Tag: books

Retreat and revolution

The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:

After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”

Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”

Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”

“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”

The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”

As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.

And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.

I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.

They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.

Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.

Free stuff: QM and Selenoth

To further celebrate the release of the first two QUANTUM MORTIS novels, JartStar, the cover artist of the newly published Gravity Kills, has created a wallpaper from the cover image and offered it to any VP readers who might be interested in downloading it. It presently adorns my desktop, and if you’d like to download it, just click on the image to the left, then right-click on the full-size image and “Save Image As”.

As I mentioned yesterday, the first 25 reviewers of the two QUANTUM MORTIS books will receive a free audiobook code from Audible. Make that 24 now, as Sensei was the first to claim one. But don’t rush through the books, I’m sure you’ll want to linger over every savory moment of the delicate, deliciously enchanting prose that dances across the pages with all the ethereal grace of a half-starved Russian ballerina.

Ah, who am I kidding? There are explosions and guns and futuristic technologies and guns and artificial intelligences and guns and Meteor air-to-air missiles and collateral damage and twin Degroet Tactical M165 20mm cannons. There are also, as it happens, guns. And possibly a mystery or two.

If you want pages and pages of thickly sensuous prose concerning which side of the pillow is more palatable to the semi-conscious senses, read Proust. If you are looking for deep insight into the psychology of the human mind, read Dostoevsky. If you would like a grand and sweeping tale of epic scope and grandeur combined with intelligent commentary on the human condition, read Tolstoy. If you seek snarky, sparkly adolescent dialogue and the inevitable triumph of the gamma male’s wit, read Scalzi.

But if you like murder mysteries and old school Mil-SF where the hero wouldn’t recognize self-doubt if he saw it and would shoot it on sight if he did, you might enjoy QUANTUM MORTIS.

Did I mention the guns? To quote one confirmed gun porn enthusiast whose blurb for A Man Disrupted was, regrettably, deemed to be a bit too enthusiastic by the publisher:

“That was a seriously satisfying ending. I loved every second of this. I sincerely did.  I think it’s more
enjoyable than A THRONE OF BONES… and I think it has broader market appeal. Seriously. Standing fucking ovation.”

Speaking of Selenoth, if you are interested, you may wish to note that the following three books are free on Amazon today:

This concludes the commercial portion of the flight.

QUANTUM MORTIS live on Amazon

The first two ebooks in the Quantum Mortis series are now available from Amazon. QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted retails for $4.99. If you’re interested in obtaining it in epub format, you should be able to find it at Barnes & Noble or Kobo soon. Otherwise, if you send me an email with a copy of the Amazon receipt, I will send you an epub copy in return. QUANTUM MORTIS: Gravity Kills retails for $2.99 and is available only from Amazon. If you want the epub, send me a copy of the Amazon receipt and I will sent you your favored format. You can also just use Calibre to convert the file since the books are not DRM-protected.

In order to celebrate the introduction of the new Mil-SF mystery series, all three Selenoth novellas, A Magic Broken, The Wardog’s Coin, and The Last Witchking will be free on Amazon for the next two days, beginning tomorrow. So, if you don’t have all of them yet, this would be an excellent chance to complete the set.

And since ACX and Marcher Lord were so gracious as to give me 25 free audiobook download codes for A Magic Broken, I will be giving them away to the first 25 reviewers of either QM:AMD or QM:GK. (NB: this offer includes the early reviewers who received a review copy last week so long as they review the other book.) Send me an email with a link to your review and I will send you the download code.

You’ll need to have an Amazon account to use the code, but since you’ll need one to post a review there, that shouldn’t be a problem. And just to be clear, the free audiobook code is not contingent upon the nature of the review. As always, I encourage honest and serious reviews, I do not seek mindless flattery any more than I approve of witless criticism.

Baen Books author Tom Kratman, who most of you are aware comments here from time to time, provided QM:AMD with a blurb that is featured on the back of the book. He described the book thusly:


“What are we going to do when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, self-willed, and maybe stark raving mad? The question matters because that day is coming…fast. With approximately as many twists and turns as China’s Tianmen Mountain Road, QUANTUM MORTIS starts fast and then accelerates, leading to a conclusion both shattering…and more than a little heart warming.”
—TOM KRATMAN, author of A Desert Called Peace

As for QUANTUM MORTIS: Gravity Kills, being a pure ebook it has no blurbs, but the first reviewers on Amazon appear to have enjoyed the novella. Keep in mind that the first GK reviewers have not read AMD and vice-versa.

“This story is an effective and entertaining rework of several of my favorite SF and Mystery themes, with a result greater and more original than the sum of its parts. Let’s start with the homeworld, which is also a refuge for a thousand plus governments in exile. To quote Agent K from “Men in Black”, “It’s like Casablanca, but with no Nazis”. Like “Casablanca” and “Men in Black”, but unlike that prize turkey, “Barb Wire”, the authors make this trope a proper background to the story itself…. The result, shaken not stirred, is an entertaining story, which combines the best aspects of hard SF and ‘Tec novels. The best thing, though, is that this world shows the possibility of many more such stories. I am looking forward to them.”
—BERNARD BRANDT

So, who will he rip off?

The people have spoken. Of the 401 respondents, 202 (50%) believe that John Scalzi’s next novel is not going to rip off Heinlein, Piper, Dick, or Star Trek, but someone entirely new. Only 11 (3%) thought that he’d return to ripping off H. Beam Piper, while 23 naive Scalzi fans (6%) genuinely believe he’s going to publish something entirely new and original. That would certainly be interesting; should that unlikely future come to pass, I might even consider reading it myself.

I happened to think the majority is wrong. I assume he would publish a Midnight Star tie-in novel. But as it happens, I was wrong, as unbeknownst to most of us who don’t pay anywhere nearly as much attention to McRapey as some would assume we do, we already had our answer: LOCK IN

Fifteen years from now, a new virus sweeps the globe. 95% of those afflicted experience nothing worse than fever and headaches. Four per cent suffer acute meningitis, creating the largest medical crisis in history. And one percent find themselves “locked in”—fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to Stimulus.

One per cent doesn’t seem like a lot. But in the United States, that’s 1.7 million people “locked in” …including the President’s wife and daughter. Spurred by grief and the sheer magnitude of the suffering, America undertakes a massive scientific initiative. Nothing can restore to the “locked in” the ability to control their own bodies. But two new technologies emerge. One is a virtual reality environment, “The Agora,” in which the locked-in can interact with other humans, both locked-in and not. The other is the discovery that a few rare individuals have brains that are receptive to being controlled by others, meaning that from time to time, those who are locked in can “ride” these people and use their bodies as if they were their own.

This skill is quickly regulated, licensed, bonded, and controlled. Nothing can go wrong. Certainly nobody would be tempted to misuse it, for murder, for political power, or worse…

I can’t remember who wrote it, but apparently the answer is either James Cameron or the guy who wrote the book about rich people riding the bodies of poor people renting them out. Anyone remember the name of that one?

The barbaric nature of Pink SF

I will soon have to write a post delineating the many differences between Blue SF, which is classic SF of the sort written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert and the other SF greats of the past, and Pink SF, which is the modern offense against literature committed by gamma males and snarky shambling shoggoths and inevitably features one or more of that quasi-literary abomination known as The Strong Female Character.

In a very long and powerful essay, John C. Wright explains that the Strong Female Character is not only an offense against literature, but an intentional crime against civilization itself:

Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.

As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.

These discussions have an ulterior motive. Either by the deliberate intent of the reviewer, or by the deliberate intention of the mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police to whom the unwitting reviewer has innocently entrusted the formation of his opinions, the reviewer who discusses the strength of female characters is fighting his solitary duel or small sortie in the limited battlefield of science fiction literature in the large and longstanding campaign of the Culture Wars.

He is on the side, by the way, fighting against culture.

Hence, he fights in favor of barbarism, hence against beauty in art and progress in science, and, hence the intersection of these two topics which means against science fiction.

It’s pretty easy to determine how infected an SF writer is by the Pink SF disease. If his work features women in the futuristic Armed Forces serving on an equal basis with men, it’s Pink SF. If her work involves having sex with animals and corpses, it is Pink SF/F.  And if any female character ever physically bests a bigger, stronger, faster male character without supernatural powers or technological enhancements, its Pink SF.

And if it involves soldiers bantering about providing each other with the sort of services that resulted in a man being beaten to death in the Roman legions, it is most definitely Pink SF.

QUANTUM MORTIS: Steve’s perspective

Confession: I am a control freak. You can ask anyone, especially my wife and co-workers. If a project is to be done right and done on time, I want to do it solo and want it done my way. In the past few years I’ve been learning, albeit slowly, to give up some control when necessary. I took part in a collaborative writing effort with my fellow authors from Marcher Lord Press. We started up a fantasy story that took a couple months to write, with each of us contributing approximately a short to medium length chapter. While I did do the intro and set up the characters, it was freeing to adapt to other writers’ imagination as they took the plot in directions I hadn’t considered.

Also, having five books edited for publication makes one give up control incrementally. It’s either that or you get really pissed off every time the boss-man tells you this is how it’s going to be in your book. Which I sometimes still do. In early February I approached Vox about writing stories for the game he had in development for the world of Selenoth. After exchanging a few emails, Vox phoned me with a different idea: a co-writing project in which we would create a sci-fi murder mystery.

I was intrigued. Never done something like that before, which meant I was excited about the challenge. Vox already had the politics, planets and religions of a story universe sketched out. That appealed to me because it meant less work. It took me a week to brainstorm ideas and whip up a first chapter.

I had no idea how he’d receive the idea. In a phone conversation prior to emailing him that first chapter, I found out that our visions for the overall story had about 75 percent in common, without even consulting each other on details. That’s when the lightbulb lit and I told myself, “I can work with this guy.”

So I hunkered down and wrote long segments, and sent them to Vox on occasion. He would change it as he saw fit, and we often overlapped, with him sending revised sections as I closed in on the finale. I don’t think I argued with any of his changes because when he told me them I went, “Well, that’s way cool!”

My only pet peeve was that Vox preferred phone contact, and I’m an email guy. It’s a minor thing and I got over it, about halfway through the process, because most of our calls ended with clear direction for the story and characters. Took me six months to pound out Quantum Mortis, and Vox another month and a half to write his portions and put on the finishing touches. Not too shabby.

I still shake my head and wonder, “How on Earth did I write a novel and let someone else change it into a finished product that was still part mine, yet not the same thing I came up with?” The trick was not being wholly wedded to the characters and plot from the get go. Told myself,  “Relax. Have fun with the people, the places and especially the action . That way if things get rewritten or cut, it’s no big deal.”

And you know what? It wasn’t. The control freak had loosened his grip. Well, somewhat. Vox wasn’t too scary. I liked that our brains were on the same wavelength when it came to character development and blowing things up. We put together a great story, a hell of a fun thing to write, and hope you enjoy the result of our collaboration.

And yes, the second installment of Chief Graven Tower’s explosive investigations is well underway.
 – Steve Rzasa

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published on 2 December 2013 and will retail for $22.99 in hardcover and $4.99 in ebook.  You can preorder the hardcover and receive a free copy of the ebook for $14.99 if you do so before December 1st.

UPDATE: If you’re thinking of preordering, here is a little more incentive. The page count turned out to be higher than estimated, at 326 pages, so the retail price of the hardcover will be $22.99, not $19.99. The preorder price is still $14.99 and the ebook price will be $4.99.

Announcing QUANTUM MORTIS

About twelve years ago, not long after writing the short story “Medal for a Marine”, I started writing another short story. This one concerned the murder of a man in exile from his home planet. I didn’t get very far on it before setting it aside, in fact, I didn’t even make it to the actual murder. Nevertheless, I had a very clear picture of the murder, the SF setting, and the detective. Heavily influenced by Fifth Frontier War, the story was set in a futuristic world that was a combination of the Traveller universe and the Space Lords universe. I should probably explain that Space Lords was a 1997 attempt to design a science fiction MMO that was a thousand-year extrapolation from the worlds of Rebel Moon Rising. We never really did much more than discuss it with Microsoft in a desultory manner, but for the next 16 years, the design document sat untouched on a hard drive.

In early 2013, I happened to run across the fragment of the short story. Having almost completely forgotten about it, it read as if someone else had written it. I thought it compared rather well to most of the SF I’d read since then, (China Mieville and Neal Stephenson aside), but realized that with four more 850-page TAODAL novels to write, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get around to that SF world for at least another six years. So, I contacted one of the guys who had expressed interest in publishing a Selenoth-related story through First Sword and suggested that we collaborate on turning that story fragment into a SF mystery series.  Steve agreed, we wrote the novel together, and we are very pleased make the following announcement:

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands on December 2, 2013. It is 326 pages and will retail for $4.99 ebook and $22.99 hardcover. Those who preorder the hardcover by December 1st can do so for a discounted price of $14.99 and in addition to the hardcover will also receive a copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted in either epub or mobi format (please specify) via email the day before release.

The independent planet of Rhysalan
provides contractual Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the
responsibility of the Military Crimes Investigation Division,
specifically, the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department, to
keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing
on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted
planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer
Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.


In addition to a missile-armed aerovar,
his trusty Sphinx CPB-18, and MCID’s extremely liberal policies concerning
collateral damage and civilian casualties, Chief Tower is assisted by
his extreme xenophobia as well as a military-grade augmented machine
intelligence that believes it has found God. So when the
disintegrated remnants of the heir apparent of an alien royal house
are discovered on the streets of Trans Paradis, the question is not
so much whether the killers will eventually be found, but if
it is the criminals or the crime investigators who will contribute
more to the final body count. 

QUANTUM MORTIS is the new
action-packed Mil-SF mystery series from Vox Day, author of the epic
fantasy series The Arts of Dark and Light. Written with Steve
Rzasa, author of The Word Reclaimed, QUANTUM MORTIS A Man
Disrupted is the first novel in the series featuring Graven
Tower, MCID.

However, as it happens, there is more. Steve is an unusually fast writer, especially in comparison with me. So, while he was waiting for me to turn the first draft into a final draft, he decided to make use of the time to write a short story concerning another of Graven Tower’s murder investigations. One thing led to another and by the time we were done with QM:AMD, we had also completed a novella that stood up rather nicely on its own. Since releasing A Magic Broken in company with A Throne of Bones worked rather well, Marcher Lord didn’t see any reason to not adopt a similar approach in the science fiction arena.

So, we are pleased to announce that QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills will also be published on December 2, 2013. It is the equivalent of about 50 pages and will retail for $2.99 in ebook-only. As those familiar with Selenoth probably suspect, Gravity Kills will be enrolled in the Kindle Select program and will be periodically available for free download in 2014 as an introduction to the many worlds of Quantum Mortis.

Speaking of Amazon, I am looking for one more volunteer to read and review QM:GK. If you are interested doing so and expect to be able to read one of the ebooks by December 2nd and post a review on Amazon, please send me an email with QM:GK in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi.

UPDATE: Steve has also announced the book on his blog. If you would like to ask him anything about it, I would encourage you to do so there.

The final translation

My favorite translator, William Weaver, has died at 90:

Deft in handling a variety of writing styles, from Calvino’s delicacy of language to Mr. Eco’s show-offy erudition, Mr. Weaver was prolific. He translated dozens of books, a dozen by Calvino alone, including “Invisible Cities,” which posits descriptive and philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and a collection of short stories, “Cosmicomics,” for which Mr. Weaver won a National Book Award for translation in 1969….

Even a partial list of the writers Mr. Weaver translated — which includes Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Oriana Fallaci, Ugo Moretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Svevo — is, as Mr. Botstein wrote, “nothing short of astonishing.”

Mr. Weaver talked about his work in a 2000 interview in The Paris Review. “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, buon giorno for instance,” he said. “How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning,’ or ‘good evening,’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’

“You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place,” he continued, “because in some places they start saying buona sera — ‘good evening’ — at 1 p.m. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say buona sera, but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3 p.m. You need to know the language, but, even more, the life of the country.”

What an epic and productive literary career. I think my next fiction read will have to be one of his translations of Eco or Calvino. That being said, having required several days and multiple consultations of dictionaries and native speakers alike to puzzle out a single Italian word coined by Eco, (celodurismo, in this case), I find it very difficult to accept that the simple words are harder.

Then again, I suppose it’s a lot easier when you can actually ask the great man what he was thinking when he coined it.

Three free ebooks

I had a few Kindle Select days that were about to become unusable, so AMB is free today. Only the text version, however, not the audiobook.  And as I belatedly discovered, The Wardog’s Coin and The Last Witchking are also free today. This may be considered a harbinger of an announcement to come next week.

In case you missed it the other day, you may want to check out the custom Vox Popoli toolbar. I’ve found it to be unexpectedly useful for searching this blog as well as rapidly switching between the recent posts for commenting purposes. I need to create some new icons for the Games, Books, and Daily section, but it will automatically update when I get around to it.

Man up and read chick-lit

It’s always fascinating to watch a gamma male attempt to utilize female shaming tactics on other men. It’s not only that it can’t possibly work, but that it’s done so ineptly:

Last week I suggested it may be time to disband Britain’s Orange Prize, which is restricted to female authors, on the grounds that since only women buy and read books nowadays all literature is by definition “women’s literature” and the need for the prize is therefore obsolete.

I was kidding (sort of), but my larger point — men do not read — is not disputed by anyone. Study after study proves that men account for less than 20 percent of the book market in England, the U.S. and Canada. This fact no longer in dispute, the only question becomes why don’t men read? Why do they choose to forego Twain’s “advantage?”

It turns out that the whole problem is — you guessed it! — women’s fault. At least that’s the answer if you ask the few guys who actually do read books, especially if they happen to be writers themselves, or worked at some point in the publishing industry.

Take Jason Pinter, for example, writing at the Huffington Post. A thriller writer who used to work in publishing, he argues that men actually do read. The notion they don’t is a self-fulfilling prophecy: “[P]ublishers rarely publish for men and don’t market towards men,” he writes.

“Nobody can deny the fact that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women,” Pinder writes. “Saying the ratio is 75/25 is not overstating things. So needless to say when a male editor pitches a book aimed at men, there are perilously few men to read it and give their opinions.”

Will Weaver, who writes young adult books, goes further, blaming not only publishing but our entire culture. Also at the Huffington Post, his indictment is much the same as Pinder’s, though. He describes going to Manhattan bookstore, where the Teen Section, all flowery and fem, contained 275 books for girls and a handful of fantasy titles for boys.

“The bias against boy books in publishing has gotten so bad nowadays that my editor now reads manuscripts, he confessed, with an eye toward ‘re-gendering,’” Weaver writes. “That is, ‘I sort of like this novel but what if the main character were a girl instead of a boy?’”

I’ll grant Weaver has a point about the need for more effort to attract boys to reading, and I’ll give Pinder props for writing respectfully of women in publishing. His critique is institutional.

Still, these writers (and others before them, like Stephen King or Chris Goldberg), however sensitive and reasonable they may be, come down ultimately to this: Publishing has been feminized, nothing is marketed to men. In other words, it’s no our fault if we don’t read. It’s the women. Again.

As a man who has read all his life, I find this faintly patronizing and more than a little insulting. I have to be marketed to before I can turn off the TV or the video game and read a book? Geez, Mom, is my bottle warm yet? I’m hungry.

These arguments ignore that women not only read all the chicklit — female readers dominate the categories I would consider male-centric, like espionage/thriller (69 percent), mystery/detective (86 percent), science fiction (52 percent). That’s according to a 2000 study — the figures may be worse today.

Given the surprising note of whining in these masculine essays, I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t read because — well, because they aren’t men. They’re spoiled little crybabies,  and adolescents who refuse to grow up.

How, one wonders, does a disinclination to read what women like to read – which is to say books like The Hunger Games, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and the current NYT bestseller, Dear Life, by Alice Munro, which features stories such as this one: “A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a
TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head
doctor” – somehow translate into being a spoiled little crybaby or an adolescent?

Then again, what Real Man wouldn’t want to read about a young woman having a relationship with the head doctor!  Spicy! As for Just One Evil Act, by Elizabeth George, we are informed that it is a “riveting tale of love, passion, and betrayal” concerning the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl named Hadiyyah. Riveting! Only a child-man could possibly fail to be fascinated by the prospect of such heart-pounding suspense!

Now, I read a lot more than most men or women do. A few of my favorite authors happen to be women. I think rather well of Murasaki Shikibu, Dorothy Sayers, Susan Cooper, Tanith Lee, and Teresa Edgerton. But the thing is, those female authors don’t write conventional romance crap, and if they do happen to exhibit the female tendency to insert some sort of a romantic angle into everything, at least they don’t permit it to dominate the story.

I now have zero – ZERO – interest in the vast majority of what presently passes for science fiction and mystery. Not because I dislike the genres, but because I dislike what the women who undeniably dominate the publishing industry insist on publishing as “science fiction” and “mystery”. And as a writer, I can say from direct personal influence that no matter how good the book is, or how significant its potential, if the book doesn’t “speak to me”, as one editor said, it’s simply not going to be published.

And guess what sort of books don’t speak to the sort of women who work in publishing? The very sort of books that men most prefer to read, which is books that reflect masculine perspectives and honor masculine virtues.

So who is to blame for the fact that most men have quit reading? The answer is obvious: whoever is responsible for refusing to publish the sort of books that men used to read.