You can’t compost an ebook

But you can certainly compost this, if you are so inclined. The #1 Gardening bestseller is now available in paperback for $9.99.

“This is a quick, easy read that
will dump as much information as it possibly can into your brain in an
hour or so. If you compost, buy this. If you want to compost, buy
this. Don’t buy some $20 how-to manual, just buy this.”

“He makes it very easy and fun to grasp gardening concepts. He is very well read and has done a lot of personal experimentation. He has taken a broad range of information and distilled it into something cohesive and contemporary.”

Post-evolutionary Man

Roosh not only observes that natural selection no longer applies to human evolution, but concludes that this indicates the inapplicability of the evo psyche model to human behavior:

Anti-evolutionary behaviors should have been weeded out of the gene pool according to the idea of natural selection, but the more I looked around, the more I saw nothing but my own behavior, of people who were actually frightened to death about being a parent even though they were healthy and could afford to raise children. In fact, the sum of Western ideologies seem aimed to specifically halt human reproduction.

Western people are structuring their lives in deliberate ways to not reproduce at all and where their cherished hedonistic lifestyles would be greatly harmed if children entered the picture, and while it’s easy to use evolutionary theory in describing which man a woman chooses to have sex with, how can that possibly be correct if the man used condoms or the woman used birth control? Darwin’s theory refers to reproduction, not recreational sex and definitely not a prolonged period of sterile sport fucking, which has no benefit to the genes of the “athlete.” Having an explanation for why a girl on birth control went home with the “alpha male” after meeting him in the club has nothing to do with evolution or natural selection, since they both knew that no child would result and used the full force of their consciousness to prevent the creation of life. If reproduction was the purposefully blocked intent, evolution was not present during the sex event….

We must therefore conclude, with logic and rationale, that evolution is so flawed at explaining modern human reproductive
behavior (and not merely casual sex where reproduction was never the
intent), that evolution is not an observable or correct principle for
human beings living in Westernized nations. We must discard evolutionary
theory as applying to all humans through the mechanism of natural
selection and begin a search for a new explanation that explains our
current biological behavior.

Evolution may have been the correct theory for a window of human
existence, but that window has now closed and theories for
post-evolutionary man, one in which there is no struggle for survival
and where the strongest of the species are not reproducing, must be
devised.

Even if we were to concede that we got here through the process of
evolution from a primordial soup, and that our brains are the result of
it, these brains are now in a modern environment which has tripwired,
hijacked, or corrupted any applicable evolutionary program. We have
become one with the plugged-in cosmopolitan borg, and that regardless of
the process that caused us to come about, that process is no longer in
effect and a new process, yet to be described or understood, is
manifesting itself throughout humanity and shattering Darwin’s “survive
and reproduce” model.

I never bought into either the natural selection explanation for human evolution or the evo psych explanation for human behavior, but it is fascinating to see other high-caliber thinkers like Roosh who did beginning to reach similar conclusions.

Needless to say, this is one of the many topics we will be discussing at next week’s open Brainstorm event. There are 500 290 seats left and seats can be reserved here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5402452949014075905. But whether you’re interested in the event or not, you should definitely read the piece linked above.

Western society is now dysgenic as well as dyscivic. This means it cannot survive in its current form. Regardless of how fervently you support concepts like women’s suffrage, equality, diversity, immigration and so forth, it is important to understand that, in the long term, you are choosing them over indoor plumbing, cheap and plentiful water, airplane travel, living wages, access to high-tech medical care, and reasonably full employment.

Believe or don’t believe that you are doing it, but that is exactly the choice you are making every single day. The fact that you can’t see the brick wall looming a few miles down the road does not mean it is not there.

Tales of Vibrant America

The wondrous benefits of diversity in action:

On April 22, Baltimore resident Richard Fletcher looked out his window and saw two teenage girls fighting — on top of his car. He went outside to ask them to take the fight elsewhere, and was then jumped by approximately 50 “teens” and beaten within an inch of his life. The attackers crushed his eye sockets and broke his nose, as well as several ribs.

61-year-old Fletcher is now out of the hospital but facing medical bills of “$200,000 to 400,000.”

According to the Daily Mail, the teens kicked Fletcher until he fell to the ground and then continued to beat him once he was down. Police have since arrested 17-year-old Antoine Lawson, a 15-year-old girl, and three others in connection with the beating “and are hoping to bring all of the teens, who are believed to be students at Baltimore Community High School, that participated in the beating to justice.”

Teens. The vibrant youth, the hope of tomorrow’s America. Just remember, no matter what happens, diversity is good. And the Zombie Apocalypse is totally about the undead.

Repent, racist white people! Celebrate diversity! Surely nothing like what befell Richard Fletcher will ever happen to anyone who believes with his heart and confesses with his tongue that there is no such thing as race.

Speaking of a true believer, Glenn Reynolds directs us to the attention of a white male who is is burdened by his Original Sin:

I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s story. I genuinely am troubled by this. I want to listen but I also want to write—yet at times these impulses feel at odds with one another. How can I reconcile the two?

 My advice? Stop appropriating and othering, move to Baltimore, and start experiencing vibrancy in all its diverse fullness. After all, nothing makes a poet’s name like a young and untimely death.

In the SF world rages a war

A translation of the article on Castalia House in Finland’s largest newspaper.

IN THE SCI-FI WORLD OF USA RAGES A WAR, IN WHICH EVEN THE GAME OF THRONES AUTHOR IS ENTANGLED WITH – AND IN THE EPICENTER OF IT ALL IS THIS KOUVOLA MAN

Sci-fi literature enthusiasts in USA are in civil war. A conservative mutiny is trying to push out of bestseller lists and awards the mainstream, “tolerant” sci-fi. The battle is already being called culture wars – and one of the headquarters is located in Finland.

There is a man in Kouvola, and before the man, a computer.

Together, the man and the computer are in the front lines of a battle that is shaking the entire world of sci-fi literature.

The man and the computer were revealed to the world, spring this year.

At the time was published “the Oscars of sci-fi books” – Hugo-awards – nominees.

The entire sci-fi world roared: lists were full of works by religious extremists and ultraconservatives.

The surprise was so big that even The New York Times and Washington Post wrote about it.

And behind the entire surprise were a man and a computer in Kouvola.

The name of the man is Markku Koponen, and on the computer runs a company called Castalia House.

Koponen publishes conservative science fiction to everywhere in the world, mainly as e-books to the web store Amazon.

Who on earth is this man?`

“I suppose you could even call me ultraconservative”, Koponen says on the phone.

At least judging by his authors, the characterization rings true. On Koponen’s list are, among others, the authors at the center of the Hugo-brouhaha, John C. Wright and pen name Vox Day, who is Theodore Beale.

Both men are known for their extreme opinions: Wright’s comments have been characterized as anti-gay, and Beale’s racist and misogynist.

Koponen tells he has founded Castalia House due to having been fed up with contemporary science fiction.

He thought it too left wing, too tolerant and full of the preaching of such things – “message fiction”.

Koponen has never been much involved with Finland’s sci-fi scene. He has been in contact with them to the degree of breaking fellowship.

According to Koponen his name and address were mentioned in a sci-fi enthusiast mailing list – at which point he wrote to the members a response saying he indeed is in an opposite corner with them, and will walk his own path with his publishing house, apart from them.

So, in Finland Koponen is alone, but in the world out there he is part of an entire army.

In the sci-fi and fantasy circles – fandom – in USA there is a controversy which is already being called a culture war.

Outside the mainstream of sci-fi there is a conservative cabal resisting the majority of fandom, which has assumed the name Sad Puppies. In spirit, Koponen is part of this group.

According to Sad Puppies, over-tolerating forces keep the entire fandom in their grip so tightly, that authors and fans who support conservative values are shut out of the circles.

This irritates Sad Puppies, who consider proper sci-fi and fantasy to be in the same vein as in, for example, the forties and fifties.

Such “proper sci-fi” is one where heroes are manly, white hetero men, women are victims to be rescued and enemies are disgusting aliens.

Black and white settings are not confused with deep moral considerations, and most assuredly not with leftist or feminist thoughts.

Koponen thinks fandom and mainstream sci-fi publishing is riddled, both in Finland and elsewhere in the world, a “tolerant consensus”. This leads to censorship of “proper sci-fi” and the dominance of preachy message fiction.

“They are quite like-minded folks. And it’s no conspiracy really, likeminded people simply easily flock together”, Koponen says.

“A common climate of opinion emerges naturally: just the way it happens on our side too.”

Examples of this “real sci-fi” that Koponen admires, were written in past decades for example by such authors as John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein.

Many of their works are considered sci-fi classics these days, but also products of their era. For example, Campbell’s views are, according to modern standards, thoroughly racist and conservative.
Nowadays “traditional” sci-fi or fantasy is represented by such people as the American author Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen. Correia rose even to the New York Times best seller list with his Monster Hunter -series, but in his own opinion he has been discriminated against among fandom for his views.

Behind the entire rebellion, in a sense, is actually Correia.

You see, two years ago he started an internet campaign for his own Hugo-nomination.

In it, he blamed the usual Hugo-voters as arrogant elitists, who only value left-wing messagefiction and turn their noses at Correia’s Pulp-style entertainment books.

He amped up his appeal ironically with a picture of a sad dog puppy, from which the Sad Puppies name was born. Then along came Torgersen, the campaign got bigger, and the duo started putting together their slates on not just their own books, but others – all of them naturally works that they’d consider discriminated against by fandom elite.

Eventually Vox Day aka. Theodore Beale came to stir the soup.

Beale was an influential figure in the techno band Psykosonik, and video game company Fenris Wolf. At the beginning of 2000’s Beale started his writing career with his strongly religious War in Heaven -fantasy book and has since released dozens of works.

Beale has written, among other things, how women’s suffrage should be ended and called an African-American woman who criticized him a “half-savage”.

The radical Sad Puppies movement got even more radical Rabid Puppies -slate.

And then, in the Hugo-vote of this spring, the conservative sci-fi -people’s project brought returns. In nearly every category there was Sad- and Rabid Puppies’ favorites, and a central publisher among them was Koponen’s Castalia House.

There was an uproar.

Several Hugo-nominated authors gave up their nomination and well-known sci-fi and fantasy authors expressed their disappointment towards what happened. Among the latter were, for example, the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who opined that the rightist sci-fi -wing has destroyed the entire award. In his blog Martin ended up in a long debate with Larry Correia.

Many sci-fi fans expressed their protest by intending to vote, instead of the official nominees, “Noah Ward”. This is not a person, but a pun on “no award”.

Most of all, the roar happened in Finland: What on earth was the Finnish publishing house amidst it all, of which nearly no-one knew anything?

Until last year, Markku Koponen was quite the ordinary engineer.

He graduated from Tampere University of Technology and programmed code for industrial use. Koponen was writing actively on politics in the internet: he calls himself a social conservative. He also read lots of sci-fi.

Koponen became acquainted with Theodore Beale in the Internet, some years ago, when the ideologies of the two men “clicked”. As a result came mutual projects, latest of them being Castalia House.

In the partnership, Beale is the foaming-at-the-mouth spokesman, and Koponen handles the business in the background, and constructs technical architechtures. Koponen might be described as the weaponsmith of Sad Puppies, of a sort.

He says he is in agreement with Beale on the “general lines”, although there are some doctrinal disagreements on the matters of faith.

Koponen describes himself as a fundamentalist Christian, in the sense of agreeing with the document The Five Fundamentals, published by the American Presbyterian Church in 1910 about the mandatory, non-negotiable content of the Christian faith.

In any event, Koponen is in line with the Sad Puppies movement.

Foundational to Castalia House according to Koponen is to give a guarantee to the authors that their religious or political views will not be censored.

For example, John C. Wright, whom Koponen describes as a devoted Catholic, will be allowed to include his ideology in his books as much as he damn well pleases, and Castalia House will publish.

“With this promise it has been really easy to get authors onboard. Many are fed up with their books being censored for ideological content with quite the heavy hand.”

However, Koponen has not been involved in the Sad Puppies -campaigning, social media arguments nor otherwise – except by publishing books that the activists will enjoy.

He says that he would not have founded Castalia House either, had he not very early on realized the commercial potential in the conservative sci-fi, so loved by Sad Puppies.

This has also proven true: Koponen says he has only invested his own money the necessary 2 500 EUR required to start a Limited Liability Company, and now the firm produces a gross profit of about 30 000 EUR already.

Castalia House mostly sells e-books. According to Koponen, in good months a few thousand books get sold. Physical books get sold only some hundreds of units a month.

Castalia Housen books have been translated to other languages than English, among them Finnish, but Koponen says 99 percent of the market is currently in the United States.

To Finland, the Sad Puppies -movement and culture war – Koponen agrees with this word – has not spread yet in a large degree.

But it will in a few years, he believes.

“At least, if Worldcon is held in Finland in 2017, I expect some sort of a clash here too”

Indeed, the mainstream sci-fi circles in Finland are active, and are attempting to get the largest event of the sci-fi world to Finland: Worldcon. The annual, controversial Hugo-awards are handed out in it.

Finnish fandom has raised its flag for equality. Also in the “Worldcon to Helsinki” -project, this flag for open-mindedness is very visible – and it’s a flag against Sad Puppies’ values.

The chairman of the science fiction society in Helsinki who has been active in Finnish fandom for decades, is the reporter and author Vesa Sisättö. He doesn’t believe that the upheaval comes here.

Sisättö opines that in the American fandom, the debate that happened in Finland already in 1980’s is happening now.

“At the time there was a minor brawl in the fan circles when Johanna Sinisalo came and spoke on behalf of the status of women in Sci-fi. The contrarians came silent pretty fast, and in the nineties it was not an issue any longer.”

Sisättö considers Sad Puppies a backlash to the fact that old, traditional values no longer hold – quite the same phenomenon as with the Finns Party in Finnish politics, Sisättö mulls.

“What was mainstream in the past, is now minority. Culture changes, and when it happens, certain fellows wake up to it and start raising a ruckus.”

He doesn’t believe the movement is viable in the long run.

“The most active Sad Puppy -buzzers run out of steam, the followers get tired too, and eventually we reach a “is this worth the fight any more?” -phase.

Nor does the conservative Koponen wish to eradicate the mainstream sci-fi, but rather wants to raise his own genre to parity with it.

“At that point, we can live in as much peace as is possible.”

Also worthy of note is that in the spring, another Finnish Hugo-news turned up: First time ever, a Finnish candidate is on the shortlist: The illustrator Ninni Aalto, who competes in the best fan artist -category.

That category has no Sad Puppy nominees.

Depository confiscations coming

If you thought the bank bail-outs were bad, just wait until you see what the bail-ins are like:

The European Commission has ordered 11 EU countries to enact the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) within two months or be hauled before the EU Court of Justice, according to a report from Reuters on Friday.

The news was not covered in other media despite the important risks and ramifications for depositors and savers throughout the EU and indeed internationally.

The article “EU regulators tell 11 countries to adopt bank bail-in rules” reported how 11 countries are under pressure from the EC and had yet “to fall in line”. The countries were Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and Italy.

France and Italy are two countries who are regarded as having particularly fragile banking systems.

The rules, known as the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) ostensibly aim to shield taxpayers from the fall out of another banking crisis. Should such a crisis erupt governments will not be obliged to prop up the banks. At any rate most countries are far too deeply indebted to play such a role.

Instead, the burden is being placed on the creditors. As Reuters put it

    The rules seek to shield taxpayers from having to bail out troubled lenders, forcing creditors and shareholders to contribute to the rescue in a process known as “bail-in”.

However, if recent events in Austria are anything to go by, creditors now also include depositors of banks. In April, Austria enacted legislation which removed government liability for all bank deposits.

Until then, the state would protect deposits of ordinary people and companies up to a value of €100,000. In its place a bank deposit insurance fund is being set up. This fund appears inadequate to protect savers’ deposits in the event of any kind of bank failure. We covered the story in more detail here.

Each country will enact its own version of the BRRD. How vulnerable savers are in specific countries is difficult to tell at this time. The drive towards a cashless economy which has accelerated in recent months makes deposit holders and savers ever more vulnerable.

This bail-in legislation which is being driven by the BIS through the Bank of England, ECB, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)  appears designed to protect banks by allowing them to confiscate deposits to prop them up rather than the noble stated objective – “to shield taxpayers”.

This doesn’t sound so bad… until you realize that another word for “bank creditor” is “depositor”.  Remember, your bank deposits are legally loans made from you to the the bank. That’s why they pay you interest, however little that might be.

So, when the bank needs money, instead of going to the taxpayers to get it, they can simply take it from their depositors. This explains why the war on cash is heating up; the banks want to make sure that you don’t take your money out of the banking system in case they need it to pay their debts.

And don’t think this is an EU-only thing. The only reason the USA isn’t taking similar action is because the US banks already have a legal framework that permits it. See: MF Global.

Hugo Recommendations: Best Fan Writer

This is how I am voting in the
Best Fan Writer category. Of course, I merely offer this information
regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the
fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or
form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the
Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 368 Vile Faceless
Minions or anyone else.

  1. Jeffro Johnson
  2. Dave Freer
  3. Amanda S. Green
  4. Cedar Sanderson
  5. Laura J. Mixon

With regards to Mixon, I still don’t consider a professional writer with five novels published by Tor who also happens to be the current SFWA President’s wife to be anything remotely recognizable as a proper “Fan Writer”, but that ship sailed back when John Scalzi, Jim Hines, and Kameron Hurley waged their successful campaigns for it. No sense in fighting battles already lost.

The more relevant problem is that Best Related Work would be a more reasonable category for a single expose, and Deidre Saorse Moen’s expose of Marion Zimmer Bradley was a considerably more important work in that regard. That being said, I don’t regard the Hugo Awards as being the place to recognize investigative journalism, otherwise I would have nominated Saorse Moen’s stunning revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley as a Best Related Work. But regardless, Mixon did publish a credible expose and she is a legitimate, if not necessarily compelling candidate.

Best Novel
Best Novella

Now, what is interesting is that the very SJW who is leading the charge to change the Hugo rules this year has also declared that personal dislike and ideological opposition is sufficient cause to vote No Award.

Best Fan Writer

Freer’s been an ass to me, and incoherent at length to pretty much everybody, so no rocket for him. Green and Sanderson seem to not like SJWs like me, so I’ll return the favor. I’m a bit reluctant to give Mixon the award for an expose. Johnson at least restricts himself to book reviews, so my ballot is Johnson and no award.

Note the name on the B.1.1. proposals: “Proposed by: Chris Gerrib, Catherine Faber and Steven desJardins”.  This quite clearly demonstrates that the impetus to change the rules is, as we expected, being driven by SJW ideology and feelbads about the wrong people being nominated. So it is more than a little ironic that Chris Gerrib and I will nevertheless be voting for the same individual in the Best Fan Writer category, as Johnson’s work is excellent, well-researched, and resolutely apolitical.

But Gerrib shows the fundamental difference between the SJW and the Puppy. I put Marko Kloos on the Rabid Puppy slate in the full knowledge that he hates me. I have repeatedly nominated Charles Stross for the Nebula Award in the past; you can look up the old NAR records and see that I was, in fact, one of the only members of SFWA championing his work back then. I openly declare China Mieville to be one of the three best living SF writers despite the fact that his politics and his economics border on the brain-damaged. I wouldn’t hesitate to nominate Johnny Con himself if he ever wrote a novel that was legitimately worthy of a nomination.

The SJWs don’t do that. They are ruled by their feelings, and the mere semblance of ideological distaste for them is sufficient to render a writer’s work without merit and unworthy of any award.

And that, my dear SJWs, is one of the two reasons why we don’t believe you when you preen and posture and proclaim the works of the right to be unworthy. Because every time the mask slips, we see that the real reason behind the various rationales being given is the writer’s disapproval of your noxious ideology.

The other reason, of course, is that we have working memories. We are able to compare what we believe to be meritorious to what you have previously prized. You expect us to believe that “Turncoat” is a bad short story while “If You Gave a Dinosaur a Cookie, My Love” is among the very best the genre has to offer. You expect us to accept that the insightful essays of Transhuman and Subhuman and the impeccable science of “The Hot Equations” are totally unworthy of an award that has gone to a ridiculous and factually incorrect blog post, Chicks Dig Time Lords, and a collection of online blog snark in recent years.

In short, we do not believe a word you say about literary quality. After all, you say a man is actually a woman, you say evil is actually good, so it is hardly surprising that you also tell us good SF is actually terrible while declaring dreadful Pink SF to be superlative.

SJWs always lie.

Brainstorm: Roosh V June 2015

On June 10 at 6:00 PM EDT, Brainstorm will be featuring a 90-minute online event with the notorious ROOSH V to discuss his 2015 World Tour and the gradual transformation of his intellectual focus from pick-up artistry to neomasculinity.

There are 500 275 seats available and seats can be reserved here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5402452949014075905


After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. This is a free event.

David Brooks discovers SJWs

And, unsurprisingly, he likes what he sees. He just thinks they take their “noble impulses” a little too far:

Every generation has an opportunity to change the world. Right now, college campuses around the country are home to a moral movement that seeks to reverse centuries of historic wrongs.

This movement is led by students forced to live with the legacy of sexism, with the threat, and sometimes the experience, of sexual assault. It is led by students whose lives have been marred by racism and bigotry. It is led by people who want to secure equal rights for gays, lesbians and other historically marginalized groups.

These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support. Of course, at some level, they are right. Callous statements in the mainstream can lead to hostile behavior on the edge. That’s why we don’t tolerate Holocaust denial….

The problem is that the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory.

According to this theory, the dividing lines between good and evil are starkly clear. The essential conflict is between the traumatized purity of the victim and the verbal violence of the oppressor. According to this theory, the ultimate source of authority is not some hard-to-understand truth. It is everybody’s personal feelings.

No. Their impulses are not noble. They are not right on any level. They have no right to police anything. Their eternal argumentum ad sensum is an intrinsically false and dangerous philosophy. They and their totalitarian ideology are what need to be eradicated.

SJW is solipsistic totalitarianism. SJW is the real bigotry of the mind. SJW delenda est.

All-Purple, All-Day

Er, never mind. I have no idea how I ended up on an old article about AD’s contract. I thought they tore up the old one and gave him a new one, but apparently all that has happened is that he’s back for OTAs.

Mailvox: bad science fiction

In which examples are requested:

Normally I try to improve my writing by reading lots of good quality writing, hoping that will come out in my own. But I’m wondering if any sort of list of bad, “don’t do this” examples (I mean in terms of writing quality, not ideological leanings) would come easily to mind for you that would be instructive for those of us who want to improve our own writing.

It would be very helpful, for me at least, to then see if any of those bad writing habits or tendencies reveal themselves in my own work, and train myself out of them.

I go back to the four elements of a book: CSSC. Characters, Story, Style, and Concepts. In decreasing order of importance, those are the most important elements.

Characters come first. The huge success of Rowling, Tolkien, Lewis, and Cooper stem from their heightened ability to create characters about whom we care. Therefore, the first example of what not to do should be those that suffer from poor characterization.

Go ahead, name three.

Story is the second most important element. You can have a pretty good book where the story makes no sense, so long as the characters are of sufficient interest. An even worse book would have poor characters and a generic or nonexistent story.

Name three more.

Style comes third. This is where we tend to most notably part company with the Pink SF crowd. They put style first, except when they put message above that. (Note: I did not say concept, but message. The latter is a subset of the former.)
But if you’ve got poor characters, a generic or nonexistent story, and bad style, now it’s getting pretty grim.

And three more.

Concept includes everything from Very Important Message to worldbuilding. And if you’ve got poor characters, a generic or nonexistent story, bad style, and a Very Important Message in a generic world, you’re approaching the nadir, which in my opinion is best represented by Mercedes Lackey.

Read Arrows of the Queen if you want to know how best not to do it.

Talia, a young runaway, is made a herald at the royal court after she
rescues one of the legendary Companions. When she uncovers a plot to
seize the throne, Talia must use her empathic powers to save the queen.