Scalzi revealed a small chink in the armor of his online presence, as he reported his blog traffic as falling, coinciding with the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. With his push toward extreme liberalism and social justice, Scalzi turned off a portion of his originally military sci-fi reading audience as he pivoted toward what he perceived to be mainstream clout.

His blog saw an 11% traffic drop from a 2015 self-reported number of 5.8 million site visits (close to 500,000 a month) in that year, but it seems to have gotten far worse in recent years as his online persona has made sure that half the country or more is not interested in what he has to offer with his extreme political takes. It’s gotten so bad that he doesn’t report his blog stats at the end of the year anymore, instead giving updates about his life in general. He vows in 2025 he will “spend more time on friendships and community,” which is usually a self-reflection that things are not going very well.

Despite his not posting his stats, using online statistical sources, Fandom Pulse estimates his monthly traffic to be anywhere from 150,000-200,000 on an average month, less than half of what it was only eight years ago. Fandom Pulse, by contrast, is doing well over 300,000 per month in our first month full time, making this Substack the most trafficked blog in science fiction.

Another sign John Scalzi doesn’t view his blog traffic as doing well is that he’s now conscripted his daughter to take over Whatever. She posted, “Hello, everyone! If you saw my father’s post yesterday, then you know that some changes that have been in the works for a while now are finally here. Mainly, I have been passed the torch that is Whatever, and I plan to carry it proudly.”

I wish both The Artist Formerly Known as… well, in the spirit of leaving history in the past, let’s just call him Neil Gaiman’s good friend, and the new Whatever blogger well. No, don’t laugh. I have absolutely nothing against Athena, and it was always Scalzi’s fans who used to infest the blog comments here that were more in my sights than the man himself. He mostly served as a useful metric, given Whatever’s onetime status as The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction.

It’s a little sad, actually. Beating up on Brandon Sanderson is redundant; the man self-flagellates more than one can possibly kick him, and I couldn’t even name most of the SJW pets and never-weres that have replaced Scalzi as Tor’s Award-Winning authors. The transformation of Whatever truly represents the end of an era, a stupid and mediocre era, to be sure, but an era nonetheless. David Weber is gone, Neil Gaiman is done, George RR Martin is done, John Scalzi is petering out, Brandon Sanderson has gone rogue and is nuking his fan base; the genre publishers simply never developed my generation of fantasy and science fiction writers and there is very little coming up behind them in the mainstream.

And yet, we not only survive, we thrive. Whatever is gone. Tor Books is next. But you can be absolutely certain that the dark empire of Castalia will continue to grow and expand.

The silence was the most terrifying thing. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of life. Birds no longer sang, their vibrant melodies replaced by an eerie stillness. Laughter, once a common thread weaving through the tapestry of human existence, had vanished, leaving behind a chilling emptiness. The whispers of the wind through the trees, once a comforting lullaby, now sounded like mournful dirges. Even the gentle hum of the world, the subtle symphony of existence, had been extinguished, leaving behind a suffocating vacuum where hope and joy once thrived.

And somewhere beneath his black velvet hood, in the shadows where no one could see, the dark lord smiled.

DISCUSS ON SG

Achieving Faster Fixation

A few SGers were confused by the way in which the 2009 paper for the e. coli experiment didn’t provide clear numbers regarding what was, and what was not, a fixation event. And, as it turns out, considerably more work has been done in this space since 2009, and it’s evident that at least a few scientists are growing concerned about the obvious implications of the time, in generations, that is required for mutational fixation, presumably due to its obvious implications for the impossibility of evolution by natural selection. In fact, some are even attempting to prove that fixation is not required for adaptation, in a quixotic illustration of the way in which they still don’t truly understand the extant nature of the problem MITTENS poses for TENS.

Any understanding of an evolutionary process requires the understanding of the particular components that make up that evolutionary process. Darwin wrote about these evolutionary processes in his book, “On the Origin of Species”[1]. From this text, we get a particular quote that describes these processes: “For it should be remembered that the competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution and structure. Hence all the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parent-species itself, will generally tend to become extinct. So it probably will be with many whole collateral lines of descent, which will be conquered by later and improved lines of descent. If, however, the modified offspring of a species get into some distinct country, or become quickly adapted to some quite new station, in which child and parent do not come into competition, both may continue to exist.” Darwin recognized that two processes can occur during evolution, competition (what Darwin also calls the struggle for existence) and adaptation. Many papers have been written about the mathematics of competition. Some of the many examples were written by Haldane et al. [2-5]. Here, we will address both the mathematics of competition and the mathematics of adaptation. In this paper, we consider a particular experimental evolutionary model, the Lenski E. coli long term evolution experiment (LTEE) [6] and the particular evolutionary components which cause the experiment to act in its manner. And to address why it takes so many generations for each fixation and adaptation step. A model for fixation was presented in the following paper BH Good, et al. and edited by Richard Lenski where they discuss these issues [7]…

In this study, we make the simplifying assumption that the distribution of variants in the entire 10ml test tube is identical to the distribution of variants in the 0.1ml sample. The other selection process is the natural selection process that occurs as the different variants replicate where the more fit variant ultimately substitutes for the less fit variants over generations. This is due to the differences in the relative fitness of the different variants in the population. These two selection processes must be combined to correctly describe the fixation process in the LTEE. But the fixation process does not describe the adaptation process. Adaptation (an improvement in fitness) occurs when another beneficial mutation occurs on the more fit variant. The improvement in fitness of a particular variant is dependent on the absolute fitness of that variant to replicate because the random trial for improvement in fitness is the replication and the frequency at which the beneficial mutation occurs is given by the mutation rate. This is a binomial probability problem, that is, does the beneficial mutation occur or does it not occur with that replication. The mathematical model to describe this part of the evolutionary process is given by the mathematics of random mutation and natural selection [10]. The probability of that beneficial mutation occurring on the more fit variant is dependent on the number of replications of that variant. This value will be tabulated in the mathematical model of fixation. The key point to understand in the evolutionary process is that fixation is not a requirement for adaptation. If the carrying capacity of the environment is sufficient to allow for the number of replications required to give a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring on some variant, then fixation is not needed for adaptation.

Have you spotted the problem yet? Anyhow, the experiment provided a way to test how long it took a mutation to fixate, and the results were considerably faster than the 1,600 generations previously indicated. In fact, they managed to reduce the number of generations to fixation to a range between 119 and 497!

However, the table raises an obvious question. What is this k that appears to be directly related to the number of generations required? And aye, there’s the rub.

 If that weight factor is 2, that means that variant is doubling in number every generation.

So, k=2 is a very strong replication weight factor. And yet, even with it cranked up to an unnaturally high rate, it’s still insufficient to reduce the number of generations to fixation to a sufficient level. And a more realistic replication weight factor that is more reflective of the genetic changes we can observe in real-time from one generation to the next is obviously going to be much lower, and in line with those previously reported.

But all of this frantic activity to prove that fixation is not necessary for adaptation is misplaced anyhow, because the problem is not adaptation, but the observable genetic distance that consists of historical fixation events separating one species from another. One can certainly prove that it’s not necessary to travel from point A to point B in a boat in order to cross a river, but that proof will never change the previously measured width of the river.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sen. Graham Demands Mass Deportations

It’s fascinating to see how the Clown World puppets simply change their tune in order to maintain their political viability as well as Clown World’s monopoly on positions of power and influence:

The US needs to fortify its border with Mexico and start mass deportations as soon as possible, in the name of national security, Senator Lindsey Graham has warned. The South Carolina Republican, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, spoke to Fox News on Sunday about the pending budget reconciliation bill.

“I’m very worried that if we don’t put border first and get it done, it’s going to be a nightmare for our national security,” Graham told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

“We’ve got millions of illegal immigrants that President Trump has promised to deport, and he should. Why are we doing mass deportation? Because we had mass illegal immigration,” he added.

My best guess is that Clown World will embrace mass repatriations of illegal immigrants in what will probably be a futile attempt to prevent the mass repatriations of legal immigrants and dual-citizens. Graham has been a U.S. Senator since 2003, and to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time he has ever publicly called for mass deportations.

Notice how all the “nationalists” who receive coverage are civic nationalists who never even mentioned the word except to disavow it until 2020 or so, while all of the overt and outright nationalists are ignored, when they’re not still being denounced as “extremists” and worse. Now the fake “nationalists” are talking up a storm trying to defend their “idea nation” and denouncing “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that the core problem isn’t, and has never been, either the ideas or the legality of the invaders, but rather, the fact that they are not part of the American nation, they are not part of the American posterity, and they never will be.

But the pendulum is definitely swinging back, and it’s going to go a lot further than Clown World or its fake nationalists would prefer.

DISCUSS ON SG

Babylon Babbles

Forget Western civilization. When did the Jews ever have anything to do with any civilization? They’re still a literally nomadic tribe! Did they invent civilization when they were enslaved for four centuries in Egypt? When ten of the 12 tribes were carried off by the Assyrians? Or perhaps they invented Western civilization in Babylon while they were enslaved there? I don’t suppose they could have invented civilization when they were being ruled by the Medo-Persians or by Rome.

If we are to take their historic claims to the land of Israel by right of conquering the Canaanites seriously, then they’ve never been part of Western civilization at all, let alone responsible for any part of its invention. The fact that this historic land is in the Middle EAST would be the first clue there.

But Joel Berry does provide us with the useful service of conclusively disproving the ludicrous 115 average IQ fiction. The amusing thing is that these historical illiterates who take the Straussian Athens + Jerusalem metaphor literally don’t realize that it’s simply a metaphor that refers to Western philosophy and religion, not the actual cities or their historic residents.

DISCUSS ON SG

Georgian Inspirations

According to Spotify, Charles Darwin is dead.

Got my mind on those genes baby, fixation’s slow.
Hundreds of generations don’t you know?
Natural selection’s got its groove, but it’s a crawl
Evolution’s math… it’s a mighty tall wall.

Mutations happen but they take their sweet time
Fixation in the genes, it’s a mountain to climb
Survival of the fittest, you’ve heard it before
But it’s the math that’s tricky. There’s so much more.

Get your groove on
Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all
Math don’t lie. And that’s a fact
Generations passing, one by one
Fixation’s slow but the funk’s begun!

DNA is twisted. A double helix spin (spiral!)
But changes in the code, man, they take years to win
Thousands of years just to make a minor shift
Mathematical reality disproves genetic drift.

TENS has been disproven, the numbers don’t compute.
Mutational fixation means the question is moot.
Populations change but it’s super slow,
It’s a long-winding journey through genetic flow.

So we DNA dance, shake it to the groove
Gotta feel that rhythm, there’s nothing to prove.
Natural Selection’s not a night at the club
But we’re caught in this math, yeah, there’s the rub!

Get your groove on
Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all
Math don’t lie. And that’s a fact!
Generations passing you comprehend
Fixation’s slow but the funk don’t end!

It’s also on UATV, of course. If, however, you’re an Unauthorized subscriber and you’re not sufficiently evolved to handle a beat and a bassline that funky, why not rhyme and revel with something a little more Byronic.

DISCUSS ON SG

Trudeau Doesn’t Actually Resign

He has announced that he intends to resign. In March. Once a new party leader is determined. Maybe. Assuming that nothing changes in the next three months.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced he intends to resign as Liberal Party leader and prime minister once a new party leader is determined. “I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process,” he said Monday from Rideau Cottage in Ottawa. Trudeau will serve as prime minister until March 24. He will then be replaced by a new Liberal Party leader.

There sure are a lot of lame duck leaders across the West of late…

DISCUSS ON SG

Swastikas in London

If Keir Starmer is going to “fight the poison of the far-right” as hard as he fought the Pakistani rape gangs, there will be swastikas flying over Parliament and Prince William will be acclaimed as Fuhrer by June.

Keir Starmer hit back at Elon Musk today in the increasingly bitter spat over his record on grooming gang cases. The PM mounted a robust defence as he took questions after laying out NHS waiting list plans this morning. Sir Keir said ‘child sexual exploitation is utterly sickening’ and victims had been ‘let down’ – but he insisted he had tackled the issues ‘head on’ as director of public prosecutions.

The premier accused opposition politicians of ‘amplifying what the far-right is saying’ on child sexual abuse after falling to act ‘for 14 long years’. He insisted he would fight the ‘poison of the far right’, arguing that those who are ‘spreading lies and misinformation.. are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves’.

The fact that Clown World has to rely on the likes of Starmer, Trudeau, and the Six Bidens just to keep its narrative going is one of the most obvious indications that it is in its terminal stage.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Thumb on the Scale

It didn’t take long to see that the NFL really wants to keep the Lions in the game, if not to guarantee their finishing #1 in the NFC. Two major “missed” penalty calls against the Lions, plus Sam Darnold throwing every single pass two feet higher than when he’s actually trying to hit the receiver, and it’s the inexplicably inept second half against the Packers all over again.

I understand the NFC has to keep the games close. They have to script the excitement or half the TV audience turns off the game. But it’s really annoying when you can correctly call what’s going to happen after an organic play takes place that goes against the script.

I’m just hoping the script permits the Vikings to play all out in the second half.

UPDATE: Obviously not.

UPDATE: 4 times reaching red zone but not scoring a TD. 3 times having goal-to-go but not scoring a TD. 2 failed 4th-and-goal attempts. 1 missed FG. No other NFL team in the last 30 years has done all of that in the same game.

I guess the Lions defense just had their number, right? Just a lights-out game and the Vikings just came out a little flat, right? And how unfortunate was that shanked kickoff, right? It’s like listening to WWF fans insisting that wrestling is too real. It’s unfortunate that people won’t pay attention to genuine sporting contests that aren’t close, but I do wish the NFL puppetmasters would content themselves with keeping things close and dramatic instead of outright dictating the outcomes.

DISCUSS ON SG

Darwin’s Dead

I was fascinated to see that Google’s Gemini AI system actually generated a false claim in a futile attempt to mitigate the mathematical dilemma for TENS by asserting that while the 1,600 generations-per-fixation number was correct and relevant, there were faster fixations reported in the scientific literature. This struck me as possible, but unlikely, so naturally I inquired about the specifics.

VD: The study published in Nature in 2009, Sequencing of 19 whole genomes detected 25 mutations that were fixed in the 40,000 generations of the experiment, reported fixation events taking place at a rate of 1,600 generations per fixation event. Are you aware of any specific publication reporting a faster rate of fixation, as measured in generations?

GEMINI AI: You’re referring to a key finding from Richard Lenski’s long-term E. coli experiment, a landmark study in evolutionary biology. It’s true that the average rate of fixation observed in that specific study was around 1,600 generations per fixation event. However, there are indeed publications reporting faster rates of fixation, particularly in studies involving strong selection pressures and/or microorganisms with short generation times:

Studies on Antibiotic Resistance:

    Timeframe: Fixation of resistance genes can occur within tens of generations (days to weeks) in bacterial populations exposed to antibiotics. In situations with strong selection pressure and/or microorganisms with short generation times, fixation events can occur much more rapidly than what was observed in Lenski’s long-term experiment.

    You keep speaking in general terms. Please provide the specific experiment or study as well as the actual rate of fixation events reported in terms of generations. Three examples will suffice.

    You’re right to ask for specifics! It’s important to back up general statements with concrete examples. Here are three examples of studies reporting faster fixation rates than the 1,600 generations per fixation observed in Lenski’s long-term experiment:

    1. Rapid Rise of Antibiotic Resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

    Study: “Evolution of high-level ciprofloxacin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a patient with cystic fibrosis” by Breidenstein et al. (2011), published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
    Organism: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that causes lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients.
    Selective Pressure: Exposure to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin.
    Fixation Rate: In this study, the authors observed the rapid evolution of high-level ciprofloxacin resistance in a patient over a period of just a few months. Given the generation time of P. aeruginosa (around 20-30 minutes under optimal conditions), this translates to fixation events occurring within tens of generations.
    Key Finding: Specific mutations in genes encoding DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV (the targets of ciprofloxacin) were rapidly selected for and became fixed in the bacterial population within the patient.

    1. Evolution of Drug Resistance in HIV

    Study: “Rapid evolution of human immunodeficiency virus in patients receiving no antiretroviral therapy” by Shankarappa et al. (1999), published in Nature Medicine.
    Organism: Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
    Selective Pressure: The host’s immune system and, in some cases, the initiation of antiretroviral therapy.
    Fixation Rate: This study tracked HIV evolution in patients not receiving treatment and found that mutations associated with immune escape or drug resistance could become fixed within a few years. Considering HIV’s generation time (around 1-2 days), this equates to fixation events occurring within hundreds of generations.
    Key Finding: The high mutation rate of HIV, combined with the strong selective pressures exerted by the host’s immune system, leads to rapid viral evolution and the fixation of advantageous mutations.

    1. Experimental Evolution of Yeast under Nutrient Limitation

    Study: “Experimental evolution of a metabolic pathway” by Fekete et al. (2010), published in Molecular Systems Biology.
    Organism: Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
    Selective Pressure: Limitation of a specific nutrient (galactose).
    Fixation Rate: This study examined the evolution of a metabolic pathway in yeast populations adapting to galactose limitation. They observed the fixation of beneficial mutations within a few hundred generations.
    Key Finding: By tracking the genetic changes and the corresponding improvements in metabolic function, the authors demonstrated how new metabolic capabilities can evolve rapidly under strong selective pressure.

    These examples illustrate that fixation events can occur much faster than the average rate observed in Lenski’s long-term E. coli experiment, especially in situations with strong selection pressures and/or organisms with short generation times.

    (Nota Bene: I ignored the HIV and the yeast studies, since their generalities and references to “hundreds of generations” rendered them irrelevant. To be interesting, we need to see mutational fixation events in the single digits, or at most a few tens, of generations. I also assumed “just a few months” to indicate a minimum of three.)

    Given the generation time of P. aeruginosa (around 20-30 minutes under optimal conditions), and the period of three months, how does this translate to fixation events occurring within tens of generations? Wouldn’t that translate to more than four thousand generations?

    You’re absolutely right to question that! My apologies for the misleading statement.

    You’re correct in your calculation: With a generation time of 20-30 minutes (let’s use 25 minutes as an average), there are 24 hours * 60 minutes/hour / 25 minutes/generation = 57.6 generations per day.
    Over three months (approximately 90 days), this would be 57.6 generations/day * 90 days = 5184 generations. So, three months translates to thousands of generations, not tens.

    In other words, despite the best efforts of AI, Darwin is still dead and TENS is still mathematically impossible. Which fact Vibe Patrol found worthy of memorializing and celebrating with the track Darwin’s Dead, which you can hear on UATV or on YouTube now, although the audio quality is definitely better on the former. Spotify and iTunes should be following soon. Who said you can’t learn science and get your groove on at the same time?

    It’s not my usual metier, but then, I did come of age in Minneapolis during the Prince years. This is the Fixation Funk mix.

    Get your groove on
    Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all.
    Math don’t lie
    And that’s a fact!
    Generations passing
    One by one,
    Fixation’s slow,
    But the funk’s begun!

    DISCUSS ON SG

    The Self-Destruction of Brandon Sanderson

    Fandom Pulse has chronicled Brandon Sanderson’s descent into ticket-taking and social justice convergence, but Sanderson has been creating some additional problems for his fiction writing as well, technical problems that no one but a better epic fantasy author is likely to notice.

    Re: Brandon needs to be edited more. I assure you, I’m edited more now than I ever have been–so I don’t believe editing isn’t the issue some people are having. Tress and Sunlit, for example, were written not long ago, and are both quite tight as a narrative. Both were edited less than Stormlight 5. Writing speed isn’t the problem either, as the fastest I’ve ever been required to write was during the Gathering Storm / Way of Kings era, and those are books that are generally (by comparison) not talked about the same way as (say) Rhythm of War.

    The issue is story scope expansion–Stormlight in particular has a LOT going on. I can see some people wishing for the tighter narratives of the first two books, but there are things I can do with this kind of story I couldn’t do with those. I like a variety, and this IS the story I want to tell here, despite being capable of doing it other ways. Every scene was one I wanted in the book, and sometimes I like to do different things, for different readers. I got the same complaints about the way I did the Bridge Four individual viewpoints in Oathbringer, for example. There were lots of suggestions I cut them during editorial and early reads, and I refused not because there is no validity to these ideas, but because this was the story I legitimately wanted to tell.

    This is more than a little ironic, given the way in which Sanderson was brought in to fix a similar problem that the late Robert Jordan had created for himself, and especially in light of how George R. R. Martin has apparently facing the end of his literary career without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire for the very same self-indulgent reason that Sanderson gives for the way in which his readers have perceived a decline in the quality of his books.

    The reason that Sanderson gives, story scope expansion, is correct, but it is too general for the average reader or writer to understand the true root of the problem. Now, this is just a surmise, because I have only read two Sanderson novels and part of another, and I regard him as the epitome of boring mediocrity when it comes to epic fantasy. I’d rather read The Sword of Shannara, the most incoherent of Erikson’s Malazan books, or anything by Joel Abercrombie than another chapter of Sanderson’s tedious meandering.

    But if any Sanderson fans here would like to check, I am confident that if you count up the number of perspective characters he’s utilizing, you will find that they are increasing from book to book. Just as George Martin did before him, Sanderson has been expanding the scope of the story by introducing new perspective characters and promoting minor characters to perspective characters, and that means he has been getting distracted by tangents taking his focus away from the larger story. By doing so, he is running a very serious risk of not only rendering his story incoherent and unreadable, but impossible to finish in a manner that will be reasonably satisfying to the reader. If anyone would care to count up the number of perspective characters in each book and report them to me via email or on SG, I will update the post with the perspective character count by book. That should tell us how grave the problem is.

    UPDATE: It will probably surprise no one here to learn that the diagnosis was correct. An SG reader provided a perspective character count for the Stormlight Archives, in which he bundled a few small group perspectives that appear in the last three books into one for the purposes of comparison. Anyhow, Sanderson has clearly committed the same technical blunder that Martin did in expanding the scope of his story.

    • SA1: 6
    • SA2: 6
    • SA3: 14
    • SA4: 14
    • SA5: 23

    This is the sort of thing of which the average novelist or editor isn’t aware, because writing an epic, be it fantasy or science fiction, is a very, very different thing than writing a novel. An epic bears about the same relationship to a novel that a novel does to a short story or a novelette. Indeed, each chapter of A Throne of Bones and A Sea of Skulls, essentially functions as a novelette and many of them could be reasonably published as stand-alones without the average reader noticing it was part of a larger work.

    I described the way in which story scope expansion creates the technical problem faced by Martin in a post last year.

    Consider the POV breakdown of A Game of Thrones, the first book of ASOIAF. Eight perspective characters, with Ned accounting for 15 chapters and 18.3 percent of the focus. Only Ned was eliminated by the end of the book, so Martin entered the second book of the series with a very manageable seven characters. He adds three characters to reach 10, then two more in the third for 12, however, he only continues the stories of three of those 12 characters as he introduces 10 more in the fourth book. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Martin had divided up his increasingly out-of-control story amidst 18 perspective characters and entered The Winds of Winter with up to 30(!) potential perspective characters whose stories require at least some degree of resolution!

    Dividing 300k words among thirty characters means devoting the equivalent of one novelette to each character’s perspective, while somehow trying to tie them all together in a coherent manner. While it’s theoretically possible, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish anything even close to that degree of literary difficulty. Some readers might find it interesting to know that in addition to predicting Martin’s inability to finish his series, last year I also pointed out that Brandon Sanderson would not be able to fix the technical problem with ASOIAF and bring it to a proper conclusion.

    Given that Sanderson has blundered into the same problem that did in Martin’s series, it appears that my observation was correct. And it also tends to confirm my opinion that despite his massive sales success, Sanderson is not in my league as an author of epic fantasy; that may well sound arrogant, but it’s not as if the sample size of works that, while unfinished, exceed the length of The Lord of the Rings, are insufficient for a determinative comparison.

    As any look at the forgotten bestsellers of 100 years ago will tell you, the best books are the ones that survive to be read by future generations, not those that sell best in their own day. And as Deng Xiaoping once said of the French Revolution, it’s just too soon for us to tell.

    DISCUSS ON SG