Tag: books

Jerry Pournelle Week V

25 years after the end of the Cold War and the publication of the ninth volume, Dr. Pournelle has revived his classic science fiction series with Castalia House. THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X continues the tradition of combining top-notch military science fiction with first-rate real-world analysis by military experts. The Cold War may have ended, but as recent events everywhere from Paris to Syria have demonstrated, war has not.
THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 18 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battle Station” by Ben Bova, “Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai, “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke, and the eerily prescient “The Man Who Wasn’t There” by Gregory Benford. Volume X also includes timely essays on “War and Migration” by Martin van Creveld, “The 4GW Counterforce” by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, and “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control” by CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN, which was awarded the 2015 Literary Award by the Surface Navy Association for “the best professional article in any publication addressing Surface Navy or surface warfare issues.”

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X is free today and tomorrow. The following is an excerpt from “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control” by CDR Phillip Pournelle. The introduction was written by his father, Jerry Pournelle.

Editor’s Introduction to:

THE DEADLY FUTURE OF LITTORAL SEA CONTROL

by Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy

The United States has always been a maritime power, and freedom of the seas has been our policy since the founding of the Republic. We have known since President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the Barbary Coast pirates that blockade might not be enough. Sometime you must control the coastal areas and send the Marines to the shores of Tripoli.

The control of littoral areas generates different fleet requirements than controlling the high seas. Commander Phillip Pournelle has been involved with the future of naval requirements, including fleet structure, for years. This article was recently published by the United States Naval Institute and is reprinted here by permission of the institute. The opinions in the article are, of course, his own.

There is a lively debate about the future of the Navy, and how the Fleet should be structured, in Naval circles. Those interested in it should consult the Naval Institute Proceedings, where the various features of the force, including submarines, carriers, surface vessels, information warfare, and the Marines, are discussed. This essay concentrates on an important part of the debate.

When I was in the aerospace industry, I used to say that “the opinions expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of the Aerospace Corporation or the United States Air Force, and I think that’s a damn shame.” The opinions expressed here are those of Commander Pournelle, and not necessarily those of the United States Navy.

And I think that’s a damn shame.

THE DEADLY FUTURE OF LITTORAL SEA CONTROL

by Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy

In an age of precision-strike weapon proliferation, a big-ship navy equals a brittle fleet. What is needed is a revamped force structure based on smaller surface combatants.

The U.S. Navy is building a fleet that is not adapted to either the future mission set or rising threats. It is being built centered around aircraft carriers and submarines. Surface ships are being constructed either as escorts for the carriers or as ballistic-missile-defense platforms. While the littoral combat ship (LCS) was originally intended for sea-control operations in the littoral environment, its current design is best employed as a mother ship for other platforms to enter the littorals. The result of all this is a brittle—and thus risk-adverse—fleet that will not give us influence, may increase the likelihood of conflict, and will reduce the range of mission options available to the national command authority.

This trend is not unique to the Navy. Like other services, it has been operating since the end of the Cold War in unchallenged environments. For the last 12 years in particular, the United States has been operating against opponents who do not have the means to seriously challenge it in multiple arenas such as the air, sea, cyber, space, and other domains. However, due to the proliferation of precision-strike-regime (PSR) weapons and sensors, these domains are increasingly being contested, and the sea, particularly in the littorals, may become one of the most threatened of all these domains.

Sea control is the raison d’être for a navy. The littorals have become, and will increasingly be, critical to the global economy and joint operations. To be relevant a fleet must have the ability to secure the littorals, dispute them, or just as importantly, exercise in them, in the face of an enemy who will contest them. Different platforms perform each of these tasks, some more effectively than others, which should drive fleet architectures. As the proliferation of weapons changes the littoral environment, the U.S. Navy will be forced to reexamine fleet architectures and make some significant changes to remain viable. This is due to the poor staying power of surface vessels in relation to their signature in the face of these rising threats. This new deadly environment will have tactical, operational, and strategic implications for the fleet, and will require significant changes if the fleet wishes to remain effective.

Sir Julian’s Three Elements

What is sea control? As the Royal Navy puts it, it is “the condition in which one has freedom of action to use the sea for one’s own purposes in specified areas and for specified periods of time and, where necessary, to deny or limit its use to the enemy. Sea control includes the airspace above the surface and the water volume and seabed below.”

Without sea control, all other attributions and capabilities for a fleet are irrelevant. As noted by the classic naval strategist Sir Julian Corbett, control (he used the word “command”) of the sea is fleeting and “the only positive value which the high seas have for national life is as a means of communication.” Given the fleeting status of command/control then, accomplishing it must be in support of further goals. Corbett breaks down his concept of control of the sea into three distinct areas: securing command, disputing command, and exercising command. Where securing enables exercising command, disputing may deny, or at least reduce, the ability of an opponent to use the sea for his own purposes.

So it would appear a navy unable to accomplish Corbett’s three elements is unbalanced, particularly if it cannot do so in the critical littorals. Execution of Corbett’s three areas can roughly be translated into three current mission areas: scouting, maritime-interception operations (MIO), and destruction. Enemy forces, and merchant ships, must be located through scouting. While ships and merchants could be simply swept from the sea, more often than not there is a need to be present to shape events and conduct visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) or MIO in support of sanctions, proliferation reduction, or other operations short of unrestricted warfare. VBSS/MIO is critical when there is a need to confirm the identity or contents of a vessel.

The characteristics of different platforms drive their strengths and weaknesses within these three mission areas. In the past, aircraft carriers were the best platforms to secure command of the sea. That role is being contested in anti-access/area-denial environments created by competitors. The air wing provided excellent scouting capabilities, but the U.S. Navy has determined land-based maritime-patrol aircraft (MPA) are best capable of searching large volumes of water, as long as the airspace is not being contested. The carrier is an inefficient vessel for VBSS. It is only used in the most extreme circumstances and limited in capacity. Further, because so many other mission capacities are tied up in one platform, using the carrier for VBSS (or humanitarian aid/disaster relief, for that matter) denies these capabilities to other missions during the duration of the operation. The carrier air wing is currently the best platform for destruction thanks to the volume of fire it can produce, and the mobility of the carrier as a home base, though it can be argued surface ships could be more cost-effective in this role. MPA can be effective in destruction but are limited by the fixed operating location of their airfield.

Submarines are poor scouting platforms with limited perception of the area around them, but they can enter anti-access areas often denied to surface ships and carriers. While they are poor VBSS/MIO platforms and have not been used in that role, submarines have an oversized impact on destruction. Their weapon of choice, as seen in the Falklands War, can be extremely deadly, and the psychological shock of an unlocated submarine can neutralize an enemy fleet.

Surface ships are good scouting platforms, particularly if equipped with helicopters and/or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They are good platforms for destruction if armed with appropriate weapons. The U.S. Navy has long vacillated back and forth regarding arming them with Harpoon or other antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) mostly because of target-identification challenges. Surface ships are the best platform for conducting VBSS/MIO, if there are sufficient numbers of ships. Today Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are conducting VBSS/MIO off the coast of Africa and other locations.

Given the cost and other mission capabilities, does it really make sense for these air-defense destroyers or other large capital ships to conduct VBSS/MIO?

Stop encouraging young writers!

A heartfelt plea from a woman writer over 40 to stop recognizing people who are not her:

A few years ago I wrote an article for the Guardian on ageism in the literary world, about the predilection of publications like Granta, the New Yorker and Buzzfeed for authors under the age of 40. The problem hasn’t gone away and on Tuesday I wrote an open letter to the Royal Society of Literature, after it called for nominations for 40 new fellows under 40.

Encouraging young writers is laudable. After all, it’s increasingly difficult to get started. Publishers’ advances are low and getting lower; arts degrees are more expensive than Stem subjects; social security is fiercely tested. Which must mean that those most able to pay for a writing course, or those most able to take time off work to write while still young, are those most likely to have money, security, contacts, confidence. There’s a correlation between setting an age bar and encouraging the already privileged.

All writers were young once, and many start writing young, but not all begin their careers as published authors at that point. Leaving aside the fact that some only decide to start writing later in life, many factors affect one’s ability to commit to writing seriously. Besides income issues, age bars can lead an organisation into worrying territory. Authors from outside the perceived cultural mainstream who do not already see their voices represented – LGBTQ writers, writers of colour – are sometimes slow to recognise the contribution they can make, or to feel like their voices will be valued.

Age is a feminist issue. Carers, delayed by years looking after children or other dependents, are mostly women; residencies that offer no childcare or require long stays are an easy way to sift female candidates out of contention. Older women are already told every day, in ways ranging from the subtle to the blatant, that they are irrelevant and should shut up. Multiply this by, say, race or gender, and the courage required to put work out is even greater. Or the potential writer might not be the carer, but the cared-for. Writers who live with a disability or ill-health may not start out until they have found a way to write with their condition – which may take longer than this 40-years-old rule allows for.

Since writing to the RSL, I’ve been sent heartrending accounts from well-published writers, several of whom specified that it wasn’t until their late 30s that they were finally able to take the time to write, making age bar of 40 not only arbitrary, but a particularly cruel irony.

Wow just wow! First, I am, of course, appalled by the writer’s unpersoning and excision from the social justice movement of so many sexualities. It’s fine to defend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer writers, but what about those who are Genderqueer, Demisexual, Transsexual, Twospirit, Intersex, Questioning, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual, and Polyamorous? If she doesn’t support LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP in its entirety, she is clearly a bigot, a hater, and she should never be published by any socially responsible publisher.

Second, what, exactly, is the point of her article? Should we not recognize young writers at all and attempt to identify the most promising? Actually, that’s not a bad idea, since the convergence of most writing awards and institutions means that they’re only promoting callow SJW droppings anyhow.

But I suspect that she wants to make elderly female and diversity writers eligible for young author awards, never mind the fact that first-time novelists of any age are honored by awards such as the  John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. What we have here is merely a literary spin on Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Or, as in this case, an award-winning writer.

I have to admit it, I’m going to be genuinely sorry when The Guardian finally finishes burning through its once-massive endowment and goes out of business. It’s genuinely funnier than The Onion.

Jerry Pournelle Week II

Jerry Pournelle Week continues with Glenn Reynolds’s tribute to Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle died on Friday, peacefully in his sleep. With his death, America lost an important figure… But Pournelle didn’t just write fiction. His 1970 book with Stefan Possony, The Strategy of Technology, outlined a strategy for winning the Cold War (with among other things, an emphasis on strategic missile defense) that was largely followed, and successfully, by the Reagan administration. He was a driving force behind the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy in the 1980s that helped lay the groundwork for today’s booming civilian space launch industry. And, for me, his wide-ranging columns in Galaxy Magazine, back when it was edited by star editor James Baen, were particularly influential.

I was a kid in the 1970s, which was not a great era to be a kid. We had Vietnam and Watergate, the Apollo space program quit abruptly, oil prices skyrocketed and so did inflation. Even a hamburger was expensive.

And while that was going on, the voices in the media were all preaching gloom and doom. Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, in his book The Population Bomb, was predicting food riots in America due to overpopulation. A group called The Club of Rome published a report titled The Limits to Growth that suggested it was all over for Western technological civilization. Bookstore displays were filled with books like The Late Great Planet Earth that announced the end times. And if that weren’t enough, most people figured we were heading for a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. It looked like we were headed for some sort of apocalyptic future in which Charlton Heston would be the only survivor besides a few apes or mutants.

But Jerry Pournelle never bought it. In his Galaxy columns — eventually collected and published in book form, and still in print — he actually did the math. The fact was, he reported, we could not only survive but, in his words, survive with style.

Castalia House is republishing The Strategy of Technology later this year. Also, today and tomorrow, we are giving away my favorite volume in the entire There Will Be War series, namely, Volume II. It is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions”, an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.

These stories are great and many of them remain relevant today. Just last month, Castalia House was contacted by a U.S. military war college and asked for permission to give out copies of There Will Be War Vol. II to the officers in the class, which permission we obviously granted.

That is what real influence looks like. Most of the authors and the editor are gone now, but the beauty of the written word is that it provides the author with a voice even after death.

Jerry Pournelle Week

To celebrate the life and work of Jerry Pournelle, we will be giving away volumes of his classic military science fiction series, THERE WILL BE WAR, all week. Today and tomorrow, you can download THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. I for free. If you have never read Dr. Pournelle before, this is an excellent opportunity to acquaint yourself with his fiction and his philosophy. The man has gone to his reward, but his ideas remain with us.

Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova. 

33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today. 

Volume I is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 23 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick, and a highly influential pair of essays devoted to the then-revolutionary concept of “High Frontier” by Robert A. Heinlein and Lt. General Daniel Graham. 

If you would prefer to buy Dr. Pournelle’s books instead, I would recommend adding the big, beautiful hardcover omnibus of THERE WILL BE WAR Vols. I and II to your library.

The ideas, they percolate

An article on PJ media about a distressed young liberal woman who keeps finding out that the men to whom she is attracted turn out to be Trump voters.

No woman wants a man she can push around, walk all over, or beat in an arm-wrestling match. Politics be damned. That’s not how biology works. (Now, I realize I may be talking to biology deniers, but you asked “why can’t I stop?” and this is why. Biology.) Women are naturally attracted to alpha males and not that gamma guy in a onesie with fragile wrists. The left has emasculated their men to the point of putting them in dresses and sending them into the ladies’ room. It’s no wonder you need to shop outside your herd. Why the heck wouldn’t you?

The reality you’re facing is that your guys are the ones getting a wedgie and ours are the ones you want to go home with. I don’t blame you.

People often think that influence is somehow related to everyone knowing your name. That’s not influence. That’s fame.

On a related note, I’ve been hearing for the last week or two that the various kerfluffles with the two Andrews, Anglin and Torba, are “bad PR” and bad for my brand.

The objective measures:

  • Twitter followers declined from 33,000 to 32,800
  • Five Infogalactic Burn Unit members canceled their subscriptions. All five have already been replaced.
  • Daily average site traffic increased 5 percent
  • Daily average book sales increased 225 percent
  • 7 8 new Legal Legion of Evil volunteers.
It would appear there is a sound basis for the Fake Right theory that Mike Cernovich became a successful shekel-grubbing book salesman on the basis of metaphorically punching Clown Nazis. That wasn’t my intention, but if this is what “destroying my brand” looks like, I think I can live with it. Although perhaps the more apt term would be “thrive” on it.

By the way, there is going to be a BIG surprise awaiting the self-appointed experts on defamation presently expressing their legal theories on Gab. I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked myself to discover what is actually considered defamation per se in the relevant jurisdiction. I mean, there is not a single non-lawyer, on either side of the issue, who had a clear grasp of the actual legal situation at hand.

Preorder SJWADD

SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN: Anticipating the Thought Police is now available for preorder. It features a foreword by Andrew Torba and its release date is October 9th. The paperback and audiobook will be released in November.

Whether you realize it or not, if you live in the West, you are currently engulfed in a civilization-wide cultural war that is taking place all around you. Maybe you’re aware of it, or maybe you’re not. It doesn’t matter. The cultural war is real and it is vicious. And unlike a traditional shooting war between different nations, in a cultural war there are no civilians. There are no neutral parties, since no fence-sitting is permitted, and there is no common ground to be found. No one is permitted to sit it out or refuse to take sides; sooner or later, you are going to be forced to declare yourself by either publicly submitting to the SJW Narrative or openly rejecting it.

No matter what you do, no matter who you are, and no matter who you know, the SJWs will come after you once they believe you pose a threat to their Narrative, or to their objectives for the organization they are attempting to converge.

The book is named after the Second Law of SJW: SJWs always double down. SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN is a much-needed guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks from the perspective of a man who has not only survived, but thrived, after experiencing multiple attempts by Social Justice Warriors to disqualify, discredit, and disemploy him in the same manner they have successfully attacked Nobel Laureates, technology CEOs, broadcasters, sports commentators, school principals, open source programmers, and policemen.

Written by Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil and bestselling political philosopher, SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN: Anticipating the Thought Police  is the second book in The Laws of Social Justice and a vital weapon in the cultural war against the thought police.

UPDATE: It would appear SJWADD is much anticipated.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #384 Paid in Kindle Store
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Political
#2 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government >Commentary & Opinion

Thanks for all the support!

Dangerous!

Some of my favorite quotes from Milo’s new bestelling audiobook.

  • I came to represent the Left’s greatest fear: an opponent who is cooler, smarter, better-dressed, edgier, and more popular than them. [Now you know why the SF-SJWs hate me. -VD]
  • Simon & Schuster’s CEO, Carolyn Reidy, put out a laughably vague announcement that my book would not include any “hate speech.” I asked for a set of guidelines as to how hate speech would be defined, but that doesn’t exist.
  • White men are the cultural counterpart to the economic bourgeousie class in classical Marxist theory.
  • The establishment’s real fear is that this book will deeply affect readers, especially young people. In particular, they fear that the young people at the epicenter of political correctness in America’s universities will begin to question the ideologies foisted upon them.
  • Twitter even put a “safety” filter on all outgoing links to the blog of Vox Day, sci-fi’s leading right-wing iconoclast.
  • If we are going to win the culture war, we must fight hard and have a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

Notice that SJWs always, Always, ALWAYS resist providing any specific guidelines, but instead prefer establishing committees and councils. They want to be able to punish their enemies and let their friends off, not establish a standard that will be applied to everyone.

One thing you’ll notice if you read Dangerous is that Milo is a much more astute observer than his critics ever give him credit for being. He certainly notices a lot, despite being notoriously self-centered and narcissistic.

Dragon Awards 2017

Congratulations to Larry Correia and John Ringo for winning Best Fantasy Novel for Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge. And to Richard Fox, who won Best Military Science Fiction Novel for Iron Dragoons.

The rest of the winners are here. I’m not disappointed about A Sea of Skulls losing out to Larry and John, but I really would have liked to see John C. Wright win in Best YA. But as good as his Moth & Cobweb books are, it was always going to be tough to beat the YA juggernaut that is Rick Riordan.

Complete the Grand Slog

The response to the free days for ATOB and ASOS was so great – and the consequent effects on the sales of Castalia House books and KU reads were so substantial – that we’ve elected to make Summa Elvetica & Other Stories free today and all weekend.

In not entirely unrelated news, I’m pleased to be able to announce that Castalia House had its second straight record month in August. The interesting thing is that unlike in July, there was no one monster performer, just a lot of interest across the broad range of our books. This tends to indicate that more people are discovering more of our books, perhaps through Kindle Unlimited, perhaps through the Daily Meme Wars, or perhaps through conventional word of mouth.

Regardless, we appreciate your staunch support, and we are working harder than ever on bringing you high-quality fiction and non-fiction books.

Excerpt from THE WARDOG’S COIN.

FAR BELOW THE rock I crouched behind, the goblins moved through the mountain pass in loose, meandering columns, stacked fifteen or twenty troops wide. It was hard to count exactly how many of the enemy light infantry there was, since the cruel whips of the orcs that drove them mercilessly onward wasn’t able to keep them marching in no sort of recognizable formation.

We’d twice beaten the blasted breeds back from the very pass they was marching through now, but once they’d managed to haul up their catapults to where they could drop rocks on our heads, the capitaine gave us the order to fall back and join the rest of the elf king’s army.

“How many do you make?” I asked the elf perched on a large boulder above me. He was a scout from the Silverbows, one of the king’s elite troops, and he had eyes so keen a hawk might envy them. Today he and me was on the same side. Problem was, tomorrow might be a different story.

“No more than eight thousand.” He spoke good Savonnais, with only a hint of elf. “They don’t matter. I think the problem lies with what follows.”

I squinted, trying to make out what the large, black objects following the goblin columns below might be. The shapes was too big as to be orcs or goblin wolf-riders, but there was a lot of them, and they moved in an even less-disciplined array than the gobbos.

“I can’t see what they are.”

“Big pigs,” said the elf grimly. “Orcs ride them. Like wargs, only not so fast.”

“Warboars?”

“Is that how you call them? We say pigs of war. Very big, very fierce. I think maybe three hundred.”

Damn it all to hell and back! If heavy cavalry wasn’t the very last thing we needed to see at the moment, it was pretty bloody close. Three hundred godforsaken warboars!

Ever seen a pig? I don’t mean a nice little piggie with a pink arse and a curly tail, I mean a big old he-boar, with black, bristled hair, sharp yellow tusks, and a giant hump on his back. Now, imagine one twice the size and three times as mean, not a whole lot taller than a donkey but a damn sight wider and weighing more than a horse. Then strap iron armor across the front, sharpen the tusks, and throw an overmuscled breed carrying a greatsword on his back. That’s a warboar.

King Everbright don’t have nothing in his army as can stand against a charge from three hundred of those monsters, except for the Company, and to be honest, even we can’t expect to do much more than get run over. The blue-bloods of Savondir and their men-at-arms might laugh at the boar riders before skewering all their mounts on lances and throwing them on the firepit for dinner, but us wardogs don’t have lances. Or plate. Or pretty warhorses.

I climbed down from the rock on which I’d been sitting and shouldered my pack. It was going to be a long walk down to the camp, so I had to get moving if I hoped to get there before night.

“What will you tell your capitaine?” The elf scout stared at me with his weird yellow-green eyes.

“That there’s an avalanche of big pigs about to fall on our heads.”

“What will he do?”

“I don’t know. Probably send a few of the younger lads home with messages for our kin. I suppose most of them will be last wills and testaments.”

“He will stay and fight? He will not run?”

I laughed, but if it came out more bitterly than I’d meant, the elf didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he just didn’t care. “I suppose it would be a particular regiment of archers who’d be told to take us out if we tried to skedaddle, wouldn’t it?”

The elf didn’t confirm or deny that the Silverbows had been ordered to turn us into human pincushions if we attempted to withdraw our services without warning. But when his cat-slit eyes narrowed, I was pretty sure he caught my drift.

I shrugged.

“Nah, he wouldn’t run anyway. Contract’s a contract. We get paid, we stick around and fight.”

The elf nodded. “It is good to know not all men are without honor. I wish you many kills before you fall.”

I’ll bet you do, I thought. Sod honor! Especially since all those right honorable elves will be off escorting His Royal Elven Arse to safety while we get ourselves trampled into a bloody muck by oversized hogs.

But it wasn’t the Silverbow’s fault, and he was a decent enough sort for an elf, so I waved him farewell and set off down the rocky mountain trail. It wasn’t going to be fun trying to make it before sunset without breaking my neck, but it sure as hell beat what the Company was going to be facing in a day or three.

The epic greatness of Stephen Donaldson

A number of people have been surprised that I write Stephen Donaldson, and in particular, the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant so highly on my list of Epic Fantasy authors. This excellent essay by Tom Simon may help to explain why.

The antipathy of Donaldson’s professors to Tolkien was immediate and complete, and it put Donaldson in a difficult, almost untenable position. With one side of his mind he had to be a good Modernist, and sneer at the tall tales of the ancients as the work of childish primitives; but with the other he was keenly and imaginatively alive to the power of those ancient tales and their modern successors. Not only Tolkien but Wagner moved him with tectonic force. In later life he would write a sprawling five-volume novel, The Gap, as a space-operatic homage to Wagner’s Ring cycle. But for now he felt the overriding need to answer his professors (and most of his fellow students) on their own ground. Not indeed by academic argument, for that would have been fruitless and might well have cost him his M.A., but by example.

So he began to write a very curious fantasy story, about a man who stubbornly refuses to believe in fairy-tales even when he is plunged into one himself. Harking back to his father’s work, he made his protagonist a leper, and with an eye on Kent State he made him a bestselling author, a Modernist and realist, facile rather than deep. The one quality crushed out the other: the Modernist imagination was no match for the stringent demands of Hansen’s disease, which forced this man, Thomas Covenant, to focus all his wits and energies on the daily struggle for survival. Tuberculoid leprosy damages peripheral nerves and makes the extremities numb; a small cut or contusion, unfelt and therefore neglected, can lead to infection and gangrene, and even bruises can be dangerous. It was thus only natural that Covenant, transported from his ‘real’ life to the fantasy world called ‘the Land’, should cling desperately to the medical disciplines that kept him alive, and strive to deny the exotic temptations of an environment instinct with magic and miracle.

Now this is a very different method from Tolkien’s, and many misunderstandings have arisen among those who confuse the two. Tolkien’s was a mythopoeic fantasy, a direct successor to Beowulf and the Kalevala, the Eddas and sagas, informed indeed by his own experience of modern life, but not primarily intended as a commentary upon it. One of his first stories, The Fall of Gondolin, was written while he was on sick-leave from the trenches of the Great War; and though it is the story of a battle, the battle of Gondolin is as remote from the Battle of the Somme as a blooded warhorse is from a military railway. Gondolin is written in an extremely archaic style, heavily reminiscent of Malory. The young Tolkien takes great and sometimes clumsy pains to emphasize the glory and chivalry of epic warfare, where fate turns on the skill and courage of heroes and not on the drill of divisions and the supply of artillery shells. This is, if you like, a reaction against the squalid and seemingly pointless fighting Tolkien had actually seen; but it is neither an allegory nor a satire of it. It is simply an escape, or rather, a quest: a desperate attempt to rediscover, in the practices of a simpler and nobler age, the need and cause of courage, the spirit that makes men willing to fight and die defending their homes and loved ones.

Donaldson, too, was susceptible to this appeal. Although a conscientious objector and in some measure a pacifist, he recognized that even a hopeless war may be preferable to mere surrender. In The Illearth War Hile Troy, another man from Covenant’s ‘real’ world, compares his former work at the Pentagon with his new role as the commander of the Land’s army, the Warward:

‘I’m useful to something worth being useful to. The issues at stake in this war are the only ones I’ve ever seen worth fighting for. The life of the Land is beautiful. It deserves preservation. For once, I can do some good. Instead of spending my time on troop deployment, first- and second-strike capabilities, superready status, demoralization parameters, nuclear induction of lethal genetic events, I can help defend against a genuine evil. The world we came from — the “real” world hasn’t got such clear colors, no blue and black and green and red, “ebon ichor incarnadine viridian.” Gray is the color of “reality.”’

This is a fine example of the likeness and difference between Tolkien and Donaldson. It is the very likeness that points up the difference: the difference is that the likeness is made explicit. In all Tolkien’s descriptions of battles, at Helm’s Deep and the Pelennor Fields and the rest, there is no reference to modern modes of warfare; the contrast and the criticism are mute and implicit. A man of Malory’s time could read Tolkien with understanding and recognition, though some of the vocabulary would be strange to him. But Hile Troy is utterly modern, and can only be understood by one with a knowledge of the modern world.

Incidentally, Donaldson has earned a lot of disrespect for his vocabulary, which ranges from the rococo to the bizarre. ‘Ebon ichor incarnadine viridian’ is a particularly concentrated example. Ursula K. Le Guin has called the word ichor ‘the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate’, which ‘bores the bejesus out of everybody’. It is certainly not one of Donaldson’s more felicitous word-choices. The prose of the Covenant books is liberally strewn with such questionable jewels as coigned, orieled, threnody, theurgy, unhermeneuticable (!), sibilating, chrysoprastic, irenic, and the ever-popular roynish. This last word is used as a sort of Homeric epithet to describe the ur-viles, the ‘black roynish’ kindred of the Demondim-spawn. Ur-viles are one of Donaldson’s more memorable and original inventions, eyeless, wizardly, sinister, and thoroughly inscrutable. But I never could discover what was particularly roynish about them; indeed, from Donaldson’s usage of the word, I could never figure out what roynish meant at all. The OED gives it as a variant of roinish, defined thus: ‘Covered with scale or scurf; scabby, scurvy, coarse, mean, paltry, base.’ The smooth skins and austerely evil magics of the ur-viles do not seem to suit the word well.

Donaldson also has a strange tendency to use clench as every part of speech under the sun. To my knowledge he has not yet used it as an interjection or a definite article, but one must not set arbitrary limits to his genius. And he gives a strange sort of value to imprecise, which is usually a Donaldsonian understatement for ‘utterly wrong or bogus’. These peculiarities give his prose somewhat of the aspect of a magpie’s nest, cluttered with bright shiny objects of unknown or forgotten use. This is not an unfair criticism; he has said himself that he keeps lists of rare words encountered in his reading, and does not always look them up in a dictionary before attempting to use them. In consequence his usages of such words are, in his own personal acceptation of the term, ‘imprecise’. When I first read the Covenant books at fourteen, I merely skipped over the words I did not know, or tried to interpret them from context. This is probably the best way to approach Donaldson’s prose; those who have a dictionary at their elbow as they read are likely to get rather angry.

On the other hand, it must be said that Donaldson is capable of wonderfully lyrical passages, relying heavily on the sound of words, even when their meaning sheds no light on his intent. He is a very considerable prose poet, a quality not much appreciated by most modern readers. Like Tolkien, he decks his fiction with verses, though as a rule of a very much lower quality; he descends to vers libre and doggerel, as Tolkien never did. A little later he developed some real facility with formal and metrical verse. Two verses in particular from the later Covenant books, ‘My heart has rooms that sigh with dust’ and ‘Let those who sail the Sea bow down’, have some claim to be called poetry even by snobs.

But let us leave Donaldson’s prose and return to his Method. Tom Shippey has put his finger on the cardinal difference between Tolkien and the Modernists:

Tolkien’s approach to the ideas or the devices accepted as modernist is radically different because they are on principle not literary. He used ‘mythical method’ not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. . . . He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment.

In this, Donaldson is very much on the Modernist side. His characters and situations do not exist for their own sake but because they are effective as symbols. Here, in the ‘Gradual Interview’ on his website, he describes a method antithetical to Tolkien’s:

My general view of the kind of fantasy I write is that it’s a specialized form of psychodrama. Putting the issue as simply as I can: the story is a human mind turned inside out, and all of the internal forces which drive that mind are dramatized as if they were external characters, places, and events. This is easier to see in the first ‘Chronicles’ because the story is simpler: the Land and everyone in it is an external manifestation of Covenant’s internal journey/struggle. Everything is more complex in ‘The Second Chronicles’ because there are two minds being turned inside out. Which means that there are actually three stories at work: Covenant’s, Linden’s, and the interaction between the two.

With the two words ‘as if’, Donaldson rejects the genuine epic; and when you analyse what remains, it all comes down to that old friend of the literati, the pathetic fallacy. He writes of battles fought with swords and spears (and wizards’ staffs) because that is an interesting way to comment on the spiritual battle in the hero’s mind. He makes that hero a leper because he wants to point out how many of us suffer from a leprosy of the soul. If you strip away the voluptuous flesh of the Land and expose the bare bones of the plot, you will find that Covenant is satirical and symbolic and bitingly topical. None of these things are true of Tolkien’s major works. You cannot strip away the voluptuous flesh of Middle-earth to expose the bones of the plot, because the bones themselves are Middle-earth. As Tolkien said in a letter to a reader: ‘The story is really a story of what happened in B.C. year X, and it just happened to people who were like that!’ With Donaldson one never forgets that the people to whom the story ‘just happened’ are carefully constructed to be ‘like that’ in the service of his theme. It is the tradition not of Beowulf and the Eddas but of Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels.

In my opinion, what Donaldson attempted to do, and the degree to which he succeeded, is considerably more of a literary accomplishment than anything that Abercrombie, Bakker, or any of the other epic fantasy authors have managed to do. And if his more recent work has not been of a similar level – and it has not – that does not detract from the excellence of the first series.

Donaldson may be a modernist, but he is a moral modernist, and as such, his color palette considerably exceeds that of the more nihilistic authors. So, it should be no surprise that the images he paints are rather more vivid than theirs.

Simon also rather helpfully explains why the Second Chronicles and subsequent books are mediocrities and should not be taken into account when considering Stephen Donaldson.

A year or two later, when the first Covenant trilogy was a runaway success, casting even del Rey’s pet, Terry Brooks, in the shade, Donaldson was duly called upon for a sequel. He had some difficulty in coming up with one, as he had never intended to go beyond the original trilogy. To solve this problem, he introduced a new character from the ‘real’ world, a physician named Linden Avery. And to increase her importance, and also to help along those readers who might not have read the first three books, he made her the chief viewpoint character of the second trilogy. Del Rey was outraged. He threatened to reject the new books outright, saying: ‘You can’t tell a Tarzan story from Jane’s point of view!’ (His superiors at Ballantine Books, rather than lose Donaldson and his undeniable earning-power, took him away from del Rey and gave him an editor he could work with.)

It should never be a surprise when an author’s effort to turn out additional work for hire fails to rise to the level of his labor of love. Stephen Donaldson is not one of my favorite authors. He is not one of my 50 favorite authors. But, as an author of epic fantasy myself, I respect his greatest accomplishment, the original Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.