Tag: books

A 4GW fiasco in realtime

You don’t have to be an expert in 4th Generation Warfare to know that the US decision to resort to air strikes against the Islamic State was going to backfire:

The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.

U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.

The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists.

The U.S. targets have included oil facilities, a granary and an electricity plant under Islamic State control. The damage to those facilities has caused shortages and price hikes across the rebel-held north that are harming ordinary Syrians more than the well-funded militants, residents and activists say.

At the start of the air campaign, dozens of U.S. cruise missiles were fired into areas controlled by the moderate rebels, who are supposed to be fighting the Islamic State. Syrians who had in the past appealed for American intervention against Assad have been staging demonstrations denouncing the United States and burning the American flag.

If there is one person who desperately needs to read William S. Lind’s forthcoming ON WAR, it is Barack Obama. And it wouldn’t hurt if whoever is presently in charge of the US military response to the Islamic State would do so as well.

When publishing was taken over

In the annual Publisher’s Weekly salary report, it is easy to see when the Pink Rot solidified:

Meanwhile, the pay gap between men and women—the other well-known imbalance in the industry—continued in 2013, even though women accounted for 74% of the publishing workforce and men only 26%. The average compensation for men in 2013 was $85,000, the same as in 2012, while average compensation for women rose to $60,750 last year, up from $56,000 the year before. Women filled at least 70% of the jobs in sales and marketing, operations, and editorial, but only 51% of the management positions. The relatively large portion of men in management roles (though they’re still a slight minority there) partly explains the overall pay gap, since those jobs are the best paid in the industry. But men also tended to earn more than female colleagues with similar titles last year, due, in part, to the fact that men tend to have more experience. In 2013, the median number of years of experience for men in the industry was 17, compared to 11 for women (the median for men in management was 19 years, compared to 13.5 for women).

Look at the Years of Experience chart at the linked post. Whereas 37 percent of the men have more than 20 years of experience, only 21 percent of the women do. But sometime between 11 and 20 years ago, women first made up the majority of employees. That’s observably the point at which the pinkshirts took over; for me it first became apparent when THE QUANTUM ROSE, which is little more than a romance novel in space, won the Nebula and made me realize how much the SF/F field was changing, and not for the better.

The amazing thing is the way it is implied that a field in which there are three times as many women as men working is somehow stacked against women due to the “pay gap”. The amusing thing is how lily-white and non-diverse the field is; it is readily apparent that the reason the publishing industry so feverishly embraces diversity in their authors is as a shield to distract from their own lack of diversity in their offices.

Obviously the process began more than 15 years ago, but that’s when it became increasingly difficult for those writing masculine fiction for male audiences to break into print.

Of fraudulent lists and fake “bestsellers”

File 770 sounds a little disappointed to discover that an SF “bestseller” on the NYT Bestsellers List doesn’t necessarily indicate the mainstream adoption of SF:

I’m a science fiction fan, yet I’m constantly being surprised to discover how that shapes my thinking. Although I know bestseller lists are artificial constructs, I also know they are constructs dominated by mainstream fiction and literary biases. Consequently, when a science fiction writer appears on the New York Times bestseller list I don’t ask how, I just shout “Hooray!” But now a Higher Critic has explained why I should be dissatisfied and suspicious about how they got there.

And now I am.

Vox Day unfavorably compared John Scalzi to Larry Correia based on alleged manipulation of the bestseller list. But isn’t Correia’s status as a bestselling author the same reason people believe Correia is the gold standard?

Even here, all Larry Correia ever did was point out two times when his books made the New York Times best seller list. Which they did. But both times the books disappeared from the list the following week. One and done….

I’m perfectly happy that Larry Correia is an NYT bestselling author. (Which I said in the post.) But since Correia and Scalzi both have experienced the same one-and-done pattern, then why would anybody doubt that Scalzi’s listings are also the result of real sales, Vox Day notwithstanding?

Actually, I didn’t compare them. I merely referenced Scalzi’s own comments on the subject. As always, Larry Correia is perfectly capable of speaking for himself. As for me, I answered Mr. Glyer on his own blog as follows: There are two reasons for the difference between Scalzi’s one-week showings and Mr. Correia’s. 1. Correia’s Amazon rankings at the time correlated correctly with his NYT bestseller listing. Scalzi’s Amazon rankings aren’t egregiously off, but they’re not high enough to be credible. 2. Baen Books is not known for attempting to game various awards and bestseller lists. Tor Books, which has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher 27 years in a row, among other things, is.

Does anyone really and truly believe that whereas OLD MAN’S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES did not sell well enough to make the NYT Bestseller list, FUZZY NATION did?

All one had to do was look at the Amazon rankings to see that LOCK IN was not selling well enough to have made the bestseller list without a bulk-sale marketing campaign. And as noted on File 770, I had an inkling LOCK IN would not only be on the NYT bestseller list, but be there for a single week before disappearing.

These faux bestsellers aren’t any great secret. It’s just one of the ways the Big Five publishers promote their favored authors. Talk to a top editor or a publishing executive if you don’t believe me; I’m not making this stuff up. Tor is simply trying to massage public perceptions to bump a high mid-list writer into reliable bestseller status.

And then, as it happened, the Washington Examiner happened to address the issue of the unreliability of this particular list today:

The New York Times Book Review, which has a history of belatedly recognizing conservative bestsellers, has banished conservative legal author David Limbaugh’s latest, Jesus on Trial, from its upcoming best seller list despite having sales better than 17 other books on the list.

According to publishing sources, Limbaugh’s probe into the accuracy of the Bible sold 9,660 in its first week out, according to Nielsen BookScan. That should have made it No. 4 on the NYT print hardcover sales list.

Instead, Henry Kissinger’s World Order, praised by Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, is No. 4 despite weekly sales of 6,607….

The September 28 list of the top 20 print hardcover best sellers includes one book that sold just 1,570 copies.

Limbaugh, published by Regnery, has been a New York Times best seller, so the newspaper should have been looking out for his high sales numbers. And as a hint, they could have looked at Amazon, where Limbaugh’s Jesus hit No. 1 recently. On Thursday, it ranked No. 6 in books sold on Amazon.

Note first that Mr. Scalzi’s LOCK IN is presently ranked #3,566 on Amazon and did not make the September 28th list. The #20 book to which the Examiner presumably refers is I AM MALALA which is presently ranked #992 on Amazon. Keep in mind that there are two different lists and that non-fiction usually sells more than fiction.

The New York Times bestseller list is simply not what it claims to be. It’s mostly a marketing device manipulated by media ideologues and marketing departments. Some books make it legitimately. Others don’t. Fortunately, Amazon gives us a means of distinguishing between the two.

Announcing Castalia Associates

You may have noticed there is a change to the left sidebar. In the place of the RECOMMENDED books, there is now a selection of books that are self-published by authors acquainted with Castalia House who have made their books available through Castalia’s online store. We are listing these books on the store under the category CASTALIA ASSOCIATES.

We’re pleased to announce the first two Castalia Associates are Chris Kennedy, the bestselling author of the mil-SF series THE THEOGONY, and Christopher G. Nuttall, the bestselling author of ARK ROYAL and the mil-SF series THE EMPIRE’S CORPS. Their books are being sold in the same DRM-free EPUB format that Castalia House books are sold. Additional Castalia Associates will be announced in the weeks to come; please do not contact us to request participation at the moment as we have our hands full with getting our forthcoming works ready for publication.

We’re also very pleased to be able to say that both Chris Kennedy and Christopher G. Nuttall are contributing short stories to the first volume of the Tom Kratman-edited mil-SF anthology series, RIDING THE RED HORSE. And while we’re on the topic of Castalia House, you surely won’t want to miss the Appendix N retrospective that many of us have been anticipating, as Jeffro addresses the Zelazny classic, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER.

Labor Day Sale on Amazon

Amanda Green of Nocturnal Lives has put together a Labor Day Sale in which all of the books listed are on offer for $2.99 or less. Check out the entire list there. Castalia House is participating and the following books are available for $2.99 all weekend at Amazon:

John C. Wright: Awake in the Night Land

John C. Wright: Transhuman and Subhuman

Rolf Nelson: The Stars Came Back

Vox Day: A Throne of Bones

Vox Day: The Altar of Hate

Steve Rzasa and Vox Day: QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted  

Tom Kratman: Big Boys Don’t Cry

In addition, the following books are free for the next three days:

John C. Wright: Awake in the Night

Vox Day: The Last Witchking

And since this doesn’t really leave much to discuss other than “hey, I’m going to buy X” or “I already own Y” or the always delightful “but why isn’t Z included” (and yes, the price of BBDC was not actually reduced because it is already only $2.99), I’ll throw out a tangential topic. Which Selenothian culture(s) would you be most interested seeing explored in Book Two in a similar manner to the way Amorran culture was introduced in A Throne of Bones.

Alternatively, what non-perspective character from the first book would you most like to see promoted to a perspective character in the second one?

All you can read

People have been asking me for my take on Amazon’s new digital subscription service, Kindle Unlimited:

After months of speculation, Amazon on Friday introduced a digital subscription service that allows subscribers unlimited access to a library of e-books and audiobooks for $10 a month.

The service, Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix-style, all-you-can-read approach to more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis, as well as literary fiction and classics.

So far, however, none of the five biggest publishers appear to be making their books available through the service. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, for example, are not participating, representatives from the three companies confirmed. Penguin Random House and Macmillan declined to comment, but a search on Amazon suggests that they are not making their books available….

In offering the service, Amazon is entering an increasingly crowded marketplace. It will be competing with publishing start-ups offering similar services, like Scribd and Oyster, which charge a comparable subscription fee and have comparable digital libraries.

My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers. At $120 per year, and an average price per ebook of around $7, one only has to read 17 books per year to make it worth one’s while. Books are considerably more fungible than the average writer or publisher would like to admit, but at the end of the day, it is the act of reading that the reader enjoys more than the average title he reads. And the sort of people who will benefit most from the subscription model are the sort of readers who will make do with reading the back of a cereal box if nothing else is available.

Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it. The casual readers don’t read enough to spend the money subscribing, collectors don’t want to borrow books (the subscription model is more akin to paying for the loan of a library book than purchasing a book), and fans of particular authors are going to buy the author’s book whether it is available through Kindle Unlimited or not.

How will it effect writers and publishers? It depends. It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates. The Big Five’s model depends upon the fungibility of authors within their ecosystem, and is increasingly dysfunctional as yet another channel outside their quasi-monopoly over the bookstores drains more book buyers from that ecosystem. As with the coming in-game retail channel I’ve spoken about for the past year, Kindle Unlimited is just one more way to free additional readers from the traditional publishing channel. Marketing and branding, two things that the Big Five have shown themselves to be remarkably incompetent at, are of increasing importance as the ability to buy shelf space becomes unimportant.

It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers. Neutral because they’re essentially already operating in the system via Kindle Select; this month Castalia’s books that are participating in the Select program vary from 5 percent to 30 percent loans as a percentage of their sales. Modestly positive because that drainage from the Big Five ecosystem will be flowing disproportionately to the indies and the selfies to whom that new channel is flowing. The challenge facing them remains exactly the same as before, namely, how to get people to notice they exist. It’s not going to get any easier for them, but unlike the Big Five, it’s not getting any harder either.

The reason the big authorial names are screeching is because they know that their predominance is, at least in part, the result of their favored position in the ecosystem. And, unlike the first step in the digital revolution which was within the traditional ecosystem, this second one will tend to lock them out to the extent they are contractually trapped by their publishers.

I expect the Big Five to eventually offer a competing subscription service, as that would be much easier than a joint bookstore. I also expect it to be clunky, poorly designed, and destined for a more complete failure than Nook. If they’re smart, they’ll simply buy Oyster and rebrand it. But I think events have proven that they are not particularly smart.

WARBOUND reviewed and the love of violence

First, a review of Larry Correia’s Hugo-nominated WARBOUND from an honest critic:

Larry Correia can spin one hell of a yarn! He writes a cool
alternate-history world with fantastic settings, from a superhero prison
to a walled-off Berlin filled with zombies. His pacing is good and his
action scenes are riveting. I kept turning pages when I knew I really
should be doing something else, which a mark of a good book. He does
dead-pan humor extremely well, I laughed out loud several times. It’s
exactly over-the-top enough to be a great ride, and very entertaining.
When he sticks to doing what he does well he writes great fiction!

The book does have two major failings.

First, it falls into the Superman trap that many superhero stories
stumble into. The primary actor in any scene has exactly the right
amount of power to just barely overcome their obstacles. It doesn’t
matter what the power-level of the threat is. If it’s a stab to the
chest, they’ll barely survive. If it’s an army of goons they’ll suddenly
be impervious to bullets and wade through them to get to the boss, and
then barely survive the city-block-exploding powers of the boss. And
they always have just the powers they need to make it through, which
leads to things like Superman’s Brick-Laying Vision and that starts to take the tension out of things when you catch on.

I can’t disagree with that in the slightest from a plausibility perspective, although the fact that so many very successful books repeatedly utilize the “it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw” (cough, Jim Butcher, cough) tends to indicate that plausibility is wildly overrated in this regard. I try very hard to keep my action and military sequences entirely coherent and plausible, (a certain tunnel-digging sequence notwithstanding) and my books are considerably less successful in terms of unit sales than those of Messrs. Correia and Butcher. That may not be the only reason, of course, but it does tend to indicate that most readers not only don’t mind, but actually prefer what the critic describes as “the Superman trap”.

However, I think the critic goes a little off the rails in his response to Larry’s reaction to his initial review:

There were people who didn’t
feel the need to impose their will on the women they cared for back
then, even if they weren’t as common as they are now. I would prefer for
my heroes to be of that type, similar to how I would prefer for the
heroes I read in colonial-era fiction to not be slave owners and view it
as distasteful.

Larry (I gather) views this sort of attitude as something that can be
admired. He’s not a bad person or anything, but I disagree with him on
that. He views it as protecting the ones you love. I don’t consider
menacing the people my daughter loves to be protecting. (full disclosure
– I don’t actually have a daughter) And likewise, I don’t consider it
protecting someone to take away their choices (which is what was done to
Hammer when she was excluded without being given the choice to help
save mankind). I can see both of these things as character flaws that
make up a multi-faceted character. Especially in Sullivan’s case, given
his recent loss of Delila. But in that case those actions would be
portrayed as flawed actions, whereas in Warbound they seemed to be
presented as positive things.

This is the same reason I found the joy in violence distasteful. I
love violence in my fiction.  🙂 I enjoyed the violence in Warbound.
Morgan’s Altered Carbon is one of my favorite books, in part because Kovacs is such a stone-cold badass throughout. Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold is
brutal and bloody and I actually bought a physical copy, it was that
awesome. However my heroes never enjoy the violence they inflict. They
are good at it, and they use it as a tool to get what they want, but
there is never joy in it. Desperation maybe, or rage, or even just cold
calculation. I don’t know if that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe that joy
really is somewhere deep inside, the vicious pride of triumphing over
one’s enemies, of seeing them driven before you, etc. Maybe it’s only lip-service we pay to civility by pretending it doesn’t excite us on a primal level. But dammit, these are heroes. They are the idealized man, that we want to model ourselves after, and our ideals really shouldn’t act like they enjoy violence, even if they secretly do.

I find this response somewhat hypocritical. To laud Abercrombie and condemn Correia for joy taken in violence is like criticizing George W. Bush for his budget deficits and then giving Obama a pass. Abercrombie’s anti-heroes are twisted and sick individuals; some are downright sadists. Correia’s heroes, on the other hand, are normal human beings with superhuman abilities who enjoy their enhanced capabilities. To find one “awesome” and the other “distasteful” is incoherent at best.

I also find the take on enjoying violence to be even more ignorant than the critic confessed he happened to be concerning FDR’s historical behavior. The only people who don’t find joy in violence are those who have never committed it or those who have suffered too much from it. The adrenaline rush that one feels when one feels a bone crack beneath one’s fist, sees a head snapping back, or stands over a physically defeated opponent is second only to a sexual rush for most men. It is one of the greatest pleasures in life; there is a reason that so many killers find the temptation to kill almost irresistible despite the risks and penalties involved and why brawlers seek out stupid and risky fights with strangers in bars. The pleasure that is to be found in violence is the very reason that civilization is dependent upon its members learning to restrain man’s natural instinct to pursue that short-term pleasure.

The idealized man who doesn’t enjoy violence isn’t a man at all, he is a robot devoid of natural humanity. The idealized man is more akin to Larry’s heroes, who may take pleasure in violence, but are careful to ensure that the violence they commit is discriminate, justified, and in performed solely the interests of those they are sworn to defend. That justified violence most definitely includes menacing the potential threats to one’s family and loved ones. Indeed, that is one of the primary responsibilities of every father.

That being said, the critic has to be lauded for giving WARBOUND a fair shake and expressing his opinion honestly. One can disagree with an aspect or two of a review without thinking less of the reviewer. I hope more reviewers of the various Hugo-nominated works will follow his example.

É dia de Português

O planeta independente Rhysalan oferece Asilo para 1.462 governos
exilados. É responsabilidade do departamento de Xenocriminologia e
Relações Alienígenas da Divisão Militar de Investigação de Crimes manter
a rédea curta com as centenas de milhares de xenos residindo no
planeta. Assassinatos, revoluções, guerras civis e tentativas de
genocídios planetários fazem parte da rotina de trabalho do Subtenente
Comandante Graven Tower, da DMIC-XRA.

Em acréscimo a um aerovar armado com mísseis, à sua confiável Sphinx
CPB-18 e às políticas extremamente liberais da DMIC com relação a danos
colaterais e vítimas civis, o Comandante Tower é estimulado por sua
extrema xenofobia, assim como por uma inteligência de máquina com
aumento de realidade de categoria militar que acredita que encontrou
Deus. No meio deste cenário, quando os restos desintegrados do herdeiro
legítimo de uma casa real alienígena são descobertos nas ruas de Trans
Paradis, a questão não é tanto se no final os assassinos serão
encontrados, mas se são os criminosos ou os investigadores criminais que
vão contribuir mais para a soma total de mortos.

QUANTUM MORTIS é a série de mistério de Ficção Científica Militar
repleta de ação de Vox Day – indicado para o prêmio Hugo e autor da
série de fantasias épicas As Artes da Escuridão e da Luz – e Steve
Rzasa.

Thanks to Israel and Daniel, Castalia House has released its second and third books in Portuguese today. Two QUANTUM MORTIS books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal, have joined Uma Magia Perdida in our Portuguese language catalog. This should be useful for those, like The Perfect Aryan Male, who are brushing up on their Brazilian Portuguese. Please note that both Gravidade Mortal and Uma Magia Perdida will be free downloads tomorrow and Thursday.

And in other Castalia House news, we’re pleased to announce the first of our new bloggers. Jeff Johnson of the Space Gaming Blog will be posting on Mondays. Yesterday he got off on exactly the right foot with a review of the first of the new Traveller novels from Marc Miller, Fate of the Kinunir. The Castalia House blog is rapidly becoming a destination in its own right, with four new bloggers joining Daniel, Mascaro, and Anson in posting essays, book reviews and interviews of independent and established authors alike. So, if you’re interested in following the Blue SF revolution as it proceeds, you’ll want to check it out on a regular basis.

Why Amazon are the good guys

Hugh Howey makes many of the same points I have concerning the Amazon-Hatchette battle, only in more detail, and he reminds everyone that the behavior of the Big 5 publishing cartel from which Amazon has liberated authors is worse than most people know:

The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself, a group so entrenched with one another and indistinguishable from one another that they simply go by the collective moniker: The Big 5.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

When members of the Big 5 do compete (truly compete, not just offer varying marketing promises and sizes of advances), the offender needs to be reigned in quickly. When Simon & Schuster innovated with print-only deals—thereby landing bestselling authors who were otherwise never going to sign with any major publisher—the resulting press on these deals (and likely pressure from other publishers) caused an immediate retreat. The poor publisher who stepped out of line dutifully pulled back into rank. Print-only deals were no longer on the table. Contracts snapped back to their immutable and noncompetitive form.

Or what about the “most favored nation clauses?” These pernicious contractual entities stipulate that any authors who get higher royalties in the future will trigger a retroactive match in royalties for select existing authors. This is like a sports contract that simply stipulates “I’ll always be the highest paid player.” It hamstrings all the publishers in a knot of anti-competitiveness. Where is the outrage or the reporting? Once again, we have a hardening of the monoculture where dissent is impossible and innovation stifled. Instead, the major publishers play Monopoly like my boss used to.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

Another point that I have not seen anyone touch upon is that unlike the Big 5, Amazon gives authors direct access to international book-buying markets. Tomorrow, Castalia House will be releasing its second and third Brazilian Portuguese books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal. That simply would not have been possible if Steve and I were publishing through a traditional publisher.

However, this is the core point: “Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.”

There are two reasons. The first is that authors are conditioned to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers. The second is that authors who are doing well under the current system are terrified that they may not be able to compete as effectively without being the structurally favored sons – and daughters – of the gatekeepers. And given what the gatekeepers have been favoring for the last two decades, I suspect their fears are well-justified.

One final note: it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that the conventional publishers aren’t leveraging their one area of historical expertise by doing print-only deals. It’s the one thing they can do very well that the independents and self-publishers can’t as easily do, and in many cases, that the two groups won’t even bother doing. Instead, by insisting on being granted both print and ebook rights, they’ll usually end up with nothing.

Speaking of Amazon, the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna” is a free download from Amazon today and tomorrow. Not only do the Big 5 publishers give away only a small fraction of the free books that Amazon does, but they junk their unsold stock rather than let anyone read them.

UPDATE: The Amazonians are voting with their downloads.

Lady Astronaut of Mars: #1,942 Free in Kindle Store
Opera Vita Aeterna:
#628 Free in Kindle Store

(Relax, I know the rankings are dynamic. This is more of that strange and unfamiliar concept called ‘humor’.)

Three Hugo reviews

Technically four, actually. Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog is reviewing this year’s Hugo nominees. He’s reviewed three in the novelette category so far, one of them being the Puppinette’s The Lady Astronaut of Mars:

The story begins with the confused ramblings of an elderly woman. We
know there’s something about Mars and Kansas… but we’re left collating
hints and scraps of information given to us by what is possibly an
unreliable narrator. If this actually is serious science fiction… then
it must be some sort of alternate history because we are shown some kind
Mars Mission from the fifties that was engineered with punch card
programs. And yet, the doctor from Kansas is named Dorothy and has an
Aunt Em and Uncle Henry… and this is so outrageous I can’t tell if this
is satire or a some kind of a joke.

If you keep reading, you soon discover that it isn’t some kind of drug addled hallucination. There is
a bit of science folded into the story: a domed colony on mars, an
asteroid impact on earth, an inhabitable extrasolar planet…. It’s not a
bad little premise there, really… but it is entirely smothered in the
details of particularly uninspiring elderly couple. The images and
situations are as far from those depicted in Frank Frazetta covers as
can possibly get. Instead Dejah Thoris, you get a sixty year old woman’s
flabby arms. Instead of gruesome sword fights and pulse pounding
action… you have a couple of bureaucrats coaxing a former astronaut to
come out of retirement.

The tone of the work is very even… almost elevated. It’s hard not to
read it in the cadence of an open mic slam poetry routine. Sometime like
this could be on NPR– it seems to hit all the right notes with a bit of
panache– but the story ends up grinding on into more and more graphic
and disheartening details.

He has also reviewed Brad Torgersen’s Lights in the Deep, which includes not one, but TWO Hugo-nominated works:

I remember the last couple of stories I’d
read in magazines like that. Back in the early nineties, I dipped into
several of them hoping to find the next Robert A. Heinlein. One story
was about a scientist running experiments on computer simulations of
pigs and chickens or something. If they passed, he might get to test his
drugs on a computer model of a human! (No aliens or explosions there.
Heck, I can’t even remember any conflict.) In another story, a painter
that specializes in portraits always ends up romancing the women he
paints. He’s a real Lothario. Then he gets a gig to paint an alien on
Mars or something… and his work just isn’t coming out right. Then it
dawns on him that he needs to get freaky with the alien in order paint a
good picture of it. Twist ending: the alien with incomprehensible
anatomy turns out to be a dude!

Perhaps  somebody else can confirm this for
me, but maybe the magazines have continued to be as godawful as I
remember. (I’m afraid to check, honestly. What if they’re worse…?)
Maybe “real” science fiction with aliens and space ships and laser
beams and exploding planets just isn’t done so much anymore…? Maybe the
fans that are deep in the science fiction scene are actually starving
for the sort of thing that I would recognize as, you know… being science
fiction. Maybe the way that Brad Torgersen’s collection combines
apocalyptic catastrophe with a sense of hopefulness really is having an
impact.
That he does this while straining to meet
editorial expectations and bending over backwards to not offend the
readership’s political and religious sensibilities is perhaps the most
obvious constraint holding back these stories. 

 He also reviewed The Last Witchking:

There’s nothing like a good pogrom, fatwā, book banning, congressional committee, or concerned citizens group to pique my interest in something. The greater the moral panic, the better the advertising. It was inevitable the hand-wringing surrounding the Hugo nominations this year would be just enough to get me to see what the fuss is about. I dove in to a book by the infamous Vox Day just hoping to be scandalized. (It’s the least I can do after growing up in the shadow of B.A.D.D. and the PMRC.)

I almost didn’t finish it. The first few pages consisted of two star-crossed lovers saying their last goodbyes to one another. I just about gave up right there, but the depiction of elves shortly after that held my attention. They weren’t the stereotypical tree-hugging types, but had a bit of an edge to them. Before long I was caring about the main character and clicking the page down key. My eyeballs were glued to the monitor and I couldn’t stop reading. (I’d picked up the Kindle edition that was free the other day because of the third story’s controversial Hugo nomination.)

Now, I’ve been hooked on page turners before that ended up making me feeling disappointed afterwards. You might know you’ve been had, but you keep buying books in the series because you have to know how it ends. This wasn’t like that. The main characters here are all so different from each other: an evil witchking, a goblin warrior, and elvish “seeker.” What’s intriguing to me is the extent to which I became immersed in the perspectives of each one. I really want to see each one to succeed… even when I maybe shouldn’t such as in the case of the titular character…. I’m glad for this brouhaha over the Hugo nominations, because this
book would have never crossed my radar otherwise. It was well worth the
few hours it took to read it, but I’m skeptical of the idea that a book
set in this world could go toe to toe with George R. R. Martin’s epic
fantasy series.

I don’t know Jeffro and he’s clearly not a reader of this blog, but I find it telling that his perspective as a genuine science fiction fan is so vastly different from that of the self-appointed “fan writers” who have been loudly pronouncing the intrinsic terribleness of my nominated work. Now that the Hugo packet has been made available to the voters, it should be fascinating to learn how many of them share his perception of these works in comparison to the usual suspects. It will certainly be more than a little amusing to hear the shrieks and the popping sound of five hundred heads exploding like Red Viper skulls if there turn out to be more Jeffros than Damiens among the voters.

In any event, I sent him a copy of A THRONE OF BONES to review, so that he could see for himself how well, or how poorly, it goes toe-to-toe with Mr. Martin’s ever-expanding trilogy.

UPDATE: Since some of you apparently weren’t aware, the Hugo Voter’s Packet is now available from LonCon and can be downloaded here by registered voters.