SFWA contra Amazon

There has been a fair amount of talk concerning SFWA aligning itself against Amazon on behalf of the Big Five publishers. Here is the confirming evidence, straight from the horse’s mouth. And to think these geniuses actually re-elected Steven Gould. I was wondering what he could possibly do for an encore after last year’s performance; now we know.  As for the Preston letter that Gould mentions SFWA signing onto, here is the text:

A letter to our readers:

Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette, which owns Little Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints. These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room.
But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette’s authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

For the past month, Amazon has been:
–Boycotting Hachette authors, refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette’s authors’ books, claiming they are “unavailable.”
–Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette’s authors’ books.
–Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette’s authors’ books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

As writers—some but not all published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want. It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be “Earth’s most customercentric company.”

Many of us supported Amazon from when it was a struggling start-up. Our books started Amazon on the road to selling everything and becoming one of the world’s largest corporations. We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner. Nor is it the right way to treat your friends. Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage. (We’re not alone in our plea: the opinion pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which rarely agree on anything, have roundly condemned Amazon’s corporate behavior.)

We call on Amazon to resolve its dispute with Hachette without hurting authors and without blocking or otherwise delaying the sale of books to its customers.

We respectfully ask you, our loyal readers, to email Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, at jeff@amazon.com, and tell him what you think. He says he genuinely welcomes hearing from his customers and claims to read all emails from this account. We hope that, writers and readers together, we will be able to change his mind.

Sincerely,
[Alphabetical list of authors]

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Between this and the pedophile-defending, one wonders what they would do if they decided to intentionally HARM their members. Techdirt explains the problems with the letter.

Bambi vs Godzilla, Round 2

Tumblr takes on 4chan. It goes about as well for them as you would tend to assume. Less than one day to go from #shutdown4chan to “PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DELETE YOUR SELFIES!”

It reminds one that feminists have no idea what post-Christian society has in store for women. Literally no idea at all.

Siding with the invaders

The federal government has chosen its side, and it is clearly not the side of the law-abiding American people:

As illegal immigrants continue to spill across the U.S.-Mexico border, federal authorities are attempting to relocate the migrants from South Texas to housing facilities in states across the nation. One such facility is located in Murrieta, California, where a large group of protesters recently blocked a bus full of migrants from arriving. The protesters remain there, adamant that illegal immigrants don’t get dumped in their town.

But soon the concerned citizens may be forced to step down–Breitbart Texas has learned that federal agents plan to arrive in Murrieta on Monday with riot gear to ensure that another busload makes it to the housing facility.

Jeremy Oliver, a resident of Temecula, California–a town that neighbors Murrieta–told Breitbart Texas that local police officers warned the protesters that “it’s going to get ugly.”

Oliver said, “The feds are pissed that they haven’t been able to use this facility. Officers out there warned people that federal agents will be in Murrieta on Monday–they are going to get the next bus through no matter what. Riot gear and shields will be used to push the crowd back.”

John Henry, a Murrieta resident since 1991, was told the same thing by local officers.

“We’re being told that federal Marshals or ICE will be here in the next few days and that they are bringing riot gear,” Henry said. “They’re apparently going to be blocking off the street with concrete blockades so that no vehicles can get through. The River County Sheriff’s Department showed up last night and brought a huge watch tower that shoots up into the air 35 feet.”

It will be interesting how determined the Feds will be to protect the continued invasion of the southern border if the protesters show up armed and in similar numbers as they did at the Bundy Ranch earlier this year.

Seriously, if the Germans simply hadn’t armed its soldiers, how many of those defending the current invasion of the USA would have defended Operation Barbarossa? And it would appear that a big apology is owed to those Germans who peacefully immigrated into the Sudentenland, as that migration was considerably less violent than the ongoing annexation of the American southwest.

UPDATE: And it looks to get interesting: A group that identifies itself as a coalition of “Patriots” has put out a call for people to go to the Texas-Mexico border and help with a citizen militia operation called “Secure our Border – Laredo.” A spokeswoman for the group, Denice Freeman, said the operation is a call for civilian militia members — both armed and unarmed — to voluntarily guard private property in the Laredo area and other Texas locations where owners feel threatened by “drug cartels and from gangs, particularly the MS-13 gangs,” a Salvadoran-based gang that is considered among the most dangerous in this country by law enforcement.

Of parentheses and protagonists

One thing I have learned over time is that the literary pinkshirts’ notion that they are superior wordsmiths and all right wing SF authors are inept third-rate hacks is about as legitimate and founded in reality as the Left’s self-serving insistence that they are highly intelligent and all right wing people are stupid:

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
A future in which right wing SF authors actually influence the future. Horrific.

Charlie Stross ‏@cstross
@damiengwalter Like the Gernsback Continuum, only in degenerate mongrel second-hander form, right?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@cstross A future entirely composed of poorly composed sentences.
Expand

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@damiengwalter @cstross As opposed to a future broken up by parentheses? (3.2 per page on average.) Why yes, I did read THE RHESUS CHART!

As it happens, I recently read two entertaining SF novels: MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS by Larry Correia and THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross. Both were good books, entertaining, and worth the read. However, if you read them both in quick succession, you will have no choice but to conclude that Larry Correia is not merely the better writer overall (taking into account plot, characters, depth, and original ideas as well as style), he is actually the better prose stylist of the two.

Now, keep in mind that I am a genuine fan of Stross’s Laundry books, of which THE RHESUS CHART is the latest. But Stross cannot manage to maintain a consistent narrative voice, he even violates the “show, don’t tell” rule in a literal manner. I mean, forget the usual “as you know, Bob” for which neophytes are so often criticized, I’m talking about an actual multi-page aside from the narrator addressed directly to the reader in order to explain what was happening elsewhere during the events previously described. Stross doesn’t so much tell a story as explain it; it is only because his stories are so interesting and his ideas are so clever that most people fail to recognize that his literary ability is mediocre at best.

And then there are the parentheses. Oh, sweet Mark Twain on methamphetamine, the parentheses! I don’t know if Stross’s editor was killed in some sort of terrible accident involving brackets and this is some sort of bizarre grammatical tribute to her or what, but regardless, he frequently insists on delivering what apparently is supposed to be additional comic detail via parentheses SEVERAL TIMES PER PAGE. (Seriously, on one page I counted FIVE SETS of them and there are no less than 371 sets in a 368-page book!) Lest you think I exaggerate, here is one of the examples I bookmarked in incredulity. Just to highlight this unusual case of Tourette’s Grammar, I have put the parenthesized text in bold:

Mhari was one of my learning experiences.

(I’m not sure what I was, from her side of the looking glass: roadkill, perhaps. Or a useful idiot. Something like that. But let’s not go there . . .)

Rewind to the late nineties/early noughties. There’s me, Bob Howard, working on a postgrad CS degree. This means I’m putting in roughly eighty hours a week on the books and in front of the computer screen, in a field where the proportion of women is roughly what you’d expect of a sixteenth-century Benedictine monastery. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, single. I then managed to bring myself to the attention of the Laundry by means too embarrassing to relate. (Well, okay: I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton by accident, because that’s what happens when your funky new realtime rendering algorithm that uses a really neat logical shortcut you can’t believe nobody invented before turns out to be an open and ungrounded summoning grid. Which is the extradimensional equivalent of a fast food joint with a buzzing neon sign that says: GOOD EATS HERE. Can we move on, please?)

So, the organization made me a job offer I couldn’t—wasn’t allowed to—refuse. And then they stuck me behind a desk to rot for a few years, or at least until I’d been thoroughly studied and quantified and got sufficiently bored to ask for something more interesting to do instead. During which period I found myself working elbow-to-elbow with a whole raft of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met, mostly in similar straits (they saw something uncanny, heard something go bump in the night, and got swept up in the dragnet when they were found to be useful), some of whom had no Y chromosomes and were also single.

Like I said, Mhari was a learning experience for me. Do you really want to hear about our doomed on-again/off-again car-crash relationship? The immediate nature of the teachable moment for little old twenty-something me was, as a drunken friend of mine questionably phrased it sometime later, “Do not stick your dick in the bad crazy.” It took a lot longer, and a whole lot more perspective (not to mention being married for several years to someone who most certainly was not the “bad crazy”) for me to work out what was actually going on in our dysfunctional relationship, which alternated between bouts of hot primal monkey sex and screaming pan-throwing arguments. What I think was happening was that the “me” that Mhari was alternately fucking and throwing things at was not me, but some sort of demented, revenge-rebound placeholder for a previous boyfriend of many years and some commitment. She’d split up with him acrimoniously less than six months before we first so much as snogged, and he’d done a beautiful gaslight number on her in the process. (Either that or she was bipolar with a topping of psycho special sauce: but resentful rebound relationships are a hell of a lot commoner, and I’ll go with Occam’s razor this time.) The net result was that she was a walking bomb, primed to take out all her existential resentment on whatever man she next took up with, because Bill (I think he was a Bill) had convinced her that all men were fundamentally untrustworthy bastards who would lie to her at the drop of a hat. And I, having recently emerged blinking into the light from a quasi-monastic existence, was simply a convenient cuddly punchbag.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any writer (or, to be more specific, novelist), who insists on inserting no less than THREE (3!) parentheses in a single paragraph has any business criticizing the prose of other authors, particularly on the sole basis of their political affiliations. (Unless, of course, his primary metric for literary quality is an exotic, but objective one based on the ratio of grouping symbols to words.)

What’s interesting, however, is that Larry and Charlie are essentially flip sides of the same coin. They both write what might be termed bureaucratic urban fantasy, they both rely heavily on combining Lovecraft with original takes on traditional monsters, (vampires in the most recent Stross, Frankenstein’s monster in the most recent Correia), they both utilize Mary Sues as protagonists in their trademark series, and they both have strong, easily recognizable voices that are casual to the point of occasionally sounding like college students. They are also both masters of detail concerning their areas of expertise. But the chief literary difference between them doesn’t stem from their political differences, their different nationalities, or even their religious differences, but from their different socio-sexual ranks.

Correia’s Owen Pitt is an accountant. Stross’s Bob Howard is an IT guy. Neither one is a conventional handsome hero naturally beloved by women. But whereas Pitt is brave, confident in his abilities, aggressive, loves weaponry, and pursues the hot girl even if she seems to be out of his league, Howard is cowardly, insecure, passive, fears weaponry, and considers himself lucky that an older, more experienced woman deigns to take an interest in him. Pitt is a lesser Alpha, Howard is a high Gamma. And in these two specific cases, the protagonists directly reflect the socio-sexuality of their creators, which consequently shapes the paths that their stories take as well as the literary style they use to tell them.

Contrast with the Stross sample the following one from Correia’s. Notice that while Stross is too insecure to make a straightforward statement without modifying it and is afraid to cite a common saying (which he quotes incorrectly anyhow) without signifying his awareness of potential feminist disapproval, Correia cheerfully embraces his honest masculine enthusiasm without feeling any need to apologize for it. Stross frequently talks about what is happening whereas Correia prefers to simply show it. Two different approaches, both valid, but bound to primarily appeal to very different audiences.

“Check this thing out. We can still hit the range while there is a little bit of light left.” He led me to a workbench where a strange-looking gun was mounted in a vise.

“Saiga?” I asked. That was a Russian shotgun that was based upon the action of an AK.

“At first. On this one I mounted an adjustable ACE stock, with recoil pad of course, FAL pistol grip, holographic sight system, EOTech in particular, night vision compatible. Full rail system, so you can mount lights or IR illuminators, or as you can see here, a Tula 6G15 40mm grenade launcher, front-loading, single-shot. The barrel has been cut down to twelve inches, modified choke, gave it the Vang comp treatment also so the patterns are good and tight and recoil is softer. I modified the trigger group, so top position is safe, middle is full, bottom is semi. I’ve got the gas adjusted so you are looking at about 700 RPM on full.”

He was speaking my language. “Don’t these only come with five-shot magazines?”

“I’ve got a bunch of nine-round box mags, and two twenty-round drums. I’ve tested them all, all are reliable, but on full you can run through the nine rounder in a second, so use it sparingly. Go ahead, check it out.”

I gently picked up the massive weapon. It was short, but it was thick and heavy, and that was while it was empty. Add almost a box of shells and a grenade and it would be even more so. I worked the action. The bolt was slick and the spring was powerful. Milo had thoughtfully added a shelf to the safety so that it could be operated with the trigger finger. It pointed better than it looked when I snapped it into position.

“What about specialty munitions?”

“There is a gas regulator at the end of the hand guard. I machined a new one so that it now has three positions. If you have the regulator in the right spot for the right ammo, it isn’t going to malfunction.”

I ran my finger along the regulator, and found detents for the different power levels. There was also a mystery button. When I pushed it a hinge unlocked, and an eight-inch, heavy-duty bayonet was released. The blade was absurdly sharp and thick. With a flick of the muzzle it locked into place with a snap. It was not the world’s best-balanced spear, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.

“No freaking way. That is awesome.”

“I got the idea off the Czech CZ52, but I improved it. It folds to the side, out of the way of the grenade launcher. You don’t hardly even know it’s there until you need it. Bottom edge is good cutting steel, on the top edge is a silver inlay. You stick this in a lycanthrope and it’s going to know it.”

“Why did you paint it brown?” I asked as I slowly turned the monstrous weapon over in my hands. It felt good. I realized I was grinning like an idiot.

He shrugged. “I’m tired of black guns. Everybody has black guns. I wanted this to be a little different. Plus black gets hot in the sun. I tried to give it kind of a desert-tiger-stripe thing. So do you like it?”

“Milo… This is the coolest gun I have ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen a lot of guns. How does it shoot?”

“Let’s go find out. From what I’ve seen from you in practice, and from what Julie told me about your shooting on the freighter, I have been waiting for somebody worthy of Abomination.”

Abomination? That was just too cool. Milo handed me a sack of loaded magazines. “Okay, just one more question. Exactly how many gun laws does this break?”

Milo’s red eyebrows scrunched together in thought. He started to count on his fingers, and then thought better of it.

“All of them.”

Flawless style? No. But effective? Indubitably. Better than Stross’s interminable internal monologuing? Without question. Whereas a good editor might wish to tweak a word or two in the Correia text, he’d want a chainsaw for the Stross sample. It is true that one cannot always judge the writer by the book. But, by the same token, in some cases it is not difficult for the observant reader to discern when a writer is not only writing what he knows, but who he is.

Uncaused != unpredictable

Michael Flynn is bemused by the customary atheist ineptitude where philosophy is concerned:

The usual suspects are at work where the Statistician to the Stars is manfully working his way through Thomas’ Contra gentiles, and TOF notices a peculiarity previously glimpsed on the blog of P.Z.Meyer: viz., so soon as You-Know-Who is glimpsed at the end of a syllogism based on causation, they will deny causation and declare randomness rules. But let randomness appear to make room for free will, and their universe becomes strictly deterministic with mechanical causes strictly propagating the past into the future. Often, the same person will make both claims, though usually on different threads. There is probably no solution to this game of intellectual Whack-a-Mole, but TOF was especially charmed by the notion that there is no cause for radioactive decay, which is said to be due to magical chthonic effects obtained by invoking “chthulu” or “quantum mechanics” or something.

One respondent even claimed that hurricanes were just as causeless as radioactive decay, despite the fact that meteorologists understand quite well the causes of hurricanes. That was when enlightenment descended upon TOF like little tongues of flame.

These people are confusing “caused” with “predictable”.

  • Because we cannot predict the time and place that a hurricane will form, hurricanes are “uncaused.”
  • Because we cannot predict the time and place that an atom will decay, radioactive decay is “uncaused.”
  • Because we cannot predict when a bird will strike a jet engine, the consequent engine failure is “uncaused”?  Say what?

But then, since Newtonian mechanics cannot predict which apple will fall from which tree at which time, let alone whose noggin it will bop (God playing Whack-a-Mole?), we would have to conclude that the motion of falling bodies is uncaused. Yet this was the very inspiration for the deterministic universe metaphor!

Perhaps we should let them continue until they have completely demolished the 19th century mythos, then pick up the pieces and rebuild a sane metaphysics.

And forget philosophy, it never ceases to amaze me how little history the average outspoken atheist knows. I mean, the moment you hear an atheist mentioning “war” in the same breath as “religion”, you already have confirmation that the atheist is a) a historical ignoramus, and most likely, b) a functional idiot. Especially if the discussion concerns, in any way, the existence of God.

Pink SF/F in one picture

For all the triumphalism, award-giving, and mutual queef-sniffing of its politically-correct champions, the observable fact is that Pink SF/F has been an unmitigated disaster when viewed from an objective perspective. While the conventional argument is that it was the Internet that has devastated the short fiction magazines, this chart showing the rapidly declining market for Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the now-defunct Realms of Fantasy show that it could not have been the Internet that had such a deleterious effect as, depending upon the magazine, the declines began between 1984 and 1992.

Naturally, those who think it is definitely wonderful that things are opening up in the genre have absolutely no idea what could possibly have caused this puzzling decline.

So, it seems that somewhere in the 1980s and the very beginning of the 90s, something, happened to both newspapers and SF magazines. Some of it is likely due to a gradual decline in reading for pleasure, but this decline is a lot less significant than the decline in newspaper or SF magazine sales. I can’t find 20+ year data for magazines, but what I could find doesn’t look as significant. I don’t have any answers, merely a question.

Whatever could that be? Speaking as a former subscriber to Asimov’s and F&SF, who finally stopped subscribing to both magazines after realizing that neither contained anything of interest any longer, I think I can shed some light on the situation. First, it was not a decline in reading for pleasure, as increasing overall book sales will suffice to demonstrate. Second, there were certainly some industry distribution issues involved, the more important factor was the way in which the gatekeepers opened up the genre to every form of subversion and perversion and left-liberal orthodoxy. This was was more than offensive to many readers’ sensibilities, even worse, it was tedious, monotonous, and uninteresting.

Consider what one SFWA member mentioned on Twitter the other day: “At Barnes & Noble. The SFF section is filled w friends. Yet the book
blurbs suggest we’re all writing the same 5 books over and over again.”

They are. They were. And due to this, as the statistics show, in only 20 years, the new SF/F gatekeepers managed to drive off as much as 80 percent of their audience! Notice that the chart above only runs through 2007; the decline of the traditional publishers has observably picked up speed since then with the rise of Amazon and independent publishing. (I have heard that e-subscriptions have helped the SF/F mags stop their decline; at this point there are probably no non-Pink readers left to lose.) Remember, in 2012, Publisher’s Weekly reported science fiction sales were down 21 percent from the year before.

Look at Tor’s bestsellers. It’s all Orson Scott Card, Robert Jordan, and Brandon Sanderson, followed by HALO tie-in novels. Many of these are books published 30 years ago. Some of these authors are dead. Tor’s current favorite, the ever-ubiquitous John Scalzi, doesn’t even show up until #25, and the long list of Tor-published no-name award-winners and SFWA activists are far down the list. Or look at this week’s Sci-Fi bestsellers on Publisher’s Weekly. Dune, by Frank Herbert, published in 1965, is number 9.

You may recall the pinkshirts celebrating the fact that women swept the Nebula Awards this year. And yet, there is not a single female author in the Publisher’s Weekly top ten Sci-Fi bestsellers.

Does a similar decline in newspapers invalidate this interpretation? I don’t think so. Conservatives used to read the newspaper and occasionally grit their teeth, but they religiously subscribed to one or more papers. But as the left-liberal influence over the editorial page steadily grew, until, by the early 1990s, the conservative voice was reduced to a single token moderate, conservatives quit subscribing to newspapers for much the same reason many genre readers quit reading science fiction and fantasy: they didn’t see any reason to pay money to have their views attacked on a regular basis.

I expect CNN’s ratings have seen a similar decline, the difference in the cable news market is that Fox News provided a direct alternative. In areas where there were no alternatives, such as genre publishing and single-newspaper cities, people simply turned away.

It’s not an accident that Brad Torgersen has been repeatedly voted the favorite author of Analog’s dwindled readership. He may be the only author published there who is still writing in a reasonable facsimile of classic science fiction.

Anti-religious discrimination in the workplace

Corporate anti-religious discrimination in America is nearly as severe as racial discrimination against blacks:

Most of the country might consider itself religious, but according to two recently released studies, admitting one’s faith on a resume can cut the chances for a callback by more than 25 percent.

Scholars with the “Religious Affiliation and Hiring Discrimination” field experiments, conducted in the South and New England, found that “applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers.”

“These studies do tend to show there will be factors in resumes that will lead to bias,” said David Lewin, head of Berkeley Research Group’s Labor and Employment practice and a professor of organizational behavior at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “Religion could well be one of them.”

Similar studies utilizing identifiably black names showed that similarly qualified blacks are 33 percent less likely to receive a callback. (NB: before you embarrass yourself by trying to correct me, do the freaking math.) Keep this in mind the next time you see an atheist try to claim there is no anti-religious discrimination in America; the studies show that at least when it comes to corporate employment, it is four-fifths as severe as racial discrimination.

Pro-pedophile, anti-Amazon

It’s certainly an unusual public position for a writers organization to take. I found this letter by an SFWA member to be vastly amusing, particularly in light of how the astonishingly inept Steven Gould was recently re-elected SFWA President:

Douglas Preston is circulating a letter regarding the Amazon-Hachette dispute. In this letter, Preston finds Amazon alone guilty of multiple sins against Hachette authors. He encourages readers to email Jeff Bezos about the matter. The dispute has exposed a big faultline in publishing, between those authors traditionally published by the Big Five (who have spared no words defending Hachette) and independent and self-published authors (who have been equally vociferous in defense of Amazon).

Myself, I’ve kept quiet about this kerfluffle because I didn’t have a dog in this fight. I’m an independent author (without connection to any of the Big Five publishers.) I do make the lion’s share of my sales through Amazon, so there’s that.

Today, though, my professional society — The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) — threw my dog into the fight. The President and Board of SFWA officially endorsed Preston’s letter. They did so without discussion among the membership or, as near as I can tell, any attempt to determine the wishes of the members….

So what does SFWA do? It publicly and officially takes the side of traditional publishing, thereby signaling to independent and self-published writers that SFWA doesn’t understand or care to understand their concerns. it’s about as clear a message of “You don’t belong and aren’t welcome” as I’ve ever seen.
I know many hardworking members of SFWA who stood ready to resign if the vote goes against allowing self-published writers to join — several of them have already said that this endorsement is the last straw.

One thing you have to understand about SFWA is that most of their members a) despise self-publishers and b) are absolutely terrified of Amazon. They speak very differently in public these days, but I was privy to their two private forums for years and many of them are on the record practically spitting contempt for people who are not, in their view, “real writers”.

One of the many things they didn’t like about me when I ran for office was that I intended to expand eligibility to self-publishers as well as game writers, which naturally horrified those who were quite happy with permitting the gatekeepers at the major publishers and genre magazines to decide who was, and who was not, eligible for membership.

The other thing that is more than a little funny is that numerous people expressed the fear that I would act unilaterally if I was elected president. And now Steven Gould has gone and publicly taken sides against Amazon without bothering to see if the membership would be on board with that.

But still nothing on former SFWA members Marion Zimmer Bradley or Ed Kramer. Or Grand Master Sam Delany.

Cedar Sanderson opines at Mad Genius Club:

So here we have an organization that still claims it supports authors and helps them get the best deal, but now they are in bed with one of the biggest publishing businesses. Their cover story is getting thinner than a streetwalker’s top…. For sure, they aren’t fighting for authors to get the best deal. They
just came out in support of the guys who pays 12.5% on a book sale, over
the guy who pays 70% on a book sale. Even the least mathematically able
among us can see where the “bend over and spread, dear’ side is.

I’m not surprised they are on Hatchette’s side. That was always obvious. I’m just shocked they were dumb enough to actually take Hatchette’s side in public. I, for one, would find it hilarious if Amazon responded by refusing to sell any books by an SFWA member. How many nanoseconds do you think it would take these highly principled writers to do a 180 and back down.

As for me, as a writer with multiple book contracts with a Big Five publisher and an editor at an independent press, I am firmly on Amazon’s side here. As every writer and reader should be. Perhaps one day Amazon will begin behaving as badly as the Big Five have behaved. Perhaps one day Amazon will try to increase its revenue share from 30 percent. But there is no rational case for taking Hatchette’s side that does not primarily involve being the recipient of payments by a Big Five publisher.

Holland v Costa Rica

Everyone has to appreciate what Costa Rica has done in this tournament. They were amazing in the group stage and no one expected them to make it this far, let alone win the Group and make it past the first knock-out game. That being said, there is no way they can hang with the Oranje tonight. No way. It’s been a phenomenal run for Costa Rica, and between them, Mexico, and the USA, any discussion of the possibility of removing a slot from CONCACAF has been silenced. But it ends here.

Argentina v Belgium is an interesting question. Belgium has the better team, but Argentina has Messi. Is that enough? I don’t think so. Belgium also has one of the best central defenders in the world in Kompany; that’s not enough to cancel out Messi, but it should be enough to slow him down. And while Messi has been brilliant at times, he simply hasn’t taken control of the games the way some were expecting.

ARGENTINA 1 BELGIUM 0. A goal that is both lucky and well-struck in the eighth minute is the only one; a deflection bounces to Higuaín, who immediately buries a nice volley. Like France yesterday, Belgium never seemed to get in gear. Messi has the opportunity to put the game away in injury time, but can’t beat the keeper on a one-on-one. He’s very good, but he’s no Maradona.

In fairness, he didn’t shoot her

You know, I don’t recall ever seeing Eric Estrada grounding and pounding a woman on CHiPs. The California Highway Patrol is caught on camera protecting and serving the California public by beating the hell out of a woman:

A barefoot woman described as harmless was subdued and pummeled by a California Highway Patrol officer in an incident captured on video. The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is investigating the incident, which occurred on Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Video shot from a by-passing car shows the CHP officer chasing the woman on foot through traffic. In the video, the officer catches up to the woman from behind, spins her around and takes her to the ground. The pair struggled, but the officer ends up on top. From that position, he begins punching her rapidly in the head.

“He is beating her up, yo,” a man filming the incident is heard saying.

“Oh my gosh, why?” a woman asks….

“No one condones when he gets on top of a woman, and this is a big officer, and he punches her repeatedly,” Diaz said. “I think he punched her in the head 15 times.”

I have no doubt the CHP will investigate the incident with all of the justice and impartiality shown by every other police department when investigating its officers.