A new Standout SF Author

esr announces his first science fiction sale:

One of the minor frustrations of my life, up to now, is that though I can sell as much nonfiction as I care to write, fiction sales had eluded me. What made this particularly irksome is that I don’t have only the usual ego reasons for wanting to succeed. I love the science fiction genre and owe it much; I want to pay that forward by contributing back to it.

It therefore gives me great satisfaction to announce that I have made my first SF sale, a short (3.5kword) piece of military SF titled “Sucker Punch” set on a U.S. aircraft carrier during the Taiwan Straits Action of 2037…. the head guy at Castalia House (the infamous Vox Day, wearing another hat) informed me of an upcoming project: an anthology called Riding The Red Horse intended to reprise the format of Jerry Pournelle’s old There Will Be War compendia. That is, a mix of military SF and military futurology, written by a mix of SF authors and serving military personnel, with few technical experts added for flavor.

“Want to write a fiction piece for us?” said Mr. Castalia House. “I can’t write fiction for shit, or at least all my attempts to sell it have failed,” I replied.

“Well, what about non-fiction?” I couldn’t think of a premise; then, suddenly, I could. Which is how I wound up researching and writing a
fact piece called “Battlefield Lasers and the Death of Airpower”.

Congratulations to Mr. Raymond; a link to his blog, Armed and Dangerous, has been duly added on the right sidebar. He is one of a number of excellent expert contributors to RIDING THE RED HORSE, which as he notes is intended to be the spiritual successor to the old THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle.

If – and only if – you are a published author of mil-SF, you may be interested to note we have two more fiction slots open. To inquire concerning a submission, send me an email with RED HORSE in the subject. Please note that we are not looking for any more first-time writers for this first volume; we are already set on that score. We’re also looking for one more non-fiction piece, particularly something related to Russia and the European theater. My original intention was to revive THERE WILL BE WAR and re-release the old anthologies as ebooks, since they are not available in that format. Although Mr. Pournelle was somewhat interested, we were unfortunately unable to make any progress in that direction and so we elected to create a new anthology series with a certain LTC of some notoriety at the helm.

Congratulations to John and John

Per John C. Wright:

I heard just this week from my agent and editor that, despite declining sales, Tor Books has agreed to published the penultimate and ultimate volume in the sexilogy (not what it sounds like; get your mind out of the gutter!) of the nonaward-winning Count to the Eschaton Sequence!

Re: John Scalzi:

Those who have been anxiously waiting for John Scalzi’s best-selling military scifi novel Old Man’s War to get a live-action adaptation won’t have to be waiting much longer. Syfy and Academy Award-nominated director Wolfgang Petersen will adapt the books for television as a series titled Ghost Brigades, after the second novel in the series.

You might remember that Paramount had originally purchased the rights to the Old Man’s War novel to make a movie, but those plans fell through. But don’t worry that this adaptation is going to skip the events of the first novel; as the author himself explains in a tongue-in-cheek self-Q&A on his website, “The series will pull elements from various books in the OMW universe in any event.” The title “Ghost Brigades” was used for the show instead of “Old Man’s War” simply because it sounded “sexier.”

I’m rather disappointed about one of these things, but possibly not the one you might think. While I personally dislike John Scalzi and consider him a fraud, a coward, and a mediocre, derivative novelist, I don’t wish him any ill. I genuinely believe he is rather well-suited for the medium of television, and based on my limited experience in the TV industry, his self-marketing tendencies may actually be on the modest side there.

No, you see, I was rather hoping to have Castalia pick up the rest of the Count to the Eschaton books. C’est la vie, a la prochaine fois. We have not yet reached the point where we can directly compete with Tor Books. But we will. Sooner or later.

Monsterboobz

David Futrelle is apparently a connoisseur of movies about violent homosexual pedophilia. One commenter notes:

David Futrelle has claimed that a photo of a 17 y.o. girl in a bikini or a tight pair of jeans is ‘child porn’. But a film containing nothing but graphic scenes of naked children as young as 14 being raped, mutilated, forced to eat faeces, tortured, and murdered, isn’t. Sums up what a disturbing psychopathic freak he is.

But let’s be fair and let the great defender of women’s suffrage speak for himself:

The movie in question is considered a classic. It’s not porn or torture porn. It’s on Netflix. I wrote about a censorship controversy involving it. I didn’t offer an assessment of the film itself.

Considered a classic? By whom, Hannibal Lector? This is how the movie he claims is “considered a classic” is described: “This grotesque sexploitation movie is officially banned in 15 different
countries, although, as stated above, it should undoubtedly be
automatically classed as the worst form of child pornography. Its
defenders claim that it makes an artistic statement about the
‘corruption of power over innocence and youth’. The abusers in the film
are portrayed as Italian wartime fascists who kidnap eight teenage boys
and girls and subject them to 120 days of grotesque sexual torture and
humiliation before murdering them.”

Sounds like a real classic. It also sounds like Futrelle would fit right in with the SFWA.

The Secret History of Psykosonik, part 0

I got an email from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time last night. It turned out that he’d saved the tapes from our old band and converted them to MP3 about ten years ago. After Big Chilly’s younger brother bought an Ensoniq keyboard, the four of us spent summer evenings in 1987 and 1988 in the basement of Big Chilly’s house learning how to use our instruments.

Mostly because they were so simple and all four of us could more or less sing, we started out by learning early Depeche Mode songs such as Just Can’t Get Enough and Dreaming of Me. We didn’t have a four-track recorder, so everything was recorded live with the programmed drum machines; our microphones were cheap Radio Shack mike sans effects, except for the echo from the basement walls, unless we ran one through one of Big Chilly’s two guitar effects. We covered everything from Depeche Mode and New Order to Shriekback and Camouflage.

It’s all cheesy as hell, but the two times we played live, once at a graduation party and once at a nightclub in downtown Minneapolis, we went over exceedingly well, I think because at the time people didn’t expect to see live electronic music from local bands. They would look intrigued with the first two songs, then New Order would win them over and get things hopping. It’s funny, but even listening to these songs for the first time in 20 years, I can still remember my harmonies. And remember that Horn always set his bloody mike too high.

The second summer, our youngest member decided that we should take the leap into writing our own music. Sharp had a rather unusual perspective on life, so the first song he wrote was Dance on the Waters, about a grouper in love with a little girl it sees on the beach from underneath the waves. It’s far too long, it’s musically naive and incoherent, rhythmically crude, and lyrically absurd, but in retrospect, it has just enough indications of genuine talent buried underneath the nonsense that it’s unsurprising he went on to enjoy the most musical success of the four.

Most of the songs we played, and most of those we wrote, are better lost to the sands of time. But a few of them do show how we were learning how to compose proper songs. One that I’d completely forgotten about, Seasons Pass, is interesting for the way it shows how we’d gone from covering Depeche Mode songs to creating our own Depeche Mode-like melodies.  Sure, it’s terrible, (that line about the streets of St. Paul, ye cats!) but the four of us were between 18 and 19 at the time and everybody has to learn somehow. In You’re So Graceful, which was written towards the end of that second summer, the musical themes have started to become a little more complex and you can hear that we were beginning to grow out of the Depeche Mode influence.

We ended up going in musically opposite directions, as I founded Psykosonik with Paul Sebastien while Big Chilly joined the Bison Chips and Sharp went on to form the great “microphone band” Face (whose interpretation of techno is considerably different), but I thought perhaps some of you might find it interesting to go back to the very beginning and hear how it all started.

Europe belongs to us

Statements don’t get much more powerful than that. This generation appears to already know it is going to have to fight the corrupt power of the anti-democratic EU, but they have a powerful message that is going to resonate across Europe, and hopefully, across the Atlantic as well.

It’s fascinating to see how strongly people react to the video. Does it fill you with pride and hope, or does it fill you with anger and fear? Your instinctive reaction, not your subsequent intellectual rationalizations, will tell you whether you are on the side of Western civilization or against it.

The awakening of the European nations is a prelude to the great battle of the 21st century, which will be the struggle for America.

So that went over well

Between statements like this and the various public calls for genocide, the Israeli/American Jew PR effort that has met with mixed results in the USA is absolutely back-firing in Europe.

An Israeli official has called for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters’.

Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, posted the inflammatory message on his Facebook page at the weekend. 

He lays out a detailed plan for the destruction of Gaza –  which includes shipping its residents across the world – in a letter he addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This is the gentleman of whom Shimshon spoke a few posts ago. He’s only got about 10 percent support in Israel, if I understand correctly, but as we know from NK Jemisin’s example, 10 percent support is dangerous and sufficient to inspire impassioned speeches about how all the white folk want you dead. Or something like that, anyhow.

To help clarify the difference between the European reaction and the American one in perspective, here are the top-rated comments.

From Italy with 1676 upvotes: It is what we have all been thinking was the real Israeli agenda. How can the world just do nothing:(

From the UK with 1034 upvotes: Israel wants the land for its natural gas, it’s as simple as that. It
won’t stop and is behaving in an appalling manner…. Hamas and the Israeli Government should hang their heads in
shame. Both are terrorist organisations in my mind.

From the UK with 939 upvotes: And Israel wonders why the Palestinians – plus a growing number of the rest of the world – hate them?

From Sweden with 818 upvotes: It is truely disgusting that the people who have been through what they
have are doing exactly the same to another group. They keep talking
about the hamas charter of wiping out israel. More often then not, it is
israel who wants to wipe out palestinians. 

And for comparison’s sake, the worst-rated from Wales with 787 downvotes: Seems fair – Hamas have called for the extermination of the jews, so its
only reasonable that Israel should exterminate all palestinians. 

Now, keep in mind that this is from the readership of the anti-immigration, right-leaning Daily Mail, which does not exactly have a lot of Muslims among its readership. I can assure you that the language in the more left-leaning papers is considerably more vehement and virulently anti-Israel.

Feiglin’s plan is so overtly Naziesque that it almost seems as if he’s trolling everyone. About the only thing he missed was to say that Palestinians would have ID numbers tattooed on their arms and forced to wear a yellow crescent moon on their clothing. Then again, what with the Holocaust card being played out, perhaps the Israelis are ready to throw it away and embrace their role as the world’s cartoon villains even if the Jews in America are not.

Perhaps those of you who previously doubted me will take my warnings about Europe a little more seriously now. It’s not just the Turkish and Pakistani immigrants who are increasingly hostile to Israel and Jewry.

The H1B lie

It is readily apparent that there is no shortage of American tech workers when the Americans are being let go in order to hire the cheaper Indians, either via offshore outsourcing or immigration:

At A.B.’s company, about 220 IT jobs have been lost to offshore outsourcing over the last year. A.B. is telling the story because, initially, there was little knowledge among fellow employees about H-1B visa holders and how they are used. They didn’t know that offshore outsourcing firms are the largest users of H-1B visas, or exactly how this visa facilitates IT job losses in the U.S.

“I think once we learned about it, we became angrier toward the U.S. government than we were with the people that were over here from India,” A.B. said, “because the government is allowing this.”

The IT workers at this firm first learned of the offshore outsourcing threat through rumors. Later, the IT staff was called into an auditorium and heard directly from the CIO about the plan to replace them. It would take months for the transition to be completed, in part because of some new system installations.

Many younger IT workers found jobs and left. Mainframe workers were apparently in demand and also able to find new jobs. But older workers with skills in open systems, storage and SAN faced a harder time. About half the IT staffers, mostly the older ones, would stay to the end.

Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.

The entire foundation of free trade is a lie. There are multiple flaws in David Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument that I have previously pointed out – do a search or go through the Free Trade tag if you’re interested. So it should be totally unsurprising that the justifications for the H1B visas are lies as well.

What does the consensus say?

Jerry Pournelle considers the veracity of some claims concerning reactionless drive inventions:

I would very much like to see a proof of principle for a reactionless drive: a way to convert angular momentum into linear momentum, angular acceleration into linear acceleration, some new cosmic principle that requires energy conservation but does not require equal and opposite reaction; and indeed I applaud NASA for doing the tests.

However, it is my understanding that the current tests have been done in air, using torsion to measure acceleration, and that is suspect to me: I’d prefer they used gravity (a swing) and a vacuum chamber. If that’s too hard to arrange, put a garbage bag around the entire apparatus.

Complex electronics produce complex force fields; it’s quite possible for a torsion spring to be affected by such a field. That’s not mysterious; but if gravity is affected I’d call it extraordinary evidence.

We can only wait for more results. But if I had to bet, so far I’d still bet that they have found a demonstration of flawed testing principles, rather than disproving Newton.

I have to confess that I am more than a little confused here. My understanding is that the correct way to determine whether science is correct or not is to take a poll of scientists in mostly unrelated fields.

4GW and Gaza I

I’ve been editing a book on Fourth Generation War theory, so it has been fascinating to see how some of the principles it expounds are being put into action, while others are ignored, by both sides in the Gaza Tunnel War. Before offering my requested take on the situation, I think it would be useful to first look at the current IDF strategy:

After withdrawing the bulk of its ground troops from the Gaza Strip in a “new phase” of its counter-terror operation, Israel declared a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire for seven hours starting 10 a.m. Monday, Aug. 4 to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid and for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. Eastern Rafah was not included. The IDF would respond to any attacks during that time.

But on the quiet, the IDF was on the process of conducting a major strategic operation, carving out a buffer strip or cordon sanitaire just inside the Gaza border, designed to be controlled from outside by special forces and armored units on round-the-clock alert, to bar hostile infiltrations. They are equipped with a battery of firing posts, sensors and drones.

This sterile strip runs 65km from Beit Hanoun in the north to Khan Younis in the south, roughly following one of Gaza’s only motorways, Highway 6 (see map). All the territory east of this line up to the Israeli border has been cleared of buildings and vegetation to a depth of 1 km in the north and center of Gaza and 2-3 km deep in such areas as Khan Younis.

Retreat and fortify. This is a classic 2GW response by a state actor to a non-state actor. Build fortresses, isolate your troops from the enemy, and prepare for massive responses of steel-on-target when incursions take place. It’s based on the same principle as the USA’s Green Zone strategy used in Baghdad and other places. The problem is that while the response is perfectly sensible and psychologically comforting to the troops, it is not going to work against a 4GW opponent who is attacking on the moral and mental levels as well as the conventional Clausewitzian levels. As Debka has noted, this means the Gaza war has now entered an attrition phase. Meanwhile, the Washington Post describes the new tactics of Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS:

We see these newly formed pseudo-armies emerging across the Levant as well. The Darwinian process of wartime immersion has forced them to either get better or die.

Some observers of the transformation admit that Hezbollah now is among the most skilled light infantry on the planet. And now there is Hamas. Gone are the loose and fleeting groups of fighters seen during Operation Cast Lead in 2008. In Gaza they have been fighting in well-organized, tightly bound teams under the authority of connected, well-informed commanders. Units stand and fight from building hideouts and tunnel entrances. They wait for the Israelis to pass by before ambushing them from the rear. Like Hezbollah and the Islamic State, they are getting good with second-generation weapons such as the Russian RPG-29 and, according to as-yet-unconfirmed reports from the fighting in Gaza, wire-guided anti-tank missiles.

These fighters are now well-armed, well-trained and well-led and are often flush with cash to buy or bribe their way out of difficulties. 

Until you read the Handbook, you can’t understand how hair-raisingly familiar the words such as “light infantry”, “flush with cash”, “ambush”, and “tightly bound teams” are. These new “pseudo-armies” have not only clearly read van Creveld and Lind, they are actively putting the military principles those strategists have outlined into action. And since we know that newer generation warfare reliably defeats older generation warfare, the Israeli defeat in Gaza, (or, if you prefer, the IDF’s inability to achieve its stated objectives) was predictable, if not inevitable.

What struck me most from the most recent round of fighting is that the 4GW Hama model is not really an option for Israel. Gaza is simply too big, Hamas is too prepared, and the IDF is too small and casualty-averse. Keep in mind that the Germans threw 270,000 troops at Stalingrad, 100,000 more than exist in the entire IDF, and still couldn’t take it in five months. In nearly one month of action, the IDF ground offensive went no further than three kilometers into Gaza. That’s not to say that it couldn’t have gone deeper, or that Hamas has even a fraction of the 187,000 troops at its disposal that the Red Army did at Stalingrad, but it is obvious that doing so would have cost a lot more than the 63 lives already lost and caused even more civilian casualties.

That leaves the 4GW de-escalation model. But how do you de-escalate in the face of a seemingly implacable enemy who is often actively seeking escalation? That is a matter for the next post on the subject.

ISIS defeats Kurds

Iraq may be turning into a bigger problem than initially anticipated:

Islamic State fighters seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, an oilfield and two more towns on Sunday after inflicting their first major defeat on Kurdish forces since sweeping through the region in June. Local officials said militants with the extremist group Islamic State took control of the towns of Zumar and Sinjar near the city of Mosul on Sunday, waging fierce clashes with Kurdish forces. The French news agency AFP quoted a United Nations spokesman saying 200,000 people have fled Sinjar and said there are grave concerns for their safety.

The Kurds are considered reasonably respectable fighters, even if, as Tom Kratman can attest, they don’t always fight fair. But if ISIS is able to not only defeat the feeble state forces, but the Kurdish peshmerga as well, this would appear to indicate that they’ll be able to take Baghdad soon and use it as the center of their new caliphate.

And that is without taking the strategic effect of the dam into account. That being said, it was a fairly small skirmish, so may indicate nothing concerning the two parties’ relative capabilities.