Tag: McRapey

Crushing the test?

Do you remember when McRapey was bragging about how he crushed standardized tests? The guy didn’t even break 700 on the SAT’s Math section:

Seriously, I took three years of post-algebra math in high school and got 690 math SAT score and yet still REMEMBER NOTHING.

Now, 690 is a very good score. It’s a great score. If his verbal score was similar, he would have just been able to squeak into Mensa. Of course, since the great self-inflator never talks about that, we can probably assume that his overall score was 1330 or below, which would indicate a verbal score of around 640 and an IQ between 130 and 134. That would make him a high midwit, which is exactly what one observes of his behavior.

In any event, Johnny would like everyone to know that it’s not absolutely necessary to tell him that you’re no longer interested in buying the work of a chubby chinless SJW. Because he totes doesn’t care.

Dudes, if you’ve decided that you’re never going to buy my work again,
you don’t HAVE to tell me. I don’t actually care. Just don’t buy it.

After all, he doesn’t need you, not when he’s got Tor to do the bulk-buying for him. And isn’t it remarkable how he cares about nothing? It’s like the man is a stone. A stone made out of Zen. Anyhow, I’m not buying his work today, just like every other day prior.

They’re so gamer

This is amusing. McRapey and the SF pinkshirts belatedly discover #GamerGate:

    Jesus. Brianna Wu is someone I consider a friend. Fuck everyone who thinks GamerGate is anything other than haters shitting on women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    If you think threatening women is a legitimate tactic for anything, feel free to stop reading my work. I don’t need you or your money.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Astounding the number of dudes who think a woman game developer being harassed has nothing to do with a movement founded to harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And yes, GamerGate was founded to harass women. We’ve all seen the IRC logs. Part of the plan: recruit others to be their useful idiots.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And there sure have been a lot of useful idiots letting offering up their services to those who want to harass women! Well done, you.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Face it, dudes: “GamerGate” is a toxic thing. You can’t say you support WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Excellent post about GamerGate. “If you don’t step away… then you *are* part of a hate movement.” http://t.co/IOB0nSiFJE
    — N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 11, 2014

    So stop standing with people who WANT you to be their useful idiots while they threaten women. You can’t pretend you don’t know anymore.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    You know. We know you know. EVERYONE knows you know. No one else buys into your denial. Just stop. AND repudiate. Stop being used. Simple.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And if you refuse to stop being a useful idiot for those who harass and hate women, we’ll know that too. And remember.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

What should be remembered is this string of tweets the next time John Scalzi tries to pretend he’s a hardcore game nerd. After all, it only took him nearly two months to discover what the entire gaming community had been discussing. As for Ms Wu, she’s not even original enough to come up with a new form of crying wolf. Anita Sarkeesian already played the “ooh, I’m so scared I had to flee my home” card back in August.

At this rate, we can probably pencil in McRapey waxing indignant about Jennifer Lawrence sometime around Thanksgiving. And as often the case, he clearly has absolutely no idea that popular opinion is absolutely not on his side here.

It should also be amusing to see him start trying to walk back this claim – “GamerGate was founded to harass women” – when he discovers that the term was coined by one of the very Hollywood figures he is now trying to suck up to.

After bravely “fleeing from her home”, Spacekatgal pulls a post-flight Brave Sir Robin:

Announcement: I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE. I am going to keep making games. And I will keep speaking up for women in gamedev.

That’s cool. The rest of us will continue not playing them and not listening to her. Exactly like we’ve been doing for the last 25 years.

UPDATE: McRapey saying that he is “currently ACTUALLY making a video game” is like a Best Boy saying that he is starring in a movie.

Of fraudulent lists and fake “bestsellers”

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

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

And now I am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scalzi spins his merry way

One of the stranger metaphysical theories I’ve encountered is presented on Twitter:

There’s a dude out there who every time he asserts I’m failing,
something cool happens for me. Suspect this is karma punching him the
face.

I find it amusing that Johnny is trying to claim that I assert he’s failing. I’ve never asserted anything of the sort EXCEPT for the fact that the sales of LOCK IN are obviously a) no better than they were for REDSHIRTS or FUZZY NATION despite b) considerably more marketing effort on the publisher’s part. I don’t think that Scalzi is failing. I think that Tor Books is failing.

Scalzi’s success doesn’t bother me at all. It certainly doesn’t harm me in the slightest. (To be honest, although I very seldom think about it, if there is one person whose success bothers me, it is Jensen Huang’s.)  I certainly wouldn’t want to trade places with the strange little guy. Aside from everything else, I’d want to kill myself if I ever saw that weird flabby body in the mirror. Anyhow, I think Scalzi is much better suited for writing
television scripts than novels, as he’s not a good novelist, but his one-dimensional snark routine should go over very well with the TV-watching Trekkie crowd.

It’s also typical that Scalzi tries to act as if he’s not the one who has repeatedly attacked me, as if he’s not the one who put pressure on SFWA to expel me from the organization. He is always trying to pretend that things are going so wonderfully well for him that he doesn’t care about the fact that I routinely expose his fraudulent efforts to market himself.

Anyhow, the point is that I haven’t repeatedly asserted that he is failing, (except, of course, as a self-respecting man). I have repeatedly asserted that he is lying. And I have backed up those assertions with conclusive evidence.

Spinning the “bestseller” narrative

Once more, Johnny is counting on the fact that people don’t know the relevant facts in order to attempt to mislead them and spin the narrative in his favor. Notice, in particular, his blatant lie about my ignorance, when the fact is that just as when I caught him repeatedly lying about his traffic, I am the precise opposite of ignorant on the subject:

Vaguely related, not too long ago I noted with some amusement a perennial detractor of mine blathering ignorantly, as he nearly always does on any subject relating to me, about how it didn’t seem to him that Lock In was doing particularly well; this was almost immediately before the book hit the NYT Hardcover list and was Bookscan’s #1 top-selling front list science fiction novel. I considered sending him one of these cookies, so he could eat his words. But then I thought that giving a cookie to an asshole was a backwards way of doing things, at least from the point of view of the cookie. So, no cookies for him. He’ll just have to bask in the infinite pleasure of being wrong, so very wrong, yet again. He’s used to that, in any event.

Now, who was wrong about those “two million page views monthly” again? It’s so typical of SF/F’s Bernie Madoff that he claims I am “so very wrong” when events have gone EXACTLY as I predicted they would. It’s not that Lock In has been a massive failure; most, though not all, books by a reasonably known author that have been pushed as hard as Tor has pushed Lock In will be similarly successful in its first month. Initial “success” in the publishing industry is, to a great extent, predetermined by the publisher’s decisions concerning print runs and marketing budgets.

For example, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was such an initial failure for Pocket Books that they turned down its sequel. That’s why The Da Vinci Code has a different publisher than its predecessor. Pocket has since sold millions of copies, and they could have sold tens of millions of copies of Brown’s other books as well if they had simply given Angels and Demons a bigger print run and a marketing campaign. An executive at Random House once told me that Pocket’s mishandling of Dan Brown was the single biggest mistake he has personally observed in the industry.

So, it’s no surprise that Lock In is superficially successful, as Tor has invested a lot of money (relatively speaking) in the marketing of the book in both obvious ways, such as the author’s nationwide book tour and the reviews in various media outlets, and less obvious ways, such as buying the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list.  On Hugh Howey’s site, Tim Grahl explains how these lists work and why they are merely marketing vehicles as opposed to reliable indicators of how a book is selling vis-a-vis other books.

This is the specific “also selling” addendum to the Hardcover Fiction list of September 14th, to which McRapey is referring:

    17. THE HEIST, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
    18. THE SILKWORM, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland/Little, Brown)
    19. THE MINIATURIST, by Jessie Burton (Ecco)
    20. LOCK IN, by John Scalzi (Tor)
    21. TOM CLANCY: SUPPORT AND DEFEND, by Mark Greaney (Putnam)
    22. LOVE LETTERS, by Debbie Macomber (Ballantine)
    23. CLOSE TO HOME, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)
    24. INVISIBLE, by James Patterson and David Ellis (Little, Brown)
    25. HER LAST WHISPER, by Karen Robards (Ballantine)

A version of this list appears in the September 14, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending August 30, 2014.

That’s great and all, but recall what I pointed out before Lock In reached the NYT bestseller list: “McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry
Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying
him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a
book.”  And also “Just keep an eye on the NYT list. If LOCK IN is only on it for one week,
it’s a paid marketing stunt. If it stays on it for several weeks, it’s
probably legitimate.”

And now the verdict is in, which is probably why McRapey is already out there frantically trying to spin the narrative again.  Here is the most recent New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list, including the “also selling” section, for the week of September 21st. Care to guess what book isn’t on it?

  1. PERSONAL, by Lee Child
  2. SOMEWHERE SAFE WITH SOMEBODY GOOD, by Jane Karon
  3. THE BONE CLOCKS, by David Mitchell
  4. THE SECRET PLACE, by Tana French
  5. THE EYE OF HEAVEN, by Clive Kussler
  6. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI, by Haruku Murakami
  7. THE LONG WAY HOME, by Louise Penny
  8. THE GOLDFINCH, by Donna Tartt
  9. BIG LITTLE LIES, by Liane Moriarty
  10. MEAN STREAK, by Sandra Brown
  11. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr
  12. DARK BLOOD, by Christine Feehan
  13. SON OF NO ONE, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
  14. WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, by Matthew Thomas
  15. ADULTERY, by Paulo Coelho
  16. SHIFTING SHADOWS, by Patricia Briggs 
  17. MURDER 101, by Faye Kellerman
  18. ANGELS WALKING, by Karen Kingsbury 
  19. THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, by Liane Moriarty
  20. THE 6TH EXTINCTION, by James Rollins

What a complete surprise! With its one-week showing of #20, Lock In didn’t even do as well as his previous “New York Times bestseller” Redshirts (#15) although it did do better than that famously popular bestseller Fuzzy Nation (#23).  Recall what I wrote back in February 2013: “the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably
fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller. They
appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week,
never to make another appearance there again.”

(Scalzi also claims The Lost Colony was a New York Times bestseller, although I was unable to find it on any of the 2007 lists. I suspect this is because the historical lists do not include the “also selling” section. Redshirts is his only book to appear on the actual list per se.)

Notice that the closest comparable, Paolo Coelho’s Adultery, which is presently at #15 in its third week on the list, has an Amazon rank of 292 overall and a Science Fiction and Fantasy rank of 71. That’s what a legitimate bestseller looks like. Lock In, by comparison, has an overall rank of 2,807 and isn’t even in the Science Fiction and Fantasy top 100. It falls an order of magnitude short. Haruki Murakami’s latest is on the top 100 list for some reason, which I find very strange since there is literally nothing science fictional or fantastic about it, although I suppose that won’t prevent it from winning a Hugo next year either.

Lock In does not appear on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list and is #107 on the USA Today list. Perhaps it will go up from there, but note that Redshirts never went higher than 55 on that list and Fuzzy Nation never appeared at all. In other words, the initial indications are that despite the massive marketing effort Tor Books put behind it, Lock In is not even doing as well as Scalzi’s award-winning Star Trek ripoff.

This is potentially significant due to what it may mean for Tor Books. I’ve heard, and seen, evidence that they are not doing very well over the last two or three years. I suspected that the otherwise inexplicable decision to push Lock In so hard was an indication of their urgent need for a quick revenue boost, and so I conclude that Lock In‘s failure to become a legitimate bestseller presages an eventual shake-up of some kind at the publisher. As always, the value of a predictive model is its ability to predict future events. It will be interesting to see if PNH is still at Tor Books proper one
year from now. If he is not, I suggest that will tend to support my
observations here.

In any event, Scalzi is spinning his “success” in the same way that an NFL running back’s agent spins it when he’s angling for a new contract. Sure, he gained a thousand yards and the team made the playoffs, but the problem is that it took him 305 attempts to gain those yards, he’s averaging 3.3 YPC , the team was a wild card that lost in the first round, and his salary is $8 million per year. The team can get similar results at considerably less cost from someone else. That’s the inevitable downside of the big splashy marketing campaign for every Big Five author. With great marketing expenditures come great expectations. Merely good results of the sort that observably could have been achieved without them is a failure.

UPDATE: McRapey is so busy with his book tour and NOT paying attention to anything that I say that he tweeted this response almost immediately:

Latest stupid from my detractors: “You were ONLY on the NYT list for a week! You’re not a real bestseller!” Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

Well, this is awkward. Ah, Johnny, look, it’s not a real bestseller. It’s a fake one that Tor Books bulk-bought for you, just like they did with The Last Colony and Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts. Some would call it fraud. Tor Books calls it “marketing”.

Chin up, Johnny! Oh, wait, you don’t have one. Um, well, stay strong, tiger!

Barometer and Bernie Madoff

The SF Weekly has an appropriate article entitled “Science Friction”:

If you’re looking for a barometer of the state of science fiction in the U.S., consider the career of John Scalzi….. Scalzi’s June
2011 to July 2013 tenure as SFWA president ran fairly smoothly — until
its final month. The decision to feature a buxom, scantily clad,
redheaded warrior on the cover of the SFWA Bulletin ignited a firestorm
of controversy.

“There was a strong generational divide on that issue,” Scalzi says.
“There were a lot of older authors who were like, ‘I don’t see the
problem with that. It’s a strong feminist symbol.’ And there were a lot
of younger authors who were like, ‘You’re kidding me. You don’t see the
problem here?'”

Scalzi was traveling on the last day of his 2013 book tour when the
controversy came to a head. “I was literally on the plane, watching it
all go up on Twitter,” he says. “I was coming into my last month as
president but I was like, ‘Fuck, I’ve got to deal with this.'”

Having approved the cover without thinking through all of its
implications, Scalzi apologized to the membership for his “screw-up.”
SFWA put procedures in place that allowed the organization to weather
that storm and others, including the expulsion of Theodore Beale, aka
Vox Day, who used a promotional SFWA Twitter feed to link to
inflammatory remarks on his blog (where he called another author
“half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog”). Day was subsequently removed
from SFWA a month after Scalzi’s tenure.

In his personal online feud with Day, Scalzi and his supporters also
ended up raising funds for charities benefiting women, gays, and
minorities. By pledging $5 every time Day used Scalzi’s name or used a
derogatory nickname for anyone else in a post, the group raised $50,000
in pledges. (Scalzi capped his contribution at $1,000, and his readers
did the rest.)

As usual, the media finds me to be one of the most interesting things about Scalzi, although only Salon has ever troubled to get my side to the story. I do find some modest amusement in the fact that even when McRapey is out pushing his new novel, the media is more interested in his passive-aggressive crusade against me than in his book. They’d probably be even more interested if they knew that he and Patrick Nielsen Hayden threatened to quit SFWA if I was not “removed”, or read his bizarre victory rant on Twitter after “Opera Vita Aeterna” failed to win Best Novelette. Or if they had any idea what a complete fraud he has always been; one observes that he no longer talks up his “online blog” in interviews these days.

Meanwhile, regarding the state of science fiction: “The biggest declines were in biography/autobiography (down 26%, partially because of the huge success of Steve Jobs in 2011), science fiction (down 21%), and business (down 18%).”
– Publisher’s Weekly, 11 January 2013

As for him being a barometer, one observes Scalzi is still trying to escape the science fiction and fantasy market: “With writing and selling Lock In, we are looking to a larger
market,” Scalzi said. “Not disrespecting the science fiction and fantasy
market, obviously, but to open it up and bring in new readers.”

It is downright perverse for one of the biggest cheerleaders of the two-decade Pink SF diversity movement that has turned off more people to SF/F than anything else in its history to talk about bringing in new readers. Scalzi isn’t merely the Bernie Madoff of science fiction, he is also one of its leading californicators. Having first conned his way into it, he shat all over it in the company of his fellow Social Justice Warriors and is now attempting to move on to greener pastures as yet unsullied by his particular one-trick pony approach to literature.

But that’s precisely why we will win the genre back in the end. We’re here because we want to be here, because we actually love genuine science fiction and classic fantasy, not because we think it’s the best place to pursue social justice or con a few people out of a few dollars. We’ll win because the gatekeepers who took over the publishers and tried to force Pink SF on everyone are losing their grip. We’ll win because women like Tiger are translating QUANTUM MORTIS into Chinese, and because men like Emilio are translating ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM into Spanish. (Both of them sent me their finished translations yesterday; while the Spanish one is already good to go, figuring out how to make a Chinese ebook will take me a little while.)

So, I hope McRapey is entirely successful in making his leap into the soulless void of Hollywood. He’s been a blight on science fiction ever since he first serialized his Robert Heinlein imitation on his “online column” with its “more than two million page views monthly”. The sooner he finds his true place writing snarky politically correct dialogue for television sitcoms, the better.

As for commissioning songs, one would be remiss if one failed to mention Everything is Falling Into Place (Groove Kittens mix) by Rapey McRaperson and the Pink Rabbit Posse. And since we’re talking about science fiction, I should probably mention that QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed is free today and tomorrow on Amazon.

UPDATE: McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a book:

    Over on the right-wing SF/F frothosphere, it’s apparently become the fashion to assert a particular conservative writer sell me than me…—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    .. and apparently this is important for REASONS, and proof of liberal bias in the universe blah blah blah oh jesus why this again.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    Leaving aside whether this particular writer sells more than me or not: Honestly, who really gives a shit if he does?—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    If he does: Good for him! I hope he’s happy. It has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on how and whether I can sell my books, or he his.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    It seems some people need publishing to be some zero-sum game in which you can only succeed if someone else is failing, etc.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    In fact, that’s a profoundly way of looking at the publishing world. It’s not zero sum: My success doesn’t stop any other success.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    And other people’s success do not impede mine. There are enough readers for many authors to do well. Which is great!—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    I find the NEED to say one writer is more successful than another FOR REASONS to be an example of how some people never stop being 12.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    So, if you’re one of those people, stop being 12. If your favorite writer sells more than me, great! I sell enough. And that’s enough.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    End of rant.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

Who gives a shit THAT he does, Johnny? Not “if he does”. Why, YOU most certainly do! That’s why you’re constantly trying to suck up to Larry Correia and John Ringo while repeatedly insulting other Baen authors who don’t sell quite as well.

Also, the publishing world is zero-sum. There are a limited number of readers, a finite amount of time in which a book hits its peak sales, and a reader who is reading a free copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed or the excellent ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM is a reader who is not reading something else.

That is precisely why the mainstream publishers are so angry that Amazon permits authors to give away their books 20 days out of the year and why Amazon limits the giveaways to 20 days.

Mailvox: on derivative forms

Lgrin asks a superficially reasonable question: Why is Heinlein derived bad and Lewis (or Hodgson) Derived good?

However, for all that it looks reasonable on its face, the question is not an apt one. The reason one derivation is dismissed as mediocre while another is hailed as a masterpiece is not a question of the differing values of the source from which the author obtained his inspiration. The term “to derive” has a fairly broad meaning: “to trace from a source or origin.” Most works are derivative in some sense, but those specific senses can be entirely different. Consider a few of my own works:

  1. REBEL MOON is not derived from THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS even though everyone assumes it was. I didn’t read the latter until years after writing the former. But a reasonable reader would conclude that it was an imitation (and an inferior one) based on the obvious similarities.
  2. THE WORLD IN SHADOW is derived from the Colombine shootings.
  3. SUMMA ELVETICA: A CASUISTRY OF THE ELVISH CONTROVERSY is derived from St. Thomas Aquinas’s SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It’s literally arranged in the same basic structure as each of Aquinas’s arguments.
  4. A THRONE OF BONES is derived from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, but it is a negative derivation, in much the same way Philip Pullman’s books were derived from CS Lewis’s.
  5. “The Last Testament of Henry Halleck” is derived from the literary style of H.P. Lovecraft. “The Deported” is a much better derivation from the style of Guy de Maupassant.
  6. QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED is derived from Jean and Jeff Sutton’s THE PROGRAMMED MAN in the same material manner as the famous Jane Austen Zombie remix. As is “The Logfile”, which is a rewritten, updated derivative of Guy de Maupassant’s “Diary of a Madman”.

Those are six different forms of derivation, all by the same author. Apparent, Thematic, Structural, Contrarian, Stylistic, and Material. So, to simply say X is derived from Y says nothing about the quality of X.

Now, Scalzi has publicly discussed his purpose in writing his Heinlein-derivative OLD MAN’S WAR. Even if we take into account – as we must – that he is a confirmed liar whose every public word is calculated in order to help him sell or excuse himself, it’s still useful grist for the mill. This was his characteristically deceitful sales pitch sent to Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Hi, there. I’m John Scalzi, who writes the “Whatever” online column.(1)

Over the last three weeks, I’ve serialized a science fiction novel I’ve written on my site. Having completed it, I’ve added an afterwards called “Lessons From Heinlein,” in which I discuss how RAH’s style of writing holds some important lessons for would-be writers, specifically relating to character development (I am an actual published author(2) and science fiction writer, so I don’t feel too hinky about dispensing writing advice). The link is here: http://www.scalzi.com/w021229.htm. Some of the afterward necessarily relates to Old Man’s War, which is the novel I’ve serialized, but the comments about Heinlein are general enough in the matter of writing to be of interest even to those who have not read the novel.

Please note that this isn’t a backdoor attempt to get you to read the novel itself; had I wanted you to read it in your official capacity, I would have done the old-fashioned route of printing out the manuscript and shipping it off to your slush pile (being a former editor myself, I do appreciate when people follow submission guidelines).(3) I simply thought the afterward might be in itself of interest to you and the Electrolite readership.

Best wishes to you and yours for a happy and prosperous 2003.

So, what can we determine about the specific forms of derivation with regards to OLD MAN’S WAR? They are Apparent, Thematic, Structural, and Stylistic. It is also an Apparent derivative of Joe Haldeman’s THE FOREVER WAR, but this is not in fact the case. Now let’s look at two of John C. Wright’s works, including the recently published ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, which most of the early reviewers consider to be (quite rightly in my opinion) a masterpiece.

  • AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:  Apparent. And a seventh form of derivation, which is something less than Material, so we shall describe it as Elemental. Wright uses specific pieces of Hodgson’s world without actually making use of his text. And that’s it. None of the other five apply
  • ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM: Apparent, Thematic (partial, as he uses Lewis’s themes to set up his own), and Elemental.

So that’s what ultimately distinguishes the Hodgson/Lewis derivations Wright is utilizing versus Scalzi’s Heinlein derivation. Wright is taking identifiable elements from pre-existing works and creating something new and bigger from them. Scalzi is simply imitating pre-existing works and creating something smaller as a result.

It is said that good poets borrow and great ones steal. But regardless, what separates the good writer from the mediocre in this regard is that he utilizes his literary references to create something new rather than something that rehashes in an inferior manner what has already been done before, and done better. What ultimately matters with regards to a literary derivation is this: is the derivative work a dumbed-down version of the original, or does it improve upon or otherwise add to it? Is it a new masterpiece that could conceivably have been painted by the original artist or is it just a traced color-by-numbers imitation?

Wright’s Hodgson-derivative is justly considered awesome because it surpasses the well-regarded THE NIGHT LAND. His Lewis-derivative will be considered a masterpiece because it expands upon THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA in a manner worthy of Lewis. Scalzi’s Heinlein-derivative novel is not considered mediocre because it is derived from the novels of the SF grandmaster, but because it is a pale and inferior shadow of its predecessors.

(1) I find it amusing that even here, Scalzi is exaggerating. “The “Whatever” online column”? It’s a blog.


(2) “an actual published author” And yet he somehow won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer for OLD MAN’S WAR two years later. A neat trick, n’est ce pas?

(3) Sure it wasn’t. How many more of these helpful and very important lessons did he send to Tor editors, or anyone else, in the subsequent eleven years.

The decline of game reviews

Speaking of the declining quality of reviews, consider the implications of this superficially glowing review of McRapey’s latest book in USA TODAY: “Lock In cements the award-winning writer as one of the best in today’s sci-fi community”

That is intended as praise, but it is more correctly understood as an indictment of today’s sci-fi community. And this comment from an Amazon review made me laugh: “I was a little irked that the huge revelation in this book is basically
that computers can be hacked. I mean really? You put a computer in
someone’s brain and you are all like “Oh, that will be completely safe,
we have a ton of safeguards in place.” I think it was incredibly
ignorant (and anti-climatic) to think that no one would realize a brain
computer can be hacked just like any other type of computer. If you
have software it can be hacked.”

Wait, embedded computers can be hacked? MIND! BLOWN! I can only conclude that Mr. Scalzi’s technological genius sounds like a perfect match for the SyFy audience.

Given the rather limited enthusiasm with which Lock In has been greeted by his fans (it only has a 4.1 rating on Amazon in its first week),  I’m wondering why Tor Books has put such a big marketing blitz behind the book. I’ve heard rumors (and seen some indications myself) that they are experiencing difficulties, and certainly it isn’t a good sign that their bestsellers for the last three years have either been game tie-in novels or Orson Scott Card novels first published three decades ago.

My surmise, and at this point it is nothing more than that, is Tor Books desperately needs Scalzi to have a Larry Correia-sized hit in order to make up for all the award-winning drek it has published that hasn’t sold. Hence the outsized push, which McRapey’s book doesn’t appear to be able to support. I expect it won’t be too long before we start hearing more about this, probably in the next 6-9 months.

The usual suspects may now commence with their customary accusations of jealousy. Go ahead, my little friends, you know you want to. Go ahead and get them out of the way so the rest of us can proceed with the discussion. Anyhow, to return to the subject of game reviews, I see Breitbart has a good summary of the Quinnspiracy and #GamerGate:

The enduring effect of #GamerGate is obvious: the gaming media has destroyed its reputation and its relationship with readers, who will never again trust it on any issue beyond which power-up is most likely to get you past level 17. By blaming its readers and burying its head in the sand, the politicised bloggers who previously influenced the opinions of millions have voluntarily given up their authority to rabid, single-issue campaigners who silence criticism and sleep with journalists and peers to get ahead.

This is a subject I’ll return to in a later column: a brief history of corruption in video game journalism needs to be written. In the meantime, those of us with some critical distance from the chaos can only sit back and marvel at how wide-ranging and fundamental the damage to the indie games industry has been these last two weeks. There are now two, bitterly opposed factions in the industry. Journalists and activists, who care more about gender politics than the video games they are supposed to be reporting on, and gamers, mocked, derided and bullied… but unbowed.

Video gamers, and video game culture, will never be the same again.

That certainly sounds more than a little familiar, doesn’t it?

Come back, he cried. I didn’t mean it!

John Scalzi, the leading light of science fiction’s Social Justice Warriors, appears to have belatedly realized that he is increasingly despised by the very people who bought most of his earlier books. This “twitter rant” is, of course, appropos of nothing at all and is TOTALLY UNRELATED to the fact that he a) has a new book out and b) recently embarrassed himself with a pair of Twitter rants about Larry Correia and me. So let’s pull a page out of Larry’s pocket and examine each of Scalzi’s claims:

Those who’ve seen me punt assholes here who happen to be conservative may be shocked to know there are conservatives I like/love/admire.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

It is probably true that there are conservatives he loves and admires.
Based on his past statements, he is married into a predominantly
Republican family. But that doesn’t change the fact that he frequently punts people
merely for the crime of disagreeing with him and asking him questions that he
doesn’t want to answer. In fact, he undermines his own case here with
the implicit claim that all the people he has ban-hammered or kittened or muted or otherwise punted in the past are assholes. A number of those people are now regular readers here and will be able to dispute his claim about them.

    In fact, there are many conservatives I like/love/admire, including much of my family and community, and many friends.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Thereby demonstrating my immediately preceding point. Although I suspect there are not actually “many” conservatives and his relationships with those “many friends” are not anywhere nearly as friendly as Scalzi likes to pretend. He’s not even as close to some of his fellow Social Justice Warriors in the SF community as he affects to pretend in public. They are usually too polite not to play along.

    I am not one of those people who believes that opposing someone politics means you can’t like/love/admire them in other ways and areas.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

 He’s blatantly lying. There are many, many cases of him openly describing
various people he has never met, and whose character he does not know, as assholes on the sole basis of their
political views. He has also described certain political views as being
intrinsically bigoted and hateful in and of themselves.

    The reason you see me punting a lot of assholes who are conservative on Twitter is because they’re assholes first, conservatives second.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

This is observably untrue. It also shows that he was lying in his previous tweet. Scalzi
simply can’t credit that those “asshole views” are genuinely held
political beliefs that have nothing to do with the individual’s
character. He does not permit the questioning of most politically correct dogmas on his blog, which is one reason why there are now so few comments there.

    And it’s true that some people who are assholes use their conservatism as a rationalization/justification for being terrible people.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Is it true? Have you ever known anyone to use his conservatism as a rationalization for being a terrible person? Does that even make sense to you? I interpret this to mean that Scalzi is again inadvertently showing that he does, in fact, equate political conservatism with being a terrible person. Don’t forget that the guy isn’t particularly bright, Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy of Language notwithstanding, so it’s far from improbable that he would inadvertently sabotage his own argument in the process of presenting it.

        But the fact is, they’re just assholes. They’d be assholes if they were centrist, liberal or arnarchists. Some people just suck.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

I find it telling that Scalzi somehow never
seems to be able to identify these “centrist, liberal or arnarchist”
assholes, much less attack them.

    (And indeed there are asshole liberals, centrists, anarchists, etc. I don’t like them, either.)—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

When has Scalzi ever publicly attacked a feminist asshole? Or a
homosexual asshole? It may be that he secretly doesn’t like them, but he
observably gives them a free pass. He certainly hasn’t had much to say about the various child molesters and anti-white racists in SFWA.
 
 If you’re a conservative, be aware I don’t hate you for your politics, even though we have many points of contention, politically.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

He’s lying again. He does hate conservatives for their politics, unless
he has some other reason to look past them. However, he’s concerned about
the fact that his blog traffic has declined by 25 percent by his own
account (35 percent would be more accurate) and more and more
conservatives have, quite reasonably, declared that they have no
interest in buying books from an author who doesn’t conceal his contempt
for them and their beliefs.

    Likewise, I assume you won’t hate me, even thought you think I’m completely wrong on many things regarding politics.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

This is projection. Scalzi doesn’t understand that no one ever hated him for his politics. Conservatives actually tend to be fairly tolerant in that regard; they are accustomed to friends and acquaintances being more left-leaning, and it is the left that socially rejects those with whom they do not agree. What conservatives and libertarians actually despise him for is his cowardice, his unmanly passive-aggressiveness,
and his unrelenting attempts to deceitfully spin the narrative in his
own favor. As he is doing now. And evidence for this contention can be seen in the way that it is not only conservatives and libertarians who harbor contempt for him, but increasingly, leftists and liberals as well.

    But if you’re an asshole who happens to be conservative, I’m might let you know I think you’re an asshole. Who happens to be conservative.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

The reality is that if you’re a conservative who expresses his views in a
straightforward manner and asks Scalzi any question he can’t or doesn’t
want to answer, he will insult you and attempt to silence you.

    And if you’re an asshole who hides behind conservatism to cover your basic lack of humanity, I will like you even less.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Scalzi again reveals that he fundamentally equates conservatism with a basic lack of humanity. And I’m sure we all fear him liking us even less than those he already publicly declares to be assholes. Apparently there is a Scale of Evil Right-wing Evil that runs from asshole to dudebro to bigoted shitheel and all the way up to Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.

    Conservatism, although I disagree with much of it, deserves better than to be ill-used by you.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

I’ve seen better concern-trolling of conservatives by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    (Conservatives, feel free to sub in “Liberals” there for your own taste, etc.)—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Again, when has Scalzi ever publicly attacked a feminist, a socialist, or a homosexual and personally attacked her character? Other than Sarah Palin, I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen him attack a woman’s character.

    Bottom line: If you’re a conservative, don’t assume I dislike you. I probably don’t. Your character as a human will show no matter what…—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

The truth is that if you’re a conservative, Scalzi probably does dislike
you, considers you evil, and bigoted, and an asshole. But he is willing
to hide that dislike if you may be of potential use to him. So there is that.

    ..and that’s the thing I’m going to respond to, first and foremost. Even when you tell I’m completely wrong about politics.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

As this latest Twitter epic demonstrates, the one thing John Scalzi actually responds to, first and foremost, is losing control of the narrative. Look how he repeatedly responds, however indirectly to everything I write about him. He has to, because I have successfully punctured the false narrative of John Scalzi, massively popular blogger, leading SF writer, and all-around great guy. As a quintessential Gamma male, the one thing he cannot bear is to have his carefully spun delusions methodically punctured and exposed, especially where others can witness it.

As I have stated previously, John Scalzi is a liar and a fraud. He lies relentlessly in order to market himself. He lies about everything. This belated pitch to conservative readers is no different from the way he repeatedly tried to make nice with the Baen gang after attacking Toni Weisskopf, or the way he tried to repair relations with John Ringo after Ringo rightly derided Scalzi’s Redshirts winning the Hugo Award in 2013. As it happens, I have considerably more information on the man than I have revealed, and I can assure you that his “warmly charming witty little man” persona is no more real than the two million monthly pageviews he publicly claimed in the interview with Lightspeed Magazine. He’s more accurately described as a narcissistic con artist with an unusual talent for self-promotion.

What Scalzi is trying to do with this rant is to spin the narrative and reverse the customary order of events. For nearly a decade, Scalzi has publicly attacked people he does not know specifically due to their political views, and labeled them assholes, or assbags, or bigoted shitheels, and so forth. Consider the first time he publicly attacked me, in response to a syndicated political op/ed I’d written, on March 2, 2005. Keep in mind I had never heard of the man at that time.

From what I know of Beale’s politics, he’s a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that. I feel pleased that my own politics, to the extent that they play any role in Nebula selection, are likely to counteract his (indeed, inasmuch as I sat on the short fiction jury this year, and we nominated a story by Eileen Gunn, it’s more than likely). Were you to join SFWA, provided you meet the entrance requirements, at the very least you could take pride in knowing you are also diluting the influence of this jackass on future Nebula Awards. 

Notice that it is my politics, and nothing else, that made me a jackass in his eyes. He knew nothing about me or my character, obviously, or he would have done as many more sensible people who disagree with me have done and either a) kept the discourse on an impersonal level or b) stayed the fuck away from me. (As Bill Simmons once wrote about Steve Smith: Don’t talk to him, don’t look at him, don’t even make eye contact
with him. If he approaches you in the warm ups, act the same way you
would if you were hiking in the wilderness and a grizzly bear approached
you — don’t move, don’t react, don’t do anything until it walks away.)

It should be obvious to anyone with a three-digit IQ that John Scalzi is simply attempting retroactive damage control. So, to paraphrase what I wrote two days ago, perhaps he is entirely correct and he doesn’t equate conservatives with assholes, I am both “a real bigoted shithole of a
human being” and “an undeserving bigot shithole”, my Hugo-nominated
novelette is “to put it charitably, not good”, and Larry Correia is
“whining about how [he] totally MEANT to fail spectacularly at the
Hugos” while trying to “RATIONALIZE [HIS] HUMILIATING DEFEAT”.

Or perhaps he is not, and he is simply lying about these things as he has been observed to lie about other things. In closing, I found this exchange on the post immediately preceding the rant to be amusing:

Todd: “Your chief opponent (who is not be named in this space) has definitely lost sales because of his political screeds.”

Scalzi: I don’t have a chief opponent, actually. I have some people who like to yell in my direction, however.

As I said, he lies about everything. He doesn’t have a single reader who doesn’t know precisely to whom Todd is referring. More importantly, I was under the impression that people didn’t read my books or give me awards because I am a terrible writer. Hmm, perhaps I would sell more books if I wrote an epic Twitter rant about how much I really love left-liberals….

Fraud and douchebaggery

This Twitter conversation amused me greatly:

Bob ‏@bobby_5150
Between @voxday and @scalzi , who would have thought scalzi would be the bigger douche bag. (;:;)

Agree&Amplify ‏@angreeandamp
@bobby_5150 Makes You wonder just what else Vox may be right about.

For some time now, John Scalzi has been offering dubious explanations of his past traffic claims. Last year he stopped reporting his annual traffic and even resorted to posting misleading evidence of a one-day traffic spike driven by an external source in order to shore up his more fraudulent claims. However, it turns out that he was even more grossly fraudulent than we knew when talking himself up to the media. Consider his 2010 interview with this Hugo-winning SF/F magazine, in which he undeniably misrepresented the amount of traffic his site receives by a factor of between 17.5 and five, respectively.

Interview: John Scalzi
by Erin Stocks
Published September 2010

Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.”

But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.

As it happens, there is considerably more of interest beyond “the dry stats”. For various reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with my relationship with certain hacker groups, I am in possession of a considerable amount of Mr. Scalzi’s historical traffic statistics and to say that he exaggerated his blog traffic does not really do the man justice. Consider: for the 12-month period from September 2009 to August 2010 immediately preceding the September interview with Ms Stocks, Whatever had 4,916,947 pageviews. And while 409,745 pageviews per month isn’t bad, it is considerably less than the “extraordinary amount” of “more than two million page views monthly” that he claimed at the time.

You don’t need to take my word for it either, as in his post entitled 8 Million Views for 2012, Scalzi happened to include a graphic summary of his annual pageviews from previous years, shown here on the right. The 4.49 million number is for 2009 and equates to 374,023 per month. The 5.13 million is for 2010 and amounts to 427,599 per month. Obviously, the 409,745-pageview number for the twelve-month period in between is both credible and substantiated by Scalzi’s own report.

Nor will his usual retreat to the “up to” excuse hold any water. The fact is that at no point, either before or after the Lightspeed interview, did Whatever ever have “more than two million page views monthly”. John Scalzi has only once ever had more than one million page views, barely, in May 2012. And his unique visitor claim is even less accurate. Prior to September 2010, Whatever’s peak MONTHLY unique visitors was just under 135,000, in February 2010. That means that far from being “over 45,000 unique visitors daily”, he was actually seeing “under 4,500 unique visitors daily”. Considerably under, as it happens; the actual number of daily unique visitors from September 2009 through August 2010 was 2,567. Which even the most math-illiterate pinkshirt should be able to grasp is not “over 45,000”.

Now, you may not like me at all. You may not agree with me about much. You may even believe that I am Voxemort, the Supreme Dark Lord, whose name must not be mentioned in the science fiction and fantasy world, in a non-ironic sense. But none of that changes the observable facts. And the facts are that John Scalzi is a proven liar, a fraudulent self-marketer who has regularly inflated his reported traffic in a self-serving manner, and an inherently untrustworthy individual. You simply cannot take anything the man says at face value, much less place any confidence in the narrative he attempts to pass off, because his primary concern is how any given fact or individual can best serve what he perceives to be his interests.

It may help to understand that my perspective has always been iconoclastic and my opinions have been widely read since I was first nationally syndicated back in 1995. As a result, I am under a certain amount of pressure to never modify, spin, or manipulate information in any deceptive or misleading way, because there are literally dozens of critics who dislike me and are waiting to exploit even the smallest slip-up. (Look what resulted from that single tweeted blog link, for example.) It has been that way for nearly twenty years now. So, if I am saying something about my traffic, or especially about someone else’s traffic, you can bet your life on the fact that I am telling you the absolute truth to the extent that it is available to me.

I have had a Sitemeter widget on the sidebar for the entire existence of this blog. I have a Google pageviews widget on the sidebar of the AG blog, and I would have one here if it worked with the old template that I prefer and still use. When I say that this blog had 41,075 pageviews yesterday, or that there were 62,971 pageviews between the two one week ago, or the two blogs will get over 1.5 million pageviews this month, I am not exaggerating in the slightest and I can easily prove the truth of my assertions. John Scalzi has all the same information about his traffic that I do and more. All he has to do to prove me to be a liar is to simply make public his WordPress statistics from September 2009 to August 2010.

Ask yourself why he does not do so. Ask yourself why he will not do so. Ask yourself why he has not only continued to hide his daily traffic numbers since I first called them into question last year, but is now releasing even less information than he did before. And then, like Agree&Amplify, you might consider asking yourself, what else is Vox right about? What else is John Scalzi lying about?

Now, perhaps he is entirely correct and I am “a real bigoted shithole of a human being” and “an undeserving bigot shithole”, my Hugo-nominated novelette is “to put it charitably, not good”, and Larry Correia is “whining about how [he] totally MEANT to fail spectacularly at the Hugos” and trying to “RATIONALIZE [HIS] HUMILIATING DEFEAT”.

Or perhaps he is not, and he is simply lying about these things as he has been observed to lie about other things. The incontrovertible evidence is right there in front of you. To take it into account or to blithely ignore it is up to you. And it’s mysterious, is it not, that this very well-sourced and impartial information concerning his “more than two million page views monthly” is missing from his Wikipedia page.