Tag: corpocracy

John Scalzi Killed Science Fiction

That’s something of a stretch, but there is a surprisingly good case to be made for it. Back in 2015, around the time SJWs Always Lie was #1 in its Amazon category for 18 straight months, Tor Books surprised everyone in science fiction by signing John Scalzi to a multi-million-dollar 13-book deal, as per The Guardian.

American science fiction author John Scalzi has signed a 10-year, 13-book deal with publishers Tor, which will net him $3.4m.

Scalzi is the author of 19 novels, including the highly-acclaimed Old Man’s War, the Star Trek-esque, Hugo award-winning satire Redshirts, and his latest, the near-future apocalyptic medical thriller Lock In.

All three of those works have been optioned for TV and film adaptations, and the title of his most recent novel is perhaps pertinent, as the author – who has a long-running blog and a strong online presence – now finds himself effectively working for Tor (part of Macmillan and one of the biggest science fiction and fantasy publishers in the US) full-time for the next decade.

The deal was reported at the weekend via the New York Times and has been signed and sealed in fairly short order.

This was very surprising, since Scalzi was, in most people’s eyes, a third-tier writer at best, not a legend like Jerry Pournelle or Larry Niven, and definitely not an author capable of filling the shoes of former Tor Books authors like Robert Jordan or the various game tie-in novels that had been providing Tor with bestsellers for years. Scalzi himself once noted how modest his career had been:

Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;

Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;

Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;

Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.

The problem is that Scalzi was never more than a mediocre mid-list writer who was a) very good at marketing himself, b) a ripoff artist who wrote pastiches rather than original fiction, and c) shamelessly dishonest. He managed to convince everyone that he was far more popular than he actually was – we all genuinely believed he had the biggest blog in science fiction when his site traffic was actually a fraction of mine – and he managed to parley that false perception into lead author status with Tor Books, the biggest publisher in science fiction.

Now, signing a lead author who can’t deliver and creates massive opportunity costs is an existential problem for the publisher. Tor Books could have, and should have, been pushing Brandon Sanderson and Charles Stross as lead authors, signing Larry Correia away from Baen Books, keeping John C. Wright in the fold, and locking down the best up-and-coming writers in the field at the time.

Instead, they gambled on this guy. And, as is evident from his latest offering, they gambled and lost. Here is a review of his latest novel, which can’t even bother to pretend to be science fiction.

The first thing to address after reading this cover to cover is the claimed genre: science-fiction. Most publications by Tor Books are in the fantasy or science-fiction genre. Most of Scalzi’s published works are in the science-fiction genre but Starter Villain is not a science-fiction novel by any stretch of the term. It is set in the present day and frequently references current things like the protagonist’s late father’s 2003 Nissan Maxima, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Zoom and plenty of contemporary political and economic issues. There is some mention or special technologies but none that are considered beyond the realm of possibility. The only genuine science-fiction aspects are genetically modified cats and dolphins that are sentient and play a significant part in the narrative. There is no real explanation of how they became so and readers are just told that research was done and they exist. 

The novel is really more a parody of the James Bond movies (though not the novels) and I would place it in the same genre as the Austin Powers films. These films had time travel, characters being cryogenic frozen and “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” but they still weren’t science-fiction films. Nor really were the Bond films they parodied despite featuring unique gadgets and vehicles that were generally beyond the technology of the time. Unlike the Austin Powers films, this book isn’t funny at all. I’m sure plenty of Scalzi’s fans found it hilarious and anyone else who finds frequent profanity and snark funny might too.

The novel is written in first-person from the perspective of a character named Charlie. He is a divorced, out-of-work journalist who makes his ends barely meet as a substitute teacher. He’s in his mid thirties, living in his deceased father’s home and his only friend is a cat named Hera. This all changes when he learns his enigmatic and rich maternal uncle has died and that he is the heir to his fortune. All he previously knew of this uncle was that he owned parking garages but soon discovers he is in fact a villain.

The premise is something that could work really well if done right: what if a normal guy one day found out he was heir to a cartoon super villain’s fortune? Scalzi scuttles this promising premise almost as soon as the novel begins. One of his problems is he obviously doesn’t want to make his self-insert protagonist a genuine villain but still wants to call him one. Even his deceased uncle turns out not to be an actual villain but just an eccentric trying to stop real villainy through legal loopholes and other less evil methods… I chose this one expecting that he would have improved his craft in the twenty years he’s been writing. Yet, this was worse than I could believe and I’m confident that had Scalzi not already had a recognisable name, that this would never have been published. It reads much more like a young adult novel than proper science-fiction; only with a lot of cursing and general self-indulgence.

How very… tedious. It’s really rather remarkable. Can you imagine how many copies of ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT the publisher of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson’s bestselling epic fantasies could have sold if they had published it and given it the kind of marketing push they gave imitative mediocrities like Redshirts, that feeble attempt at ripping off Asimov’s Foundation, and trying to push N… K… Jemisin’s second-person abominations on everyone?

Instead, the word from insiders is that Tor Books is in hard decline; it probably won’t die as soon as Baen Books, but it is unlikely to survive the disastrous Patrick Nielsen Hayden-era for long. This is what happens when institutions take their position in an industry for granted, forget what it was that put them in that position in the first place, and allow themselves to be run by employees who are more interested in pushing their personal agendas than actually running the business in a professional manner that permits future success.

I certainly don’t regret how it turned out. Castalia House regularly publishes category bestsellers on Amazon. Castalia Library is creating some of the most beautiful books in the world. We have our own bindery, our own translation machines, and we’re bringing forgotten books from foreign languages to the English-speaking world for the first time every single week.

But as a business professional familiar with the history of science fiction publishing, it’s hard not to look at how Tor Books has methodically demolished both itself and science fiction and wonder what things might have looked like if PNH had been able to understand that a) a midlist writer can never be a lead author, b) the author of a popular pastiche is not going to reliably produce popular original fiction, and c) a publisher should always seek to publish the best authors in the field, not the most politically-harmonious ones.

One can’t blame Scalzi for grifting. And it’s certainly not his fault that PNH and the other decision-makers at Tor Books were dumb enough to fall for his grift. But what began as a very bad business decision on the part of Tor appears to be heading for an ending in complete farce.

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How Galaxy’s Edge Damaged Disney

It was, of course, Kathleen Kennedy. Again.

Disney invested billions of dollars in the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge design and construction, based on a fictional world called “Batuu.” They hyped up technology and immersive elements meant to enhance the guest experience and allow for fans to spend hours in Galaxy’s Edge…And now, after just a few years in operation, new leadership at the top is completely changing the entire plan behind Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. In the process, admitting they completely missed the mark with their multi-billion dollar project.

One former top executive at Walt Disney World once explained in an interview why Galaxy’s Edge focused on the new trilogy and not the beloved original movies and characters. Because Kathleen Kennedy gave awful advice to Bob Iger.

“We got a call one day,” said former WDW VP Dan Cockerell. “They said, ‘Well, we got some news for you all.’ And the Imagineering guys, they’ve heard this line many, many times during their careers. And I had never been through this.” “They said, ‘Well, yesterday Bob Iger met with Kathleen Kennedy, who as a lot people may know was sort of George Lucas’ protégé and headed up Lucasfilm. And they had a conversation. They had a meeting. And Kathleen Kennedy, her point of view was, there are way more Disney Star Wars stories ahead of us than behind us. So we really should think about do we want to build a Tatooine, and build what all the fifty-somethings remember Star Wars is or do we want to build something else which is going to appeal to all the upcoming generations who are going to know the new stories.'”

Don’t focus the land on characters people like, focus it instead on the new movies, Kennedy said. And Iger listened. Well, those new movies have come and gone, and “Star Wars” has never meant less in the national conversation. Sure enough, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, Disney announced this month that they were bringing Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker into Galaxy’s Edge, as well as finally incorporating John Williams’ beloved score from the original films.

That’s how you know they’re admitting they made a gigantic mistake listening to Kathleen Kennedy.

Bringing these characters into Galaxy’s Edge makes no logical or thematic sense, particularly since they’re being portrayed as their younger selves from the original trilogy. But Disney is desperate to make their gigantic investment in Galaxy’s Edge worth it, so they’re hoping characters people actually like will bring new fans and keep them there longer.

It’s a series of unforced errors. They made mediocre movies that have been mostly forgotten, assumed that people cared about Rey and Kylo Ren or Fin or Poe Dameron, and then bet billions of dollars that their newer stories would be more popular moving forward than the old ones.

Whenever you see an executive making an argument about the need to appeal to the new audience, which is young, superficial, and mostly hypothetical, at the expense of the old audience, which is older, better-off, larger, and loyal, you know a business disaster is in the making. Although, in this case, the ill wind did blow some good for Nick Cole’s book sales due to the fortuitous name chosen by Disney.

It’s necessary to appeal to new arguments in order to grow. That’s why we try new things. That’s why I’ve got something like five different sites now. But never, ever, are those things done at the expense of the tried-and-true elements of the community. Even to this day, I still usually post here first.

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IRGC vs Corpocracy

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declares war on the corporations of Clown World:

IRGC Warning to the Aggressive US Ruling Regime: You have ignored our repeated warnings regarding the necessity to stop terrorist operations, and today a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in terrorist attacks carried out by you and your Israeli allies; and since the primary element in the design and tracking of assassination targets is American information technology and artificial intelligence companies, in response to these terrorist operations, the main institutions involved in the terrorist operations will be legitimate targets for us.

We advise employees of these institutions to immediately stay away from their workplaces to preserve their lives. Residents of the areas surrounding these terrorist companies in all countries of the region must also leave a one-kilometer radius from their locations and go to a safe place.

Companies that actively participate in terrorist designs will be subject to countermeasures for every assassination operation. Announced as follows:

  1. Cisco
  2. HP
  3. Intel
  4. Oracle
  5. Microsoft
  6. Apple
  7. Google
  8. Meta
  9. IBM
  10. Dell
  11. Palantir
  12. Nvidia
  13. JPMorgan
  14. Tesla
  15. GE
  16. Cymer Solutions
  17. G42
  18. Boeing

All I can say is that if ARTIST Graphics had won the 3D chip wars, it would never have been on that list. I find it difficult to believe that Jensen actually has a dog in this hunt, but then, I haven’t spoken to him in nearly 30 years. But it is interesting to see how much more clear Iran is on its real enemies than either Russia or China appear to be.

If you want to force the USA to end the war quickly, I doubt it would be necessary to take out more than two or three CEOs or corporate headquarters before they’d be demanding the politicians put an end to the hostilities.

If it were an Arab country, I’d assume it was just noise. But with Persians… the threat might actually have some teeth.

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OpenAI vs Anthropic

As is usually the case, the big two of AI are rapidly taking shape, with the only real question being who will play the role of the number three spoiler, Grok, Gemini, or some as yet unknown player.

Both companies are now building AI that acts inside applications rather than generating text about them, and six launches in eight days confirm that the two labs have arrived at the same conclusions about the future of their products.

But as the capabilities of their tools approach parity, everything else about these rival titans is rapidly diverging. In the span of three weeks, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history and signed a classified-use agreement with the Pentagon. Anthropic simultaneously lost its military contracts and was designated a supply-chain risk, then launched a $100 million enterprise push backed by private equity talks.

In January, this publication argued that OpenAI and Anthropic had chosen fundamentally different financial strategies. What we are seeing now is a concrete expression of those strategies. How each company is financing itself is now shaping its trajectory more than anything it ships…

As ChatGPT and Claude approach functional parity, enterprise customers are gaining the freedom to choose between them based on whom they wish to buy from rather than which tools they need. Upstream cloud infrastructure, vendor commitments, political exposure, and long-term flexibility will become increasingly important factors in any given company’s choice of AI platform.

It’s become obvious that Facebook badly misplayed its hand despite its initial advantages. The $80 billion they sunk into the idiocy of 3D avatars to no avail, including rebranding the company around it, would not only have gone a long way into AI investment, but is likely to go down in business history as one of the all-time corporate catastrophes with Blackberry ceding the mobile phone market to Apple and Bill Gates failing to notice the importance of the Internet in The Road Ahead.

It also underlines the falsity of the idea that Zuckerberg was ever a technological boy genius rather than the CIA catspaw that everyone now understands he and the founders of Google were. Anyhow, read the whole thing there.

In other AI-related news, I’m very pleased to observe that Claude’s one-million-token context window is now available through the web interface as well as through the API. I’m already making excellent use of that, as it should reduce translation time by as much as 50 percent.

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No Children, No Economy

By the time the next economic depression bottoms, it will be illegal for women to not have children in many countries:

Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:

People aren’t having any children.

US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.

It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.

Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.

The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate – every payday, every year, for four decades – begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.

That’s why the central planners of the world turned toward mass immigration. You need consumers to keep the GDP growth going, and with fewer children, there were going to be fewer consumers. Of course, the problem is that the macroeconomic models don’t account for quality of consumer, so it’s only very recently that the mainstream economists have begun to realize that lending to immigrants from grasshopper cultures is absolutely guaranteed to crash the banking system because none of those loans will ever be repaid.

And this is just on the consumption side. Imagine what lowering IQ, time preferences, and productivity does on the production side, although you don’t need to imagine it anymore. We already know what a calamity diversity and inclusion have turned out to be for the US corpocracy.

Indeed, based on a 2025 Danish study, it may even be necessary to ban paid female employment. Such a policy would indubitably be sexist, anti-feminist, and currently illegal in most Western countries. But no one living in any society that elects to show up for the future is going to care what the norms of a few long-dead 21st-century societies happened to be.

Egalitarianism is already conceptually dead. It won’t be many more decades before people stop believing in it.

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300 Down

One-third of the Washington Post’s staff is being laid off. Over 300 employees were let go today.

Good to know. Only 600 to go.

Sit by the river long enough and eventually the bodies of your enemies float past you. There are few things I enjoy more than reading about the layoffs of journalists.

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WhatsApp is Not Secure

Don’t kid yourself. There is no such thing as online security. Everything you do online is known, so don’t even bother trying to fool yourself otherwise. Yes, I know what Signal and WhatsApp claim. It doesn’t matter, because they are highly incentivized, and quite possibly legally obligated, to lie to you about it.

US federal authorities are investigating allegations that staff at WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms Inc. had access to message content despite the company marketing the app as protected by end-to-end encryption, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Special agents from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security have been examining claims from former Meta contractors who alleged that they and staff at Meta had “unfettered access” to WhatsApp messages.

One contractor told an investigator that a Facebook team employee confirmed they could “go back a ways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages,” including in criminal cases, according to an agent’s report reviewed by Bloomberg.

WhatsApp, which was acquired by Meta in 2014, insists on its website that “no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share” what a user says.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone had also denied the allegations, stating that “what these individuals claim is not possible because WhatsApp, its employees, and its contractors, cannot access people’s encrypted communications.”

The only thing the US authorities care about it is that they, too, have access to the unencrypted files.

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Karma is a Bitch

Amazon just laid off 16,000 more workers. I would be willing to bet this explains our groundless termination, as well as how quickly it was upheld upon “review”.

Amazon said Wednesday it plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October. In a blog post, the company wrote that the layoffs were part of an ongoing effort to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” That coincides with a push to invest heavily in artificial intelligence.

The job reductions come just a few months after October’s layoffs, when 14,000 employees were let go across Amazon’s corporate workforce. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found “additional places we can remove layers.”

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, didn’t rule out more job cuts in the future, but said the company isn’t trying to create “a new rhythm” of broad layoffs every few months.

It also might explain why the executive to whom I appealed the KDP decision was a little too busy to pay any attention to one minor KDP account right away, because apparently, he did us the favor of stepping in again and telling whomever was left at KDP to stop screwing around and reinstate us. I was a little confused this morning to see Castalia’s inbox had been bombarded with email alerts from KDP informing us repeatedly that a new book was available through Amazon and Audible, as well as this one from a different member of the Content Review Team.

I can confirm that your account is now active and you have full access to your Bookshelf. Please let us know if you still cannot access your account, so we can further investigate this issue.

None of this means that the lesson about platforms doesn’t apply. But it does give us more time to build our own correctly.

Being back on Amazon also lets us see that PROBABILITY ZERO received its first one-star review, courtesy of one of Dennis McCarthy’s readers.

Bryan H. Wildenthal
1.0 out of 5 stars This book is pseudoscientific garbage
This books is complete and utter GARBAGE and pseudoscience. The author doesn’t understand basic statistics and blatantly misuses scientific papers he relies on. Dennis McCarthy, author of widely praised articles and a book on evolution and biogeography, has demolished Vox Day’s argument in a short recent blog post. Google “Dennis McCarthy why Probability Zero is wrong evolution.”

Clearly this is some new use of the word “demolished” with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. But it’s an apt demonstration of how midwits operate. They don’t understand any of the words they use, which is why they rely upon others to do their thinking for them, then posture grandly, and confidently, with absolutely no awareness of how ridiculous they look or how insupportable their position is.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure what happened is that some KDP employees of the “I fucking love Science” variety were informed that they were laid off and decided to strike a blow for Science while they still could. So it was SJW shenanigans after all.

By the way, after all that, 死神と悪魔 is finally available. So, if you’re one of the six people who read fluent Japanese reading this blog, you’re all set now.

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Why the Economy is Collapsing

We have terminated your KDP account because we found that you do not have the necessary rights to publish the book(s) listed below. If you have documentation proving you have the necessary rights to publish this book, please reply to this message and attach it to your email.

If you’re having trouble finding Probability Zero on Amazon, or any of our other books, this is why. Somehow, its system saw that Castalia had submitted 死神と悪魔, the Japanese edition of Death and the Devil, and decided that we were infringing upon the rights of Editions Alpines, which publishes the German translation called Der Tod und Der Teufel and somehow concluded that we don’t have the necessary rights to publish a different language translation of the book we originally published.

Anyhow, we hope to have this resolved today. But it’s another object lesson in the extreme fragility of trying to work in today’s centralized business environment. And it’s a reminder of the importance of building your own platforms and never being reliant upon the mainstream ones.

UPDATE: I heard back from KDP. Now they suddenly need to look into it. Which could take until next week. But I think they’ll find a reason to expedite the restoration.

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Immigration and Outsourcing

Immigration and outsourcing are not the answer to greater profits over time. To the contrary, they are a certain path toward destroying the very organization for which they are supposed to be generating increased profits.

Ubisoft is on the verge of complete collapse due to terrible decisions like trying to develop the new Prince of Persia in India, as legendary WoW producer Grummz explains:

Prince of Persia, why it was REALLY cancelled. Insider tells all. “The game is so bad…” This from my Ubisoft sources:

  • 90% developed by Ubisoft India.
  • Project was a disaster.
  • Transferred last minute to Ubisoft Montreal to “fix” it.
  • Game unfixable.
  • Cancelled.

Note that Ubisoft Montreal spent FOUR YEARS trying to fix it and they couldn’t. I can attest that my one experience working with Indian developers for 3M on a sales training software project was an absolute and utter catastrophe. They couldn’t implement even the simplest, most basic features with any degree of reliability, and as far as the graphics went, they appeared to be limited to the stick-figure level.

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