Tag: McRapey

This is how much he doesn’t care

Science Fiction’s smiling sociopath, John Scalzi, declares he is GLAD and DELIGHTED to be ruining science fiction:

    Today I saw a rant on Reddit about me ruining science fiction, and I was all, “YES I AM AND I WILL RUIN IT FOR ANOTHER 13 BOOKS AT LEAST”
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

    ALL OF SCIENCE FICTION WILL FALL TO MY RUINATION WHICH CONSISTS APPARENTLY OF HAVING THE OCCASIONAL FEMALE CHARACTER WITH AGENCY
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

    IN THE END THERE WILL BE ONLY ME AND THE BONES OF THE GRANDMASTERS I’VE POOPED UPON or something really it’s kind of confusing to me tbh
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

    But, yeah. If you think I’m ruining science fiction you’re just gonna have to suck on that shitsicle for another decade at least. Enjoy!
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

    (To be fair to Reddit, someone there was merely excerpting the rant from elsewhere. It’s not Reddit’s fault! This time!)
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

    I’ll note the fellow whining I was ruining SF was also self-evidently racist and sexist, so I’m ESPECIALLY glad to ruin SF for that jerk.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 29, 2015

Seriously, words can’t express how delighted I am to vex and annoy bigoted turds like this one, simply by existing and publishing. Because I do exist. And I will publish! The contracts are signed! Barring death itself, there is no way to stop the decade-long flood of my ruination of the science fiction! Best of all, I don’t have to do anything other than publish to irritate this sad sack of crap. And I was going to do that anyway. It’s the perfect storm of least effort on my part.

Here’s the thing: If I ruin the genre of science fiction for you, or if the presence in the genre of people whose politics and positions you don’t like ruins the genre for you — the whole genre, in which hundreds of traditionally published works and thousands of self-and-micro-pubbed works are produced annually — then, one, oh well, and two, you pretty much deserve to have the genre ruined for you. It doesn’t have to be ruined, mind you, because chances are pretty good that within those thousands of works published annually, you’ll find something that rings your bell. And if you do, why should you care about the rest of it? It’s literally not your problem. Find the work you’ll love and then love it, and support the authors who make it, hopefully with money.

But if you’re determined that I or any author, or feminists or socialists or whomever are ruining the genre, then you’ve given those people the power to ruin the genre for you, whether they care what you think or not, or whether or not they even know you exist. And, speaking personally, if a sexist, bigoted cloacal squirt of a human wants to give me that power, then sure, I’ll be happy to ruin the genre for them through no additional effort of my own. Why, yes, I am destroying science fiction! With glee! And I’m going to be destroying it a lot over the next ten years at least.

So, you might want to pack a lunch, chuckles. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be here in science fiction a nice, long, productive time. I’m going to write what I want to write, how I want to write it, and I’m going to have a hell of a lot of fun while I’m at it. And if you think that ruins the genre, then that’s your problem, not mine.

Perhaps John Scalzi is going to write what he wants to write, write it how he wants to write it, and have a hell of a lot of fun while he’s at it.

But Tor Books isn’t going to publish it….

“Tor has decided to wait until 2017 to release the next new one.”

As one of my friends in the industry commented, “I thought it was going to take until the fourth book was due before Scalzi couldn’t deliver. He couldn’t even come through on the first one!”

Then again, maybe this is just his way of secretly endorsing the Tor Books boycott through sabotage. Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.

UPDATE: Johnny Con says the problem isn’t that the book has been rejected, but rather, he hasn’t written it yet.

I understand that one of my constant detractors is asserting that the reason the first book of my new contract comes out in 2017 and not 2016 is because I turned in a manuscript and it was terrible and now Tor is trying to salvage things. This is the same person, if memory serves, who asserted that Lock In was a failure and Tor was planning to dump me, shortly before Tor, in fact, handed me a multi-million dollar contract, which included a sequel to Lock In.

Now, as then, his head is up his ass and he’s speaking on things he knows nothing about. I haven’t turned in a manuscript; there’s no manuscript to turn in. They (remember I’m working on two) haven’t been written yet. To be clear, the only thing I’ve turned in to Tor since submitting my manuscript for The End of All Things is my contract for the next set of books. That was accepted without any additional revision, I would note.

For the avoidance of doubt, you should assume that any speculation about me or my career coming from that quarter is based on equal parts of ignorance, craven maliciousness, and pathetic longing for my attention, and almost certainly false. Anything said by that person about me is likely to be incorrect, down to and including indefinite articles.

SJWs always lie. I have never claimed that Lock In was a failure or that Tor was planning to dump John Scalzi. Here is what I actually wrote about Lock In:

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….

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.  

The point isn’t that Lock In isn’t successful, it is that it isn’t successful enough to justify the investment PNH is making in Scalzi, or the opportunity cost that their marketing efforts in it represent. Notice that I even anticipated his new contract:  

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.

Angling successfully, as it happens. But he’s spinning, always spinning, even trying here to retroactively salvage his past lies: “Anything said by that person about me is likely to be incorrect, down to and including indefinite articles.”

After all, if you can’t trust Mr. Two Million Monthly Views, who can you trust?

UPDATE 2: LT has the scoop on Scalzi’s big new book!

Scalzi has a great new book coming out in 2017. The big evil is Vahkks Gayder, and MaryJon saves the galaxy by xerself, using the Snark.

John Scalzi, Baen author

It’s probably a good thing John Scalzi is looking to find some new publishing outlets, because Tor Books obviously isn’t of the opinion that they got their money’s worth with his most recent submission:

So, here’s the Very Important News about my 2016 novel release:

Currently, there isn’t one. Not a new one, anyway.

Which isn’t to say I’m not writing a novel in 2016. In fact, I’m writing two(!). Merely that Tor has decided to wait until 2017 to release the next new one.

Why the wait? Among other things, because Tor just dropped a ton of money on me so we want to make sure we debut this next novel, the first in the new contract, just right. I’m on board with this plan — note the “we” in that last sentence — since (again, among other things) I actually want to try to earn out the silly large chunks of money Tor has dropped on me. I also don’t mind the extra time it gives me to write/tweak the novels I’m currently working on.

I’ll admit it. I laughed. I fully expected Scalzi to crack under the pressure, but not this quickly. It’s one thing to talk about writing a really good book that will sell 100k+ copies, but it’s another thing to deliver on it the big talk.

Now, those who don’t know much about the business of publishing may not understand how serious this little delay is. You see, each quarter, a mainstream publisher has certain books upon which it is relying in order to make its numbers. This is particularly important now, in a market that is characterized by declining sales; all the Big Five have seen their sales shrink as a result of bookstores closing and competition from independent publishers and self-published authors on Amazon.

Now, Tor had never previously depended on Scalzi; as recently as 2012 its bestsellers were Orson Scott Card and Karen Traviss’s HALO novels. But they lost HALO and Robert Jordan isn’t writing any more books, which is why they badly need Scalzi to step up to the next level. Hence the big contract and the aggressive book tours, which are essentially PNH throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to save his job.

The recent announcement means that Scalzi hasn’t been able to do it and his new novel didn’t meet requirements. He turned it in, and after reading it, the editors at Tor know that it won’t sell enough to meet their needs. So, they’ve pushed it back one year in the hopes that Scalzi can tweak it enough to turn it into something that will justify their investment in him.

But it’s not going to work any better than signing a WR3 to be a WR1 does. More time won’t change the core problem, which is that Scalzi is a stunt writer. He relies heavily on flash to disguise the fact that he’s not a good storyteller, he has no original ideas, and he’s merely a competent wordsmith. There is nothing wrong with that, and he could have had a perfectly satisfying career as the midlist writer that he is – as an editor, I concluded some time ago that writing snarky dialogue for short TV episodes was probably his ideal medium – but he is not the sort of bestselling writer on whom you would ever want to bet the company.

(For what it’s worth, I’m not either. Very, very few writers are. There is no shame in not being a King, a Heinlein, or a Rowling, and even those writers can seldom deliver on that scale for more than a decade.)

But, as we know, SJWs always double down. Tom Doherty or the Macmillan executives should have fired PNH when he gave them the chance last year, because he is going to cost them heavily due to his decision to ride or die with his pyrite boy. It’s far too soon to say this is definitely the case, but the smart money would bet on PNH’s Hail Mary pass falling incomplete. Sooner or later, one has to stop spinning and massaging the Narrative and actually deliver real-world results.

In the meantime, boycott Tor Books!

Science fiction’s smiling sociopath

One of the things that has always bothered me about John Scalzi’s bizarre public confession concerning his sexual predilections is the same thing that has caused many people to ask the question: why on Earth would John Scalzi openly confess to being a rapist who enjoys sexually assaulting women?

On the one hand, if he was a genuine rapist, why would he ever publicly admit to it? On the other, if he was not, how could he seriously think women would find it funny to hear him declare, in his self-styled “satire”: “I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women without
their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”

Who could possibly think that is either clever or funny? What sort of person writes that in the first place? Well, now we know, thanks to Cory Doctorow, who after 12 years of acquaintance with Scalzi has warned the public that the Tor Books author is very far from neurologically typical. Scalzi simply doesn’t care about anything; in Doctorow’s terms, he has absolutely “zero fucks to give”. John Scalzi just doesn’t care that you know that he’s a self-admitted rapist.

John is limbically atypical. Having watching him mix it up online and face-to-face, I think he’s just wired up different. I think that he really, actually, no-foolin’ gives no fucks at all. All our human traits are arrayed on a bell-curve, I think, from the length of your fingers to your autonomic nervous system’s response to jerks. John is a four- or five-sigma outlier.

This explains a lot that is confusing about the man’s behavior. I’ve heard from numerous people who have encountered Scalzi about his tendency to engage in socially inappropriate behavior towards others in public, whether it is leaping into the arms of someone who barely knows him to playing “hail-fellow-well-met” with authors he has repeatedly and virulently attacked. I’ve also heard from reliable sources that he goes from overly warm to dead-eyed cold in an instant, depending on whether he believes the person to whom he is talking is of immediate use to him or not.

At various conferences, attendees have reported that Scalzi was “weird”, prone to laughing at his own jokes, and totally unable to talk about anything but himself, even when he was supposed to be discussing the work of others. This is five-sigma narcissism, not necessarily malignant narcissism, but certainly a pathological form. And there is a word to describe a narcissistic outlier who lacks empathy: sociopath.

A reporter from the New York Times appears to have subconsciously picked up some signs of this in his interview with Scalzi, as he delicately described the Tor Books author as being prone to smiling and giggling and “someone who is comfortable with the business of promotion”, even as Scalzi blatantly lied about his site traffic in the interview.

Psychology Today lists the signs of a sociopath, and it’s quite clear that even in the eyes of his friends, Scalzi fits them like a glove, like a glove custom-made in Ohio from the tanned flesh of missing teenagers:

  • Superficial charm and good intelligence
  • Unreliability
  • Untruthfulness and insincerity
  • Lack of remorse and shame
  • Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
  • Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
  • Pathologic egocentricity
  • General poverty in major affective reactions
  • Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations

We already knew about the first seven traits. We knew that Scalzi is a habitual liar, that his egocentricity reaches pathological levels, and that he is unable to learn from experience. But we did not know about the two latter traits. And yet, what are “wired up different” and “five-sigma outlier” other than the layman’s way of describing “general poverty in major affective reactions” and “unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations”?

It was clear that the time Scalzi spent in a wheelchair in his youth had a significant effect on his socio-sexual development, but now it is apparent that the wheelchair, plus the absent father, also affected the way in which he developed psychologically. The question now may not be whether science fiction’s smiling sociopath is another abusive sex criminal in the mode of Walter Breen, Ed Kramer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gian Gomeshi, and Samuel Delany, just to name five of whom we are already aware, but rather, how many bodies are buried somewhere underneath that broad expanse of Ohio lawn?

And the gift of an empty mason jar is particularly troubling, as it can only make the astute observer wonder what sort of ghastly little trophies are intended to go inside it.

20 Million Views for 2015

Just passed the number last weekend. I’ll have a full report early in 2016. But still: 20 million
views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.

You may now throw your yellow flag: Unsportsmanlike conduct, 15 yards, taunting.

In other news, it isn’t easy being a Supreme Dark Lord at Christmas time. Forget all the various festivals and invitations from cringing inferiors too frightened to not invite one to their tedious celebrations, the real problem this year is that my Ice Princess wants a freaking cheetah as a companion for her puppy.

Because having four large beasts underfoot clearly isn’t enough. Well, I suppose it could be worse. She might have asked for a pair of matching polar bears or a narwhal. Whatever happened to a nice, simple necklace of gilded SJW ears, anyway?

UPDATE: Dance party makes Waco go away!

John Scalzi @scalzi
Also muting 27 keywords, mostly Twitter handles I’d already muted, so I don’t have to see jerks sucking up to other jerks by insulting me.

If you don’t see it, you can pretend it isn’t happening. You were right back in 2005, Johnny. There is a LOT more candy in me. An infinite amount. What a pity you don’t like the taste of it anymore.

So brave

And so very clever. John Scalzi reveals the secret to his mastery of online debate:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
I like to mute a troller, troll them back a few times, and let ’em know they’ve been muted the whole time so I didn’t see responses. PERFECT

Dave Pelna ‏@DavePelna
How courageous of you.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
This would be a devastating comment if I cared what you think. But I don’t! So.

The thing is, it is a devastating comment because McRapey cares what everybody thinks. That’s why he has to hide from all the critical responses. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t block them, mute them, or respond snarkily to them in the first place.

Remember, the Gamma male always has to win in his own mind. He can’t bear to admit failure or defeat to himself. This is why he never learns to stop making the same mistakes over and over again. And no matter what the outcome is, he will always find a way to somehow declare it to be a victory of some kind and thereby justify his course of action.

That’s why it is so important to be able to acknowledge that you got your ass kicked, or that you were wrong, or that you were bested by someone better. If you don’t, you will never learn to improve your game. And more importantly, you will never learn the self-respect that comes from the certain knowledge that you are one of those men who is always able to pick himself up, dust himself off, and return to the fray without fear.

UPDATE: Futhere evidence of McRapey’s fearless indifference to others:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Honestly if all comment sections on the Internet disappeared tomorrow our world would be a vastly better place.

Isn’t it awful that people are allowed to talk back at him? And in public, no less!

Scalzi: Americans are ” shrieking, bigoted cowards”

John Scalzi’s accusation that Americans are “shrieking, bigoted cowards” and “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” because they don’t want to permit Muslim immigrants to move in next door is more than a little ironic, considering that McRapey has a) never been in so much as a fistfight in his life, b) spent the last year lecturing everyone about how SF conventions are unsafe and #GamerGate is more evil and lethally dangerous than the Waffen SS, and c) lives in the whitiest white Christian enclave he could afford.

So, this week.

    The last few days are a reminder that a large number of Americans are in fact shrieking, bigoted cowards, and that’s a sad thing, indeed.

    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 19, 2015

Seriously, I don’t think the bedwetting about Muslims has been this bad in a very long time, which is saying something, and the panic on Syrian refugees is particularly ridiculous. Here’s a nice, juicy quote from a just released essay on the subject:

    Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States and none was successfully carried out.  That is one terrorism-planning conviction for a refugee for every 286,543 of them who have been admitted.  To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.  The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough…

    The security threat posed by refugees in the United States is insignificant.  Halting America’s processing of refugees due to a terrorist attack in another country that may have had one asylum-seeker as a co-plotter would be an extremely expensive overreaction to very minor threat.

What horrifyingly liberal commie soviet came up with this load of codswallop? The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, i.e., the fellow who with his brother is currently trying to buy the entire right side of the political spectrum for his own personal ends. When the Cato Institute is telling you to maybe take down the pearl-clutching over the Syrian refugees a notch or two, it’s an indication that you’ve lost all perspective…. So congratulations, America. We’ve successfully wrested the title of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” from France. Enjoy it.

So brave. The reference to France is ironic, in light of how the general mood in France right now is somewhere between “I am voting for Front National” and “kill all the fucking barbarians already”. And apparently the Chinese are even more cowardly, considering that they are terminating with extreme prejudice all terrorist suspects, including those under the age of six.

It will be amusing to see how long it takes before Scalzi starts desperately trying to explain away this piece in much the same way he has been trying to explain away his public rape confession for the last three years. But not as amusing as it would be to see Saladin Ahmed behead him on stage at Worldcon, which Ahmed totally would not do because Muslims never do that sort of thing. It is, I am reliably informed, “against Islam.”

UPDATE: Someone sent along this.

[Link to Vox Day’s site deleted; he doesn’t need traffic from here – JS] 

It’s true, I don’t. I’m already approaching four times his traffic.

Mailvox: the answer is obvious

Vile Faceless Minion #141 alerts us to this amusing entry at Engadget:

Self-promotion advice with John Scalzi!

#DearVeronica ,In this tech age, how should a novice novelist make an impression and promote his book to grab attention of a lot of people?
— Rajat Joshi (@MrRajatJoshi) August 14, 2015

John Scalzi, author of some of my favorite books, is here to help Rajat out!

The answer, as everyone who has read SJWAL knows, is easy: lie about your blog traffic.

After all, who doesn’t want to read a book by someone with 2 MILLION MONTHLY PAGEVIEWS!

Subhuman scum

I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible for me to think less of McRapey. I was wrong.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I support Planned Parenthood, and have the donation receipts to prove it.

I’ve always found the idea that I, of all people, am jealous or envious of John Scalzi to be bizarre, as I think anyone would have to be insane to want to have anything to do with such a grotesque, twisted creature.

Although this was rather funny.

JartStar ‏@JartStar
@scalzi Did you get the baby parts you ordered with your donation?