Tag: McRapey

“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. 

Mailvox: the Collapsing Parodist

Tor sent out an email with a big excerpt from McRapey’s forthcoming attempt to take his inimitable skills at imitation to new heights and rip off both Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert AT THE SAME TIME:

Enter The Flow With Excerpts from John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire is available March 21, but in the meantime, you can transport yourself into Scalzi’s interstellar epic with excerpts on Tor.com. We’ll be posting chapters all week; you can get started right away with the prologue and Chapter One, and check back all this week for additional excerpts, collected below. Happy Reading!

Yesterday I received an email from an intrepid SF reader who boldly dared to go where few would bother. His conclusions:

I read the excerpt and postscript of it just yesterday. It is really bad – there’s an entire chapter where strategy or politics is discussed by some lady who has been walked in on while fucking Wesley Crusher, and she just keeps going at it while continuing the conversation. Deeply pathetic.

Wait… it turns out I made a mistake. The Amazon Look Inside copy has missing pages during the Wesley Crusher episode, which is why I thought it consumed most of the chapter. After reading the Amazon sample, I looked at the Wesley Crusher chapter that Tor posted, and she only has her conversation while having sex for about two pages or so. It is nevertheless patently ridiculous, although much much funnier in the Look Inside version where she has her third party conversation for about 15 pages while getting plowed by a boy toy.

Sadly, the misunderstood version is a better yarn. The ironic thing about it is that end of the book gives away that the Flow or whatever it is called has been based on some convoluted lie the entire time. And now they finish by having to establish a new lie to keep the galaxy going, or something.

It is surprisingly devoid of snark. Or anything resembling emotion. It reads like a damned board meeting or something. It’s like he plagiarized SFWA treasury meetings for inspiration.

Oh. My. I’m not surprised in the least. But I am amused. You know that later today, there will be an executive at Macmillan flipping through the book and saying, “wait, Patrick paid HOW much for this shit?” But then, I thought, surely the reviewer exaggerates!

No, as it turns out, no, he isn’t.

Chapter Two

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. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.


“It’s important.”


“Trust me, so is this.”


“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”


“Well, shit,” Kiva said. Her groove was definitely gone, and the assistant purser, her little project, looked pretty miserable at the moment. “That was a pretty impressive jab you just gave to someone who can fire your ass, Brennir.”


“You can’t fire me, ma’am,” Brennir said. “I’ve got tenure with the guild. Now, are you coming or not?”


“I’m thinking.”

Well, it is sort of reminiscent of Asimovian naming conventions, I suppose. Awful as it is, I don’t think it quite manages to top this legendary exchange from the Hugo Award-winning Redshirts, though.

“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.


“What?” Dahl said.


“What?” Hester said.


“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”


“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”


“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said.   


You can tell from that gritty, realistic dialogue that McRapey has spent a lot of time with manly, military men, doing manly, military things. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that McRapey has written that I find funnier than this absolute jewel of pure, unadulterated fiction.


[Vox] really has a thing for me, which is straight-up pure envy, as far as I can tell.


My dear, very dear, Mr. Scalzi, while there are certainly authors whose literary accomplishments and talents I envy, from Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse to Tanith Lee and Edgar Allen Poe, I can assure you, with 100 percent honesty, that you are not, and have never been, among them.

Another fake Scalzi “bestseller”

I think we can safely assume, on the basis of this UK cover, that Tor Books is going to be purchasing another dubious one-week appearance for John Scalzi on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

I mean, who could doubt that a book that has been reviewed so positively will fail to meet with anything less than overwhelming enthusiasm from the science fiction book-buying community?

Readers might wonder whether Scalzi can write another space opera that shares the elements that made his Old Man’s War series so popular but be sufficiently different to feel fresh. Both include political plotting, plenty of snark, puzzle-solving, and a healthy dose of action, but there’s just enough here that’s new for this to avoid becoming a retread. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but you’ll still want to find out what happens next.
– Kirkus Reviews

Unless you’ve been a professional reviewer, you may not be able to read between the lines well enough to understand what the reviewer is actually saying in his review. You see, when you want to say something positive about a mediocre book, but also want to avoid completely sacrificing your credibility, the trick is to say nice, cute things about the author that he can run off and happily quote, while assiduously avoiding any overly positive statements about the book itself that will come back to haunt you once the readers discover how mediocre it is.

But that’s neither here nor there; the fact that McRapey wrote another snarky mediocrity is hardly a surprise. The real question is: how could Tor Books possibly know, six weeks before the first book in the series is published, that the forthcoming series can be described as “The New York Times Bestselling Series”?

UPDATE: Amazing. Tor Books has somehow known that The Collapsing Empire would be a New York Times Bestselling series since June 27, 2016, 10 months prior to its scheduled release! That must be some killer psychometric prediction software they’ve got there. That, or they’ve already set aside the cost of a one-week “bestseller” in the marketing budget.

Portrait of a failed strategy

Indignation and posturing having failed in intersectional defense of his interspecies relationships, McRapey tries a new strategy. It does not go well.

  • So… he’s trying to be witty and troll his opponents… by agreeing and amplifying the cuck insult, and making himself look like a creepy gay man?
  • Correct. He’s been doing that since high school.
  • He’s on the bottom rung of the ladder with actual men, who display nothing but disgust and contempt for him, a physical revulsion, since he’s utterly insecure and doesn’t know how to act like a man. So he self-neuters and acts like a woman to get validation from the only people who can stand him. Example A of why fathers are so important to little boys. If all you have to emulate is mommy you may end up like this degenerate.

What is supposed to pass for humor is the Gamma go-to under pressure. First, it’s not funny. Second, it doesn’t actually fool anyone.

UPDATE: Don’t worry, now he’s going to butch it up. On Twitter.

“Why would you punch a Nazi when baseball bats are readily available?” 

So tuff! So fierce! So very 6’3″ Marine badass! The funny thing is that there are almost certainly far more people who would love to see McRapey get punched in the face than ever wanted to see someone hit Richard Spencer. And that’s just the SJWs.

McRapey responds

John Scalzi has bravely risen to defend his ritual public humiliations of his wife against the Chateau’s speciesist scorn:

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
1. Incidentally, it’s a thing with alt-right types to try to run down my marriage, ie, HOW DARE YOU BE BESOTTED WITH YOUR WIFE YOU BETA CUCK
10:59 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
2. And it really just makes me giggle. Yes, you sad little boys. I’m married to a strong awesome equal partner, for 21 years now. How awful!
11:01 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
3. I mean, honestly. I’m not sure how HA HA LOOK AT THIS LOSER WHO DELIGHTS IN HIS MARRIAGE is supposed to be an insult. To ME, anyway.
11:04 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
4. Mind you, if being happy with my wife sends them into paroxysms of fury, well, I guess that’s a bonus? But otherwise: Silly little boys.
11:06 PM – 17 Jan 2017

 John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
5. In sum: Yeah, being married to my wife is super-fabulous. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, any day of the week. And twice on Sundays.
11:14 PM – 17 Jan 2017

You have to see the wedding day picture to believe it. It’s hilarious. As Heartiste observed: I haven’t seen a “lean out” like that since Sheryl Sandberg’s husband set his treadmill speed to “the sweet relief of marital release”.


John, no one is running down your marriage, much less sent into “paroxysms of fury” over your ongoing experiment in interspecies relations. We think it’s great that you’re so happily married to an orc, or half-troll, or whatever it is. No one begrudges you that. We just think it’s funny. Especially when you brag about how strong your offspring are.

HALF-ORCS
These orc–human crossbreeds can be found in either orc or human society (where their status varies according to local sentiments), or in communities of their own. Half-orcs usually inherit a good blend of the physical characteristics of their parents. They are as tall as humans and a little heavier, thanks to their muscle.
    +2 Strength, –2 Intelligence, –2 Charisma.

Mailvox: the illustrated shiv

VFM #7634 wasn’t entirely sure to whom Literally Who’s self-outing as… something was referring.

I’m confused… is this another post about Scalzi?

No, as it happens, THIS is a tremendous post about the most important author in science fiction history, the Fifth of the Big Three, the biggest, baddest, bestselling dog at Tor Books, the man with more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke or Jerry Pournelle and more Hugo Awards than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks combined, the writer whose innovative “he said, he said, he said” structure has shocked and awed and intimidated the entire science fiction writing community and forever altered the way it approaches writing dialogue.

Our case study today is John Scalzi, a quisling male emblematic of so much that has gone haywire with White American men (and their beards).

Exhibit A: This is Scalzi’s Christmas card. He signed off on it. He approved of it. This is how he wants the world to see him.

Exhibit B: Scalzi in love. Here Scalzi is in the submissive position, an obvious inferior looking up to his wifely better.

Exhibit C: Scalzi smooches. Kissing upward and nuzzling his doughy face into hard manjawline, eyes closed as his hunky lady peers into the middle distance looking burdened with the weight of the world (or for an escape from her husband’s octopus lips), Scalzi eagerly inverts the sexual polarity, taking on the role of the woman in his marriage, ceding all the T to his wife.

Exhibit D: Serious Scalzi. Scalzi tries to look serious (ie like a normal man), but is still out-mugged by his wife, who looks more serious, and tougher, than him.

People have mostly given up trying to sell the narrative, but I always found it bizarre when people tried to claim that I envied John Scalzi. On what planet, and for what reason, would I, or any man, ever envy a gamma male like that?

I find the most interesting thing about Scalzi to be the fact that he somehow managed to delay the inevitable gamma self-implosion until he reached a much higher level of success than is conventionally the case. This suggests that his implosion, when it inevitably comes, is going to be absolutely spectacular.

The best part of the Chateau post is the comments from the women there.

  • What I really despise about this guy is that he’s contributing to the further ruin of science fiction. So why do these mannish women latch on to these beta guys? Seeing stuff like this out of a man makes me hurt inside. It’s instinctive, like being scared of rattlesnakes. How do women kill them in themselves, and why would they want to?
  • Exhibit B made my ovaries shrivel.
  • Who’s that gay bloke standing next to the giant woman?

Some might fear that the lack of compassion and respect shown in this post might cost Heartiste any chance of being nominated for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award from The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect. However, I would observe that the metric for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award given out by The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect is “showing compassion and respect” for one’s “fellow man”, and therefore, due to the subject’s observable lack of any identifiable signs of actual manhood, it would not be correct to hold this post against le Chateau.

Thank you for caring.

This is what Zero Fucks looks like

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Pro tip: if you write me telling me you’re tired of me writing about politics, expect a response along the line of “I don’t fucking care.”


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Pointed out to me a certain racist failure is still desperately trying to prove he’s more popular than I am. Well, with assholes, certainly.


James S.A. Corey ‏@JamesSACorey 
How come you get all the cool enemies?


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Well, if by “cool” you mean “sad little bigoted manchildren, wailing disconsolately at the indifference of others”: just luck.


Edward Trimnell ‏@EdwardTrimnell
John Scalzi, studiously ignoring Vox Day. Lol.

MAGA Thermite ‏@SirThermite
It’s telling how Gamma 0 isn’t content anymore with calling @voxday a racist, has to lie about him being a failure

Just a reminder that John Scalzi is so successful, and cares so little about what other people think, that he told Lightspeed Magazine in 2010 that Whatever was getting more than 2 million pageviews per month when it was actually getting 409,745. As it is written, SJWs always lie. The first funny thing – and I would have spotted this if I’d been paying attention at the time – is that later that year, he reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the entire year. Be it lying, political analysis, or writing science fiction, he is a mediocrity.

It’s true that McRapey gives zero fucks, but about the truth, not about what you think of him. He cares very much indeed about that. And if you’re here reading this, you are probably already aware that John Scalzi says you’re an asshole. See: Third Law of SJW.

Speaking of the Laws of SJW, the second funny thing is that McRapey is still trying to preserve his narrative about my being a failure when Castalia House now sells more books than he does and November’s VP-only traffic was 3,446,312 pageviews, which happens to be 3.3 times more than Whatever’s very best month ever back in May 2012. Scalzi has been in decline ever since, as his site traffic and Google Trends and flat number of Twitter followers all demonstrate.

I’m not trying to prove I’m more popular than he is. I am conclusively proving it, using the very metric that he dishonestly used to create a false media narrative of his own popularity. Far from being desperate, I am distinctly amused at his complete inability to admit the observable reality; Gamma pride is truly a thing to behold. And once his attempt to rip off Isaac Asimov fails to take him to the next level, again, it’s back to the coal mines of the midlist for poor McRapey. His readers know the truth, of course, even as they rush to smooth his ruffled feathers.

Fledgist ‏@Fledgist
What matters is not the roar of the world but the love of your family & the affection of your friends. You’ve got that in spades.

Or, you know, maybe not.


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
When retweeting things, try to be better than your racist aunt forwarding bullshit she found on Facebook. It’s easier than you think.

3.1 million

For nearly 10 years, I didn’t think much about the traffic statistics, until in 2012, a few Scalzi fans began trying to taunt me with McRapey’s supposedly massive traffic at Whatever. (Key word: supposedly). So, it now gives me a sense of satisfaction every time a new high-water mark is reached. October 2016 marks the first time I’ve hit three times the all-time peak for the former most popular blog in science fiction, which was recorded in May 2012.

Of course, it’s around 6x Whatever‘s current traffic, but no one cares about that anymore.

Anyhow, October set a new traffic records for both VP – 2,615,169 Google pageviews – and VP+AG – 3,112,416. It will be close, but it now looks like the combined blog total will exceed 30 million in 2016, up considerably from last year’s 20,776,969 pageviews.

A lot of that is the election, of course, but there was no dropoff at all after November 2012, so perhaps the newly come Ilk will become the foundation for the next ramp up to 50 million annually. Who knows?

There is a deeper point to this post, however, beyond the petty ball-spiking. Past performance can be indicative of future performance, but that is not always the case. For example, I have a pretty good statistical model that predicts traffic growth with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It can be so good that it predicted 1,990,883 pageviews in January 2016. The actual number was 1,982,034. That’s precision to within half of one percent! It also predicted 27,682,865 pageviews for 2016; we’re presently at 24,247,801 with two months to go. Not bad, right?

That, you see, is why I take dh very seriously when he discusses the election in terms of the historical poll analyses. His perspective is not irrelevant. Far from it. On the other hand, one also has to be aware that these statistical trends, however reliable they tend to be, are not determinative. One also has to pay attention to potential outliers, and recognize the scenarios when they are likely to be in play.

For example, my impressively precise traffic model predicted 2,019,930 pageviews in October 2016. The actual result, previously mentioned, turned out to be 54 percent higher.

TL;DR: Thank you for visiting. Feel free to join the discourse. And please to enjoy the incipient Trumpslide.