How to write a negative review

Now THIS is a proper negative review, of such quality that even the professional reviewer can only salute and applaud. An actual scientist provides the fake reviewers of Corrosion with an exemplary masterpiece of devastation in his review of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, which he took the innovative approach of actually reading in order to criticize it more effectively:

A Slipshod, Incompetent Disaster

I gave this book a fair shake. While I disagree with John Scalzi on sociopolitical issues, that doesn’t mean he can’t be a good, or even great author. After all, I disagree vehemently with Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, but I consider them brilliant scribes whose works I adore. Unfortunately, “The Collapsing Empire” is a mess so wretched that I can’t see how even Scalzi’s biggest fans can defend it.

A major problem is the lack of logical sense to the proceedings. This goes beyond mere plot holes, although there are no lack of those. For instance, the Prologue features a ship mutiny. One in which the ship’s chief engineer is murdered and there are plans to do the same with the captain and her supporters. Risky business, no? Not only do the mutineers face the prospect of armed resistance, putting their lives on the line, but they have committed a serious criminal act. Who is to say they won’t be found out by an investigator? Or one of the many fellow mutineers won’t blackmail them or squeal later on the others?

In other words, they need a damn compelling reason to mutiny. The one provided by Scalzi is that the executive officer leading the mutiny will receive a 30% premium on their weapons cargo by selling to the rebels of the planet instead of the government. Yes, you read that correctly. 30 percent, not 30 times.

This is absurdly stupid, the equivalent of burning down one’s house because one spotted a spider in the bathroom.

There are other problems with the mutiny. Inexplicably, the ship has all the weapons stored in one and only one cabinet in the entire ship. Which is conveniently taken over by the mutineers. This is of course preposterous, and shows again that Scalzi has no clue about the military science fiction he writes about.

Oh, and neither the captain nor any of her loyal officers is armed beyond a single futuristic weapon that works inside of three feet.

With the mutiny proceeding poorly, Scalzi interjects with some long exposition. In the middle of the tense life-and-death stand-off, we suddenly get multiple paragraphs explaining the pseudo-science behind “The Flow”. This completely shatters a reader’s immersion into the story, and is done so poorly a fan fiction writer would wince. Scalzi even breaks the fourth wall, explaining to us about how things function in “this universe”.

Moreover, this exposition exposes Scalzi as being as clueless about science as he is on military matters. Now, “The Flow” itself seems to be a rip-off of similar teleportation concepts from older, classic science fiction works like “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman. But whereas Haldeman has a degree in physics and astronomy and writes credibly on the topic, Scalzi, a philosophy major, is hopelessly lost.

He tries to mask this confusion with meaningless mumbo-jumbo. “Topographically complex” is not a term, but word salad to impress laypeople with. And just what the hell is “metacosmological structure”?! Hilariously, Scalzi then throws up his hands and admits defeat;

“And even that was a crap way of describing it, because human languages are crap at describing things more complex than assembling a tree house. The accurate way of describing the Flow involved the sort of high-order math probably only a couple hundred human beings across the billions of the Interdependency could understand, much less themselves use to describe it meaningfully. You likely would not be one of them.”

In that case, why not delete the previous section entirely? There are other absurd passages. For instance, the crew is told of the speed (a scalar) of Scalzi’s teleportation mumbo-jumbo, but not its direction (a vector) or its acceleration. A high school freshman taking physics for the first time would be embarrassed for the writer.

Now, while I’m a scientist for a living who enjoys hard science fiction, there is nothing wrong with a science fiction author having a poor grasp of science, provided he excels in other areas. Harry Harrison is a favorite of mine, and the less said about his understanding of physics and mathematics, the better. However, Harrison avoided this problem by very rarely bothering with these subjects at all. Scalzi, meanwhile, engages with them and looks like an absolute fool in the process.

Even when it comes to basic human interaction, the mutiny is a failure. In this tense, life-and-death situation, the characters react with…snark. Consider this exchange;


“Eva Fanochi probably could have answered that for you,” Gineos said. “If you hadn’t murdered her, that is.”


“Now’s not a great time for that discussion, Captain.”

This doesn’t exactly inspire a reader to care about what the hell ends up happening to the characters. After all, they themselves don’t. Oh, and the captain wins by a bluff that makes no sense. She says that if she dies, her hand on a control panel will “blow every airlock the ship has into the bubble”? Sounds convincing, but what is it supposed to mean? And why would the mutineers, all experienced crewmen, fall for it when it’s revealed to be absolute rubbish a moment later? Wouldn’t they know the ship and its capabilities?

The following chapters I read, while not as error-laden, are still inauthentic and boring, when they’re not vile and outrageous.

Other reviewers have noted the introduction to Kiva Lagos, a powerful noble who is busy either raping or sexually coercing a lowly male subordinate through her vastly superior rank. He begs her to stop. She doesn’t let him. Lagos also swears and insults others constantly. One might think she is a main villain, but instead Lagos is a primary protagonist. Scalzi even called her one of his favorite characters ever. Apparently, behavior that would be considered sickening and abhorrent even in an unrepentant male antagonist is considered admirable and empowering so long as the gender is switched to female.

Scalzi tries to write cool, even female cool (which is harder), but it comes off as sophomoric and laughable when it’s not vulgar and repulsive. We are also told that Lagos was pursuing (stalking?) this junior purser for six whole weeks. Men pursue women for that long, but women don’t. Once her mind is made up, a confident woman would express her feelings long before that, and the man would either reject or accept her. Add “sexual dynamics” to the list of subjects Scalzi is ignorant of.

We are told the “emperox” Cardenia has to marry a member of a merchant guild. Why is she compelled to do so, when she is the most powerful person in the universe? Surely, it’s lesser individuals and families that have to scheme and marry to accrue more power rather than the top potentate? I’m not saying there aren’t circumstances where doing so wouldn’t make sense. However, it has to be EXPLAINED. Instead, Scalzi, in murky fashion, notes it would be advantageous for dealing with the merchant guilds (why?), with nothing further.

Speaking of lack of explanations, that dovetails with the most startling weakness of the book. The complete and total lack of any description. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing about the physical characteristics of any character, including main protagonists Emperox Cardenia Wu-Patrick, Kiva Lagos, and Captain Gineos. Naturally, there is no description of any buildings, rooms, objects, or spaceships, either.

While I generally dislike voluminous, multi-page descriptions, favoring sparser brush strokes, one still expects SOMETHING. With nothing offered at all, these characters, and the story as a whole, become little more than an amorphous blob. It adds to the feeling that this is lazy, bad fan fiction…. Avoid this, even if you’re a die-hard Scalzi fan.

While the book review is borderline sadistic in its heartless attention to detail, it is certainly informative for prospective readers, particularly when one compares it with a negative “review” of similar length, which is chiefly notable for the fact that the reviewer is as unfamiliar with Isaac Asimov and Foundation as he is with Johan Kalsi and Corrosion.

Ceterum censeo Tor Books esse delendam

How to repeal Obamacare

After all, Republicans didn’t vow to replace it, they vowed to repeal it:

In a simple two-page document, an Alabama congressman has filed a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal Obamacare.

Or, as it is stated in the bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, introduced the bill Friday.

“This Act may be cited as the ‘Obamacare Repeal Act,'” the bill states.

And the bill uses just one sentence to do it.

“Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted,” the bill states.

And that’s it – one sentence.

Needless to say, the cuckservatives and moderates are probably far too stupid to get behind it. But it would certainly be a slick move by the God-Emperor if he did.

The core problem with Republicans is that they feel the need to posture and affect “responsibility”. But they didn’t pass Obamacare. They’re not responsible for it. So, kill it as cleanly and completely as possible, without worrying about the inevitable repercussions. Deal with them as they come, don’t try to anticipate and pre-manage them, and in doing so, fail to accomplish the primary objective.

So laughing, so NOT AT ALL butthurt

One cannot help but reflect upon the truth of the Third Law of SJW when presented with this emotionally incontinent confessional that passes for a “book review” by one Jon Milne. Note that we are told this is not the first time Mr. Milne has felt the need to “review” a book by Castalia House, even though there are no other reviews listed by anyone of that name.

It’s fascinating to see that SJWs are so confident that the relevant authority will prove amenable, or at least indifferent, that they are willing to so openly admit their violations of the review guidelines as well as their intentions of attempting to manipulate Community Content.

A massive inferiority and insecurity complex dooms this book to failure from the start
By Jon Milne on March 28, 2017

Much like with my review for “SJWs Always Lie” – inexplicably not subtitled “My Inability To Somehow Not Notice Two Chapter 5s During My Awesome Editing Skills” – I am delighted to admit I did not read “The Corroding Empire”. I did not need to. It was not the cover itself that convinced me of giving it a 1 star review, but rather the attitude and motivations the publisher had in creating the cover that provides all the justification I need.

Consider an alternate scenario: Castalia House releases this book, with the real name of the author (Harry Seldon) on the cover, as well as not having the identical artwork, fonts, and positioning of the words as an other considerably higher selling book. In other words, the book by Mr Seldon would be allowed to stand on it’s own two feet and attract judgment purely for it’s literary merits, or lack thereof, and then attract those who want to read it into buying and scoring the publisher some bucks. It stands to reason that if the book was of high quality, then people would buy it, and the would not need to rely on any cheap publicity stunts based on trying to score political points.

And yet it is precisely this desperation on the part of Vox Day – a guy who seriously holds the hilariously stupid view of “White Genocide” that mixed race babies will totally cause the destruction of Earth – that leaves a permanent black mark on this book and completely strips it of whatever credibility it might have as a literary work. Because no matter what Mr Beale may insist about how totally awesome he thinks this book is, it’s quite evident that he was clearly not confident in the ability of this literary work to sell without saddling it with a spectacularly lame gimmick as part of a great big amount of bitterness he has in relation to the success of John Scalzi.

It’s truly amazing how much sour grapes old Theodore is full of that Mr Scalzi has a highly lucrative book deal worth millions of dollars, something which Beale is nowhere close to ever achieving. Other “highlights” of Beale’s obsession with Scalzi include the Hugo Awards of 2015 and 2016, wherein Beale thought-policed his mindless drones, uh, I mean, followers into voting specific works dictated by a slate onto the ballots, all for the self-entitled purpose of winning awards they somehow feel entitled to, and to stick it to the so-called “SJWs” and “CHORFs” who are totally working behind the scenes to steal the whole science fiction genre from “TrueFans(tm) like Voxy and his Dread Milk minions. I mean, they never exactly elaborate how this conspiracy actually works, but still…

This is the mindset behind the “Corroding Empire’s” publication. Not one motivated purely by a desire to please fans and for the love of writing, but by petty squabbles fuelled by inferiority and insecurity complexes on Theodore Beale’s part, as well as a ridiculous obsession with needing vindication from awards. Perhaps Beale should research some of the most highly regarded movies of all time, many of which did not ever win or even get nominated for Oscars, and do the same for music albums and TV shows and video games etc and their equivalent awards which they never won, and then he could maybe reach a much-needed epiphany about whatever “vindication” he so desperately craves.

In closing, I present a contrast of an author who used and still uses a pseudonym for her writing with far more dignity and grace, even if her real name ended up getting leaked. I talk of course of the highly successful J.K. Rowling, currently writing as Robert Galbraith for the Cormoron Strike series of crime novels, all of them highly rated and highly selling. And of course, one can’t forget that according to TheRabidPuppiesDotCom, Hugo Award Nominee and perhaps the world’s greatest author Chuck Tingle has a counter going for how each book is doing: Scalzi’s “Collapsing Empire” has an Amazon Best-seller’s Rank of #235, where as “Corroding Empire” by Harry Telson is ranked #1671. Add another notch of failure to Castalia House’s marketing strategy.

Now comes the part where I get an outraged phone call from Castalia House decrying me for my “WrongThink”. I could definitely use a laugh.

I’m sure Tor Books is ever so relieved that the first book in its big bet on John Scalzi has managed to outsell an ebook from an independent publisher. No doubt that was their metric for success. As for my supposed sour grapes, I note I signed my first million-dollar contract was when I was 27 and it was not the most recent one. I very much doubt that anyone who has read a reasonable portion of both our collected works would believe for a second that I would ever wish to trade my bibliography for his. And, quite to the contrary of SJW assumptions, I sincerely wish Scalzi’s contract had been ten times bigger in monetary terms; Tor delenda est is the point, after all, as Scalzi is little more than Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s creation. Even Scalzi’s first unprovoked attack on me in 2005 was inspired by PNH, the corrupt, beating heart of all that is wormwood and rotten in science fiction.

As for the “failure” of Corrosion, those reviewers who have, unlike Mr. Milne, troubled to actually read the novel, have almost uniformly been pleasantly surprised to discover that it is actually a solid science fiction novel in its own right. Castalia House does not publish Tor-like trash, not even when we are gleefully sowing chaos and havoc. From the latest reviews of the first book of The Corroding Empire:

  • Did not know what to expect. Was very pleasantly surprised to discover a first rate SciFy novel. An involved tale of what can go wrong when dimly understood digital algorithms developed by aware AI machine intelligences tightly control the galaxy. Until they don’t. Then, the fun starts.
  • I was reading very late at night. I finished an intense chapter detailing a farmer in a life and death fight with systemic wide algo-decay, and went to sleep.  A few hours later I was awakened by the sound of our electricity going off, I drowsily thought to myself, ‘oh, drat, more algo-decay.’ and then woke up more fully into my own world.  Kind of cool when a book does world building that well, isn’t it?
  • I read “Foundation” and it’s sequel 50+ years ago and remember them as about a 4 star duo. Enjoyed the Main character, a robot who goes through many changes. The idea of “corrosion” due to basic algorithms over centuries is good. The science ideas are fascinating,, so I enjoyed the book.
  • I remember Foundation as having a general optimistic tone, where the viewpoint characters overcome the challenges of their day guided by the all-knowing ghost of Hari Seldon. There was a sense of inevitability that was only punctured in later books. Corrosion takes an almost opposite track, illustrating a decaying galaxy where chaos reigns and even the far-sighted seer dedicated to restoration is stymied by events and very human reactions. Without going into spoilers, the world of the Corroding Empire is a darker place than the world of Foundation. Yet this darker world also makes the bright spots of the story all the more hopeful and rewarding.
  • I know this book is based on Asimov’s Foundation, which is a book I found amusing but not terribly compelling. I actually found this book to be much more interesting, not least because A) the premise was comparatively much more novel and B) it actually had characters I cared about. If you are too dim or humorless to get the obvious joke, this really says a lot more about you than the author or seller. I find it incredibly impressive that this was written essentially on a dare and turned out as well as it did.

The simple fact is that Book One of The Corroding Empire: Corrosion, by Johan Kalsi, was an absolutely smashing success in the eyes of everyone involved, as the fake review by Mr. Milne so beautifully demonstrates. It was a fantastic performance by the highly efficient Castalia House team, wonderfully supported by the ever-loyal Castalia House readers, and after a bit of confusion at the start, even our new friends at Amazon came through in the end.

Seriously, though, why do SJWs always pretend they are laughing, even when you can see they are shaking with rage?

They’re big science fiction fans too. In addition to not reading the books they review, SF-SJWs aren’t even familiar with the classic SF canon:

EDIT: My bad on the “Harry Seldon” thing. An honest mistake. I’ve never read any Asimov novels, the closest exposure I’ve had being the “I, Robot” movie released in the mid-2000s, which I remember liking. Nothing a trip to my local library can’t fix. Duly changed those references in my review anyway.

In fairness, I very much doubt John Scalzi has read very many Asimov novels either. I doubt he’s even finished the original Foundation trilogy.

Cerno on 60 Minutes

I understand why Mike decided to give it a go. But after seeing the results of his and Scott Adams’s recent experiences with the media, I have absolutely no intention of modifying my policy in the slightest. I’m not attempting to build a media career and Mike has already proven that a single shot or two of mainstream media exposure does not sell books, so there simply isn’t any upside in it for me.

I’m interested in continuing to help the Alt-Right, the Alt-Tech, and Blue SF build their own platforms, not waste any time with the fake news.

She did the math

Nice to see that women are capable of grasping that feminism is bad for more women than it benefits economically:

Author Fay Weldon has risked infuriating fellow feminists by claiming their cause left two-thirds of British women worse off. In an interview in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today, Weldon, 85, says the feminist revolution had adverse implications by ‘halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family.’ That meant some women had to get jobs, even if they would rather have been at home with their children. ‘Women had to work to support the family. So for two in three women, it really was a problem.’

I first pointed this out back in 2007:

Anyhow, it’s interesting that people are finally beginning to pay some attention to the basic economics of the issue. I expect more than a few people on both sides of the feminist aisle are going to be very upset when the period from 1970 to the present is studied.

Feminists will be upset because it will make feminism look like a disaster for women. Working, married non-feminists will be upset because they’ll realize that they are essentially working for nothing. Men won’t like it either, since they’ll realize that they’re getting paid less for the same work that their fathers did.

It’s interesting how everyone understands that immigrants cause labor prices to fall, but most people don’t grasp that a substantial increase in domestic work force participation, by any group, has the same effect.

For the benefit of those who needed me to type more slowly, I spelled it out in more detail in 2013:

While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don’t bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don’t work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.  This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:

  1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down.  This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
  2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate.  These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
  3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.  This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically. 

A theory, falsified, again

One wonders how many times evolutionary biologists are going to see their hypotheses falsified before they finally give up and abandon ship on their pet theory.

Before the advent of rapid, accurate, and inexpensive DNA sequencing technology in the early 2000s, biologists guessed that genes would provide more evidence for increasing complexity in evolution. Simple, early organisms would have fewer genes than complex ones, they predicted, just as a blueprint of Dorothy’s cottage in Kansas would be less complicated than one for the Emerald City. Instead, their assumptions of increasing complexity began to fall apart. First to go was an easy definition of how complexity manifested itself. After all, amoebas had huge genomes. Now, DNA analyses are rearranging evolutionary trees, suggesting that the arrow scientists envisioned between simplicity and complexity actually spins like a weather vane caught in a tornado.

In summary:

  1. Biologists predicted genome size would increase over time, and that was wrong. 
  2. Biologists then predicted that gene number would increase over time, and that was wrong. 
  3. Biologists predicted that complex body parts would develop after simpler body parts, and that was wrong.
  4. Biologists have now found that the oldest living ancestor of animals, comb jellies, already had brain, nervous system, and muscles, and that sponges later lost those genes. Complexity was there at the start. 
  5. Biologists have also found, through experiment, that most mutations cause a loss of complexity.

The latter is particularly important, because it renders evolution statistically improbable to the point of impossibility. How many scientific theories can produce so many predictions that are completely proven wrong, so many hypotheses that are falsified, and still be considered orthodox dogma that one must be a madman or a barbarian to question?

I don’t have the answer, but frankly, at this point, I am more inclined to believe in the possibility either alien breeding programs or the grand simulation hypothesis I am in the combination of abiogenesis and the neo-Darwinian synthesis. The combination is not only too temporally difficult and statistically improbable, but reliably produces incorrect hypotheses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it isn’t science, merely that it is bad and outdated science that is unlikely to ever have any engineering relevance.

Cerno does 60 Minutes

This is an open thread to discuss Mike Cernovich’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes:

During a contentious debate on the nature of truth and what is “fake news,” Mike Cernovich told Scott Pelley what story 60 Minutes would publish before the episode had aired. Find an excerpt of this interview below:

Scott Pelley: Who’s gunning for you?

Mike Cernovich: You are. I’m on 60 Minutes. Right?

Scott Pelley: What do you mean, we’re gunning for you?

Mike Cernovich: Do I really think that you guys are going to tell the story that I would like to have told, no. Your story’s going to be here’s a guy, spreads fake news, uses social media, these social media people better … I know the story you guys are doing before you do it.

Scott Pelley: What’s wrong with that story?

Mike Cernovich: Because it is an agenda. The agenda is … The truth is you’ve talked to a person who sincerely believes true, you must also admit that there have been many stories reported by major outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, that were false.

Scott Pelley: Agreed.

Mike Cernovich: People get it wrong, so why then come guns blazing at me, and not guns blazing at everybody? Why isn’t this segment going to say, how did the New York Times get conned? How did the Washington Post believe that Russia had hacked the power grid? We all together, collectively need to discover what the truth is, and converse with one another what the truth is, that’s a different story.

Mike and I discussed whether it was a good idea for him to make an exception to his usual policy to not grant interviews to what he calls the Hoax Media a few days ago. We’ll find out soon enough!

Dear, oh dear

And you see, even if I wasn’t opposed to fake reviews, the following is why, in this case, they are not only wrong and deceptive, but redundant. There will be no shortage of legitimate one-star reviews by Scalzi fans who feel let down by his latest effort, particularly since it is the result of nearly two years of groundless hype.

Half a novel. Don’t bother.
March 25, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

I’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s work enough that I pre-ordered this novel. Having read it (and enjoyed what there was of it) I feel profoundly cheated.

The problem has nothing to do with length — plenty of excellent complete novels have been written in fewer pages. Here though, critical elements of the story are left undeveloped at the end of the novel. I don’t want to spoil what there is of the plot, so suffice it to say that there are no meaningufl resolutions of conflicts facing any of the main characters except, I suppose, for the one who dies and another relatively minor villian. The resolution of the only interesting plot question that is revealed is blindingly obvious half way through the book. So no payoff there either.

I have no objection to setting a plot line that sets up a sequel. The series seems to be almost an imperative in sci-sfi publishing these days. But that’s quite different from a novel that basically ends with a “to be continued” on all fronts that anyone cares about.

As for the fake good reviews, why, the more the better! The more people who fall for the deception and buy the shlockfest, the more disgusted Scalzi-haters there will be. Remember, even I once fell for “the new Heinlein” hype too.

The problem Tor Books faces is simple. Sooner or later, the truth will out. And the truth is that John Scalzi is a mediocre and derivative midlister who has only reached “major” status in science fiction as a result of his own deceptive self-marketing combined with the extraordinary marketing efforts made on his behalf by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Scalzi has a legitimate fan base, but it is much smaller than Larry Correia’s; imagine how many books Larry would sell if he was being featured in Audible advertising, having fake New York Times bestseller slots arranged for him, and talked up by Tor-published contributors at the Guardian, then featured in puff pieces in the New York Times, and NPR.

Pity poor Brandon Sanderson, who actually is a major SF author and outsells Scalzi by a significant margin, but doesn’t get one-tenth the attention or support from his publisher that Scalzi does. That’s the price of working with an SJW-converged publisher. They will always put their political agenda ahead of their professional responsibilities.

Anyhow, I’d assumed Scalzi would need to “restructure” his contract after delivering the fourth book. In light of this disaster, he’s probably going to have to do so after he fails to deliver the second book on time and Macmillan finally discovers that PNH has sold them a midlister in major’s clothing.

In any event, Johan Kalsi and I would like to thank you all for making his debut with Castalia House such an unforgettable one. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Mr. Kalsi is already hard at work on the sequel to Corrosion, which will be entitled Corrosion and Empire, and eagerly awaits the announcement from Tor Books concerning the direction of his next new series. And I have to say, perhaps the most amusing thing in all this, to me, is the angry, upset SF-SJWs who are unaware that this little stunt is literally nothing new in the science fiction world; it should hardly surprise anyone that the current publisher of There Will Be War would be aware of the various, perfectly legitimate, marketing possibilities in this regard.

There is more at Castalia House. Including, but not limited, to this video commentary.

The return of Walt Ames

Peter Grant, the author of The Ames Archives, has debuted the title and cover of the second book in the series, the sequel to his very well-received revival of the Western, BRINGS THE LIGHTNING, on his site.

I think perhaps a brief excerpt from ROCKY MOUNTAIN RETRIBUTION would be in order:

As the half-light of dawn began to spread across the eastern horizon, Walt arranged himself into his prone shooting position, tucking the stock of the Remington Rolling Block rifle more tightly into his shoulder. Its powerful .50 Government cartridge would kick back like a mule if he wasn’t positioned correctly to absorb its recoil. He put his eye to the full-length Malcolm telescope sight mounted over the barrel, but the shadows were still too deep and too dark to make out the carcass in the field below.


He waited patiently as the morning light grew slowly brighter. Looking downward from his hide in a rocky outcrop, he began to make out a dark mass against the green grass of the field. It looked larger than it had the evening before, when he set up this position… and, yes, it was moving! He grinned triumphantly and bent his head to the sight once more.


The big brown bear was soon breaking its fast by ripping chunks of meat off the dead cow, eating quickly. Walt reckoned it had probably already learned the hard way that, while farmers’ cattle were easy prey, the farmer would express his resentment of their loss with burning powder and hot lead. Even as he watched, the bear took a last mouthful, then turned, looking up past the rocks as it prepared to climb the hill to the safety of the tree line.


He took a deep breath, let it half-out, and held it. Aim low, he reminded himself. You’re shooting downhill. You’ve got to make allowance for that. He’d already pushed forward the set trigger until it clicked, adjusting its pull weight to mere ounces. He set the sight’s crosshairs on the bottom edge of the bear’s body, to the left of its head, as it walked towards him on all fours. His finger tightened on the trigger, gently… slowly… gently…


The rifle boomed in the still morning air, sparks and white gunpowder smoke erupting from its muzzle. Walt immediately reached up with his right hand, re-cocked the hammer, and flicked open the breech to remove the fired case, then withdrew another fat .50-70-450 cartridge from the box at his side and slid it into the chamber. Closing the action, he pushed the trigger forward to reset it. The whole sequence took no more than three seconds before his eye was back at the telescope sight.


The first round had slammed into the top of the bear’s left shoulder and raked downwards into its chest, rocking the beast’s massive body. It roared aloud in pain and anger as it reared upright, standing on its hind legs, looking to see where the unexpected attack was coming from. It spotted the cloud of smoke drifting away on the light morning breeze and roared again – just as Walt’s second bullet smashed into its breast, piercing its heart. It bellowed once more in anguished fury as it fell forward onto all fours. It started up the hill towards him, but within just a few steps its gait grew unsteady, and faltered. With a final groan, the bear toppled forward onto its snout, then slid back a few feet on the dew-wet grass.