Vibrancy on video

Don’t think you’ll be left out of the fun, ladies. This is why you must carry. If both those victims had had compact .357s, there would be five fewer predators out there looking for kicks through beating up white people. Remember, vibrants never fight fair, so you always have to be prepared to deal with at least three of them at a time, and four is the safer assumption. Or, as in this case, five.

If you’re armed, it’s actually better if there is more than one attacker because it’s that much less likely that the pro-diversity crowd will try to concoct a case against you. Just don’t pull a Bernie Goetz and shoot anyone in the back or when they’re already down.

Even if you can’t carry a gun for some reason, a serrated three-inch blade on your keychain will be enough to address the first attacker. Get the blade out, keep your hand out of sight as the first attacker comes in, stay low, drive in with your left shoulder, rear hand in and up, and the attacker should be out of commission before he even knows you’re armed. Don’t try to warn them off, because when outnumbered you want surprise on your side. Vibrants tend to be cowardly, as you can see by the way they dart in and out when they attack, so they’re probably not going to stick around after the first guy goes down. But don’t pause and wait for them to run off, move in and take out the second one as soon as the first one is incapacitated.

The guy actually acquitted himself fairly well, but the key mistake he initially made was to try to pretend the predators weren’t there and hope they would just pass by. Never ignore groups of vibrants, especially not at night, and not when they are approaching from behind you. If you whirl around, aggressively meet their eyes and stand there in silence watching them, they will usually slink off in search of less dangerous prey. Remember, most blacks are even more frightened of whites than whites are scared of blacks because they have been raised on scary stories about white racism and oppression since they were small. Use the fear.

The very last thing they want to see is a cold smile that says: “Why, hello there, Mr. Vibrant. I have been waiting my entire life for someone to give me this excuse.”

Los revisores querían

If you speak Spanish and are interested in reviewing Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos by John C. Wright for Amazon, please shoot me an email with ESTRELLA in the subject. The translator, Emilio, explains why it made sense to use Mexican Spanish rather than theoretically more proper Spanish.

According to the royal academy of the Spanish language, the country
that speaks the most proper Spanish is Colombia. But large companies,
like Disney, use the Mexican translation for their movies or shows for
all Latin America, since it’s considered the most neutral by most Latin American countries. It’s easier to understand a translation to Mexican Spanish in Peru, Argentina, or the Dominican Republic than any of those
dialects elsewhere. So there’s an argument to be made, that if you want
it to be successful economically, it should have a Mexican translation.

Good enough for me. Emilio is also one of the guys who has expressed interest in setting up a new gaming review site, as is Caedryn, who posted the following comment yesterday:

If anyone is interested, I would really like to start a push for making and contributing to a blue gaming site. I have been putting around on making my own using blogger, but I run into a scope of just how much there is to cover in the industry for one person, and a realization of how relatively mediocre my writing ability is to carry a place on its own.

I personally have very limited experience on the blogging side of things, but I was a QA tester in college for a couple of companies and am working on a table top game independently as a hobby. So… very limited experience on that side as well past an obsessive desire to learn and dissect mechanics and writing.

I’d like a place for people who actually like games to be able to write about them without the need to feed into the industry and clickbait for revenue.

I’d personally want it to be a place for tabletop and video gaming or any other genres I may have missed that tie into such a framework. We could include gameplay/podcasts/whatever medium you’re into for providing commentary and reporting on news and events. I’d like to get a solid group of people together from the ilk to start talking about site design and structure and anyone initially interested in writing regardless of time dedication then branch out from there with requests for regular writers and so on.

If anyone is interested in writing at all or helping build the site, please send me an email at the account I’ve made for the project gammaphiedATgmail.com so I can get an email chain together to start discussion over this weekend.

This is a project that both I and Castalia House will definitely want to support. Castalia, of course, is inspired by the most famous game-related novel of all, Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse. I don’t have time to head up the project, but would be more than pleased to help out, as I am willing contribute my old game review columns to serve as an archive of historical reviews. I’ve also been teaching a game development course at a technical institute, and I suspect some of the students might be very interested in getting involved.

In other news, one really has to respect the power of Instapundit. Last week, we put up a free novella. There were 848 downloads and it climbed to a respectable Amazon rank although I don’t recall what it was. Yesterday, Instapundit mentioned  that QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED was a free download. It’s presently #1 in military fiction, #4 in science fiction, and #52 on Amazon.

They made their bed

Leave them lie in it. Britain would be mad if they permit their “nationals” to return to Britain after joining ISIS:

British jihadis fighting in Syria want to come home after becoming disillusioned with the conflict, it emerged today. In the last three years, more than 500 radicalised Britons are believed to have headed out to the war-torn country, where Islamist groups are fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces. But some of those who signed up to fight have now contacted authorities in Britain saying they have had enough of the war-zone and want to return home, it was reported today.

A man representing a group of 30 militants reportedly contacted King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), telling them his group want to come back.

The men, who went to the region in the hope of toppling President Assad, are reportedly unhappy at having to fight against other rebel factions. According to The Times, the man told researchers: ‘We came to fight the regime and instead we are involved in gang warfare. It’s not what we came for but if we go back [to Britain] we will go to jail.’

The ICSR’s Professor Peter Neumann told newspaper: ‘The people we have been talking to… want to quit but feel trapped because all the Government is talking about is locking them up for 30 years.’

Forget locking them up. They ought to simply have their citizenships revoked, their passports cancelled, and left to fight their gang wars. Which is exactly what the USA and every other Western state should do to every member of ISIS, wherever they are.

Based on the comments that follow the article, there is barely a Briton who wants them back.

The end of Kotaku et al

Observers are unimpressed with the gaming journalists’ hatred for their nominal audience:

Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.

Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.

If you’ll notice, I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to all the new gaming sites and I have absolutely no idea why anyone else ever did. It is entirely obvious that none of them know anything about the history of games, and many of them are observably not very interested in games at all.

Barometer and Bernie Madoff

The SF Weekly has an appropriate article entitled “Science Friction”:

If you’re looking for a barometer of the state of science fiction in the U.S., consider the career of John Scalzi….. Scalzi’s June
2011 to July 2013 tenure as SFWA president ran fairly smoothly — until
its final month. The decision to feature a buxom, scantily clad,
redheaded warrior on the cover of the SFWA Bulletin ignited a firestorm
of controversy.

“There was a strong generational divide on that issue,” Scalzi says.
“There were a lot of older authors who were like, ‘I don’t see the
problem with that. It’s a strong feminist symbol.’ And there were a lot
of younger authors who were like, ‘You’re kidding me. You don’t see the
problem here?'”

Scalzi was traveling on the last day of his 2013 book tour when the
controversy came to a head. “I was literally on the plane, watching it
all go up on Twitter,” he says. “I was coming into my last month as
president but I was like, ‘Fuck, I’ve got to deal with this.'”

Having approved the cover without thinking through all of its
implications, Scalzi apologized to the membership for his “screw-up.”
SFWA put procedures in place that allowed the organization to weather
that storm and others, including the expulsion of Theodore Beale, aka
Vox Day, who used a promotional SFWA Twitter feed to link to
inflammatory remarks on his blog (where he called another author
“half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog”). Day was subsequently removed
from SFWA a month after Scalzi’s tenure.

In his personal online feud with Day, Scalzi and his supporters also
ended up raising funds for charities benefiting women, gays, and
minorities. By pledging $5 every time Day used Scalzi’s name or used a
derogatory nickname for anyone else in a post, the group raised $50,000
in pledges. (Scalzi capped his contribution at $1,000, and his readers
did the rest.)

As usual, the media finds me to be one of the most interesting things about Scalzi, although only Salon has ever troubled to get my side to the story. I do find some modest amusement in the fact that even when McRapey is out pushing his new novel, the media is more interested in his passive-aggressive crusade against me than in his book. They’d probably be even more interested if they knew that he and Patrick Nielsen Hayden threatened to quit SFWA if I was not “removed”, or read his bizarre victory rant on Twitter after “Opera Vita Aeterna” failed to win Best Novelette. Or if they had any idea what a complete fraud he has always been; one observes that he no longer talks up his “online blog” in interviews these days.

Meanwhile, regarding the state of science fiction: “The biggest declines were in biography/autobiography (down 26%, partially because of the huge success of Steve Jobs in 2011), science fiction (down 21%), and business (down 18%).”
– Publisher’s Weekly, 11 January 2013

As for him being a barometer, one observes Scalzi is still trying to escape the science fiction and fantasy market: “With writing and selling Lock In, we are looking to a larger
market,” Scalzi said. “Not disrespecting the science fiction and fantasy
market, obviously, but to open it up and bring in new readers.”

It is downright perverse for one of the biggest cheerleaders of the two-decade Pink SF diversity movement that has turned off more people to SF/F than anything else in its history to talk about bringing in new readers. Scalzi isn’t merely the Bernie Madoff of science fiction, he is also one of its leading californicators. Having first conned his way into it, he shat all over it in the company of his fellow Social Justice Warriors and is now attempting to move on to greener pastures as yet unsullied by his particular one-trick pony approach to literature.

But that’s precisely why we will win the genre back in the end. We’re here because we want to be here, because we actually love genuine science fiction and classic fantasy, not because we think it’s the best place to pursue social justice or con a few people out of a few dollars. We’ll win because the gatekeepers who took over the publishers and tried to force Pink SF on everyone are losing their grip. We’ll win because women like Tiger are translating QUANTUM MORTIS into Chinese, and because men like Emilio are translating ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM into Spanish. (Both of them sent me their finished translations yesterday; while the Spanish one is already good to go, figuring out how to make a Chinese ebook will take me a little while.)

So, I hope McRapey is entirely successful in making his leap into the soulless void of Hollywood. He’s been a blight on science fiction ever since he first serialized his Robert Heinlein imitation on his “online column” with its “more than two million page views monthly”. The sooner he finds his true place writing snarky politically correct dialogue for television sitcoms, the better.

As for commissioning songs, one would be remiss if one failed to mention Everything is Falling Into Place (Groove Kittens mix) by Rapey McRaperson and the Pink Rabbit Posse. And since we’re talking about science fiction, I should probably mention that QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed is free today and tomorrow on Amazon.

UPDATE: McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a book:

    Over on the right-wing SF/F frothosphere, it’s apparently become the fashion to assert a particular conservative writer sell me than me…—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    .. and apparently this is important for REASONS, and proof of liberal bias in the universe blah blah blah oh jesus why this again.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    Leaving aside whether this particular writer sells more than me or not: Honestly, who really gives a shit if he does?—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    If he does: Good for him! I hope he’s happy. It has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on how and whether I can sell my books, or he his.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    It seems some people need publishing to be some zero-sum game in which you can only succeed if someone else is failing, etc.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    In fact, that’s a profoundly way of looking at the publishing world. It’s not zero sum: My success doesn’t stop any other success.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    And other people’s success do not impede mine. There are enough readers for many authors to do well. Which is great!—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    I find the NEED to say one writer is more successful than another FOR REASONS to be an example of how some people never stop being 12.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    So, if you’re one of those people, stop being 12. If your favorite writer sells more than me, great! I sell enough. And that’s enough.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    End of rant.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

Who gives a shit THAT he does, Johnny? Not “if he does”. Why, YOU most certainly do! That’s why you’re constantly trying to suck up to Larry Correia and John Ringo while repeatedly insulting other Baen authors who don’t sell quite as well.

Also, the publishing world is zero-sum. There are a limited number of readers, a finite amount of time in which a book hits its peak sales, and a reader who is reading a free copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed or the excellent ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM is a reader who is not reading something else.

That is precisely why the mainstream publishers are so angry that Amazon permits authors to give away their books 20 days out of the year and why Amazon limits the giveaways to 20 days.

How not to destroy Christianity

China is going about it the wrong way:

In China the government is now taking on Christianity, treating some practitioners as potentially dangerous to the state. Christianity has been in China for centuries and currently is about five of the population and growing fast. In some provinces where Christians are prominent (lots of churches) and numerous the government is shutting down churches and arresting clergy and prominent Christians for the least infraction of the law. This effort is most visible on the North Korean border, where foreign Christians (some of them ethnic Koreans or Chinese) have been assisting North Koreans who have escaped from North Korea. Another hotspot is the southeastern city of Wenzhou, long known as a “Christian city” (because about 15 percent of the population is Christian) where local authorities are shutting down dozens of Christian churches.

Even before the communists took over in the late 1940s Chinese governments had long seen religion as a constant threat. What is especially alarming is any religion that attracts too many members and become more visible, especially as critics of the government. Some Christian sects are doing this and now comes the usual government response.

While Chinese are free to worship any way they want, the government picks religious leaders and imposes discipline. Thus the ongoing war against Falungong and Tibetan Buddhism. Both of these religions refuse to accept government control and are persecuted for that. This included sending thousands of practitioners to slave labor camps and often using some of those prisoners for organ donors. These victims never survived this process. But the persecution has not wiped out these two movements, and this, government officials know, sets a dangerous example for other Chinese. Throughout Chinese history governments have been overthrown by religious movements that harnessed and directed mass discontent.

It should be obvious that if the Communist Party was serious about destroying the Christian faith in China, instead of outlawing Christianity, it would provide Christians with easy sex and money and require them to watch at least eight hours of American television every day. It’s incessant temptation that weakens the Christian, not hatred, violence, and persecution.

esr calls BS on tor.com

Specifically, with regards to their woefully misplaced glee concerning an asserted discovery of “women warriors”:

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit.

What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking migrants were female, which is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The leap from that to “half the warriors were female” is unjustified and quite large.

There’s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.

It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons – knives, swords, and polearms in particular. I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.

I also know a good deal about Viking archeology – and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my review of William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat.) We’ve both read saga literature. We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.

And I’m calling bullshit. Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost no such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women. Tellingly, they are almost always archers.

Here we go again. Who do these science fiction SJW idiots think they’re trying to fool? That retarded Hugo-winning blog post about how women have always fought notwithstanding, all these women – and it is mostly women – have proven with their insane inventions and historical misrepresentations is that they have never, ever, stepped into a ring with a man.

As I have previously mentioned, I have fought women. I have fought female black belts. And it’s like fighting very flexible 12 year old boys, only the women usually quit faster. I’ve never fought a full two-minute round with a woman where I didn’t ease off; most times they will simply quit after the second time you knock them down. They are slow, small, and weak. They are much slower and weaker than you probably imagine if you have never kicked one in the face or punched one in the stomach.

I found the occasional look of betrayal some women would show to be particularly amusing. Yes, I did just hit you in the face. Yes, I’m sure it did hurt. No, I won’t stop because you’ve got tears welling up in your eyes. What on Earth do you think you are here for? That sort of dojo bunny never stuck around for long. The sort that did ended up marrying both of our senseis.

More importantly, there is the evidence of historical logic. Any society that made use of women warriors wouldn’t have survived for long. From Families and Demographics in the Viking Age:
 
“A typical woman probably bore 7 infants during her lifetime,
29 months apart on average. During pregnancy, women were expected to continue
working. After the child’s birth, the mother typically returned to work with
little delay. Evidence suggests that mothers nursed their children until the age
of 2 years, which may have dictated the interval between the births of a
couple’s children. A typical couple probably had 2 or
3 living children at any one time. Few parents lived to see their
children marry. And fewer lived to see their first grandchild.

So, a female warrior would have had to be not just as good as her male counterparts, but exceptional, and kill AT LEAST seven enemy warriors before being killed herself for the opportunity cost of her warrior womanhood to be considered break even from the tribe’s perspective. Then again, it’s not impossible for at least one bygone society to have been this stupid and shortsighted. After all, our society observably is.

The idea that the Vikings were sexually egalitarian is hysterical if you have ever read the account of a Viking funeral written by Ibn Fadlan in 921, when he was serving as the secretary of an embassy from the Baghdad Caliphate to the Bulgars. By my count, sixteen men have sex with the slave girl who “volunteers” to be slain with her master before she is stabbed and strangled on the ship that is subsequently burned. Wikipedia has a partial description, which appears in full in the revised edition of THE HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS by Gwyn Jones.

And even the mythical warrior woman Brynhildr followed the practice in the human sacrifice she offered for Sigurd.
    Bond-women five
    shall follow him,
    And eight of my thralls,
    well-born are they,
    Children with me,
    and mine they were
    As gifts that Buthli
    his daughter gave.

This seems unwise

At what point are the EU and USA going to realize that Putin doesn’t react well to token gestures:

As fighting between the army and Russian-backed rebels rages in eastern Ukraine, preparations are under way near its western border for a joint military exercise this month with more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its allies.

The decision to go ahead with the Rapid Trident exercise Sept. 16-26 is seen as a sign of the commitment of NATO states to support non-NATO member Ukraine while stopping well short of military intervention in the conflict.

The annual exercise, to take place in the Yavoriv training center near Ukraine’s border with Poland, was initially scheduled for July, but was put back because early planning was disrupted by the crisis in the eastern part of the country.

“At the moment, we are still planning for (the exercise) to go ahead,” U.S. Navy Captain Gregory Hicks, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s European Command said on Tuesday.

I suspect there will be a substantive Russian response to this which will likely involve taking more territory.

Learning from Zion

I’m certain the many Jews in the American media will have no problem with the USA or any European nations following Israel’s lead in how it handles what it calls “infiltrators”:

With Gaza terrorists showering Israel with rockets, August didn’t bring much good news for Israelis. But every cloud has a silver lining: in August a noted increase was recorded of illegal African immigrants leaving the country.

While there was no specific connection to the war, observers said that many in the infiltrator community were taken by surprise by the intensity of the war – and many of them have apparently decided that Israel isn’t necessarily the best place for them.

A total of 379 illegals voluntarily left Israel in August, more than had left the previous four months altogether. It was also significantly more than had left the country in August the previous year, when 216 illegals voluntarily emigrated.

So far this year, 5,388 illegal Africans have left Israel voluntarily; Israeli authorities who have investigated the infiltrators have repeatedly reported that nearly all of them snuck into Israel looking for job opportunities.

In June, more than 1,000 illegal African immigrants staged a sit-in near the southern border with Egypt, following a protest march against their internment camp in Holot, near the Sinai border, where they are required to stay. The infiltrators called for help leaving the country.

Israel requires illegal immigrants who have been in the country for more than five years to live in Holot. Under legislation passed in December 2013, authorities can detain illegal immigrants for up to a year without trial.

It’s a good idea. But can you even imagine the hysterics that would fill the mainstream media if the US government required all of its illegal immigrantsundocumented workers who had been in the USA for more than five years to live in an internment camp in Death Valley?

In any event, there is precedent. It’s often pointed out that Israel is effectively a Western nation, so let’s see the rest of the Western nations follow suit.

Mailvox: on derivative forms

Lgrin asks a superficially reasonable question: Why is Heinlein derived bad and Lewis (or Hodgson) Derived good?

However, for all that it looks reasonable on its face, the question is not an apt one. The reason one derivation is dismissed as mediocre while another is hailed as a masterpiece is not a question of the differing values of the source from which the author obtained his inspiration. The term “to derive” has a fairly broad meaning: “to trace from a source or origin.” Most works are derivative in some sense, but those specific senses can be entirely different. Consider a few of my own works:

  1. REBEL MOON is not derived from THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS even though everyone assumes it was. I didn’t read the latter until years after writing the former. But a reasonable reader would conclude that it was an imitation (and an inferior one) based on the obvious similarities.
  2. THE WORLD IN SHADOW is derived from the Colombine shootings.
  3. SUMMA ELVETICA: A CASUISTRY OF THE ELVISH CONTROVERSY is derived from St. Thomas Aquinas’s SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It’s literally arranged in the same basic structure as each of Aquinas’s arguments.
  4. A THRONE OF BONES is derived from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, but it is a negative derivation, in much the same way Philip Pullman’s books were derived from CS Lewis’s.
  5. “The Last Testament of Henry Halleck” is derived from the literary style of H.P. Lovecraft. “The Deported” is a much better derivation from the style of Guy de Maupassant.
  6. QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED is derived from Jean and Jeff Sutton’s THE PROGRAMMED MAN in the same material manner as the famous Jane Austen Zombie remix. As is “The Logfile”, which is a rewritten, updated derivative of Guy de Maupassant’s “Diary of a Madman”.

Those are six different forms of derivation, all by the same author. Apparent, Thematic, Structural, Contrarian, Stylistic, and Material. So, to simply say X is derived from Y says nothing about the quality of X.

Now, Scalzi has publicly discussed his purpose in writing his Heinlein-derivative OLD MAN’S WAR. Even if we take into account – as we must – that he is a confirmed liar whose every public word is calculated in order to help him sell or excuse himself, it’s still useful grist for the mill. This was his characteristically deceitful sales pitch sent to Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Hi, there. I’m John Scalzi, who writes the “Whatever” online column.(1)

Over the last three weeks, I’ve serialized a science fiction novel I’ve written on my site. Having completed it, I’ve added an afterwards called “Lessons From Heinlein,” in which I discuss how RAH’s style of writing holds some important lessons for would-be writers, specifically relating to character development (I am an actual published author(2) and science fiction writer, so I don’t feel too hinky about dispensing writing advice). The link is here: http://www.scalzi.com/w021229.htm. Some of the afterward necessarily relates to Old Man’s War, which is the novel I’ve serialized, but the comments about Heinlein are general enough in the matter of writing to be of interest even to those who have not read the novel.

Please note that this isn’t a backdoor attempt to get you to read the novel itself; had I wanted you to read it in your official capacity, I would have done the old-fashioned route of printing out the manuscript and shipping it off to your slush pile (being a former editor myself, I do appreciate when people follow submission guidelines).(3) I simply thought the afterward might be in itself of interest to you and the Electrolite readership.

Best wishes to you and yours for a happy and prosperous 2003.

So, what can we determine about the specific forms of derivation with regards to OLD MAN’S WAR? They are Apparent, Thematic, Structural, and Stylistic. It is also an Apparent derivative of Joe Haldeman’s THE FOREVER WAR, but this is not in fact the case. Now let’s look at two of John C. Wright’s works, including the recently published ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, which most of the early reviewers consider to be (quite rightly in my opinion) a masterpiece.

  • AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:  Apparent. And a seventh form of derivation, which is something less than Material, so we shall describe it as Elemental. Wright uses specific pieces of Hodgson’s world without actually making use of his text. And that’s it. None of the other five apply
  • ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM: Apparent, Thematic (partial, as he uses Lewis’s themes to set up his own), and Elemental.

So that’s what ultimately distinguishes the Hodgson/Lewis derivations Wright is utilizing versus Scalzi’s Heinlein derivation. Wright is taking identifiable elements from pre-existing works and creating something new and bigger from them. Scalzi is simply imitating pre-existing works and creating something smaller as a result.

It is said that good poets borrow and great ones steal. But regardless, what separates the good writer from the mediocre in this regard is that he utilizes his literary references to create something new rather than something that rehashes in an inferior manner what has already been done before, and done better. What ultimately matters with regards to a literary derivation is this: is the derivative work a dumbed-down version of the original, or does it improve upon or otherwise add to it? Is it a new masterpiece that could conceivably have been painted by the original artist or is it just a traced color-by-numbers imitation?

Wright’s Hodgson-derivative is justly considered awesome because it surpasses the well-regarded THE NIGHT LAND. His Lewis-derivative will be considered a masterpiece because it expands upon THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA in a manner worthy of Lewis. Scalzi’s Heinlein-derivative novel is not considered mediocre because it is derived from the novels of the SF grandmaster, but because it is a pale and inferior shadow of its predecessors.

(1) I find it amusing that even here, Scalzi is exaggerating. “The “Whatever” online column”? It’s a blog.


(2) “an actual published author” And yet he somehow won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer for OLD MAN’S WAR two years later. A neat trick, n’est ce pas?

(3) Sure it wasn’t. How many more of these helpful and very important lessons did he send to Tor editors, or anyone else, in the subsequent eleven years.