Mailvox: your mileage WILL vary

Baseball Savant emails about his daughter’s inarguably flawless taste in epic fantasy literature:

I know I’ve e-mailed you this but my 14-year old daughter has read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 3x and the Hobbit countless times. She loves them. She basically has them memorized. She collects them if she sees copies with a different cover. It’s crazy.

She read Throne of Bones in a week. After, she read Lord of the Rings again. So I asked her, how does Vox compare to Tolkien.

She hesitated and then said….”Hmmmm, I think Vox got him.”

What I really like about Throne of Bones is that it sucks you in so fast. The beginning pages with the painting! Whoa. Loved it.

That’s very flattering, of course, and I’m delighted to hear it, but honestly, it would be hard for me to disagree more. Here is how I rank some random authors on a broad and indistinct range of criteria I have not fully articulated. In some cases, it’s based more on their peak, in others, on their average. There is no particular rhyme or reason in this regard; even the greatest novelists have their occasional clunkers.

10/10: Immortals
Tolkien, Eco, Tolstoy, Murakami, Hesse, Maupassant, Poe, Wodehouse

9/10: First-Rate
Lewis, Tanith Lee, Dostoevsky, Adams, Gibson, Herbert, Mieville, Stephenson, Balzac, Calvino, Douglas Adams, Lovecraft, Fitzgerald, Soseki

8/10: Second-Rate
Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Heinlein, Clarke, Barbara Hambly, Arthur C. Clarke, Pratchett, Keillor, Simmons, Zelazny, Howard

7/10: Third-Rate
Robert Anton Wilson, Katherine Kurtz, Ann McCaffrey, Raymond Feist, Eriksen, George RR Martin, Eddings, Card, Poul Anderson

6/10: Fourth-Rate
Gaiman, Asimov, Anthony, Bujold

At my very best, which is to say with ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT, I’d give myself an 8 to date. But I’d regard a 7 as perfectly reasonable, depending upon your tastes. And yes, I can explain each of these ratings in detail, but I’m not going to do so here.


MAILVOX: Just read your recent posts on Gaiman, was curious which book or two you would recommend starting with China Mieville? I have read about his work here and there and it seemed intriguing but never got around to it, am interested now upon seeing that you admire his writing.

I would read The City and the City, followed by Kraken, and then, assuming you enjoyed both of those, read his best, which is Embassytown.

Me-So was right!

I stand corrected. Apparently Japan has had the ability to invade California all along:

With its official operational date fast approaching, Japan’s first Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade kicked off the bilateral Iron Fist 2018 exercise on Friday with an opening ceremony alongside its Marine Corps hosts. It wasn’t a time for long speeches.

Over the next month, 350 soldiers with the Japan Ground Self Defense Force will train closely with Marines to hone skills that will run the gamut from amphibious reconnaissance and fire-and-maneuver assaults to close-air support and staff planning. They will fire mortars and artillery, land on beaches aboard rubber boats and assault craft and attack and defend “friendly” land from foes in various training scenarios.

The soldiers are members of Western Army Infantry Regiment, a light infantry force that Japan has tasked with creating the first brigade of sea soldiers – with the goal to be ready by April 1, 2018 – that can conduct amphibious operations ultimately as part of a broader “dynamic joint defense force.”

This year’s Iron Fist exercise – it runs from Jan. 12 to Feb. 12 – marks the 13th iteration of the annual training that focuses on amphibious operations, with I Marine Expeditionary Force as a primary host.

Time to dust off those old Japanese internment camps. Well done, Michelle!

West or Not-West

The Northern League is finally confronting the mass invasion of Europe and the most important chart in the world:

An Italian politician has called for his countrymen to decide whether they wish to preserve the ‘white race’ in the face of mass migration to Europe.

Politician Attilio Fontana, from the Northern League, said Italy had a stark choice to make over immigration – propelling the contentious topic to the front and centre of the general election campaign.

‘We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if it will be wiped out,’ Fontana said, the League’s candidate to govern the northern Lombardy region.

It was ‘not a question of being xenophobic or racist, but a question of being logical or rational,’ he said in remarks made on Sunday.

Unfortunately, Fontana backed down a bit under media pressure, which is always a mistake. People have to stop denying that their position is xenophobic, racist, or whatever else the globalist media calls it. The characterizations are purely rhetorical and are totally meaningless from a dialectical perspective. All that matters is that the statement is true. The defenders of the West need to stop apologizing for defending their civilization. The West cannot and will not survive if it is populated by the South or the East; it will no longer be the West. Stop allowing the critics to pretend otherwise.

The correct response would have been: “Why do you wish to destroy Italy? Why do you wish to destroy the European nations? Why do you seek to destroy Western civilization?” Instead of constantly playing defense, force them to try to deny that they are doing what they are doing when the evidence is everywhere, right in front of everyone.

If Congolese or Chinese or penguins from the South Pole can truly become Westerners and maintain Western civilization, let them prove that they can do so in their own countries first. Civilization is not a game and the entire world will suffer greatly from the transformation of the West into the Not-West. Because what we are presently enduring is the Great Retardation of the West and the literal dumbing-down of the entire planet.

EVS follows up

Ethan gave me the chance to speak my piece, so I’ll leave him with the last word for now. However, I will respond to one of his commenters.

James Robins
I don’t get vox man. I mean comparing yourself to Gaiman? Nobody is haruki murakami, hes a great writer. But vox? Come on lol.

It’s pretty simple. I am a better novelist than Neil Gaiman by almost every reasonable measure. Anyone who has read a sufficient variety of both our novels will recognize that pretty easily. Gaiman writes a variant of the same book with the same sort of characters almost every time. Even his Sandman is a Gary Stu of sorts. I have much wider literary range and can write everything from haunting shorts that could almost pass for modern Maupassant to murder mysteries to epic military fantasy. I don’t write myself into my books and I can even successfully pull off the “you genuinely think he’s dead but actually he isn’t” trick without cheating or magic or medical science or anything but pure literary sleight of hand.

George Martin can’t do that despite repeated attempts. Gaiman can’t do it either. And as for Murakami, I have been writing a literary novel inspired by his style for years, although since I am not Japanese, it is more likely to feature a wedding than a suicide. I have no idea when it will be finished, if ever, but I think I might be able to pull it off. And if I can’t get even reasonably close, then I won’t publish it.

I admire Tanith Lee. I admire JRR Tolkien. I admire John C. Wright. I admire China Mieville. I admire Alan Moore. I admire Umberto Eco. The only thing I admire about Gaiman’s writing is his ability to give everything the flavor of a fairy tale. That’s not nothing, it’s actually pretty cool, but it’s very far from the most significant thing. Sure, he sells a lot more books, but then, Dan Brown and Katie Price sell even more and I don’t have any respect for either of their literary abilities.

Anyhow, there is no need to pay any attention to my opinion. Read the reviews of the Arts of Dark and Light instead. Better yet, read the books and decide for yourself.

  • This book contains strong traces of DNA from Umberto Eco and Neal Stephenson but it stands on its own as a fantastically monstrous creature.
  • A Throne of Bones, for me at least, shines like a beacon in this literary twilight.
  • One of the best Fantasy novels I’ve read in the past ten years.
  • Better then GOT. I read a lot of fiction. Vox’s writing skill is superb.
  • I’d put it on par with Tolkien in terms of epic fantasy.
  • I am a big time Tolkien and George Martin fan. Vox’s Selenoth has wiggled its way between Middle Earth and Westeros.
  • Comparisons with Martin are much more useful, and there I agree, Day comes out ahead.
  • Vox Day has catapulted himself into the storied and rarefied rank of writers that sits just below The Master himself. That’s right, I went there. I just said that Vox Day has written a book that is nearly as good as J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.
  • Easily the best epic fantasy series out today.
  • It is the best fantasy book of the past 50 years.

Since we’re on the subject, a bit of Selenoth-related news. Because Kindle Unlimited is becoming increasingly important, we’re going to release a new version of the series specifically formatted for KU. It will be EXACTLY the same text, but divided into more readily digestible 50k to 60k chunks and released under the series name LEGIONS OF BLOOD & BONE.

And yes, I’m still working on A SEA OF SKULLS. And yes, it will be out this year. It will be worth the wait. I think I can safely promise you that. I’m not interested in just getting it out, I am attempting to further raise my writing game.

Amazon’s next market

I refuse to use any of these smart, voice-activated devices or to have one in my home. It astonishes me that anyone does:

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device. The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a ‘smart alarm’, will probably be facing directly at the user’s bed.  The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room – even if music is playing.

However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home. Amazon devices have previously activated when they’re not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.

Five years from now, I’m sure we’ll all be shocked when Amazon unveils that it is adding adult channels to all of its streaming services, with a library bigger than all of its rivals combined.

Decline is everywhere

Even the quality of the fake reviews on Amazon is in serious decline these days:

1.0 out of 5 stars
By Seth Rutledge January 15, 2018
This man writes for the Daily Stormer…
You should be ashamed of yourself for agreeing with this neo-nazi garbage.

That’s definitely news to me. On the other hand, my column has appeared in both Pravda and The Boston Globe, two well-known organs of the global Neo-Nazi movement.

UPDATE: Assuming this is the same Seth Rutledge, and the other reviews suggest it is, this low-effort fake review appears to represent the first direct attack of the Art-SJWs doing what SJWs always do.

Last night Ethan asked about why SJWs behave the way they do, and I mentioned it was something I’d addressed in SJWs Always Double Down. Here is the relevant passage:

SJWs are creatures of pain. They are in a near-constant state of mild psychological distress, which is why so many of them are in therapy or on various psychotropic medications. This is why they are so sensitive, so fragile, and so prone to angry, incoherent rants for reasons that often seem inexplicable to others. They might well be pitied, were it not for the behavior that their suffering inspires in them.

Now, it may seem bizarre that individuals whose primary objective is to mitigate their emotional pain would make a habit of seeking out conflict, much less generating conflict where none previously existed. But that is because you are a normal, psychologically healthy individual whose normal state is not one of internal distress. It is only through conflict that the SJW can generate the feelings of moral superiority he requires in order to drown out his steady state of emotional pain. This is why the Narrative can never stop mutating and why no solution will ever suffice regardless of how perfectly it complies with SJW demands.

It also explains why SJWs are so relentlessly critical of others. In a paper entitled “Holding People Responsible for Ethical Violations: The Surprising Benefits of Accusing Others”, funded by the Wharton Behavioral Lab, researchers found that people who accuse others of unethical behavior can derive significant benefits from doing so. Compared to normal people who do not make a habit of accusing others of crimethink and other moral failures, accusers are perceived by others to have higher ethical standards. In one study, it was found that the act of making accusations increased trust in the accuser and lowered trust in the target. This is precisely the purpose of the disqualify and discredit routine that SJWs so often utilize. In a second study, it was found that making accusations tends to elevate trust in the accuser by boosting other people’s perceptions of the accuser’s ethical standards. And in a third study, it was found that accusations boosted trust in the accuser, decreased trust in the target, and even more significantly, promoted dissension within the group.

In other words, SJWs transfer their own emotional pain into making themselves feel more positive about themselves while simultaneously elevating their social status at the expense of others and at the cost of group harmony. This is why group after group, organization after organization, find that acceding to the demands of the SJWs in their midst inevitably generates more conflict, not less.

This explains why the moderate response to SJWs invariably fails. You cannot solve the problem of childhood obesity by giving the fat, screaming kid the candy for which he is screaming. All that acceding to SJW demands will accomplish is new and more outrageous SJW demands.

And this is also why it is simply false to claim that we are the “mirror image” of SJWs. We have literally nothing in common with them and it would be more accurate to say we are their polar opposites. Unlike their ever-shifting narratives, our standards do not change. We are psychologically strong and stable. We don’t care what others do, so long as they don’t interfere with our ability to do as we please.

Their country?

The demonstration would have been more meaningful in Port-au-Prince:

A sizeable crowd of expatriate Haitians, waving their country’s flag, gathered near the foot of a bridge leading to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, to jeer at Trump as the motorcade returned from the golf club where the president capped his weekend before returning later Monday to Washington.

The Haitians and their supporters shouted, “Our country is not a shithole,” according to video posted by WPEC-TV, and engaged in a shouting match with the pro-Trump demonstrators who typically gather on the other side of the street.

Their country? I thought they were Americans now by virtue of the magic dirt. Interesting to see how “nationality” is now as mutable as the SJW narrative.

And if their country is not a shithole, then why are they in the United States? Why do they complain so vociferously when Americans call for them to be sent back to these wonderful places?

Upon further review

Last night I made two comments that drew an amount of attention. Well, three, actually. Allow me to explain:

First, as a result of Marvel badly misplaying its hand in an attempt to bypass the two major comics distributors and go direct-to-dealer in the late 90s, Diamond managed to establish a near-monopoly over the comics distribution business. Like all monopolies, their customer service has gone downhill as their prices have risen. If you combine their own reports on total retail sales with Hoover’s report on their annual revenue, Diamond takes 22 percent of the total retail dollar that goes through the comics stores. That amounts to a 37 percent markup, 17 points and 85 percent more than is normal for a distribution business.

It’s good to be the monopolist. The additional markup amounts to $55.8 million annually, or $31,885 in lost profit to each of the 1,750+ brick-and-mortar comics stores in the USA. It’s no wonder these stores are struggling or that long-established retail establishments are closing down everywhere from Arizona to Iowa and Sacramento. Diamond isn’t evil or even particularly rapacious, they are simply failing to recognize that they have been devouring their own seed corn. The rise of digital delivery systems combined with the shrinking physical channel is going to place Diamond in an increasingly difficult position; I would expect them to buy some of the independent publishers and get into content production themselves as time goes on, since from what I hear they are pretty smart.

Second, we have found it difficult to establish Alpenwolf even though we have completed one DevGame game and have several others in various stages of development because the major free game sites, Addicting Games and Kongregate, have kept changing their strategies in ways that make it difficult to work for them. Since we already built a complete virtual goods and virtual currency infrastructure, there is no reason why we shouldn’t simply launch our own free-to-play site. It’s going to be very small by gaming standards, and will probably launch with 3-5 games, but at least we’ll have a vehicle for getting our games out there to the gamers. From there, its simply a matter of building traffic and that’s not a challenge that frightens us. Frankly, it’s probably preferable to be able to grow slowly and steadily int his regard. Look for announcements asking for volunteers concerning forum moderation and writing trivia questions for everything from the NFL and NCAA football to comics and television shows in the next few months.

Third, if you think Neil Gaiman is a great novelist, or even a great SF/F novelist, you are simply wrong. He is a successful, talented and much-loved SF/F author, and understandably so, but he is also little more than a very successful stunt writer with two or three tricks in his bag. There is a reason that all of his notable books involve mythology of one sort or another; his true gift is translating ancient myth into a form that pleases postmodern palates. He also has the ability to convey that sense of the numinous that I lack. But Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Alan Moore, John C. Wright, China Mieville, Nick Cole, and even George R.R. Martin are all better, more original SF/F writers with considerably more to say about the human condition than Gaiman.

When I have thought about the writers whose work I would like to be able to emulate or surpass over the years, Neil Gaiman never once entered into the equation, not even for a moment. Consider that American Gods is described as “Neil Gaiman’s best and most ambitious novel yet.” I liked that story considerably better when it was called Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and On the Road. That being said, of the various comics I have read, Sandman is head-and-shoulders above the rest.

As for my own writing, you might contemplate this: How many other authors flow as easily across as broad a range of genres as I do? How many authors have historically done so? Perhaps my inability to focus precludes achieving greatness in any one genre, but I think that sort of unusual breadth at least merits consideration.

UPDATE: this guy has a skeptical, but reasonable perspective on the situation.

To say Arkhaven has been controversial is an understatement. From the moment the company’s flagship title, Alt-Hero, was announced the internet was debating whether a right wing perspective would “save” comics, or further damage an already fractured industry. But as I said before, what’s lacking is a shared notion of what “saving comics” really means. That said, there is a general consensus that Mark Waid’s head on pike would be a good start. Which brings us back to Vox Day and Arkhaven. Most criticism directed toward Vox can be boiled down to: “The last thing comics needs is another goddamn writer with an agenda.”

A self-described libertarian nationalist and member of the Alt-Right, Vox Day has never been shy about his politics. Likewise, his yet to be release Alt-Hero series looks to be something of a satire of today’s overly politicized comics. The project is still months away from completion, so for now we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, Arkhaven has two titles digitally available on Amazon—Quantum Mortis and Right Ho, Jeeves. Both are selling well. Neither are political in nature. And there’s the rub—Alt-Hero could be a political screed. Then again, maybe not. But so far Arkhaven’s catalog hasn’t shown itself to be a mouthpiece for anybody’s politics. If only we could say the same for Marvel.

Does this signal a new dawn for comics? Well, if bringing content to an ignored demographic is Arkhaven’s end goal, it’s not a bad start. And drawing new readers to the medium is a net gain for everyone. But as Green Lantern artist Ethan Van Sciver has been quick to point out, the company currently has no presence in Diamond’s monthly Previews catalog, which is a prerequisite for getting books stocked in comic book stores. And in Sciver’s eyes, if a company isn’t moving product through brick-and-mortar shops, it’s contributing absolutely nothing to the overall health of the industry.

I’ll be blunt, if Arkhaven can eventually become successful enough to provide comics shops with enough monthly product to pay the rent, Vox will not only save the industry, he’ll be the motherfucking Batman.

Better yet, the Shade.

The Ember War comes to Arkhaven

Richard Fox, the Dragon Award-winning author of the bestselling science fiction series THE EMBER WAR SAGA, has an announcement.

Exciting news! The Ember War will come to a comic store near you! The contract with the comic imprint (either Dark Legion or Arkhaven, publisher’s choice) and fellow writer Jon Del Arroz (who’ll do the prose to script work) are signed. 

We’re excited about this, as we’ve wanted to work with Richard for some time now. The first series will be five issues that cover the events of the initial book; there are currently 9 books in the series. We’ll also have another announcement soon about a collaboration for Castalia House that is definitely going to be of serious interest to fans of a certain science fiction series that has already seen graphic adaptation.