Tag: books

A MAGIC BROKEN free on Amazon

I also posted this notice on Helen’s Page, which is rapidly turning out to be a rather useful online bulletin board for the liberty-minded.

The novella A MAGIC BROKEN is free for Amazon Kindle users today and tomorrow.

It has 78 reviews, including this 5-star one:

“This is a short book, and I understand it is intended to introduce
some characters and setting for Vox Day’s upcoming book “A Throne of
Bones.” I thoroughly enjoyed it. Once it gets going, it is hard to put
down. I highly recommend it, especially if you are weary of the typical
book in the fantasy genre that goes on and on and on and never comes to a
conclusion. You won’t be disappointed in your purchase, and you will be
excited to read the next book.”

A better class of fake review

One has to respect that at least Zoidy went to the trouble of buying the Kindle version before writing his fake review.

Boring! Very much a Warhammer novel (with the license), January 25, 2013

By Zoidy, Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a terrible book. Slow, tiresome, boring!

It’s pointlessly
wasteful with pages upon pages of characters writing letters that say
nothing! Of characters that spend ungodly amounts of time internalising
about simple issues like whether to put their cloak on to go outside!
What’s the weather like?! Who might see them outside?! Will they catch a
chill…and on and on! This is horrible writing.

Also, thanks to the Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k worlds for providing pretty much most of what this author has written.

Note to the next fake reviewer: it’s more convincing if you actually read the book.  And noticing the absence of any brand logos or laser guns would also help.  Of course, actually reading the book sort of defeats the purpose of the fake review, doesn’t it?  If Zoidy thinks A Throne of Bones has pages of pages of letters – about 12 out of 854 – I’d hate to imagine what he’d conclude of Pat Wrede’s Sorcery and Cecilia, which I am given to understand is a Vampire Diaries-licensed novel.

I should be absolutely fascinated to learn what elements of the Warhammer 40k universe are present in the novel.  I don’t know whether to be flattered or appalled that people are actually willing to pay money in order to publicly trash my work.  But it occurs to me that this may open up whole new horizons in the honorable profession of getting paid to not write….

Jared Diamond and the Grass Hut Imperative

At least there is one left-liberal who is honest about his heartfelt desire to return to the Great Grass Hut Matriarchy:

….The World Until Yesterday, a vanity project marketed as anthropology. In this book, Diamond draws from his extensive field research in New Guinea to share his views on the shortcomings of contemporary American society. Primitive approaches to social problems, he thinks, would better serve our society. For example, he argues for: dedicating more resources to mediation as an alternative to civil lawsuits, establishing “conventional monopolies” to smooth out trade fluctuations, deemphasizing competition and the desire for excellence among children, on-demand nursing for infants, spending more time talking to our children, devising new living conditions for the elderly, accepting that the gulf between rich and poor in the United States provides an explanation of the popularity of religion in our country, preserving language diversity, and ending obesity.

At its core, the book is based on a fundamental contradiction. Diamond explains that the customs of primitive societies are not applicable to the characteristics of our society; then he proceeds to use those customs as the basis for recommendations for improving everything in our society from parenting to diet.

Apparently it’s not enough that we’re basing our trade policy upon early 19th century illogic, our monetary system upon early 20th century fraud, our economic system upon Depression-era nonsense, and our immigration policy upon a play written by a Jewish immigrant to Britain in 1908, Diamond wants us to go all the way back to cannibalism, huts, and throwing rocks at one another.

What I don’t understand is why?  I mean, they don’t actually ever go and live in Papua New Guinea or Deepest, Darkest Africa themselves, so why do they think that the primitive lifestyles that they favor should be imported and imposed upon the West?

The bright lights of the hrududu

You may recall that I’ve mentioned how the Rabbit People have three basic weapons to which they resort.  One of their most important ones is exclusion; to a herd animal exclusion is the worst of all possible fates because they are incapable of even imagining survival on their own.

Now consider in this light an intriguing one-star review of A THRONE OF BONES that appeared yesterday courtesy of one Virginia Conterato of EdinaMinneapolis.

It’s very difficult to review a book so badly written. The wordiness
attempts to disguise the utter lack of decent storytelling and world
building. There is a whole lot of NOTHING happening along with badly
written dialogue and poorly developed characters. It is not often that I
write negative reviews, but I felt I needed to warn others away from
this terrible book. THis book is truly terrible. Don’t waste your time,
much less your money. 

It’s even harder to convincingly review a book one hasn’t read.  Or, as appears to be the case, even bought.  Isn’t it amazing how strongly some of these one-star reviewers feel they need to “warn others” and save them from exposure to the terrible, horrible, doubleplusungood novel?  As if otherwise, they might inadvertently read such a miniscule tome?  It tends to remind one of McRapey warning his readers not to read this blog or even mention Lord VoldemortRSHD.  This is classic Rabbit People behavior, especially in light of how Mrs. Conterato clearly hasn’t read the book.  You’ll note that attack reviews are usually phrased in the most general of terms; if they do provide details, they usually just happen to come from things that take place in the text selection available on Amazon.  Seriously, is there anyone who genuinely believes that Kay is one of the very few people who bought the hardcover?

Although I have to admit, the idea of an angry little rabbit flipping furiously through all 854 pages just to write a credible-sounding fake review does amuse me.  It’s worse than TIA’s unclimbable Mount Chapter Four.

Now, why would a married woman in her late forties be so upset that she would go to the trouble of posting a fake review at this particular time?  The answer, I suspect, is to be found at Change.org, where last year Kay signed the petition “Senator Amy Klobuchar: Publicly Come Out in Support of Same-Sex Marriage”.  Logic suggests the following scenario: McRapey repeatedly pounds the homophobic drum, Kay’s little rabbit ears perk up, and she bravely hops forth to do battle on behalf of the Whatever warren and her lesbian writer friends at The Loft.

And then the bright lights appeared….

Now, you’d have to have lived in the Twin Cities to fully appreciate what I find funniest about the good doctor’s wife.  You see, when Kay signed the petition, she claimed to live in Edina.  But she doesn’t.  As it happens, in high school I dated a few girls from Edina, including one who lived just down the road from Southdale. Which, you see, is why I happen to know that Kay, like many others in certain parts of Richfield and southwest Minneapolis, only affects to live in the more prestigious city….

I now await, with no little amusement, the declarations of how scary the Rabbit People find it to discover that Lord Voldemort now has the dark and dangerous powers of Google-fu at his disposal.  I have to confess, I’m more than a little tempted to knock on her door and offer to sign her nonexistent hardcover the next time I’m in EdinaMinneapolis.

The other interesting thing, in addition to the fake reviews, is that there are at least two rabbits who are giving helpful ratings to all the negative reviews and rating all of the positive reviews unhelpful.  Given the timing, one of them is likely our little friend Kay.  It’s not so much the review as the rating of the review that is of interest here:

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

1 out of 5 stars: hard to follow yet very predictable January 21, 2013
By  Tracy

This a long book, very slow read. Not a lot of action or suspense. You can tell whats going to happen almost every step of the way. It is layed out like it is 7 or 8 books stuck together. The chapter titles are just the name of the character that will be prominent for that chapter. Then the next chapter is for the storyline of the next character and so on. After forcing myself to finish the book, it is only a lead up to a second book! It does’t even stand on it’s own! Horrible!  

Helpful indeed.  This is how the Rabbit People fight; it’s all nonsensical, passive-aggressive attacks intended to be plausibly deniable, sniping from behind corners, and appealing to the herd; the correct way to respond is not through reactive passive-aggression, but rather to shine a light on the little critters’s activities.

We are not like them, we are better than them.  They know it.  And they know we know it.  That is why they hate us.

UPDATE: Some are incredulous that I would post information that is freely available to the public about a suspected fraud here on this blog.  Very well, let me be clear.  I am demanding an admission from Mrs. Conterato that she neither purchased the hardcover nor the Kindle version, nor did she read the book in its entirety prior to posting her review.  On a related note, I am requesting the order records from my publisher today; since the book is not available in retail bookstores, I should be able to confirm within days that she did not, in fact, ever purchase the hardcover that she claimed to have reviewed.  I will remove the public information from this post if a) Mrs. Conterato admits she did not buy the book and her review is a fake one, or b) if she proves that she did purchase the book and read it in its entirety.

UPDATE II: I just got an email from the publisher containing a list of the books sent to Minnesota.  None was sent to anyone named Conterato or to the address shown above.  Or to Edina…. This is not yet conclusive proof as one more possibility exists that I am presently having tracked down, but it is a significant step in that direction.

Interview by Speculative Faith

E. Stephen Burnett interviewed me for the Speculative Faith Blog about A THRONE OF BONES and various aspects of the novel that some Christians apparently consider to be controversial.

ESB: What’s different between Summa Elvetica and your newest novel, A Throne of Bones?

Vox Day: About 650 pages, for one thing. Summa Elvetica could be considered a long chapter in the life of one of the perspective characters in A Throne of Bones, the military tribune Marcus Valerius Clericus. In fact, it explains his agnomen, Clericus, which means “priest”. But the real difference is that I learned to stop being clever and to focus on the story instead of the subtext. The Wrath of Angels, for example, is a subtextual spin on the single European currency and the failure of the European elite to replace the pound sterling, but no one has ever picked up on that. I’ve found that the depth of the subtext tends to detract from the natural flow of the story, at least when written by an author of my admittedly limited talents.

After A Dance with Dragons came out, I was talking with a friend who was as disgusted with that epic disappointment as I was, and he was lamenting that with Martin having gone south, there wasn’t anything worth reading in that genre. I always wanted to write a fat fantasy and figured I couldn’t do all that much worse than Martin had, so I decided I would return to the world of Summa Elvetica. This time, however, I would throw out the intellectual fireworks that no one seemed to notice or care about anyhow and focus solely on writing a good story with strong, memorable characters. I assumed I’d have to self-publish it, but I needed to get Marcher Lord’s permission first since it could be considered a sequel of sorts even though there is absolutely no need to read the earlier novel. All I was looking for was a release and I was shocked when Jeff said he wanted to publish it, even after I warned him that I intended for it to be around 300,000 words. He didn’t blink, not then, and not later when I turned in the 297,500-word manuscript.

Despite being longer, Throne was much easier to write than Summa. It was exactly 494 days from that first conversation to publication on December 1, 2012. I figured that taking six years to write Dragons hadn’t done Martin any good, so what was the point of dragging the process out? Also, if it was going to be a spectacular failure, the less time I wasted on it, the better.

ESB: Now for the controversial parts. Last week, your editor/publisher Jeff Gerke shared the story behind the novel. In part: “The author felt very strongly that the book needed to have vulgarity (which, he informed me, is different from profanity), nudity, and even sex.” To you, how are vulgarity and profanity different? Which Scriptures have informed your views? Do you think you can write a character saying something you would try not to say?

Vox Day: The distinction between profanity and vulgarity is not original to me, anyone can look up the etymology of the words. To be profane is to attack the sacred. To be vulgar is merely to be low and common. Even the most uptight, eagle-eyed Churchian will not find any blasphemy or taking the name of our Lord and Savior in vain; such profanity wouldn’t make any sense in the world of Selenoth. To me, the idea of writing a book where legionaries are anything but low and common in their speech and behavior is so ludicrous that it would be more credible to give them jet packs and laser guns than to delicately avoid showing them drinking themselves insensate at every opportunity, whoring in brothels, bitching about their officers, and jeering at those who betray a physical response to being terrified in battle.

The verses which influence me on the subject of literary language are Leviticus 19:12, Colossians 3:8, and 1 Peter 3:10. Particularly Colossians 3:8. I find it absurd and bordering on the delusional to see Christians who would never think to object to angry, malicious, and slanderous speech in fiction nevertheless try to use the Bible as a basis for objecting to vulgar language in the mouths of fictional characters. I write about life in a fallen world and I do so as honestly and accurately as I can. I believe that to do otherwise is to be deceitful.

And yes, I absolutely assert that I can write something that I would never say or even think for myself. The writer is not the character. And the writer whose characters are little more than various reflections of himself is one who lacks imagination, creativity, and basic powers of observation.

This is merely an excerpt from the interview; read the rest of it at Speculative Faith.

A bestiary of hate

And why it is increasingly important to provide Amazon reviews for books you really like.

Now, some authors firmly believe you should never engage with a critic of your books.  They’ve got a sound basis for this belief, because most authors are sensitive little wallflowers who can’t bear criticism, so when they do respond to it, they tend to overdo it a little.  Or a lot.  The prime example, of course, being Laurell K. Hamilton, whose epic hissy fit was ironically more entertaining than any of the novels she inflicted upon the general public.  Her predecessor in the sexy corpse genre, Anne Rice, also provided another well-regarded classic in the annals of authorial peevishness, albeit one handicapped by the virtue of it showing at least some signs of the sanity entirely missing from Hamilton’s masterpiece.

Given that I have been the beneficiary of the constant attentions of various anklebiters and more substantive critics for some years now, I am considerably less upset than most writers when it comes to negative readers.  They’re bound to come, particularly when an author is as free with his own opinions as I am.  But that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to permit reader absurdities go unchallenged, particularly when they are putting them out there in public in an attempt to influence the decisions of potential readers to give my books a shot or not.  Also, given that I am a polemicist of some notoriety, I am more conscious than most of how some purported “reviews” are nothing more than polemics by other means.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion of every book.  Tastes and intellects differ considerably.  But no one has a right to not have their opinions mocked or criticized.  Now, most of those who have read and reviewed A THRONE OF BONES have expressed a generally favorable opinion of it; some have even written of it in a superlative manner.  Most consider it to have surpassed their expectations.  Not these three reviewers, however, who claim to have found literally nothing of merit in the novel:

THE DELICATE CHRISTIAN FLOWER

“I was looking forward to reading it. I was sorely disappointed to find
profanity, and vulgarity and a few other things I found objectionable.
If you are into Christian fiction, this is not the book for you.”

Translation: “All books with bad words are bad.  Don’t read them.”

My response: hey, at least her opinion is based on fact and is reasonably consistent, given that she also gives a glowing five-star review to a children’s Bible that leaves out that unimportant bit about Jesus’s death.

THE EVERYDAY ANKLEBITER

“This book is bad. So bad that I was moved to leave my first amazon
review and I couldn’t just put it down and move on to the next book in
my pile, I had to move on to something I already knew was exceptional,
like Tolkien. Since zero stars is not an option, I can at least take
some comfort in the fact that I had to give “A Throne of Bones” one star
in that it pushed me into something more worthwhile.”

Translation: “I hate the author, so I’ll just fling some imaginary crap and hope it sticks.”

My response: Trolls are going to troll and anklebiters are going to snap at ankles wherever they can.  Keep in mind this first-time “reviewer” appears to be the same guy who was dumb enough to claim, on this blog, that the novel was a structural imitation of Gibbon – whose work covered the imperial Roman period some 200 years after the Republican era I utilized – and a literary imitation of R. Scott Bakker.  The fact that the “reviewer” is a fan of Bakker’s who is still bitter about my failure to genuflect before Bakker in the nihilism debate is, no doubt, entirely unrelated to his review….

The strange thing about The Everyday Anklebiter is that he apparently has never stopped to think that there are thousands of readers of this blog who are perfectly able to do what he has done in purposefully tanking the ratings of authors they don’t like.  This sort of negative review isn’t merely abusive, it is dangerous to the entire review system, given its potential to start a reviews war.

If you have an Amazon account, I would encourage you to report this as abuse. I have already done so.  Personal vendettas belong on the blogs, they have no place on public book review sites.

THE OVER-HIS-HEAD GUY

“The author show no imagination. He basically just copies imperial Rome
at the time of the Roman Catholic church. Neither one of which I find
entertaining in a fantasy setting. If I wanted to read about Roman
Legions and the Church I’d buy a history book. I’ll get through it
eventually and maybe it will get better but if the first 20% is this bad
I can’t imagine how it’s going to redeem itself. Don’t waste your money
or your time. It’s the worst book I’ve ever read and I’ve read about
everything.”

Translation: tl;dr

My response: (laughs)  Imperial Rome copied at the time of the Roman Catholic Church… that pretty much says it all.  But it least it is an honest review, as clearly, if the idea of combining Rome and fantasy bores you, A THRONE OF BONES is almost surely the most boring book you could ever hope to read. 

No book is for everyone because we all have different tastes.  Some read fiction, some don’t.  Some love history, some find it tedious in the extreme.  But these reviews should help underline the importance of reviewing the books you like, especially those books you love.  So, later today, I’ll be posting a review of a book I recently read that I really liked, and which I would recommend reading.

Hesse and Spengler

Now, I could be completely off-base here, but in reading the following passage, I was left with the very distinct impression that reading Spengler very likely inspired, in some way, Hermann Hesse’s creation of the magnificent Glass Bead Game.

“Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and — what has perhaps been impossible hitherto — things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

“But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics,and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect….

“Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.”

I should be very interested to learn if Hesse ever happened to read Spengler prior to his writing Das Glaspernspiel.

Book review by Jonathan Moeller

Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, reviews A THRONE OF BONES:

A THRONE OF BONES, by Vox Day, is one of the more ambitious epic fantasy novels I have read…. I enjoyed the historical verisimilitude of the novel, especially the depiction of the Amorran republican legions. (It is in my opinion a bit fallacious to argue for historical “realism” in fantasy novels – if a book has characters that can shoot lightning bolts from their fingers, the writer have taken realism out back to be shot. Historical verisimilitude is then the best the writer can reach for, then, something I’ve done myself.)  In that vein, battle scenes are very well done. Additionally, none of the characters are caricatures. All of the nobles involved in, say, the Amorran civil war, have completely understandable motives for their actions, and none of the (human) characters are villainous so much as they hold incompatible views of how the world should work.

The author deliberately wrote the book in response to the moral nihilism of many contemporary epic fantasy novels. Many elements, in particular the civil war between noble families, seems to owe its inspiration to George R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (though SONG was based on the War of the Roses, and A THRONE OF BONES seems based on the Social War of the Roman Republic.) The character of Corvus, for example, seems similar to Ned Stark in SONG, and like Ned Stark, makes a honorable but nonetheless stupid decision that has long-reaching bad consequences….

Read the rest of the review at Jonathan’s site.  He has some interesting comments about the way the technologically-empowered bypassing of the conventional gatekeepers is likely to improve fiction.

Reading List 2012

The book I enjoyed most of the 66 I read this year was China Mieville’s The City and the City, followed by Charles Stross’s The Apocalypse Codex and Hugh Howey’s Wool. The
worst thing I read this year was Charlaine Harris’s Deadlocked,
which demonstrated to me that it is a very good thing HBO’s True Blood is increasingly diverging from the books that inspired it.  Easily the most disappointing book, however, was the collective effort that is The Mongoliad.  I thought the idea and the subject matter sounded brilliant, but it turned out to be surprisingly tedious.

On the non-fiction side, while I quite enjoyed both Machiavelli’s Discourses and Keen’s Debunking Economics, (and got more than a few chuckles out of Krugman’s latest), Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design was actually very useful to me this year.  Sam Harris’s Free Will, on the other hand, was a short and poorly-reasoned extended essay that fell well short of his previous effort in the subject matter.

Keep in mind these ratings are not necessarily statements about a book’s literary quality, they are merely casual observations of how much I happened to enjoy reading the book at the time.  When I review a book and rate it for quality as well as enjoyment, I rate it out of ten.

FIVE STARS
The City and the City, China Mieville
The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross
Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Niccolo Machiavelli
Kraken, China Mieville
Pegasus Bridge, Stephen Ambrose
Debunking Economics, Steve Keen
Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey
Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, Adams and Dormans
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle

FOUR STARS
Cold Days, Jim Butcher
War Room, Michael Holley
Feast of Souls, Celia Friedman
Wings of Wrath, Celia Friedman
The Discoverers, Daniel Boorstin
The Devil’s Brood, Sharon K. Penman
A Shadow in Summer, Daniel Abraham
With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Robert Silverberg
Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, PG Wodehouse
End This Depression Now!, Paul Krugman

THREE STARS
Absolute Monarchs, John Julius Norwich
The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson
Lionheart, Sharon K. Penman
A Betrayal in Winter, Daniel Abraham
An Autumn War, Daniel Abraham
The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham
Legacy of Kings, Celia Friedman
NFIB v. Sebelius: Five Takes, Reynolds and Denning
White Moon, Red Dragon, David Wingrove
I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett
Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
Faded Steel Heat, Glen Cook
Whispering Nickel Idols, Glen Cook
Cruel Zinc Melodies, Glen Cook
Sharpe’s Tiger, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Triumph, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Fortress, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Prey, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Rifles, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Gold, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Escape, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Fury, Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe’s Trafalgar, Bernard Cornwell
Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth, Simon Green
Hell to Pay, Simon Green
The Unnatural Inquirer, Simon Green
Just Another Judgment Day, Simon Green
The Good, The Bad, and The Uncanny, Simon Green
A Hard Day’s Knight, Simon Green
The Bride Wore Black Leather, Simon Green

TWO STARS
Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik
The 100-Yard War, Greg Emmanuel
The Mongoliad: Book One, Neal Stephenson
Songs of Love and Death, George RR Martin, ed.
Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting, David Reed
Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold
Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold
Deflation and Depression: Is There an Empirical Link, Atkeson and Kehoe
Beneath the Tree of Heaven, David Wingrove
An Acceptable Time, Madeleine L’Engle

ONE STAR
Deadlocked, Charlaine Harris
Free Will, Sam Harris