Tic-tac-toe

So, I wonder how many kitty pictures McRapey will post this week? But that’s not all, folks, there’s more!

Looks like the Os have it.

UPDATE: That scent you smelled this morning wasn’t burned toast, it was the butthurt emanating from Bradford, Ohio.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Question for the legal scholars among you: Is this title parody? Or libel?

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 11m11 minutes ago
Personally, I’m not sure where it is on the parody/libel line. I am a public figure, but there is definitely malice, etc. It’s a puzzle!

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Also, for those asking, I obviously reported it to Amazon as inappropriate. I mean, the cover art is TERRIBLE. And, uh. Other things.

Here is a hint for the man with the 2.8 GPA: it’s in the parody section. And the parody directly quoted you. But I’m sure everyone at Amazon will be astonished to learn that John Scalzi believes satire directed at John Scalzi is inappropriate.


I said “punch back twice as hard”

Not beat them to death with an iron bar, before sodomizing their corpses with it! (shakes head) See, this sort of thing is why we keep the minions leashed and muzzled when we have company.

Ah well. One of these days, the SJWs are going to realize that while I may be the Supreme Dark Lord, I am the calm and civil voice of sweet reason as far as the Evil Legion of Evil is concerned. The Dread Ilk are not dreaded for nothing, after all.

Just to be clear, I neither wrote nor published nor commissioned JOHN SCALZI IS A RAPIST: Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His Gentle Touch; A Pretty Pretty Girl Dreams of Her Beloved One While Pondering Gender Identity, Social Justice, and Body Dysmorphia. But I will readily admit to being deeply, deeply, amused by it.

I wonder if McRapey will want to do the audio book for this too?

Anyhow, I suppose this can be taken as a resounding NO vote for Mr. Martin’s suggested reconciliation.

UPDATE: The initial SJW reactions are about what you’d assume they would be.

dream a dream@maryeverbright
“These people are absolutely vile. Can’t you sue them for defamation or libel @jscalzi?

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
@maryeverbright @jscalzi What the hell did I just see?  Why… WHAT????

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU???  @voxday #HugoAwards #sadpuppies

dream a dream ‏@maryeverbright
@voxday @jscalzi You people are revolting, every single one of you. I’m glad you you’ll never get a Hugo.

Hey, don’t come crying to me. I didn’t do it. I’m just sitting here on the old throne of bones, drinking a little fermented SJW blood, and laughing. “Absolutely vile?” What part of “Vile Faceless Minions” did she not understand?


The sour grapes of Mensa

The Aesopean analogy doesn’t quite work, though, given that foxes are a symbol of intelligence. And it’s just so hard to maintain the pretense that you’re the smartest guy in the room when you didn’t even qualify for the high-IQ society with the lowest bar to membership. It doesn’t take a, well, a Mensa member, to figure out why Mensa is such a sore spot for McRapey.

    Pro tip: Bragging about your Mensa card as an actual adult signals that while you may be “smart,” you almost certainly are not wise.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 31, 2015

In the various recent kerfuffles surrounding science fiction and its awards, there have been a couple of people (and their spouses, declaiming about their beloved) who have been slapping down Mensa cards as proof that they (or their spouse) are smart. Let me just say this about that:

Oh, my sweet summer children. Just don’t.

If you want to be in Mensa, that’s fine. Everyone needs hobbies and associations, and if this is the direction you want to go with yours, then you do you. Not my flavor, but then, lots of hobbies and associations aren’t my flavor.

That said:

1. Literally no one outside of Mensa gives a shit about your Mensa card. No one is impressed that you belong to an organization that has among its membership people who believe that because they can ace a test, they are therefore broadly intellectually superior to everyone else.

2. Your Mensa membership does not imply or suggest that you are the smartest person in the room. Leaving aside the point that the intelligence that Mensa values is a narrow and specialized sort, a large number of people who can join Mensa, don’t, for various reasons, including the idea that belonging to a group that glories in its supposed intellectual superiority is more than vaguely obnoxious.

3. Your need to bring up the fact you have a Mensa card suggests nothing other than it’s really really really important to you for people to know you’re smart, and that you believe external accreditation of this supposed top-tier intelligence is more persuasive than, say, the establishment of your intelligence through your actions, demeanor, or personality. Which is to say: It shows you’re insecure.

4. Your Mensa card does not mean you know how to argue. Your Mensa card does not mean you do not make errors or lapses in judgment. Your Mensa card is not a “get out of jail free” card when someone pokes holes in your thesis. Your Mensa card does not mean that you can’t be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. You may not say “I have a Mensa card, therefore my logic is irrefutable.” Your Mensa card will not save you from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and if you think it will, then you are exactly who the Dunning-Kruger syndrome was meant to describe. You Mensa card will not keep you from being called out for acting stupidly, or doing stupid things.

See, you’re not supposed to brag about your Mensa-qualifying IQ and having one doesn’t mean you know how to argue. What you’re supposed to do is brag about your BACHELOR’S DEGREE in Philosophy of Language from the University of Chicago, which institution we are reliably informed does not hand them out like gumballs, and appeal to the authority of that degree whenever someone happens to observe your incompetence at constructing syllogisms and formulating sound arguments. Which, as it happens, is practically every single time McRapey attempts to construct an actual argument rather than simply posturing about his assertions.

As I noted back in 2013, McRapey hasn’t changed what passes for his debating technique since at least 2005.

    1. Make an obviously questionable assertion.
    2. When the assertion is questioned, appeal to bachelor’s degree.
    3. When the appeal to the bachelor’s degree is questioned, question the questioner’s intellect and/or good will.
    4. Avoid further questions.
    5. Posture as if one has thoroughly proved one’s point.

      He even went so far as to claim that I had never bested him in any argument. “As for besting me in argument, well, no, not at any point I can remember.”

      SJWs always lie.

      Sure you don’t remember, Johnny. Read SJWs Always Lie, Amazon’s #1 bestseller in Political Philosophy. It will serve to refresh your memory in brutal and well-documented detail, and it even contains a chapter devoted to rhetoric that you will find educational.

      Speaking of Dunning-Kruger, McRapey is a walking, talking example of the syndrome in action, particularly when it comes to rhetoric. For all that he majored in something that could be considered akin to it if you squint hard enough, he clearly doesn’t know the first thing about it. The rhetorical device to which he habitually resorts is a sophistical and dialectically illegitimate one called “ambiguity”, not that he could correctly identify or name it despite his famous bachelor’s degree. But then, as we know, we shouldn’t be too harsh on him considering that he’s not even smart enough for Mensa. Aristotle had Scalzi’s kind pegged more than 2,000 years ago.

      “Now for some people it is better worth while to seem to be wise,
      than to be wise without seeming to be (for the art of the sophist is the
      semblance of wisdom without the reality, and the sophist is one who
      makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom); for them, then, it is
      clearly essential also to seem to accomplish the task of a wise man
      rather than to accomplish it without seeming to do so.”

      As for me, I don’t brag about my Mensa membership. Why on Earth would I? The requirements for joining aren’t even within a standard deviation of my IQ or the three other residents of the Digital Ghetto back in the day. I joined Mensa after starting my WND column as an efficient and effective way to defang the inevitable “right-wing writer is stupid” disqualifications from the left. And that is precisely why some people on the right brandish it like a shield, because that is exactly what it is: a rhetorical shield that successfully blunts the left’s most frequently used rhetorical disqualification: “dey stupid, DISQUALIFY!”

      And since we’re on the subject of SJWs lying, where, exactly, is the “bragging about your Mensa card” in Sarah’s post, to which, of course, McRapey does not link? Go ahead, see just how much importance she and her readers place on it and note the context in which it was mentioned.

      But do tell us more about how it is actually membership in Mensa that is stupid and totally doesn’t matter and doesn’t mean that one is intelligent at all, Johnny. Let it all out. You’ll feel better after a good cry.

      UPDATE: It turns out that Mr. “Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy of Language from the University of Chicago” graduated with a 2.8 GPA. See, obviously he was one of the cool party guys… at the University of Chicago.

      I was not hugely grade-intensive. I didn’t stress out: I had a 2.8 GPA…. I did well in the classes that I liked, and I did very poorly in the classes that I did not care about.

      Apparently he didn’t care about his IQ test either, or he totally would have done well enough to qualify for Mensa.


      John Scalzi on #GamerGate

      Because McRapey is due to start claiming that he’s always been a gamer – in fact, he’s a game developer who has written games – and claiming that he and #GamerGate were just joshing each other a little like him and John Ringo, that they’re really good pals just like him and Larry Correia, any day now, I figured this particular Twitter rant should go on the record as the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate approaches.

          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

      #GamerGate is going to remember too, Johnny. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that one SJW fame whore who has virtually no connection to the game industry would rush to take the side of corrupt SJW journalists and other SJW fame whores who have virtually no connections to the game industry.

      It’s no secret how actual devs feel about McRapey. But speaking of devs and game development, here is a screenshot from one of our games that will be released this fall. I expect seriously old school gamers will have no trouble identifying the original inspiration, as well as one of the new elements added.

      It may interest you to know that while this particular project is a small one, it is a 100 percent Dread Ilk production. And to continue on to a second tangent, I should mention that another member of the Ilk is looking for a web developer.

      I had an idea for a web business and I’ve had an acquaintance designing the program over the past year – he’s become unreliable so I need to find someone.  It’s a start-up and I’d like to find someone who’s willing to design the software for an equity share in the company. The system was developed in .net framework (I think with ASP).  There may be a better way and I’m not committed to that platform.  If you know someone that may be interested in such an arrangement, please forward my email to them.

      If you’re interested in learning more about it, shoot me an email with WEB DEVELOP and I’ll pass your email onto him.


      Why everyone hates McRapey

      It looks like John Scalzi is back in the depressive phase of his cycle, as he offers ten theories about why he is so disliked by so many people. You know, he simply could have asked us. We would have told him. But let’s see how many he gets right. Without having looked at them yet, I’m going to guess 3 out of 10:

      Over on Facebook at the moment, and as a subset of a larger discussion, there’s a conversational thread about why so many dudes (and it is largely dudes, and dudes of a certain sort and political persuasion) have such a rabid dislike of me, both as a writer and as a human being.

      Naturally, I have thoughts on this, based on years of personal observation, so below you’ll find my hypotheses on why I am so widely disliked by a certain type of dude. These hypotheses are mix and match: Not all will apply to everyone.

      1. Because I’m an asshole. TRUE

      2. Because they’re assholes. FALSE. No one dislikes Scalzi due to them being an asshole. Some would certainly put me in that category and that’s not why I dislike Scalzi; vastly more non-assholes dislike Scalzi than the sum total of everyone who can even remotely be described as one. As for the idea of “an unpleasant variation of starfucking”, I would point out that most of the people who dislike him here disliked him back in 2005, long before he was a Tor-made SF star.

      3. Because of my politics. FALSE. I live in Europe. I have plenty of friends who are far to the left of Scalzi; the Socialist Party is the #2 party in my region. I would guess that most of my friends outside the USA are to his left. It’s entirely possible to be of the political left and not be an obnoxious fraud.

      4. Because I should be with them and I’m not. FALSE. We most certainly do not want McRapey with us in any way, shape, or form. That’s just insulting.

      5. Because I’m successful: FALSE. We live in a world where Britney Spears is a music star, Katie Price is a bestselling author, and there are probably any number of Hollywood stars who would serve as an example of acting success without talent. Scalzi may be a mediocre stunt author, but is not entirely without talent and his level of success is minimal compared to some egregiously less talented writers. Scalzi simply can’t seem to grasp that not everyone is as driven by envy as he is.

      6. Because I’m not a real man. TRUE. He’s a prime example of a gamma male, a parody of a real man, which is why he inspires disgust in men and women alike.

      7. Because they can’t actually do anything to me. FALSE. If nothing else, I’ve exposed him as a fraud who repeatedly lies about his success.

      8. Because of envy. FALSE See the Third Law of SJW: SJWs Always Project.

      9. Because I refused to recognize that they were right about something that one time, or several times
      . FALSE.

      10. Because of tribal identification. TRUE. He is a proud SJW. He is anti-GG.  Both of those identifications are sufficient reason for tens of thousands of #GamerGaters alone to legitimately hate him.

      What do you know, 3 out of 10. Do I know the little freakshow or what? And notice how he keeps trying to tie everything back to envy, because people envy him, because he is successful, which he obviously needs to remind himself on a regular basis. Now let’s list the eight primary reasons he is hated; only two of which he managed to identify, in the order of most to least hateful.

      1. He is a liar. John Scalzi repeatedly lies, and when caught lying, he does not admit it and repent, but keeps lying and then lies about those who caught him out. He lies about himself. He lies about others. He’s reliably dishonest and even when he isn’t blatantly lying, he’s deceptive. I doubt it will surprise anyone in the least if it eventually turns out there is some funny business concerning his book contract not exactly being what it was described as being.
      2. He is a con artist. Almost everything he does, from his writing to getting published by Tor to campaigning for awards to laying claim to be a popular blogger, is a calculated, self-promoting scam. I know from multiple sources that in public he pretends to be better friends with people than he in fact is, particularly when those people are better known than he is.
      3. He’s a coward. He’d also be a bully, but he’s too cowardly for that. He runs away from any challenge he can’t simply ban.
      4. He is obnoxious. I think he covered that with #1 above.
      5. He is pathologically narcissistic. All those silly Photoshop-edited
        selfies are indicative of a narcissist who absolutely loathes his own
        physical appearance. The combination of his pathological narcissism with
        his physical ugliness is literally repulsive and goes well beyond the
        usual gamma issues. Although he is disgusted by himself, he resents us for being disgusted by him. Hence the constant “look at me, love me” antics. His incessant need for attention would be pitiful if it didn’t manifest in such obnoxious ways.
      6. He is pretentious. Look at how he tried to call himself a game developer and talked about the game he was working on when he was
        nothing but a lowly writer on the failed project. (It was a ridiculous rail-shooter for mobile; I knew it would fail from the moment I read the description.) Some things never change; I caught him exaggerating the number and nature of his publications in our very first meeting back
        in 2005.
      7. He is a gamma male. All gammas are secret kings ruling over their delusion bubble with majesty and sly, smooth charm, but Scalzi is a particularly virulent example of the species, as he’s somehow able to convince others of low socio-sexual rank that they, too, can be winners like him. But he more or less nailed this in #6. He’s not a real man.
      8. He significantly overrates his intelligence. He’s not stupid. Far from it. But he’s more than a standard deviation below me, and I’m not the smartest guy around. He’s a high midwit with delusions of brilliance, and like all midwits, assumes that if he can’t understand something, that must be because it’s stupid. This is more annoying than hateful, though.

      Did I miss anything? Why do you hate John Scalzi? Apparently he wants to know. But if I had a single piece of advice for him if he genuinely wanted to be less hated, it would be this: stop lying. Stop lying to yourself, stop lying to your readers, and stop lying to your enemies. You’re not fooling ANYONE anymore.

      Yes, lying has worked for him in the past. He would not be where he is today without repeatedly lying to lots of people. But the seeds of failure are often sown in the mindless repetition of what made us successful.


      Of math and the SJW

      In which McRapey totally pwns the math:

      Vox Day (@voxday)
      The @torbooks boycott has reduced @scalzi’s Bookscan sales by 68%! http://t.co/kYXVBeBBo7 #SadPuppies

      John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
      1. A detractor trying to show his “boycott” of Tor was working claimed a 68% drop in my Lock In sales since the boycott, citing Bookscan…

      2. His only problem is that he read the data backwards. Literally backwards. My booksales went UP in that time, not down.

      3. And people wonder why I occasionally say I wish I had a better class
      of detractor. Even being able to math would be an improvement!

      4. (To be clear, the week-to-week number movement have nothing to do
      with boycotts or anything else. They’re the usual sales up and downs.)

      5. Those curious can see discussion of it here:
      http://file770.com/?p=23709 . Note the first comment, which catches the
      math error.

      You know, I haven’t been caught out this badly since I observed that Kim Stanley Robinson was, on the basis of the picture on his web site, a remarkably ugly bearded woman. If nothing else, you’d think the exclamation point on a single tweet would have given it away, but apparently anything short of a “LOL”, a smiley face emoji, and a (jk) will be lost on these masters of the social arts.

      Johnny Con’s attempted derision of his nameless detractor’s inability to do math is amusing because there is no mathematical error involved. There is absolutely no indication of not “being able to math”. And he would appear to have failed to realize that I was mocking Jason Sanford for a) pretending that an obviously irrelevant snapshot of data was relevant, b) listing the dates in the reverse of the usual order, and c) proceeding to reach a backwards conclusion. See, unlike Scalzi, I don’t assume the other side is completely retarded; I find it impossible to imagine that Sanford is genuinely dumb enough to believe that the data he cited is meaningful in any way, shape, or form.

      SJWs like Scalzi are so easy. All you need to to do make them jump is offer them a “mistake” they can attack in order to disqualify you and show how totally smart and superior they are. As Scalzi demonstrates, they will ignore literally everything that is relevant to the argument at hand in their desperate eagerness to strike their pseudo-superior poses.

      Sanford wrote: “Lock In by John Scalzi (hardcover) 65 copies on 7/05, 39 on 6/28, 74 on 6/21, 63 on 6/14, 46 on 6/7, 54 on 5/31, 21 on 5/24.” The chart, on the other hand, begins with May 24th and ends with July 5th, with the data running in the more conventional left to right manner, which made his reversal obvious even for those who don’t know how to read dates in the American manner. There is no math error; 21/65 = 0.32, which would indicate a 68 percent decline; more importantly, as Mike Glyer correctly notes, the dates Sanford cites to “prove” the ineffectiveness of the boycott are invalid because he cites data from three successive weeks before the boycott began.

      When I aggregated the sales for these 10 books from the week of June 21, the latest unaffected by the boycott (announced on June 19), and the sales from the week of July 5 (the latest reported by Sanford), that gave me 1,740 vs. 1,667 books. Therefore, the July 5 sales of these 10 books were 95.8% of what they were before immediately before the boycott.

      In fact, Scalzi’s Bookscan sales have observably declined since the boycott began: from 74 the week of June 21 to 65 the week of July 5. That is a 12.2 percent decline. Clearly, if we are to take Mr. Sanford’s numbers seriously, the Tor boycott has been effective.

      Of course, what will likely be of considerably more concern to Tor Books than the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of the boycott is the fact that the writer for whom they blew off 523 new writers is selling as few as 21 copies of his “best-selling” hardcover per week.

      Remember the First Law of SJW: SJWs always lie.


      The Olympian indifference of Johnny Con

      John Scalzi attempts to spin the narrative about his book deal on Twitter:

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      I’d like to thank @torbooks for taking a chance on me even though I don’t actually sell any books.

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      Also, yeah, if you’re one of those people who thinks I’m ruining science fiction, it’s gonna be a bad next decade for you. Oh well!

      John Scalzi retweeted
      Jim C. Hines @jimchines
      1. @scalzi signs a $3.4 million deal with Tor.
      2. People authorsplain how he’d have earned even more if he’d only done ________.

      #Facepalm

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      Reading commentary on the deal reminds me that a large majority of people do not know how publishing works. Which is fine, but interesting.

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      Most people don’t HAVE to know publishing economics, mind you. Why would they? But if you’re going to opine on them, it does help.

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      Schadenfreude: Watching people who’ve been sooo wrong about my career desperately try to spin this deal as a bad thing for me. Wrong again!

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      For those interested in compare and contrast: The advance for my first published novel — “Old Man’s War” — was $6,500.

      John Scalzi@scalzi
      Someone living off of daddy’s money probably shouldn’t try to lecture others about finances.

      What else is new? SJWs always lie. Mike Cernovich summed up the salient point yesterday.

      Mike Cernovich @Cernovich
      As a white straight male capitalist, I’m happy for @scalzi’s $3.4 million book deal. But how many women/POC are squeezed out because of it?

      I had estimated 680 on the basis of other SF publishers’ current initial advances, but I stand corrected. According to McRapey(1) himself, Tor is funding 13 more John Scalzi books at the opportunity cost of no less than 523 initial advances to new science fiction authors. As a side note, it is informative to see how much initial advances from major publishers have shrunk over time; the advance for my first published novel in 1996 was $20,000 $25,000.

      CORRECTION: For the benefit of those who don’t know, I brought in Bruce Bethke as a co-writer AFTER being offered my first book contract with Pocket Books. Also, it was the advance for my first solo novel, The War in Heaven, that was $20,000. Those who think publishing isn’t a zero-sum game are correct in a sense, it is worse than a zero-sum game. It is a negative-sum game, which is why first advances are now one-fifth to one-tenth of what they were 20 years ago.

      Those who have thrown hissy fits over Sad Puppies supposedly slate-blocking as many as 12 authors and preventing them from receiving recognition for their work at the Hugo Awards would do well to consider the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi have combined to prevent more than 500 authors from getting published and receiving paid advances. Opportunity cost is a bitch, especially when you’re the one upon whose fingers the window of opportunity has closed.

      As Scalzi himself says, it’s going to be a bad decade for them. But at least we’ll have a few more snarky, derivative and mediocre novels from Tor to not read. So that’s nice.

      It’s a little strange that people have claimed that my head is exploding or that I’m somehow upset by this deal. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I’m very, very, very pleased that Tor has decided to bet its future on John Scalzi rather than on any of the 523 other authors in whom they could have invested. I wish it had been a 13-book deal at $3.4 million per book. Scalzi isn’t the problem, after all, Scalzi is just one of the uglier public faces of the problem.

      Castalia House was never going to publish Johnny Con because we don’t publish Pink SF snark-fic or work with people we know to be liars. But if you’re one of those 523 authors left out in the cold and you have a really good science fiction novel you want to publish, then we would certainly be interested in hearing from you.(2)

      (1) I have been asked if John Scalzi will be relinquishing the “McRapey” title in light of George R.R. Martin’s astonishing accomplishment in rape fiction. Upon consideration, the answer is no, but GRRM will henceforth be known as “George Rape Rape Martin”.  

      (2) Yes, we are behind in responding to our submissions. I’ll be working on them this weekend.


      A lesson in con artistry

      I thought John Scalzi’s new book deal to lock in his retirement was an interesting indication of his intrinsic insecurity as well as the practicality that distinguishes him from most of his SF colleagues.

      John Scalzi, a best-selling author of science fiction, has signed a $3.4 million, 10-year deal with the publisher Tor Books that will cover his next 13 books.

      Mr. Scalzi’s works include a series known as the “Old Man’s War” and the more recent “Redshirts,” a Hugo-award-winning sendup of the luckless lives of nonfeatured characters on shows like the original “Star Trek.” Three of his works are being developed for television, including “Redshirts” and “Lock In,” a science-inflected medical thriller that evokes Michael Crichton. Mr. Scalzi’s hyper-caffeinated Internet presence through his blog, Whatever, has made him an online celebrity as well.

      Mr. Scalzi approached Tor Books, his longtime publisher, with proposals for 10 adult novels and three young adult novels over 10 years. Some of the books will extend the popular “Old Man’s War” series, building on an existing audience, and one will be a sequel to “Lock In.” Mr. Scalzi said he hoped books like “Lock In” could draw more readers toward science fiction, since many, he said, are still “gun-shy” about the genre.

      Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the executive editor for Tor, said the decision was an easy one.

      I imagine it was a very easy one. Scalzi is, nominally, Tor’s big dog. He’s not a proper big dog, as he isn’t one of their ten annual biggest sellers or even a bestselling author, but he’s their most important SF figurehead author. Who else do they have? Of their better-selling authors, Frank Herbert is dead, Robert Jordan is dead, Orson Scott Card is hated by their core audience, and they can’t control Microsoft or the game companies whose tie-in novels are their biggest sellers. They have Scalzi and Brandon Sanderson, both of whom appear to have more or less peaked in terms of their careers. It’s not as if the award-winning Jo Walton or the award-winning Catharine Asaro or any of their other award-winning authors sell enough books to support all the SJW non-SF they keep trying to push on an unwilling public.

      So to be gifted the opportunity to lock in one of their top authors for a decade at little more than 250k per book at an initial cost of $1 million up front is an absolute no-brainer. Scalzi is a hack in the positive sense of the term; unless he’s dead there is no chance he’s not going to be able to churn out the sort of mediocre material he produces. To break even on the initial advance, (the payments are usually divided into signing, delivery, and acceptance these days), Tor only has to sell an average of about 15k books each. Assuming all 13 books are delivered and paid for, they have to sell around 40k copies apiece, which should be doable considering that Redshirts sold nearly that many ebooks alone in the first eight months of its release. It’s a great deal for them, especially since they likely have the ability to get out of it down the road without paying two-thirds of it if they wish.

      NB: The mainstream publishers now pay book advances in thirds. One-third on signature, one-third on delivery, and one third on either acceptance or publication. So, the contract is most likely $1 million up front, with two payments of $75k for each book upon a) delivery, and b) acceptance or publication.

      This isn’t a bad deal for Scalzi, it is merely a very conservative deal. What Johnny Con is attempting to do is to secure his retirement and look for any upside to come out of the various media deals he’s got going. It’s a perfectly reasonable strategy, particularly in these uncertain economic times. The bolder strategy would have been for him to go into self-publishing, where as I’ve demonstrated, there is considerably more upside to be had. But Scalzi is neither a self-confident man nor an entrepreneur, so it is entirely in character that he’d prefer to give up the equivalent of about five birds in the bush in favor of the one in Tor’s hand.

      There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And since he has a reasonable shot at other upsides, I think it’s an entirely sensible deal on his part. Lock in the base, then see what you can leverage elsewhere. It’s a conservative move, but not one that I would criticize him for making. Everyone has different appetites for risk. Indeed, as I have often said, McRapey has an unusual talent for self-promotion. The fact that a mediocre and derivative hack without any discernible talent beyond self-promotion and petty snark could turn 300k monthly pageviews and a color-by-numbers Heinlein ripoff into a near-guaranteed $250k per year is borderline astonishing. If he’d somehow managed to do it without repeatedly lying his ample ass off and consistently misrepresenting himself, I’d consider him to be downright brilliant.

      What is much more important is what the deal indicates for science fiction publishing, and that is where I see problems on the horizon. If one of the best-known authors in science fiction can only command $260k per book from the biggest science fiction publisher, then conventional publishing does not appear to be long for this world. Which is, in fact, exactly what I believe to be the case.

      Of course, I was genuinely amused to see McRapey omit making any traffic claims for the blog that made him “an online celebrity”. I wonder why he doesn’t brag about those two million monthly pageviews or 50 THOUSAND DAILY VISITS to reporters anymore?


      The common factor

      XDPaul points out that the parties responsible for what the Worldcon community is lamenting are not either the Sad or Rabid Puppies:

      This is supposed to be a literary award, not playground taunts and bullying

      If that was generally understood Sad Puppies would’ve never happened in the first place!

      Exactly.

      Scalzi should never have – unprovoked – called that guy he didn’t know a “a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that” in order to curry favor with established authors. All of this could have been prevented, had Scalzi not turned fandom into his private personal playground specially designed for these taunts and bullying of which you complain.

      Taunts, bullying…and awards-gathering, of course. I know, let’s call it “Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded,” that epic scholarly work so highly regarded in the annals of SF.

      If you want to condemn the one who set this all off, I think the former President of the SFWA, initial taunter, rape humorist, “easiest difficulty setting there is,” master of the recommendation list, and award-winning Professional Fan Writer John Scalzi is not a bad place to look.

      Everyone here knows why I went to the trouble of getting John Scalzi’s traffic statistics and unmasking him as the liar and fraud that he is. Perhaps fewer understand why Larry Correia is no fonder of the little charlatan, but Steve Moss explains:

       From what I can determine,the Corriea-Scalzi feud started as follows:
      1. Ms. USA makes comments about women’s self-defense.
      2. Corriea supports her comments.
      3. Jim Hines’ criticizes Ms. USA and Corriea, in not too pleasant terms.
      4. Corriea pins Hines’ ears back.
      5. Scalzi goes after Corriea, and is his usually condescending and insulting self.
      6. Scalzi gets his butt kicked in the Twitter exchange.
      7. Many hot tempered words follow for the next 2-3 years year, with no sign of abating.

      And then, of course, I would be remiss if I failed to recall this hilarious exchange:

      John Scalzi ‏@scalzi Apr 8
      I wish Larry Corriea had the balls to admit the reason he started the Sad Puppies campaign was that he just wanted a Hugo so fucking bad.
      45 retweets 66 favorites

      Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
      I turned down my Hugo nomination and you still didn’t make the ballot.
      360 retweets 501 favorites

      The post-Loncon period in which McRapey repeated the very sort of falsehoods that the International Lord of Hate predicted the SJWs would attempt to put forth also merits mention. Meanwhile, Hugo nominee Kary English notes that the self-proclaimed inclusivity crowd has been more than a little bit hostile to outsiders, even to the point of harassing us with violent language.

      “I’ve pretty much lost count of all the times I’ve seen someone say the Puppies should be shot, euthanized, put down, drowned, etc. It’s not cool. It’s not acceptable”

      Perhaps someone should enquire of Sasquan if people who have harassed Hugo nominees in such violent fashion will be banned from the con, as I expect such statements are likely in clear violation of their Harassment Code. And finally, we have more evidence of the oft-observed truism; SJWs always lie:

      Owlmirror on May 16, 2015 at 9:43 pm said:

          Scalzi should never have – unprovoked – called that guy he didn’t know a “a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that”

      You mean VD’s anti-Semitism and misogyny don’t count as provocation?

          All of this could have been prevented, had Scalzi not turned fandom into his private personal playground specially designed for these taunts and bullying of which you complain.

      You mean, VD would have not taunted and bullied anyone if not for Scalzi? What about the fact that he taunted and bullied women SF writers in the first place?

      Yes, nonexistent anti-Semitism and misogyny don’t count as provocation, for the obvious reason that they do not exist. Nor does a single column addressing an attack on a disease-stricken Michael Kinsley by Susan Estrich and explaining the toxic effect of feminism on female intellects qualify as taunting and bullying women SF writers.

      It’s fascinating to see how the SJWs resolutely refuse to see the obvious and recongize the single common factor in everything from award campaigning and pro Fan Writers to the culture war and the increased incivility in SF. This is particularly obvious once you take into account that I was an SFWA member participating in various events and activities without incident for seven years prior to McRapey first surfacing in the SF community.

      However, the most interesting bit in the comments might have been easily missed, as Mike Glyer raised one of the few relevant points to be found amidst the lunatic sea of SJW rhetoric:

      “How many conservatives have won the Hugo in the past 2 decades again?”

      I just did a count and found 19 Hugos have been won by conservatives since 1996.

      The determination of who is and who is not a conservative may be arbitrary, but as Mike has shown himself to be impartial throughout, there is no reason to quibble over it. This means that out of the approximately 304 266 Hugo Awards* that have been given out since 1996, only 7.1 percent have gone to conservatives. It will probably surprise no one here to learn that this factual observation of extreme left-wing bias in science fiction fandom was immediately met with the suggestion that conservatives simply aren’t very good at writing science fiction and fantasy.

      “It could be just that Conservatives are not (at the present) very good at creating art…. Certainly (some) Conservative art in the PAST was good. Maybe there is
      something about the current Conservative movement which curtails their
      ability to create art? IDK.”

      That could be. Or, you know, perhaps there is something to the assertion that nearly every single right-of-center author, male and female alike, has made about aggressive left-wing ideological gatekeeping in science fiction and fantasy. After all, the mere possibility that a few more right-of-center authors might win a Hugo has not only prompted a hate campaign in the international media, but open calls for changing the rules.

      *This is a correction. I originally multiplied the number of years by the number of awards given out in 2014, but fewer awards were given in previous years.


      400,000 Comments!

      John Scalzi @scalzi
      Sometime in the last couple of days, my site reached the 400,000 comment marker. That’s, uh, a lot of comments.

      400,000 comments is certainly a lot of comments. But then, you all know that since you have left 447,022 Blogger comments… since March 2012.

      I keep hearing people claim these metrics don’t matter, but the strange thing is that they observably were said to matter quite a bit a few years ago when media publications from Lightspeed to the New York Times were marveling at Scalzi’s false claims. Not that I doubt his claims to have reached 400k comments, as based on our relative traffic, I assume his commenters were able to do in 7 years what took the commenters here only three. In fact, it was the observable discrepancy between the number of comments and his traffic claims that was the first hint that Johnny Con had a propensity for lying about the latter.

      On a tangential note, since we’re speaking of someone with A DEGREE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABUSE OF LANGUAGE or whatever it was, this comment from File 770 is an amusing exercise in completely missing the point:

      Anna Feruglio Dal Dan on May 15, 2015 at 1:54 am said:
      This is the point at which, as somebody who has actually STUDIED PHILOSOPHY AT COLLEGE LEVEL, I want to scream and cry.

      Don’t get me wrong, Aristotele is a great mind. His contribution to philosophy and the history of human thought has been great, although he did stop science and logic and many other things in their tracks for several centuries – but that was not his fault, as anybody who has read The Name Of The Rose knows (yes, if you are a) Italian and b) a philosophy student, TNOTR is a fun read).

      But he did not invent dialectic and what he meant by it is different from what Socrates, and Plato, and Kant, and Fichte, and Hegel, and Marx, and many others, mean by it. Kant in particular is rather scathing towards Aristotelian dialectic, saying, in short (I don’t have my copy of Critique of Pure Reason with me to check the exact quote) that the ancient Greeks thought they were so smart but they couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag, which makes sense if you have the mind of Kant.

      I suppose the most widely use of dialectic that I found is the hegelian sense: there are two opposing principles, which Hegel saw as fundamental principles of reality rather than logical propositions, and history proceeds by “finding out” that there is a third fundamental principle that makes both of them not so much false as superseded (well, history is what happens when the third principle unfolds itself, from what I understand of Hegel’s writings, but you know what I mean). This is all very abstract which is why I am not so fond of Hegel, but Marx’s idea of class struggle is a concrete example: there is a class that holds oppressive power over another, and in their interaction there arises a new state of affairs in which there is only one class that is neither the oppressive nor the oppressed one and everybody is happy.

      The scientific method is also an example of dialectic, in a sense: if you want to stretch the definitions somewhat. Say that you contemplate the different models of the solar system, heliocentric and geocentric, and as a matter of fact both are valid explanation of observable facts, until Newton comes along with a better explanation that makes both of the models obsolete. (Yes, I know, gross simplification).

      The history of the concept of dialectic is endlessly fascinating and stimulating. But one of the things any kind of dialectic presupposes is the ability to change, to discover the truth, or at least get endlessly closer to it.

      The fact that somebody might seize on what we have left of the thoughts of a man who lived and died 2,300 years ago and think that that is the be all and end all of human thinking and call that dialectic just shows… well, a monumental lack of knowledge of the rest of the history of Western thought.

      Lei non vuole gridare o piangere, invece lei vorebbe solo mostrare che l’ha una laurea in filosofia. In ogni caso, leggevo Il Nome Della Rosa tante volte, in inglese e ancora in italiano, in fatti, ho discusso quel libro due volte col stesso autore. Inoltre anch’io ho preso diversi corsi di filosofia all’universita’. Non significa nulla.

      In any event, for all her very impressive philosophical book-larnin’, the signorina has managed to completely miss the point. I am not ignorant of Kant or Hegel or Marx, and I am perfectly aware that what Aristotle meant by dialectic is very, very different than what later definers of the term meant by it. That’s precisely why I am always careful to explain my reliance upon the Aristotelian form as opposed to the Marxian one I learned from the Marxian economists from whom I obtained my economics degree or any of the others. Instead of showing “a monumental lack of knowledge of the rest of the history of Western thought” on my part, she has demonstrated an impressive quantity of educated stupidity on her own.

      What the signorina is doing is posturing in the modern fashion in which recognition of a thing is expected to pass for genuine knowledge of it. And yet, she doesn’t understand Aristotelian dialectic enough to do more than regurgitate some dimly remembered things she was told about it, or recognize that I am not pretending to make any use of Aristotelian dialectic to prove anything. As it happens, I tend to prefer the Thomistic method despite its various shortcomings.

      All I am doing is utilizing the Aristotelian distinction between the dialectical and rhetorical populations as a useful heuristic that reliably proves useful in distinguishing between serious critics who merit serious responses and unserious ones who merit nothing more than contemptuous dismissal and a rhetorical kick in the empty head. I leave it to the reader to determine which population Ms Dal Dan most clearly belongs.

      I find it reliably amusing to see how they cling to their pose of being intellectually superior and better educated even when they observably don’t understand what they’re reading.

      Meanwhile, Glenn Haumann, the anti-Puppy who publicly called for posting fake reviews on Amazon, suggests a way The Most Despised Man in Science Fiction could rehabilitate himself in the eyes of science fiction fandom:

      (Of course, science fiction reserves the right to re-evaluate your standing if you’re ever suspected of being involved in pedophilia.)

      Apparently all one needs to do is to rape a few minors, unrepentantly write about it in the most graphic terms, and one can then not unreasonably expect to be named an SFWA Grand Master or win a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement Award. From Arthur C. Clarke to Tony Alleyne, from Marion Zimmer Bradley to David Asimov,  from Walter Breen to Ed Kramer, the science fiction community is one of the biggest collections of known pedophiles outside the British Parliament.

      The widespread sexual aberrancy in the SF community was one of the many reasons I wanted nothing to do with it after my one mercifully brief encounter with Sad Freakville at Minicon. You have not seen true human wreckage until you’ve been to a science fiction convention. I’ve seen physically and psychologically healthier people on reservations and in refugee camps; one can hardly blame them for being drawn to escapism.