Tag: McRapey

BOOK REVIEW: The Collapsing Empire

An established author who wishes to remain anonymous became interested in Scalzi’s latest as a result of the various shenanigans surrounding it and sent me his review of the book for posting here. His opinion of it is modestly more positive than mine, but I post it here, unedited, for the record. I also sent him a copy of Corrosion, so it will be interesting to see his perspective on that if he happens to read and review it.

The Collapsing Empire started its career as a published book with a major disadvantage – it had a great deal of hype.  Depending on who you believe, The Collapsing Empire is either the greatest space opera since Dune and Foundation or a millstone around Tor Books’ collective neck.  John Scalzi, known for Old Man’s War and Redshirts, has the problem that his latest novel will be judged against the hype, instead of being judged on its own merits.  In writing this review, I have done my best to ignore both sides of the ongoing culture wars and judge the book by its own merits.  You can judge for yourself if I have succeeded.

In the far future, interstellar travel is only possible through the Flow – an alternate dimension that allows FTL travel between colonised star systems.  (The science explanation is highly dubious, but I wouldn’t hold that against anyone.)  Humanity is united by the Interdependency, a network of colonies that are (mostly) dependent on each other to survive, and ruled by the Houses, led by the ‘Emperox.’  Unfortunately for the inhabitants of this universe, the Flow is actually changing – it’s either shifting routes (what the bad guys believe) or collapsing completely (what the good guys fear).  Either way, humanity is going to be in for some pretty rough times.  The Interdependency is so interdependent that only one world is habitable without massive tech support.

This sounds like the basis for a great space opera.  Humanity can – humanity must – find a way to survive when the Flow vanishes and all of its scattered star systems suddenly find themselves on their own.  (The tech base described in the book should certainly be up to the task.)  A lone star system can work to survive when the Interdependency vanishes.  Or humanity can find a way to travel FTL without using the Flow, or find a way to bend the Flow to humanity’s will.  Or …

These don’t happen.  Maybe they will in the sequel (the book ends on a cliff-hanger) but they don’t in The Collapsing Empire.  Instead, we get a mixture of local politics, interstellar shipping concerns and interstellar politics.  Some of these blend seamlessly into the story line, others don’t quite make sense.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that the most exciting part of the story is the mutiny in the prologue, which honestly doesn’t make sense (the mutineers are taking a terrible risk) and is completely unnecessary.  I’m happy to enjoy a Game of Thrones-style story about mighty aristocracies battling for supremacy, but that wasn’t what I was promised when I downloaded this book.

The book flows well – I read it in an hour – but it was oddly choppy.  There are aspects that really needed an editor’s touch – the mutiny in the prologue stops long enough for the author to lecture us on his universe, which isn’t necessary as all the main points are covered in CH4 – and others that needed more consideration.  I had problems following the flow – hah – of time within the universe; we are told, on one hand, that it takes months to move from Hub to end, yet Marce leaves Hub (after a largely pointless escape sequence) and in the very next section he’s on Hub.

Cardenia Wu-Patrick is probably the most likable character in the story, although she takes pointless risks and is generally ill-prepared to assume the post of ‘Emperox.’  (Her aide quips that nice people don’t get power, which misses the point that Cardenia inherited her power – she didn’t earn it.)  Marce Claremont is young and overshadowed by his sister, who I felt would have made a more interesting POV character.  And Kiva Lagos is – put bluntly – a potty-mouthed bully and a sexual predator.  Her good aspects are overshadowed by her bad points.

I admit it – I cringed when I read the first section, where it is clear that Kiva has pulled a very junior member of her ship’s crew into sexual congress.  Consent is dubious at the very least – there isn’t even a sense that he’s using her as she’s using him.  And then, she comes on to Marce later in the book in a manner that, if she were a man, would be considered borderline rape.  To call her ‘problematic’ is to understate the case.  This might not be a problem if she was the villain – or the text even acknowledged the issues – but it does not.

There are other issues, deeper issues, that offend my inner critic.  On one hand, Count Claremont – the physicist who first realised that something was wrong with the Flow – makes snarky remarks about the lack of peer review, yet his own work has the same problem.  While this is acknowledged, it makes no sense.  Modern-day governments have no problem finding qualified scientists and putting them to work on secret government projects.  Why can’t the Interdependency do the same?  And on the other, the bad guys – who have also realised that there is something wrong with the Flow – have a plan to take advantage of the crisis, but don’t seem to realise the potential of their own technology.  It suggests, very strongly, that no one takes the crisis completely seriously.

And yet, it is made clear that the Flow has shifted before.  Humanity has lost contact with Earth – in the distant past – and a relatively small colony world in the more recent past – but this does not appear to alarm anyone.  Is Earth really that insignificant?  One may draw a comparison between the Flow’s slow collapse and global warming, but the loss of two entire worlds is a little more significant than anything we’ve seen on Earth.  I would have expected a serious effort to reduce the degree of interdependency since that disaster.  If nothing else, shipping foodstuffs and suchlike between star systems must be an economic nightmare.  (And the ‘lie’ that binds the Interdependency together is obvious from the setting.)

To be honest, the text tries to balance humour with story and fails.  The fact that there is a legal way to mutiny – which no one bothers to follow – make me smile and roll my eyes at the mixture of humour and absurdity.  There are moments of banter that are oddly misplaced or unintentionally ironic.  The ship names sound as though they have come out of Iain M. Banks – Kiva’s ship is called the ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ – but they have a very definite air of absurdity.  Banks made it work because the names suited the Culture – they don’t work so well in The Collapsing Empire.  And the very first line in the book is stolen directly from Scooby Doo.

In the end, The Collapsing Empire left me feeling oddly disappointed.  It’s shorter than I expected, given the price, and very little is resolved in the first book – the bad guys have taken a few blows, but the good guys haven’t even started to come to grips with the real problem.  I know that most books are set up as either trilogies or open-ended series these days, but there should be at least some resolution.  (If only because the second book might be delayed, increasing reader frustration.)  Off Armageddon Reef and The Final Empire, both also published by Tor, show how this can be done.

The Collapsing Empire is not the best SF novel of the decade, nor is it the worst.  It has high ideals and grand ambitions, but it doesn’t live up to them (nor the hype).  I probably won’t be picking up the sequel.

Fun with book tour

Another rare Pepe! I had no idea so many Dread Ilk were also Scalzi fans. It’s the rare author who can really reach across the political divide these days.

How to write a negative review

Now THIS is a proper negative review, of such quality that even the professional reviewer can only salute and applaud. An actual scientist provides the fake reviewers of Corrosion with an exemplary masterpiece of devastation in his review of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire, which he took the innovative approach of actually reading in order to criticize it more effectively:

A Slipshod, Incompetent Disaster

I gave this book a fair shake. While I disagree with John Scalzi on sociopolitical issues, that doesn’t mean he can’t be a good, or even great author. After all, I disagree vehemently with Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, but I consider them brilliant scribes whose works I adore. Unfortunately, “The Collapsing Empire” is a mess so wretched that I can’t see how even Scalzi’s biggest fans can defend it.

A major problem is the lack of logical sense to the proceedings. This goes beyond mere plot holes, although there are no lack of those. For instance, the Prologue features a ship mutiny. One in which the ship’s chief engineer is murdered and there are plans to do the same with the captain and her supporters. Risky business, no? Not only do the mutineers face the prospect of armed resistance, putting their lives on the line, but they have committed a serious criminal act. Who is to say they won’t be found out by an investigator? Or one of the many fellow mutineers won’t blackmail them or squeal later on the others?

In other words, they need a damn compelling reason to mutiny. The one provided by Scalzi is that the executive officer leading the mutiny will receive a 30% premium on their weapons cargo by selling to the rebels of the planet instead of the government. Yes, you read that correctly. 30 percent, not 30 times.

This is absurdly stupid, the equivalent of burning down one’s house because one spotted a spider in the bathroom.

There are other problems with the mutiny. Inexplicably, the ship has all the weapons stored in one and only one cabinet in the entire ship. Which is conveniently taken over by the mutineers. This is of course preposterous, and shows again that Scalzi has no clue about the military science fiction he writes about.

Oh, and neither the captain nor any of her loyal officers is armed beyond a single futuristic weapon that works inside of three feet.

With the mutiny proceeding poorly, Scalzi interjects with some long exposition. In the middle of the tense life-and-death stand-off, we suddenly get multiple paragraphs explaining the pseudo-science behind “The Flow”. This completely shatters a reader’s immersion into the story, and is done so poorly a fan fiction writer would wince. Scalzi even breaks the fourth wall, explaining to us about how things function in “this universe”.

Moreover, this exposition exposes Scalzi as being as clueless about science as he is on military matters. Now, “The Flow” itself seems to be a rip-off of similar teleportation concepts from older, classic science fiction works like “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman. But whereas Haldeman has a degree in physics and astronomy and writes credibly on the topic, Scalzi, a philosophy major, is hopelessly lost.

He tries to mask this confusion with meaningless mumbo-jumbo. “Topographically complex” is not a term, but word salad to impress laypeople with. And just what the hell is “metacosmological structure”?! Hilariously, Scalzi then throws up his hands and admits defeat;

“And even that was a crap way of describing it, because human languages are crap at describing things more complex than assembling a tree house. The accurate way of describing the Flow involved the sort of high-order math probably only a couple hundred human beings across the billions of the Interdependency could understand, much less themselves use to describe it meaningfully. You likely would not be one of them.”

In that case, why not delete the previous section entirely? There are other absurd passages. For instance, the crew is told of the speed (a scalar) of Scalzi’s teleportation mumbo-jumbo, but not its direction (a vector) or its acceleration. A high school freshman taking physics for the first time would be embarrassed for the writer.

Now, while I’m a scientist for a living who enjoys hard science fiction, there is nothing wrong with a science fiction author having a poor grasp of science, provided he excels in other areas. Harry Harrison is a favorite of mine, and the less said about his understanding of physics and mathematics, the better. However, Harrison avoided this problem by very rarely bothering with these subjects at all. Scalzi, meanwhile, engages with them and looks like an absolute fool in the process.

Even when it comes to basic human interaction, the mutiny is a failure. In this tense, life-and-death situation, the characters react with…snark. Consider this exchange;


“Eva Fanochi probably could have answered that for you,” Gineos said. “If you hadn’t murdered her, that is.”


“Now’s not a great time for that discussion, Captain.”

This doesn’t exactly inspire a reader to care about what the hell ends up happening to the characters. After all, they themselves don’t. Oh, and the captain wins by a bluff that makes no sense. She says that if she dies, her hand on a control panel will “blow every airlock the ship has into the bubble”? Sounds convincing, but what is it supposed to mean? And why would the mutineers, all experienced crewmen, fall for it when it’s revealed to be absolute rubbish a moment later? Wouldn’t they know the ship and its capabilities?

The following chapters I read, while not as error-laden, are still inauthentic and boring, when they’re not vile and outrageous.

Other reviewers have noted the introduction to Kiva Lagos, a powerful noble who is busy either raping or sexually coercing a lowly male subordinate through her vastly superior rank. He begs her to stop. She doesn’t let him. Lagos also swears and insults others constantly. One might think she is a main villain, but instead Lagos is a primary protagonist. Scalzi even called her one of his favorite characters ever. Apparently, behavior that would be considered sickening and abhorrent even in an unrepentant male antagonist is considered admirable and empowering so long as the gender is switched to female.

Scalzi tries to write cool, even female cool (which is harder), but it comes off as sophomoric and laughable when it’s not vulgar and repulsive. We are also told that Lagos was pursuing (stalking?) this junior purser for six whole weeks. Men pursue women for that long, but women don’t. Once her mind is made up, a confident woman would express her feelings long before that, and the man would either reject or accept her. Add “sexual dynamics” to the list of subjects Scalzi is ignorant of.

We are told the “emperox” Cardenia has to marry a member of a merchant guild. Why is she compelled to do so, when she is the most powerful person in the universe? Surely, it’s lesser individuals and families that have to scheme and marry to accrue more power rather than the top potentate? I’m not saying there aren’t circumstances where doing so wouldn’t make sense. However, it has to be EXPLAINED. Instead, Scalzi, in murky fashion, notes it would be advantageous for dealing with the merchant guilds (why?), with nothing further.

Speaking of lack of explanations, that dovetails with the most startling weakness of the book. The complete and total lack of any description. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing about the physical characteristics of any character, including main protagonists Emperox Cardenia Wu-Patrick, Kiva Lagos, and Captain Gineos. Naturally, there is no description of any buildings, rooms, objects, or spaceships, either.

While I generally dislike voluminous, multi-page descriptions, favoring sparser brush strokes, one still expects SOMETHING. With nothing offered at all, these characters, and the story as a whole, become little more than an amorphous blob. It adds to the feeling that this is lazy, bad fan fiction…. Avoid this, even if you’re a die-hard Scalzi fan.

While the book review is borderline sadistic in its heartless attention to detail, it is certainly informative for prospective readers, particularly when one compares it with a negative “review” of similar length, which is chiefly notable for the fact that the reviewer is as unfamiliar with Isaac Asimov and Foundation as he is with Johan Kalsi and Corrosion.

Ceterum censeo Tor Books esse delendam

Dear, oh dear

And you see, even if I wasn’t opposed to fake reviews, the following is why, in this case, they are not only wrong and deceptive, but redundant. There will be no shortage of legitimate one-star reviews by Scalzi fans who feel let down by his latest effort, particularly since it is the result of nearly two years of groundless hype.

Half a novel. Don’t bother.
March 25, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

I’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s work enough that I pre-ordered this novel. Having read it (and enjoyed what there was of it) I feel profoundly cheated.

The problem has nothing to do with length — plenty of excellent complete novels have been written in fewer pages. Here though, critical elements of the story are left undeveloped at the end of the novel. I don’t want to spoil what there is of the plot, so suffice it to say that there are no meaningufl resolutions of conflicts facing any of the main characters except, I suppose, for the one who dies and another relatively minor villian. The resolution of the only interesting plot question that is revealed is blindingly obvious half way through the book. So no payoff there either.

I have no objection to setting a plot line that sets up a sequel. The series seems to be almost an imperative in sci-sfi publishing these days. But that’s quite different from a novel that basically ends with a “to be continued” on all fronts that anyone cares about.

As for the fake good reviews, why, the more the better! The more people who fall for the deception and buy the shlockfest, the more disgusted Scalzi-haters there will be. Remember, even I once fell for “the new Heinlein” hype too.

The problem Tor Books faces is simple. Sooner or later, the truth will out. And the truth is that John Scalzi is a mediocre and derivative midlister who has only reached “major” status in science fiction as a result of his own deceptive self-marketing combined with the extraordinary marketing efforts made on his behalf by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Scalzi has a legitimate fan base, but it is much smaller than Larry Correia’s; imagine how many books Larry would sell if he was being featured in Audible advertising, having fake New York Times bestseller slots arranged for him, and talked up by Tor-published contributors at the Guardian, then featured in puff pieces in the New York Times, and NPR.

Pity poor Brandon Sanderson, who actually is a major SF author and outsells Scalzi by a significant margin, but doesn’t get one-tenth the attention or support from his publisher that Scalzi does. That’s the price of working with an SJW-converged publisher. They will always put their political agenda ahead of their professional responsibilities.

Anyhow, I’d assumed Scalzi would need to “restructure” his contract after delivering the fourth book. In light of this disaster, he’s probably going to have to do so after he fails to deliver the second book on time and Macmillan finally discovers that PNH has sold them a midlister in major’s clothing.

In any event, Johan Kalsi and I would like to thank you all for making his debut with Castalia House such an unforgettable one. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Mr. Kalsi is already hard at work on the sequel to Corrosion, which will be entitled Corrosion and Empire, and eagerly awaits the announcement from Tor Books concerning the direction of his next new series. And I have to say, perhaps the most amusing thing in all this, to me, is the angry, upset SF-SJWs who are unaware that this little stunt is literally nothing new in the science fiction world; it should hardly surprise anyone that the current publisher of There Will Be War would be aware of the various, perfectly legitimate, marketing possibilities in this regard.

There is more at Castalia House. Including, but not limited, to this video commentary.

We. Are. Amused.

Meanwhile, The Collapsing Empire on Kindle is falling while Corrosion: The Corroding Empire is climbing. 194 to 918 830 748 683 666. Make it happen. You know you want to see it happen. It’s also telling that most of the 5-star reviews for Collapsing and all of the 1-star reviews for Corrosion are from people who haven’t even pretended to read the book “reviewed”. This is a good sign, as this kind of engagement is a certain sign that SF-SJWs have been successfully triggered.

Here is the thing: the more people that actually read Corrosion, the higher the good/bad review ratio will increase. The reverse is true for The Collapsing Empire. It’s terrible and word from inside Tor Books is that everyone involved with the book knew it even before it was released.

Meanwhile, Allan Davis proposes a solution to solve the terrible problem of racism and discrimination and excessive white maleness in science fiction:

I propose a tax on science fiction novels, to level the playing field in the same fashion that carbon taxes are designed to punish those who use more resources than their fair share.

Call it the “Bergeron Tax.”

Those authors writing for any mainstream international science fiction publishers have obviously been profiting from this industry-wide discrimination, so the structure of the Bergeron Tax should be arranged like this:

For each novel the author has previously published (with one of the big mainstream publishers), add 10% to the cost of the book.

Add on 5% for each Hugo or Nebula award the author has already won.

If the author is white, add an additional 10%.

If the author is male, add another 10%.

Finally, if the author has a beard, add on an additional 5%.

The windfall proceeds from this tax should then be shared among authors and publishers who have not been part of this industry-wide and genre-wide discrimination.

I don’t know. If you look at Tor’s prices, it looks like they’re already implementing this tax. $13 for a 300-page Kindle book would be a ripoff even if book was any good.

Also, on a completely unrelated subject, I’m delighted to announce that thanks to the Dread Ilk, we will have Dark Lords! Autaruch sent out the following notice to the backers of its latest kickstarter.

Thanks to all of our backers for the tremendous outpouring of support. Since we started we’ve seen huge contributions come in from our first Patron Diety-level backer, Jeff Binder, from five Emperor-level backers, and from a legion of backers that really, really want to see a a Dark Lord class (and, yes, it has been funded and will be added to the book).

Here come the fake reviews!

Like clockwork…. SJWs are nothing if not predictable.

Meanwhile, in a classic SJW Narrative spiral, iO9 has picked up the fake news from File 770. This is a beautiful example of how the SJW Narrative spiral works to create fake history in line with the Narrative:

  1. File 770 publishes fake news
  2. SJWs run with the fake news and offer various false theories and rumors
  3. Larger SJW-converged media sites pick up the fake news and spread it
  4. Wikipedia cites these “reliable sources” and enshrines the fake news as false facts.

We’re already at point 3, obviously. Note that both iO9 and File 770 have conveniently omitted to mention the fact that John Scalzi was proudly involved with Alexandra Erin’s parody of my #1 Political Philosophy bestseller, SJWs Always Lie, two years ago. Scalzi narrated the audiobook. SJWs are always so mystified that people don’t respond better to them crying “no fair, he hit me back!”

UPDATE: And we’re up again. Also, Chapter One of SJWADD just wrote itself.

UPDATE: I discuss the latest Corrosion-related developments on tonight’s Darkstream.

UPDATE: Corrosion is no longer inappropriately excluded from the Amazon Associates program.

“Scalzi at his best!”

Well, that’s certainly true. At long last, the much-anticipated Foundation rip-off The Collapsing Empire is out, and by all accounts, McRapey has surpassed himself. From one of the first reviews:

Scalzi laces his plot with plenty of humor, some of it gentle, some of it barbed, and some of it rather broad. I enjoyed little exchanges like this one between the emperox and her aide:

“[T]he executive committee…wants to marry me off.”
“They want to preserve an existing alliance.”
“An alliance with terrible people”
“Really nice people don’t usually accrue power.”
“You’re saying I’m kind of an outlier,” Cardenia said.
“I don’t recall saying you were nice.”

Scalzi’s characters come alive much better than is common in space opera. I enjoyed getting to know them and even to care about them, from spunky Cardenia, who had never expected or wanted to become experox, to Kiva, the potty-mouthed member of a powerful guild family. (SF readers who decry the relative deficit of strong female characters in the genre, take note. In retrospect I realize that most of the really memorable characters in the book are women.)

Brilliant stuff! Spunk and potty-mouthed wit! Keep in mind these excerpts are not clunkers I am cherry-picking as being particularly terrible, these are excerpts that fans and Tor employees have been selecting on the basis of a belief that they are the best the book has to offer. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are assured is “the heart of modern Sci-Fi” and “the best SF writer of his generation.”

Which, if either statement were true, would be a damning indictment indeed.  Fortunately, it’s only obese midwits less well-read than the average illiterate Venezuelan peasant, who think snarky space romance is the height of cleverness, that actually believe that.

Seeing the SF-SJWs unite in a desperate attempt to convince the reading world that Scalzi is actually a good science fiction writer very much reminds me of the Democrats trying to convince everyone that Hillary Clinton was a good presidential candidate. Not only are their efforts unconvincing, but their bizarre overselling reveals that even the people pushing the idea don’t believe it.

But don’t worry, you can totally trust the SF-SJW reviews. And the New York Times bestseller ranks achieved months in advance of publication too.

The Collapsing Empire (The Interdepency #1)
by John Scalzi (Goodreads Author)

Renay’s review May 24, 2016
it was amazing
Can’t say much about this yet BUT DON’T WORRY I WILL, I WILL HAVE SOME WORDS.

That’s a pretty positive five-star review, particularly for a book that wasn’t actually published for another 10 months.

UPDATE: My position on fake reviews is what it has always been: never write fake reviews, for good or for ill. If you have not read a book or played a game, then you should not even consider reviewing it. As a former nationally syndicated professional game reviewer, I do not approve of fake reviews no matter who the author or developer is. Unlike most published authors, I have always abided by Amazon guidelines and never review books or games on Amazon. The only place I write reviews are a) on this blog, and b) on Recommend.

UPDATE: Castalia author-to-be Brian Niemeier addresses the increasing desperation of Tor Books. He’s got a good point. If Tor actually had any confidence in their author’s ability to compete with our book, they wouldn’t have freaked out and begged Amazon to take it down. When Alexandra Erin published a parody of SJWAL, did we do that?

No, we simply laughed at the fact that the book, along with the parody and the parody of the parody, ranked as the #1, #2, and #3 bestsellers in the Political Philosophy category.

So, it’s tomorrow…

Indigo March 06, 2017 4:00 PM
Check back tomorrow for a more accurate ranking comparison.

The Corroding Empire
#30 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera


The Collapsing Empire
#166 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

THE CORRODING EMPIRE – preorder now!

Galactic society is ruled by algorithms. From interstellar travel and planetary terraforming to artificial intelligence and agriculture, every human endeavor has become completely dependent upon the hypercomplex equations that optimize the activities making life possible across hundreds of inhabited worlds. Throughout the galaxy, Man has become dependent upon the reliable operation of ten million different automated systems.


And when things begin to go wrong and mysterious accidents begin to happen, no one has any idea what is happening, except for a sentient medical drone and the First Technocrat of Continox. But the challenge of fixing the unthinkably complicated problem of galaxy-wide algorithmic decay is made considerably more difficult by the fact the former is an outlaw and the latter is facing a death sentence.


THE CORRODING EMPIRE marks the English-language debut of Johan Kalsi, Finland’s hottest science fiction author. An accomplished geneticist as well as a 6’3″ ex-Finnish Marine, in THE CORRODING EMPIRE, Kalsi shows himself to be more Asimovian than Isaac Asimov himself!

THE CORRODING EMPIRE is now available for preorder on Amazon with a retail price of $4.99. It will be released on March 20, 2017. And speaking of corroding empires, one can’t help but note that Tor Books has slashed the preorder price of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire from $25.99 to $13.68, presumably due to insufferably good, think-y prose such as this:

Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.


“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. 

The Third Edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says: “If anyone stands at the core of the American science fiction tradition at the moment, it is Scalzi.” That explains a great deal about the precipitous decline of American science fiction, does it not? The award-winning McRapey is, we are frequently informed, the very best that 29-time Best Publisher Tor Books and mainstream science fiction has to offer. That may be true. Nevertheless, from concept to cover, from title to text, THE CORRODING EMPIRE  is a very clear and public demonstration that the Castalia House team can do what they do, and do it better, even as an in-house joke in our copious spare time.

After all, what would be more amusing than for THE CORRODING EMPIRE to outsell and outrank The Collapsing Empire? This isn’t a lame Bored of the Rings-style parody, it is, quite to the contrary, a legitimate Foundation-style novel that effectively demonstrates how hapless Tor’s latest imitative mediocrity is by comparison.

The first number produced by the extrapolated algorithm was off by one-ten billionth. There were nine zeros behind the decimal point. It was a tiny error, all but impossible to detect unless one was looking specifically for it.


The second number was off by twice that. Two in ten billion. Or, rather, one in five billion. One might more reasonably fear being struck by lightning. On a cloudless day. Indoors.


And yet, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the size of the error that was relevant so much as the fact that it existed at all. Somehow, he concluded, even though it was impossible, the data set must have become garbled. Garbage in, garbage out. Geist had run the extrap-algo more than a million times in the past month, using it to check and and recheck Orland’s agro-surveys. But there was no denying it. Somewhere, somehow, something had introduced an unknown variability into the process, but whether it was to be found in the data or the equations, he did not know.