Women not in combat

One aspect of the Amazonian warrior woman that is never considered by its SF/F proponents is the female ability to override any combat assignment at will:

Nearly 100 female British soldiers have been sent home from Afghanistan after finding out they were pregnant. Between January 2006 and December last year, 99 servicewomen on operations have been flown back to the UK under strict military rules that ban mothers-to-be from serving in a war zone.The women were flown back on flights usually reserved for injured troops, meaning the true figure could be higher if other female soldiers came home via routine flights.

That is 1.2 percent of all the women serving in the British Army.  The percentage of women serving in Afghanistan is even higher, though unknown. And keep in mind that only three women have been killed in Afghanistan. This should suffice to demonstrate the complete absurdity of women in combat.  Even if one assumes a 10:1 kill ratio in Afghanistan, it means an Amazonian warrior woman is more than three times likely to get pregnant than to kill a single enemy troop.

In battles between reasonably equivalent forces, such as the Eastern Front in WWII, the kill ratio is 2:1. So, for every enemy soldier killed by a female soldier, the superior army can assume that it will lose 16.5 of its troops to pregnancy.

Mailvox: compare and contrast

  1. Josh observed: “It looks to me like the prestige of being published by a traditional
    publisher is a commodity paid for by allowing them to rape you on the
    royalties.”
  2. McRapey defended Tor: “I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.”
  3. Jerry Pournelle cited history: “As to conceding 30% to Amazon, I’m damned happy to do it, since publishers take 90%, and back in the bad old days hardbound publishers got 50% of the 5% we got from paperbacks as well. And tried to grab half the movie rights.”

I suggest a look at the facts are in order. Here are the specific terms from a Big Five publisher on a one-book contract offer with a $40,000 advance. Except for the retension of multimedia rights and the unusually high ebook royalties I negotiated, the terms are very similar to contracts with both larger and smaller advances from fellow Big Five publishers.

  • full term of copyright
  • Hardcover: 10 percent of catalog retail price on first 10,000 copies, 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent on 15,000+ copies.
  • Trade Paperback: 6 percent of catalog retail price on the first 20,000 copies and 7.5 percent on 20,000+ copies.
  • Mass Market Paperback: 9 percent on first 150,000 copies and 10 percent on 150,000+.
  • Ebook: 50 percent of revenues received.(1)
  • Foreign language: 25 percent of proceeds from foreign publisher. Which, if similar to these terms, means 2.5 percent on hardcover and 6.25 percent on ebook.
  • All multimedia rights to games, films, and so forth were retained by the author.(2)

Now, keep in mind that this was considerably better than the boilerplate (see points 1 and 2 below). And there are certainly some authors who are able to command better terms than that, Hugh Howey being the prime example of an ideal model to follow. But before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or blithely accepts bad contracts, how many authors do you know receive bigger advances than 8x the median SF first novel advance in 2005, (and I’ve heard they’re down to around $3,000 now, in which case 13.3x), while not giving up any film or game rights and receiving twice the standard ebook royalty?

Keep in mind that Jerry and I are not the horror stories. We’re simply pointing out how bad traditional publishing contracts have been even though we are both relative success stories! Bruce Bethke, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate. Consider the fate of Cyberpunk: “Initially written as a series of short stories in 1980, the novel was purchased by a publisher via an exclusive contract which
forbade Bethke to sell the novel to any other publisher. The publisher
decided not to release the novel, causing several years of legal battles
over the rights to the book.”

So, while Tor may not be ripping off McRapey, who happily accepts making less money per unit in return for primary author status at the largest SF publisher, they are most certainly taking advantage of their lesser auhors. Compare who the names of the writers they published 10-15 years ago to the names being published now. What you will see, and what you will see if you look at any major publisher’s list of authors published over time is a regular new author churn, with low-cost authors providing 1-3 new books before being dropped and replaced when they fail to achieve sufficient sales velocity. It’s a constant churning process, and sometimes the publisher gets it wrong, such as when Pocket Books dropped Dan Brown prior to him writing The Da Vinci Code, which is a sequel to the Pocket-published Angels and Demons.

As one of the people involved in that decision once told me: “Nobody knows what they’re doing in this industry. We act like we do, but we really don’t.”

For the most part, publishers don’t really care who makes it and who doesn’t, because there are always new replacement writers to pour into the publishing mill. And there is nothing wrong with this process at face value, after all, publishers can’t afford to keep publishing authors who don’t sell in sufficient numbers. The problem is that the winners and losers are, to a large part, predetermined by the gatekeepers within the publishing house due to print runs and decisions to reprint books that have sold through their print runs or not. In my experience, these decisions are seldom based in ideology or malice, but are mostly rooted in happenstance and bureaucratic inertia.

Also, I should correct a previous statement. John Scalzi did not denigrate “self-publishers” when he went on his anti-Random House rampage in his swan song as SFWA president. He explicitly denigrated independent publishers operating on the no-advances model.

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

There is nothing stupid or malicious about a shared risk/shared reward model. Only a rabbit who is afraid of risk could possibly suggest that there is. I leave it to the reader to compare the royalty terms of the traditional publishers shown above to the 25 to 65 percent royalties on revenues received offered by independent publishers utilizing the “no advances” shared-risk model, and to decide whose business model is disadvantageous to the author and which sort of contracts are therefore best avoided.

(1) With the Big Five these are now a standard 25 percent.
(2) I have a copy of the contract with the boilerplate struck out. They actually tried to grab 100 percent of the net proceeds from British Commonwealth rights, foreign language translation rights, motion picture and television rights, and commercial merchandising rights.

Question

I find it a little hard to summon any massive outrage on this basis:

The last time I blogged about the Author Solutions subsidiary iUniverse, I highlighted a typical marketing move. Just before Christmas last year, iUniverse mailed their existing customers with a very special “deal” where they offered to turn their print books into e-books and upload them to the various retailers for free. The catch was that customers would then have to fork over 50% of their royalties from every single sale to iUniverse. Needless to say, formatting and uploading is a trivial task. For those unable to do it themselves, that service can be purchased for a nominal up-front fee, leaving a writer’s royalties intact.

50 percent of their sales? Hmmm. Looking back at my original Simon and Schuster contract, it appears that they took 93 percent of my sales in mass market paperback. While I don’t use any Author Solutions services and never have, I fail to see how their overpriced services are any more abusive than the way conventional publishers have been treating the vast majority of their authors for decades.

Most of the publishing industry is set up specifically to exploit writers. That’s the stone cold reality. Castalia House isn’t, but then, as the shambling shoggoths will readily testify, we are extremists very far outside the pale of the mainstream publishing industry.

Do they have a script or something?

Awareness gradually dawns:

If the account of my reader’s experience is fiction, oh well. I got punked. Dumb ol’ me. I got lied to. But here’s the thing: That doesn’t really matter all that much, because the issue is not whether some local group of DE types goes in for silly rituals or uses goofy code words lifted from Tolkien or has a kinkyboots fascination with inspecting your phenotype. It’s not whether a couple of rich guys have decided to patronize this stuff as their latest boutique cause. It’s that, yes, this stuff really is about racialism and the inculcation of pride. And you need look no further than the comments from DE types in my comboxes who show up to laugh at my gullibility in the matter of gnats and stay to swallow the camel of racialist pride (and, by the way, contempt for the Church, particularly among Reactionary Catholics)

Even after getting trolled and being shown for a reactionary buffoon, Mark Shea still hasn’t grasped the essential point. There is no movement. There is no “Dark Enlightenment”. There are no secret meetings and oaths sworn on On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. None of it is real. None of it exists. I’m not a Sith Lord.

The amusing thing is watching Shea attempt to simultaneously a) admit that he was wrong, b) claim that it doesn’t matter, c) stand by his claim that the Dark Enlightenment is a deadly danger, and d) pretend that one of its supposed leaders is unimportant. He adds this in the comments:

As near as I can tell, Vox Day is a non-denom Protestant of some sort
who has cobbled together a do-it-yourself theology from the stones and
bones of the American Christian landscape and is now alloying it with
some crap stuff about being among the High IQ elect. A sort of
Calvinized racialism. And judging from the number of flying monkey he
sends my way, he seems to have a bit of a following. Beyond that, I
don’t pay too much attention.

I would say he doesn’t pay any attention at all. I’m not sure which is more absurd, the SFWA Board’s claim that I am a white supremacist or Shea’s idea that I am some sort of Calvinist. And while it’s absolutely fine that he pays no attention to me, that would appear to be a little strange considering that I am supposed to be one of the Sith Lords of the movement that concerns him so greatly.

I find it bemusing how a certain sort of critic always seems to be torn between warning everyone how Very Bad and Dangerous you are while simultaneously attempting to play down your influence. I suppose it’s not surprising that they don’t tend to be the sort of critics who are capable of mounting credible logical challenges.

Anti-democracy in America

It’s hard to deny that the Swiss people are considerably more free and democratic than the American people when one compares the results of two referendums. In Switzerland, the entire national government is forced to bow to the will of the people. In the USA, a single judge can completely and unilaterally override it:

A federal judge on Thursday evening declared that Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, in the strongest legal reversal yet of restrictive marriage amendments that exist throughout the South.

“Our Constitution declares that ‘all men’ are created equal,” wrote Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Norfolk. “Surely this means all of us.”

The ruling, which overturned a constitutional amendment adopted by Virginia voters in 2006 as well as previous laws, also said that Virginia must respect same-sex marriages that were carried out legally in other states.

I look forward to men stepping forward and mounting legal challenges to women’s bathrooms, the Selective Service, female preferences in the family law, high school sports for girls, and the WNBA. After all, if equality means all of us, all of these outdated sexual distinctions are clearly unconstitutional, not merely those related to marriage.

Ninth Circuit: 2nd Amendment secures right to carry

In other words, “bearing arms” doesn’t just mean “owning” them.

The court concludes that California’s broad limits on both open and concealed carry of loaded guns — with no “shall-issue” licensing regime that assures law-abiding adults of a right to get licenses, but only a “good cause” regime under which no license need be given — “impermissibly infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms in lawful self-defense.” The Ninth Circuit thus joins the Seventh Circuit, and disagrees with the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits.

This is good news. Sooner or later, the Supreme Court will be forced to face the issue directly.

That’s no statue, that’s Mark Shea!

In which Mark Shea gets trolled so hard, it’s a wonder he didn’t turn to stone. You absolutely MUST read A Reader Writes of his Experience Among the Dark Enlightenment Types:

The thing about nascent movements like this is that it’s hard to know
when to pay attention and when to ignore them. If you ignore them they
can grow in the dark, like mushrooms on dung.  If you make too much
fuss, you can attract idiots–particularly extremist idiots–who
automatically assume that anything normal people find objectionable must
be awesome, radical, and “not PC” and therefore good.  But of course,
cannibalism is not PC either and embracing something simply and solely
on the basis that it is a “reaction” is one of the stupidest things
humans can do. You can’t build a life on protest and reaction.  You have
to be for something, not merely against something.  And at the end of
the day, the only real core of DE “thought” is to be for racialism.

Much of the stuff written above describes a sect that brings out
belly laughs. Eldar? Men of Numenor?  Seriously? Tolkien would have
these overgrown D and D players’ guts for garters if he heard they were
exploiting his work for their deplorable cultus. Particularly since
(which is my main concern about them) they are using his work as a grab
bag of code words for their deep-rooted racialist heresy.

I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or
just “Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and
was interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved
with the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here
is what I learned:

– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith
Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land,
but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed.
They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram
for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).

– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.

– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar
in Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas.
He had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a
pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.

– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists,
monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad
Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they
call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor
points.

– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans)
practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t
deny ethnic identity).

– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet
seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.

– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money
to play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a
major tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day
meeting on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc.
Different forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos,
3-piece suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes,
hoods, etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function
but heard about it.)

– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment,
which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my
phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often
relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I
really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more
impressionable and eager to please.)

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of
Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After
that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while
Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or
Iliad.

– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens
alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and
then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old
German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly
what they were saying.

Now that was some epic artistic cruelty, so much so that one almost suspects the dark hand of Roissy. Thank the Divine Rainbow for Mark Shea, saving the world from nonexistent movements since 2014! Then again, as a media-identified Sith Lord, perhaps that’s merely what I want him to think….

Ready for Round Two

It’s always good to know who regards you as the enemy:

Documents from an Ohio National Guard (ONG) training drill conducted last January reveal the details of a mock disaster where Second Amendment supporters with “anti-government” opinions were portrayed as domestic terrorists. The ONG 52nd Civil Support Team training scenario involved a plot from local school district employees to use biological weapons in order to advance their beliefs about “protecting Gun Rights and Second Amendment rights.”

Portsmouth Fire Chief Bill Raison told NBC 3 WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia that the drill accurately represented “the reality of the world we live in,” adding that such training “helps us all be prepared.” Internal ONG documents provided to Media Trackers after repeated delays provide further context to what WSAZ-TV reported last winter.

In the disaster-preparedness scenario, two Portsmouth Junior High School employees poisoned school lunches with mustard gas, acting on orders from white-nationalist leader William Pierce. The ONG team discovered biological weapons being produced in the school,
requiring activation of containment and decontamination procedures.

That’s a nice little Baphomet the 52nd Civil Support Team features on its unit logo. Things do appear to be getting uglier and uglier. It was recently reported that less than 15 percent of Connecticut citizens who own semi-automatic rifles registered them with the state authorities. No one in his right mind thinks it is wise to be disarmed at this late stage of American history, not when the barbarians have been permitted inside the gates and the next big war appears more likely to take place at home than abroad.

New books, new policies

Castalia House has already announced that Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry will be published at the end of this month. In addition to that, we will have another book coming out as well. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but I will say that it is longer than a novella and the first two words in the title begin with the letters Q and M. So, I’m looking for 20 volunteers, ten for each book, to commit to reading the books and then reviewing them when they go live on Amazon. Please send me an email with either BBDC or QM in the title. And if you aren’t already familiar with the science fiction world of Quantum Mortis, you’ve got a few weeks to read QM: Gravity Kills and QM: A Man Disrupted before the third volume appears.

And in other news, we certainly have not forgotten about Selenoth. If you haven’t already read Summa Elvetica, this is your chance to get caught up since Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy is free for the first time on Amazon today.

Castalia House has also reviewed its translations policy after speaking to our vast stable of authors as well as consulting with a number of professional translators. We have decided that our standard offering will be a 25 percent royalty to translators and 25 percent royalty to the authors on revenues from the translated editions. This approach appears to be satisfactory for all three parties concerned, as Castalia House now has 20 foreign language translations in progress.

Also, if you’re one of the reviewers of QM:AMD or QM:GK, please note that the missing reviews may have been preserved in your Amazon account even though they’re not appearing on the book’s current page. So, if you don’t mind, please check to see if you still have it and post it to the current book page.

Dum-dum-dum

And another one’s down:

Ordinarily we would ignore the news of another banker’s death – after all these sad events happen all the time – if it wasn’t for several contextual aspects of this most recent passage. First, the death in question, as reported by the Stamford Daily Voice is that of Ryan Henry Crane, a Harvard graduate, who is survived by his wife, son and parents at the very young age of 37. Second, Ryan Henry Crane was formerly employed by JPMorgan – a bank which was featured prominently in the news as recently as two weeks ago when another of its London-based employees committed suicide by jumping from the top floor of its Canary Wharf building….The circumstances surrounding his death are scarce, but what is most
notable is that not only is Crane the second very young JPMorgan banker
to pass in recent days, but is also the fourth banker death in under a month.

Curiouser and curiouser….