Tag: mailvox

Random book notes

Huggums asks about other novels with military action:

I really enjoyed all the short stories leading to A Throne of Bones and
I’m halfway through the novel now. The battles are what really pull me
in. Are there any other novels with that level of tactical detail that
you’d recommend?

That’s a good question.  There really aren’t many in the fantasy genre that spring immediately to mind, and even the historical Roman fiction out there tends to concentrate on the personalities rather than the tactics.  The Malazan Books of the Fallen contain some, although it’s more akin to the Bataan Death March than anything out of Jomini or Vegetius and reading the 10-volume Malazan series feels a bit like a literary death march at times.

I haven’t read Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles, but based on his Sharpe books, which I have read, I suspect they will have a fair amount of military tactics.  In the latter, he provides some of the most detailed description of Napoleonic tactics I’ve seen in fiction. Unfortunately, I imagine the former will probably also have a character who always gets – and loses – the girl ala James Bond, even on battlefields where one would not imagine there could possibly be a girl for miles around.

Harry Turtledove’s Misplaced Legion, which I belatedly discovered was more or less ripped straight out of Procopius, is probably his best work and also contains an interesting take on tactics as a conventional Roman legion is forced to adapt to fighting foes akin to the historical enemies of the Byzantine empire.

In general, there are a lot more novels that utilize naval tactics, and ersatz naval tactics in space, than infantry tactics.  But if anyone has any additional recommendations for Huggums, please feel free to throw them out there.  As a few sharp-eyed Selenoth fans have noted, the tactical elements within the Selenoth series will remain strong; the question is who will be utilizing the Tactics of Asclepiodotus.

In other news, I was surprised and delighted to discover how unexpectedly good A Presumption of Death turned out to be.  Dorothy Sayers is my third favorite mystery writer, after Ellis Peters and Agatha Christie, (so much for the theories of my literary misogyny), and so my expectations from a book that was cobbled together from the Wimsey Papers were pretty low.  But Jill Paton Walsh did an astonishing job of capturing the essence of Sayers’s characters; she wisely chose to make Harriet Vane the center of the novel.  While the wit does not sparkle and the erudition is more plodding, both are there and the plot is considerably superior to any of the proper Wimsey novels.

Walsh doesn’t give in to the temptation to modernize either the characters or the setting; the Christianity of the English people of the World War II setting is deep and reminds the reader of the civilized world we have lost.  The nobility, the dignity, and the humanity of even the most common people is striking in comparison with the parade of vulgar fools, cowards and moral degenerates who fancy themselves a progressive advancement from their predecessors.  It’s easily the best novel I’ve read for the first time this year.

The author adds in a note:

From November 1939 to January 1940 Dorothy L. Sayers made a series of contributions to the Spectator magazine, consisting of mock letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family, about war-time conditions like blackout, evacuation, rationing, and the need for the public to take personal responsibility: ‘They must not continually ask for leadership – they must lead themselves.’

These contributions, usually now referred to as ‘The Wimsey Papers’ in effect lay out the characters in the crime novels like pieces on a chess board during the opening moves of a game. They tell us where everyone was. Lord Peter was somewhere abroad, on a secret mission under the direction of the Foreign Office; Bunter was with him; Harriet had taken her own children and those of her sister-in-law to the country, the loathed Helen, Duchess of Denver had joined the Ministry of Instruction and Morale, etc. etc.

The Wimsey Papers are almost, but not quite, the latest information that Dorothy L Sayers provided about her characters. There is also a short story called ‘Talboys’, contained in the volume ‘Striding Folly’ which shows Peter and Harriet and their children living in their country farmhouse peacefully together, and which must refer to 1942.

The Wimsey Papers are not fiction, and were not intended to be read in a continuous chunk. Some of them are about details of war-time history that would now require extensive footnotes in explication. But they do afford an authoritative foothold for an account of the Wimsey family in 1940. I have opened this novel with a selection from them, and incorporated insights and information from them in the narrative where I could.

I should be very pleased indeed if anyone playing in the Selenoth sandbox, now or in the future, manages to do so as effectively as Ms Walsh.  It has definitely interested me in her own novels.  If this is fan fiction, as a few puritans have described it, it must come very near to the Form of that despised form.

Tom Simon’s Lord Talon’s Revenge is quite good, although it is the sort of novel that is most likely to be appreciated by a writer or a student of the traditional fantasy genre.  One imagines Matthew David Surridge would have a field day with it.  I’ve also been re-reading Stephen Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels and while they remain fairly entertaining, it’s a little disconcerting to discover how socio-sexually juvenile and logically nonsensical they are.  I hope to put a few more substantive reviews together in the next week or two, but in the event that I do not, I thought I would at least mention them here.

Mailvox: what martial art

The Baseball Savant has been bulking up:

I remember asking you this
awhile back but I’ve went through some physical changes. I’m going to
start to really try and master a martial art. I remember talking about
brazilian jiu-jitsu because I thought at 5’10 it might be better to
ground fight given my lack of height but I think I remember you saying
something about akido because of my strength at potentially being a
striker. I think when I e-mailed you I was around 200lbs but now I’m 245lbs and have been doing some lifting. My best lifts are:

BENCH: I can do 225lbs for 49reps and my last max was 430 although it might be higher.
SQUAT: 550lbs
MILITARY: I do bells for this and my gym only goes up to 135lbs but I can get reps (6-8) with these

DEADLIFT: 600lbs for one

What is your recommendation on this? Is it still strike-oriented?

Okay, that’s ridiculous.  That’s 3x more reps than I can do at 225, or rather, than I could do before I dinged my shoulder.  Anyhow, with that sort of power at his disposal, BS probably doesn’t need to do much in the way of strike-oriented training.  Strike-training allows one to deliver more power through speed and technique, but when one already has power in truckloads, it’s not necessary.

However, all the power in the world doesn’t do much good when one doesn’t have the reflexes, moves, and combinations that come from training.  So, I would look at something in the grappling range that still uses strikes, in other words, aikido rather than judo.  But some strike-oriented sparring is still a good idea. Ender does judo and I’ve noticed that while he and his fellow judoka have an enhanced ability to defend themselves, it hasn’t given them the heightened sense of alertness or the hair-trigger fighting reflexes one is accustomed to seeing in a well-trained strike-oriented fighter.

Aikido may do so; I don’t know.  But either way, I would encourage BS to look for an aikido school that utilizes multi-discipline sparring.  At the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for getting hit.

Mailvox: on moderation

Halojones-Fan erroneously believes moderation equates to copyright and responsibility:

Someone as smart as you figure yourself to be should understand that, if
you’re talking in a legal-proceedings sense, there is no such thing as
“light” moderation. It’s like saying you’re “a little bit” pregnant.
If you delete comments for content, beyond simple “this is spam”, then
you’re implying that you review and approve of whatever stays on the
blog. You provide the discussion forum; you allow people to wander in
and use it; you are as responsible for the content as the editor of a
newspaper is responsible for what’s in his rag.

That moderating is hard is not an excuse to not moderate.

“But it’s other people saying these things, not me!” Then let them get their own blogs.

First, his argument is intrinsically self-contradictory.  How is spam excerpted from this magical review and approve process?  Furthermore, the fact that a comment is not deleted does not mean it has been reviewed and approved; it does not even mean that it has been read.

The newspaper comparison is a false equivalence. The very important difference between me and the editor of a newspaper is that the editor of the newspaper is soliciting and paying for the content he publishes.  The newspaper also often owns the copyright for the material he publishes, whereas I do not solicit comments, pay for them, or claim ownership of their copyright.

To say that I am responsible for the comments made by the commenters on this blog is more closely akin to claiming that the owner of a restaurant is responsible for the comments made by the people who come to eat there.  The fact that the comments are written here rather than spoken is irrelevant; it is totally absurd to attempt to hold any blogger responsible for the free speech of his commenters and I am unaware of any case in which a blogger has been legally held responsible for the comments of his commenters regardless of whether moderation is allowed or not.

Furthermore, even in the legal sense, there is a distinction between light moderation and heavy moderation, just as there is a definite legal difference between a woman who is pregnant for two weeks and one who is pregnant for eight months.  Halojones-fan point is observably absurd, as the law quite clearly distinguishes between a woman who is “lightly pregnant” and a woman who is “heavily pregnant” in numerous ways.

Mailvox: on Scalzi the author

Patrick is curious about my opinion of John Scalzi as an SF/F author:

Vox, his politics aside, what is your assessment of the Chief Rabbit as a novelist? China Mieville, for example, is a Marxist lunatic, but I read one of his novels and found it creative–if a little dull.  Do
you think that Scalzi’s would be more or less successful as a novelist
if he stopped blogging, or if he merely stopped the political posts?

My assessment is that Scalzi is a one-book writer of modest literary talent who has prolonged his writing career through a combination of a) unusually good self-marketing skills, and, b) stunt writing.

In the recent history of publishing, there are a lot of one-book writers, by which I mean writers who have one genuinely good book in them and nothing more regardless of how many books they write.  Dave Eggers is a very good example of this while Jay McInerney is another.  I think David Foster Wallace would have proven to be one too; I even suspect the painfully self-aware Wallace knew this and the knowledge may have played some role in his suicide.

In most cases, the reason is simple: the writer is writing about his life.  Very few of us have lives so interesting that they are capable of supporting multiple books about them, so once the writer has finished his book about himself, he literally has nothing else about which to write.  Now, that’s not the case with Scalzi; Old Man’s War is obviously not about his life. But although it’s a pretty good science fiction novel, (you may recall I reviewed it favorably), in hindsight it can be seen to contain the seeds of Scalzi’s subsequent decline as a writer.  First, there was the transparently silly bit about the atheist who rebukes the bigoted Christian by – you’ll never guess – quoting John 8:7.  How totally new and creative and different than anything that had ever been done before! That little scene was a hint concerning his intellectual laziness as well as the ideological inclinations that have increasingly taken over his public persona. Second, and more importantly, there were the heavily derivative aspects that briefly caused everyone to wonder if a new Heinlein had appeared upon the scene.

Not so much. What we didn’t realize at the time is that the Heinlein elements were only there because Scalzi is insufficiently creative. He’s essentially a fan-fic writer whose derivative works are publishable, not unlike EL James.  This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy if you want to sell books, just ask Terry Brooks or every post-Laurell K. Hamilton author of urban fantasy.  But it’s the exact opposite of being a good storyteller, much less a great science fiction writer like Heinlein.  I am not the anti-Scalzi, China Mieville is, their political kinship notwithstanding.

Scalzi sent me The Android’s Dream when it came out and I also read The Ghost Brigades.  And that was when I stopped reading his books, not because I had anything against him, but because the former was abysmally unfunny and the latter was uninteresting. I didn’t review them here because I didn’t have anything positive to say about either book and I didn’t wish to poison relations that had improved after our initial encounter.  It didn’t surprise me when he went on to publish books like Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts, since by that time I’d already pegged him for a derivative stunt writer.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with stunt writing.  It requires an amount of cleverness and can definitely sell books, as AJ Jacobs has shown.  The problem is that you can’t repeat the stunt, but have to continue coming up with new ones in order to stay relevant.  Scalzi’s latest stunt, the serial ebook, was a good one, but has already worn thin.

I suspect Scalzi knows his limitations better than anyone, which is why he has been attempting to move on to television, movies, and games.  If he is successful in making any of those moves, it wouldn’t surprise me if he stopped writing novels because he obviously doesn’t write for the love of it or because he has so many stories to tell.  He’s a true professional in that he writes to earn money, and he does an exceptionally good job in that regard at a time when it is difficult to do so. I don’t think even his biggest fans grasp how gifted a self-marketing BS artist he is; had he gone into Internet technology rather than writing, he would be a very wealthy man on his fourth failing VC-backed venture by now.

I actually have great respect for Scalzi’s ability to make bestselling soup out of what is very thin literary gruel.  If Tor knew anything about business beyond scooping up genre awards and paying for one-week bestseller list placements, they would hire him as an editor and turn him into a James Patterson-style book factory churning out three or four books per year. It’s an absurd waste of talent for Scalzi to spend time writing his derivative mediocrities when he could be marketing them.  There are 500 SFWA members who could write them as well and at least 150 who would produce better books.

In answer to the final question, I think Scalzi would be far less successful as a bookseller if he stopped blogging, and I think it would be a huge mistake for him to stop the political posts because they are an important part of his appeal to his most loyal fans, the great majority of whom are SF/F readers.  Nor do the political posts appear to hurt at all him with the right. Conservatives and libertarians have always bought left-wing fiction because they are accustomed being offered little choice in the matter.

Mailvox: Mike Resnick clarifies

One of the chief targets of the SFWA pinkshirts corrects two misconceptions and explains a few things concerning Bulletingate:

A couple of corrections. I -asked- Laura not to get involved in this. I
know how much vituperation can get spewn by the hatemongers.

Also, I had nothing to do with the Campbell Award. I never created it, administered it, or won it.

For
those who haven’t read the offending articles (in which case, you have a
lot in common with the screamers): in issue #200, at the request of our
(female) editor, we wrote a very complimentary article about editors of
that gender…but we had the temerity to call them “ladies” rather than
“females”, and to state that Bea Mahaffey, who edited Other Worlds 63
years ago and died a couple of decades ago (and was a close personal
friend of mine) was beautiful. Those were sins #1 and #2. After the hate
mail began appearing, we committed Sin #3 in issue #202: we defended
our right to call Bea Mahaffey beautiful, and our (female) editor’s
right to run a generic, non-naked, non-bare-breasted warrior woman on
the cover. They’re still screaming for our deaths by slow torture. 🙂

It
got so bad that our editor, Jean Rabe, resigned, not just as editor but
as a member of SFWA. And for the record, I hired her as my assistant on
the Stellar Guild line of books 5 minutes later.

Corrections duly noted. Although one can only imagine the shrieks of outrage when Mr. Resnick’s shockingly sexist paternalism becomes known to the pinkshirts.  I think it goes without saying that neither Jim Hines nor John Scalzi would ever be so appallingly sexist as to attempt to silence a woman’s voice in this oppressive and demeaning manner.  They’re much more inclined to hide behind, or wear, a woman’s skirt than to protect her.

Mr. Resnick, on the other hand, is sufficiently old school to wish to shield his daughter from the hatemongering pinkshirts, for which one can only commend him.  And his Stellar Guild line promises to be a significant step up for Ms Rabe from the Bulletin. The idea of publishing collaborations between established writers and their proteges is a good one and something I can fully support, having been the beneficiary of a similar collaboration with the Original Cyberpunk in the early days of my SF/F career.

It is amusing to note that despite SFWA being an organization originally founded to professionalize the relations between SF writers and SF publishers, this latter-day parody finds itself engaged in furious attacks on new model editors and publishers like Mr. Resnick and myself.  One suspects that one factor contributing to the pinkshirts’ unmitigated rage is their shattered dreams, as Judith Tarr describes in the following manner:

Now, of course, there are so many more options. Chances are the
author will still go broke–all those stories of ebook gold mines are
exceptions, not the rule, especially for authors without large
followings or very up-to-date, popular, trendy subject matter. But the
books will see the light of day as ebooks, print-on-demand books,
audiobooks, even games or graphic novels. That doesn’t help the authors of ten or twenty or more years ago who
saw their hopes crushed, their dreams shattered, and their books
rejected by the one standard that validated them in publishers’ terms:
money and sales.

It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of SFWA members who Mr. Resnick describes as “screamers” are complete nonentities in the field, most of whom have published little more than the bare minimum to qualify for membership. They’ve taken over the organization just as it has become entirely irrelevant to the wider SF/F market.

At what point does complicity begin?

AV has a question about how responsible he is for his organization’s official position contra Christianity and traditional morality.

I have a dilemma. I work at a huge [REDACTED] company that is based in [REDACTED]. The company is publicly pro-GLBT.

This week the HR dept published an internal article describing a company-sponsored pro-gay club. There was a fairly civil discussion taking place in the comments section. (Which illustrates the obliviousness of the publisher that comments would be enabled at all). Later in the day I noticed that the Christian comments were removed and others were not).

Not huge deal, the company can do whatever they want. As a libertarian, I think its fine if they only hire GLBTs and the market can determine if that’s viable.

But it got me thinking, am I participating in evil or facilitating ungodly activities? Would Paul work there?

Clearly, if my manager asked me to sign a scroll in blood denouncing Christ, I would terminate my relationship with them. Things usually aren’t that obvious. I am sure Hitler’s secretary didn’t think anything was wrong at first either.

At what point does the negative effects from associating with worldly organization outweigh the necessity to make a living? Or as good of a living; a longer commute isn’t exactly like being thrown to the lions.

I don’t think an employee is responsible for his employer’s actions.  He is only responsible for his own. And so long as one is not lying or dissembling about one’s faith and about one’s principles, as Abraham did when asked about the nature of his relationship to his wife, then I think one can continue to work in that situation.  After all, one is expected to be in the world, merely not of it.

On the other hand, the writing is clearly already on the wall.  The fact that one can, in good conscience, continue to work there now does not mean that one is wise to do so.  It is bad enough that the corporation has embraced evil and is now openly pro-GLBT, but the fact that the Christian comments were selectively deleted indicates that it will soon be entering the next stage of actively suppressing all internal dissent.

The corporation hasn’t begun the witch hunts yet, but it will almost surely begin doing so in the relatively near future.  And that is when the ritual submissions will be required, which is when AV will no longer be able to remain there in good conscience.  Given that the clock is already ticking, I would recommend that AV begin actively looking for another job while he still has his current one.

Mailvox: time-preferences and civilization

JC is is wondering at the intrinsically anti-scientific bent of the SFWA:

I’m a white, Christian, American male of slightly above average
intelligence – but far from a super intelligence.  I’ve been ejoying
your writings since the WND days.  Since you left them, and I was forced
to discover and follow your Vox Popoli blog – my mind has been quite
blown away by the content.  I eagerly digest (or attempt to follow) the
economic posts, and love the cultural posts.  The science fiction
generally doesn’t interest me, but this latest uproar re: SWFA makes me
sick.  I just wanted to drop a note of thanks and support.  Between you
and Ann Barnhardt, I truly feel blessed to be able to see the examples
you set in steadfastly standing for Truth.
Thank you.
Now for a question.  I may have missed it, but your “h8ers” seem to
imply you’ve conferred a superior/inferior distinction to the various
human sub-species.  I don’t recall seeing anything of the sort, I
thought you just noted that they are provably different.   I
would personally assume that different groups should have nothing
approaching “equality” for quite a number of characteristics, in general
from a statistical perspective.  An overall ranking of
“superior/inferior” doesn’t seem like it would make any sense at all
unless we are discussing specific characteristics.  For instance, a
Jimmy the Greek foul in discussing fast twitch muscle fiber and athletic
performance, or perhaps predisposition to certain hereditary medical
conditions.  Or demonstrated contributions to advanced science.  
There’s nothing in my mind that would necessarily judge one of
God’s children as better/worse from an overall intrinsic value sense
simply by noting a particular subspecies (or intermingling thereof, such
as with my mixed heritage children), but it’s absurd to say we can’t
talk about relative comparisons of discrete characteristics.  I’ve
wandered a bit here, but I assure you I’m no rabbit or troll.  I guess
my question was about the conclusions drawn from the variations in
subspecies:  you never made any claims that the homo sapiens sapiens are
just dirty pieces of shit with no worth, as your critics seem to be
claiming, right?  I don’t know how you put up with these clowns without
having their insanity rub off on you just a little bit.

I have repeatedly stated that it is absolutely meaningless to claim general superiority or inferiority for any of the various human subspecies, (or, if you prefer, genetically distinct population groups), because it completely depends upon the specific metric involved.  Is a Great Dane superior to a Siberian Husky?  Is a bluebird superior to an eagle?  It all depends upon what the basis for comparison is.

Now, the reason that the SFWA pinkshirts are upset is because if one chooses the metric of “civilized”, by which I mean “the ability to participate in, maintain, and build a complex, technologically advanced civilization”, one can both observe and explain which subspecies are more and less capable of it than others, and therefore it is possible to claim that Group X is superior to Group Y on that particular basis.  As it happens, that particular ability is largely predicated on time-preferences, as longer time-preferences are required in order to a) practice self-discipline, and, b) build wealth, which are two of the primary prerequisites for maintaining and building civilizations.

One can even go so far as to say that the civilizational process, which I observe appears to take around 1,000 years on average, is largely the result of artificially selecting for individuals with longer time-preferences.  If a society regularly gets rid of its short-preferenced, hot-tempered predators and its non-savers, it will eventually find that it has built up considerable wealth as well as a population capable of cooperating and living together in relative peace.  And with cooperation and wealth, a society has the wherewithal to begin advancing technologically so long as it has entrepreneurs and elects to foster them rather than crush them in the interest of established parties.

Having shorter time preferences doesn’t make anyone “dirty pieces of shit with no worth”, any more than being physically shorter does, it simply makes them human beings with the same intrinsic human value as everyone else who happen to be less able to participate in, maintain, or build an advanced civilization.  The pure savage lives entirely in the moment and does not control his impulses. The entirely civilized individual is self-disciplined and is always capable of putting off for tomorrow, or next year, options that are available today.  This may explain why Christianity tends to be a civilizing force, as it reinforces longer time preferences by extending them beyond one’s lifetime, and why atheism, despite the higher-than-average intelligence of atheists, tends to be a barbarising force. Intelligence, while not entirely irrelevant, is somewhat of a red herring in this discussion.

The idea that there are meaningfully different time-preferences between genetically distinct population groups is a testable scientific hypothesis, although aside from some very small-scale studies on children, “the Stanford marshmallow experiment”, I am not aware of any studies that have been done in this regard.  In order for it to be useful, I would recommend a study with randomly selected adults, (corrected for income and debt), who would be offered a choice between receiving $200 in cash immediately and a check for a randomly selected amount between $250 and $1,000 in a randomly determined period of time ranging from three months to one year.  A second study would then test the ranges of the time preferences of the various population groups based on the information from the first study, and a third would test children to see if the range of their time preferences were consistent with the adult ranges.

Perhaps the hypothesis that pure homo sapiens sapiens have shorter time preferences than the various homo sapiens-homo neanderthalensis blends would hold up, or perhaps not.  But that is the primary purpose of science, to formulate and test hypotheses.  It is, I think, more than a little ironic that so many self-professed “science fiction” writers are not only horrified by a scientific perspective, but are openly and avowedly anti-science whenever science threatens to upend their cherished ideological beliefs.

Anyhow, it is because the entire concept of a racial supremacist is intrinsically nonsensical that I occasionally describe myself as an “Esquimaux supremacist”.  Having grown up in Minnesota, and having lived through more than a few bitterly cold Minnesota winters, I have a particular appreciation for the obvious and undeniable superiority of that noble people of the north.

Mailvox: the lessons of history

JD demonstrates that one of the benefits of aging is that one has the ability to look back and determine who was, and who was not, correct:

At college in 1980, my Government Studies prof also served as Secretary
of the Socialist Workers Party of Minnesota (the real one, not the DFL).
We clashed over Robert Mugabe, just coming to power in Zimbabwe, he
asserting it spelled salvation and I, that it spelled ruin.

I
e-mailed him a year or two ago, asking if I could get a retroactive
grade increase since my predictions had proven more accurate than his.
His explanation was that he truly believed Mugabe was an agrarian
reformer whose program of taking land from Whites to give to Blacks
would benefit the country; but things just hadn’t worked out as hoped.

I
didn’t bother to send him the famous Heinlein quote about Bad Luck. And
I didn’t really expect the grade change. But it certainly was
satisfying to say “I told you so” 30 years later.

I doubt it will take until 2043 for “anti-racists” and those who are blinded by rage at the suggestion that not all human populations are equally civilized to ruefully explain that they truly believed that Africans were every bit as capable of maintaining and sustaining advanced technological civilizations as Europeans.

The question is: how many human beings will have to die by starvation and mass slaughter in America, Africa, and Europe before they consider the possibility that they might be wrong?  Based on how long it took the same sort of people to begin considering that perhaps communism was not, in fact, capable of economically outperforming capitalism, my estimate would be around 250 million.

It is an interesting question to direct towards my critics, though.  Is there any number of deaths caused by starvation and mass slaughter in a five-year period as a result of the structural breakdown of society in one or more countries that would convince you to at least consider my time-to-civilization hypothesis?  If so, how many?

Mailvox: a sincere apology

It seems I have inadvertently caused offense, for which I am indeed deeply sorry.  Remo hopped onto the keyboard and took me to task:

As a Sonoran desert toad, I find the labeling of Ms. Hayden as a
“grotesque toad” offensive. I quote the good Sir Thomas Browne: “I
cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly;
they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best
express the actions of their inward frames; and having passed that
general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good.”
-Sir Thomas Browne, 1642.

I would point out that
licking *me*
brings on a state of euphoria and a series of pleasant
hallucinations, while licking Ms. Nielson would cause spastic
uncontrolled vomiting and give you herpes. Please be more sensitive in
your use of the word “toad” in the future. As you can see here our
couplings are *FAR* less offensive looking than Ms. Nielson’s.

*Ribbit*

I sincerely apologize to Remo, all Sonoran desert
toads, and indeed, the families Bufonidae, Bombinatoridae,
Discoglossidae, Pelobatidae, Rhinophrynidae, Scaphiopodidae, and
Microhylidae for any offense I have caused.  I deeply regret my
thoughtless, hurtful remarks, and in the future, will be sure to avoid
any further invidious and unflattering comparisons.

Mailvox: Clive Staples award

I was under the impression that I was more likely to be nominated for
both the Nebula and the Hugo than for any Christian fiction award, but
apparently I was wrong.  I received the following email concerning the
Clive Staples award for Christian Speculative Fiction:

Greetings,

As
you may know, the Clive Staples Award for Christian Speculative Fiction
has been revived, with Speculative Faith hosting it, and one or more of
your books has been nominated by a reader. We’re also happy to announce
that the new Realm Makers writers’ conference is partnering with us to
announce the award winner at the Friday dinner (August 2) and to provide
a modest cash prize.

The CSA is entirely a readers’
choice award, from nominations to final selection (which means that
authors associated with Spec Faith or Realm Makers ARE eligible).
However, we are opposed to popularity-contest awards, which makes the
request I’m about to make a little tricky.

We need
readers to know about the award and their opportunity to vote, but we
also need to communicate the need to honor good writing, not just
popular authors. To achieve this, we’ve put a minimal requirement on
voters: they must have read at least two of the nominations. I’ve also
written several posts at Speculative Faith (see links below) explaining
the standards we want readers to use when voting.

My
request is that you would help your readers know about CSA and our
goals, their opportunity to vote, and the requirements to do so. Without
voters, a readers’ choice award is not possible. But to appeal to you
to bring in readers, risks the possibility of the award devolving to a
popularity contest. In reality, whether this award works depends on how
widely we can spread the word and how determined the readers are to vote
for quality stories. Whatever you can do to help achieve this would be
greatly appreciated!

Below is a list of the books that
have been nominated and the links to the Spec Faith articles about the
award. Congratulations on your book(s) being included! And thank you for
any help you can give in notifying readers about the award.

I
believe I have been abundantly clear about my skepticism concerning
literary awards, but since I was asked to notify readers about the
award, I am doing so.  I’m not asking you to vote for A Throne of Bones, and I would request that anyone who is interested in voting for any of the nominated books on the list
to please be sure to follow the voting guidelines.  I’m a little
surprised, to be honest, given that I’ve actually been expressly banned
from being nominated for at least one Christian fiction award, but
apparently that was a different one.