The dry bones of the Autumn People

John C. Wright excavates an astonishing review of THE LORD OF THE RINGS to illustrate the malice and poverty of spirit inhibiting those who never have anything but evil to speak of that which speaks truth to the human condition.

The reason why this mocking and forgotten review should be remembered and held up to mockery in turn is because the animating spirit behind it is alive and well, if not increased in size and reach and insolence.

Ray Bradbury described this spirit, as is his wont to describe anything he describes, with the insight of a poet and the wisdom of a sage:

“For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”
-Ray Bradbury, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Elsewhere, he describes their homeland:

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
-Ray Bradbury, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

If this sound deliciously like the dreary rainscape of the microscopic yet immeasurable Hell portrayed in THE GREAT DIVORCE by C.S. Lewis, where the houses are imaginary and do not keep out the cold and wet, it is no coincidence. The two writers both had met the Autumn People from the cold lands deep in October.

They are among us today, the Autumn People, and in greater numbers, and for the most part they have dispensed with the delicacy of expression of Mr. Wilson, as with his culture and his learning. His spiritual grandchildren are among us, and turned against his learning the same scorn he turned against Tolkien’s, so they cannot express themselves as well, or, indeed, coherently.

From the point of view of an autopsy then, one wonders what is wrong with such people as Mr. Wilson? What ails the Autumn People?

The Autumn People are now the gatekeepers of SF/F and of our larger media culture. They mock and belittle all nobility, all tradition, all religion. They are intellectual parasites who have nothing to offer but nihilism and momentary animal pleasure. They disingenuously appeal to justice, a concept in which they do not actually believe, in order to attack the very foundations of civilization. They preach uncertainty with all the rock-solid belief of a divinely-appointed prophet and place their faith in a method documented to be reliably false.

Mr. Wright asks what ails the Autumn People. There are others, even more generous of spirit, who wish to cure them. As for me and my House, we think only to vanquish their soulless Insect Army and send them scuttling back under the rocks from which they crept. For if the literary world is abandoned to them, there will never be another Middle Earth, there will never be another Narnia, there will be nothing but the black ravenous goo of the Silent Oecumene.

The Autumn People admire autumnal books. The Autumn Man is a man who has collapsed into temptation. The disease has eaten into his bones so that he can no longer stand. What he wants to hear is stories that mock the standing people, that trip them up, that bring things down to his level.  Above all, the Autumn People like sly, sarcastic books, books that mock and shock, books that sneer. Sneering is the only emotion they know, aside from dull resentment and petulant hatred. The Autumn Man therefore wants to hear a story that says he is in the right when he knows he is deeply wrong. 

It sounds familiar, does it not? Sneering, snark, science fetishization, and sex in its most degraded form is the totality of today’s Pink SF/F. And notice in particular how Wright astutely draws the connection between the behavior of the reviewer and his current heirs: “the accuser does not address the evidence, which is
public, but attacks the subconscious motive, which is not only private,
it is unknown even to the person himself.”

This passive-aggression, this attempt to safely snipe from cover while avoiding direct confrontation that will permit others to adjudicate the objective facts of the matter, is the hallmark of the Autumn People, the rabbits, the insects, the Nothing Mentality. Beware of them. Stand against them. And always – always – shine the light of truth upon them. It is the one thing they truly fear.

A tale of corporate torture

Any society that believes it to be vitally important to get more employees like this in the tech industry would appear to be one that is unlikely to maintain its technological advantage over the rest of the world:

In other words, her colleagues didn’t think well of her work, she was having an inappropriate and unprofessional relationship with at least one male colleague,  her presence caused the performance of another male colleague to go downhill, (possibly through no fault of her own), she pissed off the founder’s wife, spent considerable time on a project of no possible use to the company’s bottom line, spend much of her time at the office in the bathroom crying, the founder has now been “put on leave”, as has one of the engineers, and the company has inadvertently become the focus of considerable media attention.

How good does a female coder have to be to make her employment worthwhile if all that is the potential cost?

Read about the grand saga of the persecution of Miss Horvath at Alpha Game. It’s like something out of the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition.

Holding their breath and turning blue

It should be obvious that women cannot and will never be as effective as men if they are going to come right out and openly declare that they will not do their jobs because they find doing so to be offensive:

Rebecca Davies, who writes the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk, tells me that she is equally sick of receiving “books which have been commissioned solely for the purpose of ‘getting boys reading’ [and which have] all-male characters and thin, action-based plots.” What we are doing by pigeon-holing children is badly letting them down. And books, above all things, should be available to any child who is interested in them.

Happily, as the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, there is something that I can do about this. So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

Duly noted. I wonder how long this policy will last before it quietly goes by the wayside? Probably right around the time that a massively successful book explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys, is published. If I were managing The Independent, I would immediately fire both women for their open refusal to simply do their jobs and review the books that are submitted for review.

This is a particularly egregious case of the gatekeepers attempting to decide what is permissible to read and what is not. The ironic thing is that they probably think the Spanish Inquisition’s list of proscribed books is one of the great crimes of human history. Would you trust these people’s opinions on any book now?

The ridiculous thing is that there is nothing to prevent a boy from reading a pink sparkly book, or to prevent a girl from reading a book with a Frazetta-style painting of a young man holding a severed orc’s head on the cover.

Of course, they’re already walking back their idiotic public posturing: We’re not planning to judge books by their cover….

Sure you’re not. And if sex-specific books demean all children, don’t sex-specific changing rooms and bathrooms demean all adults?

THE STARS CAME BACK

Castalia House has been receiving an increasing number of submissions, so I didn’t think anything of it when Rolf Nelson sent me a copy of The Stars Came Back. He said that it had been self-published for several months, which wasn’t necessarily a problem, (although we tend to favor unpublished submissions), and provided a link to the Amazon site as well. I had a quick look at the book, as is my custom before deciding to which of our ten crack Readers I would send it; the First Line of Defense is fairly ruthless in their rejections of anything they believe does not fit the model. And my first thought was “what the hell is this?” This was apparently not the first time such a thought had been inspired by the book, for as it turned out, as all three Readers immediately came back to me expressing precisely the same sentiment before they’d really even started it.

One Reader threw up his hands and said he simply couldn’t deal with the script-style format. Another one read it and said that he loved the story and would recommend acceptance if it was rewritten in conventional format. The third, and I quote, said: “this story is like gold” and urged immediate acceptance as is.

Well, that’s tremendously helpful…. But it did indicate a closer look into the matter. So I went to Amazon to read through the… 55+ customer reviews? Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry has been selling very well and has only 31 reviews to date. Then I had the chance to read a bit more myself and the reason for the number of reviews began to make sense. Let’s just say that if Firefly still holds a warm place in your heart, you will very much enjoy Mr. Nelson’s work. Not that it is an imitation; it is not. But it hits a similar set of chords, only in a more intelligent manner.

Then it struck me: if so many people were enthusiastically reading this book despite its unusual format and a cover that tended to suggest “this book is self-published”, then we were obviously looking at a considerable story-telling talent. And at the end of the day, that is exactly what Castalia House wants in its novelists. So, I promptly called Mr. Nelson and offered him a contract, which he signed after consultation with his lawyer. As I mentioned in a previous post on Brad Torgersen’s paean to Baen, we look at Baen as an admirable model to follow and we are as interested in helping talented new authors like Mr. Nelson develop their talent as we are in publishing established authors like Mr. John C. Wright, who are already at the top of both their game and the SF genre.

Consider some of the reviews from those who have read The Stars Came Back:

  • Wow. It took about 5 pages to get used to the screenplay format. After
    that, the format really added to the mental images that the dialogue
    creates. The story is fast paced and physics used are consistent. By
    that I mean the physical laws the author imagines work the same way each
    time. That consistency definitely helps the storyline. Several of the
    other raters compare this to works by John Ringo, I would agree and
    probably add Larry Correia as well. Not only is The Stars Came Back
    enjoyable it is also thought provoking. 
  •  Without a doubt, the best read I have had in many a month – and I
    average four novels per week. I was deeply engrossed in this novel and
    was presently surprised by the content, the plot, and the editing. 
  •  The plot in this tale doesn’t just thicken, it twists through about
    seven different dimensions, but maintains a most compelling theme. In
    this imagined world, the attributes of humans that lead to the most
    success are exactly as one would hope would work in OUR world – honesty,
    independence, perseverance, reliability, morality. The protagonist
    isn’t a perfect person, and knows it, but strives to do right by those
    whose lives he touches, and to avoid having wrong done to him.
  •  I can’t say enough good things about this story. Excellent plot;
    interesting, plausible characters; great pacing and storyline
    development; and just fistfuls of nods to Star Wars, Star Trek,
    Firefly/Serenity, the Bolo series (and Hammer’s Slammers), Lovecraft
    mythos (kind of tangentially, but still there), The Forever War, and
    probably several other fictional sci-fi universes as well.
  •  The Stars Came Back is a good foray into the literary world. Lots of
    shades of Heinlein and Weber, and a dose of Firefly mixed with
    McCaffrey’s The Ship That Sang.

So, I would encourage you to pick up a copy and see for yourself why we were so enthusiastic about Mr. Nelson’s first book. It is only $3.99 for 589 pages of pure science fiction entertainment.

The curse of the Youtube song

Actually, according to Zerohedge, the number of banker suicides is now 11:

The financial world has been rattled by a rash of apparent suicides, with some of the best and brightest among the finance workers who have taken their lives since the start of the year. A majority of the eight suicides of 2014 have been very public demonstrations, which has suicide-prevention experts puzzled.

“Jumping is much less common as a method for suicide in general, so I am struck by the number that have occurred in recent months in this industry,” said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Perhaps it is because they are not suicides. I was somewhat dubious about the sudden rash of banker deaths, particularly after hearing about the guy who tortured himself with a nail gun. And the 11 deaths doesn’t include Jeffrey Corzine. Bankers have stolen homes and deposits from hundreds of thousands of people and ruined thousands of lives. It seems highly improbable that all of those people are now in a perfect state of Zen equilibrium and have no interest in seeking revenge.

Same as he ever was

You may recall that I previously demonstrated that John Scalzi’s claim to have 50,000 daily readers was a 12x exaggeration of his actual daily blog readership in 2013, which was 20,600 daily pageviews and 4,085 daily readers. As it turns out, this significant exaggeration of his site traffic and his influence was nothing new.  Consider this post from July 2009, in which he arrogantly claimed that he was more influential than the three major SF publications, Analog, Asimov’s, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, combined.

Brad Torgersen: “Unless the work you’re writing is not the sort that fits any of the
Big Three, why would you allow the format and method of submission to
stop you from sending to the three markets still considered to be the
Top Dogs in short F and SF fiction?”

John Scalzi: “Because it would cost me money to buy a printer, paper and ink, the
rate they pay is shite, and I can reach more people on my Web site in a
day than any two of them can in a month.”

 In July 2009, Whatever had 300,487 monthly pageviews, or 9,613 per day. That meant he had about 1,940 daily readers. In 2009, Analog’s monthly circulation was 25,418 and Asimov’s was 16,696. It will probably not escape the mathematically literate observer’s attention that 42,114 is more than 1,940. So, five years ago, he was exaggerating his site traffic by a factor of 21.7. His absurd 2013 claims are actually less exaggerated than his previous claims.

And, of course, he was aggressively policing his potential critics even then.

Just as a general note, as I’ve told Brad to move on from this thread, directing comments to him specifically will be frustrating for him, and will not get actual responses.

Those who have recently lost respect for John Scalzi were simply not paying sufficient attention to his antics before. He’s precisely the same narcissistic con man that he’s always been, the only difference is that now he is less able to successfully control the narrative and spin a self-serving web of deceit because an increasing number of people in the SF/F world are aware of the facts and are able to see through his incessantly fraudulent activity.

As Bernie Madoff learned, eventually people figure out the con. Mr. Scalzi may not yet have come to terms with the fact that the jig is up yet, but sooner or later, he will have to do so.

“WHEN YOU SEE FRAUD, SHOUT FRAUD.”
– Nassem Talib

Epic Gamma Fail

It’s always amusing to be lectured on feminist dogma by white-knighting gamma males desperate for female approval. A brief background:

  1. I wrote an Alpha Game post on the widely reported fact that most women who obtain computer science degrees don’t end up sticking with programming very long. I attributed this to the same reason women don’t write much hard science fiction; they are disinclined to put in the hard work required because they don’t enjoy it and it’s not a field where the usual trick of playing the “I’m just a little girl” card doesn’t get the men to do their work for them.
  2. A commenter added: “I think too many of these girls who get drafted in under the “MOAR
    GIRLS!” banner never see real work, then bail when they encounter it.
    Who will be at a technical conference debating the fine points of
    something technical, or the fine points of a pun, and who will be taking
    selfies in a mirror with a sign like “I am doing programming!”?
  3. Enter White Knight #1, who promptly took it to Twitter, encouraging male programmers to take pictures of themselves doing programming and posting them to Twitter with the hashtag #iamdoingprogramming.
  4. The gammas, sending the possibility of attracting some rare female attention, promptly committed the aforementioned epic gamma fail.
  5. One Ted Mielczarek ‏promptly declared the need for a Pink Programming Police. “We need some sort of HN-terrible-comment database that we can use as a “do not hire” blacklist.” He also threatened to never hire me. Oh, well, maybe I can find a job at Tor….

Apparently people with decades of experience in software development are simply supposed to ignore everything they have seen and heard while embracing the GIRLZ CAN 2 CODE movement. I have a better idea. Let’s take a scientific approach and simply mandate female employment on all mission-critical financial programming projects from now until the financial system collapses.

We know mass default and credit contraction is necessary to clear the system, so we may as well kill two birds with one stone.

On the knife’s edge

In belatedly going over the Q4 2013 Z1 report, I was a little surprised to see that total credit market debt picked up a bit, increasing $909 billion in the fourth quarter alone. At 1.57 percent, that’s still not enough to keep pace with the historical quarterly advance of 2.36 percent, so it’s still disinflation mode, but it is the third-highest quarterly credit growth seen since credit disinflation began in Q1-2008.

However, the Household sector remains flat and the State and Local Government sector has been deflating the last three quarters in a row and seven of the last eight. This means that the private economy is still contracting because State and Local is restricted by tax revenues. Nearly all the credit growth is taking place in the Corporate and Federal sectors.

In fact, of the $7,718.7 in credit growth since Z1 peaked and began deflating in Q1 2009, $7,078.7 is Federal borrowing. In other words, the private economy is right on the knife edge of debt-deflation and has been so for the last five years despite the vast inflationary efforts by the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve.

As for the credit demand gap, at $29.4 trillion, it has now reached nearly 50 percent of Z1. That is why money printing to fill the gap is simply not an option and any attempt to do so will necessarily go right to hyperinflation and failure.

SFF Net separates from SFWA

This is interesting news in light of the number of professional writers who have quietly been leaving SFWA:

Steven Gould, President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Jeffry Dwight, President of Greyware Automation Products, Inc. announced that they are severing the formal ties between the writer’s organization and the legacy SFWA discussion discussion boards still hosted at SFF Net (a Greyware service).

Gould said, “SFF Net was the host of SFWA’s online home for many years. We are incredibly grateful for the years of support from Jeffry and his team. When SFWA moved over to managing its own domain at sfwa.org in 2009, the organization continued to maintain the old discussion boards for a transition period. The SFWA board of directors were discussing the appropriate time to separate when I received Jeffry’s email on the same subject.”

Dwight said, “SFF Net initiated this separation. We have no immediate plans to shut off the private.sfwa hierarchy, nor to remove access from those who already have it. SFF Net will continue to offer discussion areas to professional writers, but based on each individual’s writing credentials rather than membership in SFWA or any similar groups. Our goal is for the transition from sff.private.sfwa to sff.private.pro to be both gradual and gentle, so that no one is disenfranchised.

It’s a smart move by SFF Net. Being tied to SFWA prevented non-SFWA writers like me and many others from participating on SFF Net’s formerly active pro writing forums. And many of the most experienced writers who were already there simply never migrated to the SFWA forums, which were mostly infested by the activist junior members who don’t actually write or publish much science fiction.

It won’t be surprising if within six months, there are two- or three-times as many pro writers active at SFF Net than there are in the SFWA forums. Even though their individual credential requirements will probably be more stringent as well. And thus SFWA’s slide into further irrelevance begins….

UPDATE: This book feature from SFWA.org says it all about the modern SFWA. It’s now the Romance Writers of America’s little league.

FEATURED BOOK: “Post-apocalyptic biopunk romance from the RWA RITA Award nominated author of GHOST PLANET. Coming from Tor in April 2014.

The end of the free love era

As socionomics predicts, with economic contraction comes war… and disease:

The CDC has issued a report detailing its findings in attempting to trace the increasing difficulty in treating gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that can cause severe discomfort, serious medical problems (such as sterility) for both genders and in very rare cases, death.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial disease that has been around for thousands of years, if not longer, plaguing human populations. In more recent times, it’s had to evolve to survive as humans learned to treat it using penicillin and other antibacterial agents. Over the past thirty years in particular, gonorrhea has evolved to the point that there are very few treatments left (ceftriaxone along with either azithromycin or doxycycline) and now, it looks like its poised to get the best of those as well, which will mean those who contract the disease in the very near future will find that doctors have no way to cure them…. The overriding conclusion of the researchers is that the world is now sitting on the precipice of losing the ability to fight a major bacterial infection.

AIDS was the warning and the medical and political establishments completely failed in their responsibilities in the face of the gay community acting up. One sincerely hopes they will do better the next time around. Because the next time does not appear to be very far off.