The truth always comes out... eventually

This is, in retrospect for those familiar with the history, hilarious:

Looking above at my novel advances, I see four distinct eras in them:

Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;

Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;

Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;

Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.

Now, at this point, it's almost uniformly recognized by anyone who has read both of our works that I am a much better novelist than old Johnny Con. Whereas I can credibly write everything from 4-panel comics to movie scripts to 900-page epics, he struggles to put together a 250-page novel without ripping off one or more better science fiction authors. If you don't believe me, just read a few reviews of our works, then compare short story to short story or novel to novel.

But what is amusing in light of the long-running SF-SJW "envy" narrative, to say nothing of the ludicrous "awards" metric, is that this talent gap was obviously recognized by our mutual editors from the very start. As it happens, I was getting paid more to NOT write books than Scalzi was getting paid to write them at the same time that his fan club was insisting that I was envious of his "massive success". But his literary success turns out to have been the same sort of manufactured charade that his "extraordinary amount" of blog traffic was.

My first two novel advances were $20k and $20k, or nearly five times more than Scalzi was paid for his first two novels. And here is the punchline: writing has never been anything more than a pasttime for me. I still don't consider myself to be a writer; I am first and foremost a game designer. It's also a bit amusing to see him labeling himself a franchise writer, especially when we've got multiple film studios inquiring about the availability of everything from Alt-Hero and Avalon to Vampire Lords (not the actual title).

The lesson of John Scalzi is this: ruthless self-promotion, shameless dishonesty, and genuine hard work can pay off, as long as you can find the proper victim for your con artistry. His literary career, to the extent that one can even call it that, is nothing more than a house of cards constructed on a color-by-numbers basis.

And speaking of writing, the new Hypergamouse is up. It's a good one.


UPDATE: Comments are closed. Quelle surprise!

It's not exactly plagiarism

But it's hardly indicative of one a brilliant creative mind either. When I read The Sandman in preparation for writing comics, I occasionally had the strange feeling that I'd read it before, and not simply because Gaiman was mining a lot of stories and characters with which I was familiar from ancient mythology. I've been on a Tanith Lee kick of late, and it suddenly occurred to me why the Endless, and Delirium in particular, were so familiar:

Delirium: The youngest of the Endless, Delirium appears as a young girl whose form changes the most frequently of any of the Endless, based on the random fluctuations of her temperament. She has wild multicolored hair and eccentric, mismatched clothes. Her only permanent physical characteristic is that one of her eyes is emerald green (usually the right side) and the other pale blue with silver flecks (usually the left side), but even those sometimes switch between left and right. Her sigil is an abstract, shapeless blob of colors. Her speech is portrayed in standard graphic novel block-caps, characterized by wavy, unpredictable orientation and a multi-colored gradient background. She was once known as Delight, but some traumatic event (of which even Destiny does not know the particulars) caused her to change into her current role. Her sigil as Delight was a flower.

Note that The Sandman ran for 75 issues from January 1989 to March 1996.

The main character of The Sandman is Dream, also known as Morpheus and other names, who is one of the seven Endless. The other Endless are Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (formerly Delight), and Destruction (also known as 'The Prodigal'). The series is famous for Gaiman's trademark use of anthropomorphic personification of various metaphysical entities, while also blending mythology and history in its horror setting within the DC Universe.

Now consider this passage from Delirium's Master, the third of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series, which was published in 1981. I've actually quoted from it here before; it's the novel that contains her excellent tale of how the Snake became the Cat and thereby fooled Man.

There were then five Lords of Darkness. Uhlume, Lord Death, was one, whose citadel stood at the Earth’s core, but who came and went in the world at random. Another was Wickedness, in the person of the Prince of Demons, Azhrarn the Beautiful, whose city of Druhim Vanashta lay also underground, and who came and went in the world only by night, since demonkind abjured the sun (wisely, for it could burn them to smoke or cinders). The earth was flat, and marvelous, and had room then for such beings. But it is not remembered where a certain third Lord of Darkness made his abode, nor perhaps had he much space for private life, for he must be always everywhere.

His name was Chuz, Prince Chuz, and he was this way. To come on him from his right side, he was a handsome man in the splendor of his youth. His hair was a blond mane couthly combed to silk, his eye, being lowered, had long gilded lashes, his lip was chiseled, his tanned skin burnished. On his hand he wore a glove of fine white leather, and on his foot a shoe of the same, and on his tall and slender body the belted robe was rich and purple-dark. “Beauteous noble young man,” said those that came to his right side. But those who approached him from the left side, shrank and hesitated to speak at all. From the left side, Chuz was a male hag on whom age had scratched his boldest signatures, still peculiarly handsome it was true, but gaunt and terrible, a snarling lip, a hollowed cheek, if anything more foul because he was fair. The skin of this man was corpse gray, and the matted hair the shade of drying blood, and his scaly eyelid, being lowered, had lashes of the same color. The left hand lay naked on the damson robe, which this side was tattered and stained, and the left foot poked naked from under it. When Chuz took a step, you saw the sole of that gray-white foot was black, and when he lifted that gray-white hand, the palm was black, and the nails were long and hooked, and red as if painted from a woman’s lacquer-pot. Then again, if Chuz raised his eyes on either side, you saw the balls of them were black, the irises red, the pupils tarnished, like old brass. And if Chuz laughed, which now and then he did, his teeth were made of bronze.

Worst of all, was to come on Chuz from the front and see both aspects of him at once, still worse if then he raised his eyes and opened his mouth. (Though it is believed that all men, at one time or another, had glimpsed Chuz from behind.) And who was Chuz? His other name was Madness.

It's not plagiarism, but it does tend to lend credence to my opinion that Gaiman is overrated as a writer. He certainly doesn't compare to the late Ms Lee.

The scholar of Middle Earth

Christopher Tolkien, the great champion of his father's literary estate, has died at 95:

It is with great sadness that we can confirm that Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien has died aged 95.

Christopher was born in Leeds, United Kingdom, on 21 November 1924. After a childhood in Oxford, he joined the RAF during the Second World War and was stationed to South Africa. After the war, he finished his studies and became a lecturer in Old and Middle English as well as Old Icelandic at the University of Oxford. After his father’s death in 1973, he became the literary executor of the Tolkien Estate and went on to edit and publish his father’s unpublished material starting with The Silmarillion in 1977 and ending with The Fall of Gondolin in 2018.

Upon hearing the news, Tolkien Society Chair, Shaun Gunner, said:

All of us in the Tolkien Society will share in the sadness at the news of Christopher Tolkien’s death, and we send our condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family at this difficult time. Christopher’s commitment to his father’s works have seen dozens of publications released, and his own work as an academic in Oxford demonstrates his ability and skill as a scholar. Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to Christopher for bringing us The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, The History of Middle-earth series and many others. We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed.

Tolkien scholar Dr Dimitra Fimi reflected on Christopher’s academic contribution:

Tolkien studies would never be what it is today without Christopher Tolkien’s contribution. From editing The Silmarillion to the mammoth task of giving us the History of Middle-earth series, he revealed his father’s grand vision of a rich and complex mythology. He gave us a window into Tolkien’s creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth. He was Middle-earth’s cartographer and first scholar.

The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to the Tolkien family.

Christopher Tolkien was the very model of the ideal literary executor. He not only protected his father's legacy, but substantially added to it through his editing and publishing of the source material that were the foundation for his father's landmark books. He was a good and faithful servant to his father and Middle Earth fandom, and both Christians and Tolkien fans can rejoice at the thought of the proud approbation with which his father will have welcomed him to his reward.

Very few sons of great men are worthy of them; as the son of a very successful man myself, I can testify to the soul-crushing burden paternal success tends to impose upon a young man, especially a young man of ambition. But through his embrace of a difficult role to which he was literally born, Christopher Tolkien undoubtedly proved himself worthy of his great father.

The Grey Havens

Shut up and write

A Selenoth fan would really like me to finish the extended edition of A Sea of Skulls:

Please Vox, for the love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, PLEASE try and find the time to complete TSoS extended edition. I have read (ahgmm.. “listened”) to AToB 3 times and read ASoS once. This is quality stuff that serves as a gateway to many truths people would otherwise never be exposed to. If I could be so bold as to give you feedback from my time in Selenoth, it would look like this:

I first listen to A Magic Broken, then AToB, then the Last Witch King Collection, then read Summa Elvetica, then most recently read ASoS. I'll spare you any fan boy text walls but I have to explain what I love as well as what don’t understand so far. I listen a A Wardog’s Coin weekly on my daily commutes. It is a wonderfully balanced tale that never gets old and would be the first thing I recommend to a new reader.

You said on a Darkstream once that you didn’t expect the strong response to Lodi. He is hands down my favorite character. Maybe this was overly influenced by my reading A Magic Broken first, but I LOVED his story line in AToB and was left wanting much more in ASoS. Lodi is without a doubt the first character you would pick if you needed a buddy in a good ole-fashioned brawl. Ironically, a Big Bear, if you will.

I really don’t understand the importance of Severa and her character arc. At first I assumed it was because she was a strong female personality so most likely I just didn’t relate to her. But after the second and third pass at AToB, I can say with confidence that Fjotra is one of my top three favorite characters so Severa remains an enigma to me because I'm not sure what I want from, or even for her going forward. My shot in the dark prediction is that Severa actually personifies you in a way, born into more privelege than most but the powers, that be take her father, and life forces her to unforeseen places. Still, assuming that to be the case I don’t understand her place in the story.

Again, thanks for all you do and please forgive me for carrying on so long. God bless and keep crushing! I pray that you will not grow weary of the path laid before you. God equips those He calls. Conflict may be the air we breathe but no one is having more fun than us!

Believe me, I would very much like to finish ASOS and move on to the next book in the series. But my time is finite, and so every time I need to hunt down someone's failed credit card or respond to someone else's deplatforming, or deal with someone who has failed to utilize a coupon during the allotted time is a distraction from even starting to write anything. That doesn't mean those things don't need to be done, but it's not possible to do them while getting into the right frame of mind. I wish I could simply switch gears at will, but apparently I don't work like that.

I appreciate that people enjoy my work as much as they do, indeed, the overall response to the Arts of Dark and Light has significantly exceeded not only my expectations, but even my hopes. I do find it a little strange, however, when the some of the very people who really want me to finish various works don't seem to grasp the obvious consequences of asking me to deal with various other things that often have nothing to do with me.

Anyhow, I am determined to finish it during the first half of this year. The extended delay is on me, not anyone or anything else, and I'm neither excusing nor rationalizing my tardiness. But I am not apologizing for it either, because I'm absolutely not going to allow the quality to decline just so I can call it complete and get it off my plate. To the contrary, I am determined to make the remaining sections better than the previous parts.

But Selenoth fans should be pleased to know a) Chuck Dixon is working on the six-issue comic of the Legion-Goblin battle and b) there is serious film/TV interest in ATOB.

UPDATE: After thinking about it and talking with Spacebunny, I'm going to put myself on an alternate-day schedule for the Darkstreams until ASOS is done. That should do the trick.

The next book

So, here's a question. It's not a poll, because who knows what I'll actually do, but I am interested in knowing what book the readers here would prefer to see published next by me in 2020:

1. A Sea of Skulls extended edition
2. The first SSH book, Alpha.
3. Insert your pet project, which will almost certainly be ignored, here.
4. Surprise me.

I take no offense at anyone who doubts that (1) will ever happen, because RR etc. I'm just curious to know what people actually think they want. And please keep in mind that what you think is more or less popular is not necessarily so. For example, SJWAL outsold ATOB 3:2 in 2019, while both outsold the much more recently published Jordanetics.

None of this has anything to do with Castalia Deluxe or any of our other projects. It's just about how I spend my limited writing time. And sometimes Calliope simply doesn't permit one to proceed in the direction one intends.

The problem with time travel

The master of time travel fiction explains the fundamental problem with stories based on the concept:

The problem afflicting all time travel stories, which makes cause and effect paradoxical, is that time travel makes moral law is paradoxical.

In a universe without time travel, the things done by a man in the past are done.

What is in our past cannot be changed, and the future cannot be known. But introduce time travel, and, suddenly, anyone whose future actions you know (because he is from your past) can be treated as a creature without free will, that is, an entity with no moral self determination. He is an NPC.

This includes the past self of the time traveler himself: from the point of view of the Wednesday Dr Who, Tuesday Dr Who is a like a robot, or a historical character, someone who cannot change his actions because they are set in stone. An NPC.

With time travel, an immoral act like killing an innocent baby, whom the Time Traveler knows will grow up to be a tyrant, seems moral, and a moral act, like saving that same innocent baby, seems immoral.

To make matters worse, if the time traveler on Thursday wants to undo an act he did on Tuesday, such as killing a child fated to be a tyrant, and he leaps backward in time to shoot his Monday self in order to preempt the Tuesday attack on the child fated to be a tyrant, he is killing a man who is, at that moment on Monday, not yet guilty of any crime. Is this moral or immoral? Is this suicide or self defense?

So if yet another version of himself from his own future leaps out of Friday afternoon to land in front of Wednesday, pistols ready, to prevent his Thursday self before the fated this Monday crime of killing his Tuesday self preemptively, can the Wednesday time traveler rightfully defend himself?

Because if it is wrong for Thursday on Monday to kill his innocent younger self in order to prevent the killing of the child on Tuesday, logically, by the same token, it must also be wrong Friday to kill Thursday on Wednesday to prevent Thursday from killing Tuesday on Monday to prevent the prevention.

And yet, also equally logically, on Wednesday, the Time Traveler is guilty of killing a child, and so can be killed in retaliation, or, better yet, killed before he commits the crime, because, unlike human justice, time traveler justice actually can unmake the crime and restore the dead.

Therefore, logically, the fact that killing the innocent is immoral makes it moral for a time traveler to kill the innocent.

I won’t even mention the moral problems arising from the possibility that the tyrant the child is fated to become turns out, in a plot twist, to be the Time Traveler himself, and the one event that warped and embittered his young mind to set him on the path of tyranny was seeing all these murders taking place in the nursery when he was young.

That is the problem with time travel stories.

Mr. Wright is no doubt correct. That being said, his City Beyond Time is without question the greatest collection of time travel stories ever assembled.

Second beginning. This one brighter than the others:

I recall my first view of the city.

I thought it was a job interview. I had no other work, no future, and the best woman I had ever laid eyes on walked out on me the night before. I wasn't in a great mood, but, at that point, I was willing to listen to anything.

Almost anything.

“Time travelers?” I said, trying to look chipper. I was trying to think of a polite way to say goodbye and get lost.

He didn't look crazy. (The real crazies never do). Mr. Iapetus was a foreign-looking fellow in a long red coat of a fabric I didn't recognize. He had dark, magnetic eyes, high cheekbones, and wore a narrow goatee.

His office was appointed with severe and restrained elegance. To one side, a row of dark bookshelves loomed; in the center was a wide mahogany desk, polished surface gleaming; to the other side, heavy drapes blocked a hidden length of window. I did not think it odd at the time to see bright sunlight shining from the carpet at the lower hem of the window drapes. But it had been raining outside when I entered the lobby just behind me.

Mr. Iapetus was standing by the window. He took up a fold of drapes in his hand. “I believe in what you might call the shock therapy method of indoctrination. It helps make the tedious period of disbelief more brief.”

A wide yank of his arm threw the drapes aside. A spill of blinding sunlight washed around me.
Blinking, I saw I was high up, overlooking a shining city. I had been on the ground floor when I came in. Now, I was miles up in the air. And glory was underfoot.

Mailvox: we have an answer

No, Neal Stephenson was not taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to writing Seveneves. Yes, Neal Stephenson has gone SJW, or so we are informed by a reader of his latest:

Neal Stephenson's last novel Seveneves was just bad.  His newest effort Fall is full of social justice AND bad.  Thank God I got it from the library.

In this story, he has adhered to your theory that the USA will break up sometime in the 2030s, but the "Red State" area is called Ameristan, from which all smart/educated people have fled.  Ameristan has no dentists, so everyone has brown or missing teeth.  If anyone needs medical care, they have to sneak across the border to the "Blue Lands." Nothing of value is produced in Ameristan, nothing is exported, everyone is dirt-poor.

Furthermore, Ameristan lives under the Levitican Law, which is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.  Even the most obscure passages from the Bible are enforced, such as executing anyone who wears mixed linen and wool.  They also crucify people and burn crosses a lot.  The countryside is infested with roaming bandits, so everyone has to drive around with AK-47s or even vehicle-mounted machine machine guns, a bit like ISIS territory.  It's such a heavy-handed parody it's like something out of Saturday Night Live, but he isn't joking.

Finally, Stephenson really lays on the feminism here.  The female characters are hyper-alert for "microaggressions" (yes, he really uses that word), for instance in one scene a character "decided to let the microaggression pass without comment."  Also the women call out a male character for "mansplaining."

At one point he talks about the bad old days, where women were harassed on the internet all the time, and men didn't believe women could write good code.  Now (in the 2040s) everyone has an anonymous public ID - no one knows your sex, even when applying for jobs - so OF COURSE it turns out that when code is written anonymously, female-written code turns out to be better than men's code!

Seveneves pretty much took Stephenson from "buy immediately in hardback" to "borrow from library only" in my eyes.  Now I think I'm just done with the guy.  I guess he was probably always like this, but now has so much money he thinks he can go wild.

I don't know. It sounds so over the top that in light of his famous account of his duels with William Gibson, I can't help but suspect him of selling books while taking the piss out of his SJW readers.

From pulp to Puppies

This is an interesting article on science fiction history that even references Castalia House:

Alec Nevala-Lee, an Asian-American science fiction writer,[2] has here written something remarkable: an intentionally PC multi-biography that nevertheless manages to be well-informed and informative, well-written and compulsively readable.

It’s the first substantive biography of John W. Campbell, Jr., the man – or, as we’ll see, some would insist on “the white male” – who basically invented modern science fiction; and that last point means that to do so properly, we have to take into account the three men – yes, again, white males – whose writing careers he promoted in order to do it.

It’s an index of Campbell’s importance that, although I am not really a science fiction fan – certainly not to the level of the fanatical creeps[3] that slip in and out of these pages – I could recognize almost every work referred to, and had indeed read most of them; and I bet you have, too.

Campbell started off with a bang, writing “Who Goes There?” in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, later filmed as The Thing (1982), The Thing from Another World (1951), and again, not so well, as The Thing (2011).[4] Next, almost by accident, he became the editor of Astounding, and in the decades to come he would find young authors, eager to break into the big time, and feed them his ideas for stories. Even as his career wound down, and the magazine slipped from its dominant position, he was still able to snap up Frank Herbert’s serial “Dune World.”

It's an interesting read that demonstrates the genre has long been populated by the brilliant, the bizarre, and the fundamentally broken.

And speaking of the Puppies, this is what a desert called victory looks like. Notice that no one, anywhere, pays attention to the Hugo Awards anymore. A glance at the Best Novel nominees will suffice to explain why.

• The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)
• Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
• Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
• Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
• Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

Total nonentities. All six of these novels together won't sell as many copies as a single Galaxy's Edge novel. Novik would have been considered a C-level talent at best in the 1980s. And people could be forgiven for thinking that the Rabid Puppies were still dictating the nominees with titles such as “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” on the short list.

The diminishing appeal of Harry Potter

I never, ever, thought the Harry Potter books were destined to become classics. This commenter at Castalia House gets it:

I started reading Harry Potter in 2004. I devoured the 5 books in less than 6 months, and followed the release of the last two books. Harry Potter was the fever of my teenage years. What I think made me like HP was not exactly the characters themselves, but the universe created by JKR. I liked to imagine myself inside that universe, being a witch like Harry and studying at Hogwarts.

Of course, as a teenager, I knew very little about other fantasy works and literary classics, so back then I really believed that Harry Potter was a genius story and JKR was the best writer in the world. Today I recognize that this is far from being true. JKR's characters are mostly shallow, static and stereotyped. Voldemort is part of the villain trope I least like, an irremediable psychopath who was born evil and died evil, remaining eternally static, and without any trace of humor. There are villains who are irremediable but at least they have a vein of great humor, like Joker. Voldemort is nothing like that.

In addition, I think JKR made some bad decisions and wasted a lot of interesting characters on the books. I've always found it a shame she'd never delved into such treacherous characters as Wormtail / Peter and for example. Traitorous characters can make great stories, but instead of going into a story of redemption, she decides to put him in the shadows of the story with a death so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the film's adaptation. Game of Thrones does a much better job with Theon Greyjoy for example, giving him more prominence and a arc of his own.

Talking about her bad decisions... I never liked JKR's decision to make Ginny be Mrs. Potter. In a universe where we have unique and fantastic female characters like Luna and Hermione, why did JKR make Ginny the Mrs. Potter? The romance between Harry and Ginny was poorly written in the books, and extremely cringeworthy to watch in theaters. They make the most insipid and generic pair of literature, IMO. Luna Lovegood would was the best choice for Harry's romantic pair, imo. Or if Harry finished the story with no one, it would not be bad either. I just think Ginny / Harry was hideous.

I'm not saying that the HP series is horrible and unimportant. Quite the contrary, it was part of my adolescence and in a way, it is nostalgic. The fact is... the Harry Potter books lose more and more appeal to me every time I revisit them, and today, I do not feel like reading them any more.

Rowling's one skill was creating vivid and compelling characters. But that's not enough to create a classic capable of withstanding the erosion of time.

At blog's end

A 13-year blogger who is retiring his blog explains a few things to the trolls and critics. I think everyone who has run a blog for even a few months understands exactly where he is coming from:

Contribute or Shut the Heck Up
If you nitpick the mistakes of others but are unwilling to show your own work, even crappy phone photos, you are nothing. You can say you’re a professional woodworker who builds high-end pieces for clients with 40+ years of experience. But if you don’t have a website, blog or even an Instagram account, you’re just a pimply 30-year-old man-child living in your momma’s basement – until proven otherwise. Show your work – a lot – or shut up.

No One Asked for Your Advice
If you begin any comment with “You should…” you’re a blowhard. If your comment is longer than my blog entry, get your own blog. If you haven’t tried the operation/joint shown in the blog entry, your opinion is just noise.

And Stop Mansplaining
I have to add a special section on this bad habit. When a woman posts something, don’t tell her how to do it better. Don’t tell her she’s doing it wrong. Don’t offer advice or tips from your special Y-chromosome perspective. There’s a reason you don’t have many close friends who are women, and this is it.

Reading is Not Knowledge
About 23 percent of the stuff written about woodworking is untested, untrue or just misleading. So there’s a 1-in-4 chance that if you repeat something you have read but have not tried, then you are the problem. Even if you begin your sentence with “I read that….” you are not helping anything except your ego.

Look it Up
Don’t ask for information that you can find via Google. Want to know where to buy a Tite-Mark? Try typing “buy Tite-Mark” into your browser. I recommend trying at least 20 searches before leaving a question on a blog.

I Know You’re in Pain
Woodworking commenters aren’t good at masking their IP addresses. It’s easy to learn the identities of anonymous wanks with a little sleuthing. I tracked down a few of the most vile commenters on my blog and (with some additional reporting using public records) learned something interesting. Most of these people were suffering from some serious physical ailment. Many were taking painkillers and dealing with a level of pain that will make any human angry and bitter.

One thing he doesn't mention is the idiot platform-hijackers whose comments are not welcome, but simply will not stay away because they are so desperate to try to make use of someone else's platform rather than build their own.  I'm now utilizing a new tactic of deleting their comment but leaving it up for future reference, so that I will preserve a public record of their repeated cyberstalking for use in criminal complaints. It also has the useful feature of showing other commenters just how persistent the platform-hijackers are.

But despite the various irritants, I've never seriously thought about shutting down this blog, to be honest. The comments, yes, many times, but not the blog itself. That being said, it's astonishing to me that after 15 years, the people at Blogger still have not provided a simple system for blocking specified names and text strings, and that none of the other comment systems really have either.

"The best blogger"

This is very flattering, particularly as the designation comes from an intellectual for whom I have a considerable amount of respect, and to whom I really should link more often:

Blogs are clearly on the way out, and many of the best bloggers have gone - but let's just express our opinion on who is - overall - the best blogger... Leaving-out myself (!) and also my co-bloggers at Albion Awakening and Junior Ganymede (because we are really the best :) - then who do you think is the best?

My vote goes to Vox Day (Theodore Beale) - whose blog is quite remarkable in terms of posting very frequently, across a wide range, and with great 'originality' - in the sense that he is so inventive and so good at discovering, elaborating and refining ideas.

Read the rest of it there. And also read this post, which should demonstrate why I have a high opinion of Prof. Charlton's perspicacity beyond his excellent taste in bloggers.

What makes modern people 'naturally' disbelieve in God?

(My answer; speaking from the experience of several decades of living as an atheist...)

The fact that all modern public discourse excludes the divine.

As a modern child grows up, he becomes socialised, he becomes trained in modern public discourse of many kinds: school work, everything to do with the mass media, sports, pastimes, hobbies... and all of these exclude the divine.

It Just Isn't There. The lexicon of objects that function in the system  exclude the divine; the causality of the system excludes the divine.

As the child reaches adolescence - these modes of thought become more dominant, and they become habitual to the extent of being simply taken for granted; and eventually they become so habitual as to be extremely difficult to break out from.

Culture matters and the globos know it. That's why they have been relentlessly campaigning to force Christianity out of the public spaces, by hook, crook, and Christmas carol, for generations.

Totally worth it

If only for this. You can preorder JORDANETICS now, if you're interested.

The poverty of sex

I note, with some satisfaction, that I am now Bucknell University's Greatest Living Novelist. Not that they are likely to brag about that fact any time soon or ask me to speak at graduation. The thing is, for all his much-ballyhooed and oft-awarded literary talent, Philip Roth was a boring and trivial novelist because he could never get his damned hands out of his own pants.

Roth’s enduring subject matter was the American male’s carnality in the age of the Sexual Revolution, and he was honest and pitiless and unsentimental about it. In his 2001 novel “The Human Stain” he railed against the neo-Puritanism that he said resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, but his own work offers a horrifyingly bleak view of Americans liberated from puritanical attitudes that would warm the heart of any present-day Cotton Mather.

He began with sexuality denied. The title story of “Goodbye Columbus” concerns a couple of New Jersey kids in their early 20s — young, attractive, full of life — and how their relationship cannot survive her mother’s discovery that they are having sex. Though Roth was not a writer whose work ever delivered a message, “Goodbye Columbus” certainly makes you think that the social stricture against premarital sex was something not protective but corrosive.

Ten years later, in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the title character pleasures himself with a piece of liver during his adolescence and goes on to a series of ruinous relationships with inappropriate women that land him (maybe for eternity) on a psychoanalyst’s couch.

Roth lays Portnoy’s complaint firmly at the feet of his simultaneously emasculating and stimulating monster of a mother. Surely a more enlightened kind of mother was emerging in 1969, when the book was published, a new kind of mother who wouldn’t distort her son in this way.

But how did this all turn out for Roth’s characters, most of whom are versions of Roth himself? Not well. His novels from “Portnoy” onward feature variegated portraits of crippled men for whom there is no liberation. The world of freer sex isn’t freeing for any of them. And like Roth himself, none of his male characters (with one exception) ever finds any real happiness or contentment in marriage or as a parent.

The novelist Nathan Zuckerman is felled by mysterious back pain that makes it impossible for him to write. This metaphor for impotence becomes literal in later books. In 1995’s “American Pastoral,” Zuckerman has become literally impotent after prostate surgery and even seems slightly relieved to have been taken out of the game.

In “The Human Stain,” published six years later, a professor in his 70s takes Viagra in a desperate effort to perform with his illiterate cleaning-lady girlfriend, barely out of her 20s.

The late novels “Exit Ghost,” “The Dying Animal” and “The Humbling” offer an unsparing and despairing view of a man no longer able to perform — a problem made especially acute by the fact that the Roth stand-ins here are alone and solitary with little to distract them but their failing bodies.

Only once, in “American Pastoral,” did Roth find the imaginative power to conjure up a person unlike himself who embraces bourgeois life and bourgeois domesticity.

The arc of Roth's literary career should be shown to sex-obsessed schoolboys in order to demonstrate to them that there is vastly more to life than getting laid. Sex is natural and sex is good, but for the love of all that is beautiful, good, and true, it's very, very far from the only interesting thing in life.

Defend the Right

Jon Del Arroz explains why it is wrong for those on the Right to attack Right-wing creators:

I will not attack fellow creators on the right ever. We’re already under immense pressure from above. We’re being banned from conventions en masse. We’re being blacklisted from publishers by threats from industry professionals. There’s no way you can ever get me to talk smack about someone who’s struggling as an independent to create art and make it against these insurmountable odds.

Every time you do it, you are holding our movement down.

I know it sounds counter intuitive, as the media will lambast Person X and make them look really bad! If only we had respectable creators, well then they couldn’t lambast and that’s what we need, right?

It’s wrong. No one on our side is respectable to their media machine or legion of groupthinkers. No one is even HUMAN on our side according to them. So what if we have some ideological differences? So what if the artistic project isn’t my cup of tea? It’s not like it’s some giant corporate promoted propaganda, it’s an independent person doing it on their time, taking enormous risk.

I’m only here to lift up the movement. I don’t care about disagreeing with someone on minor matters, I don’t even care if I love the product they put out. There’s personal reasons their product is done the way they want — that’s what art is all about. Sometimes there’s financial reasons that it looks or feels a certain way as well.

So I urge you, if you don’t like a book or whatnot or someone on our side, don’t say anything.That’s the best you can do. You’re not obliged to promote everything, but don’t squash this movement in its infancy.

I absolutely agree. Look at how the Left does it. They unstintingly praise even the most shoddy, error-filled nonsense as brilliant works of genius. Look at how the Fake Right does it; you need only read the recent reviews of Jonah Goldberg's eminently forgettable new book by all the neocons hailing it as "a new conservative classic" and praising it to the skies.

They do this because it works. Hell, look at how most of you genuinely believed - and some of you still believe - that Jordan Peterson is a brilliant and important intellectual on the basis of nothing more than an extensive public relations campaign that began back in 2004 at Wodek Szemberg's house.

Now, you might ask how I can reasonably endorse Jon Del Arroz's policy when I have so publicly criticized Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Anglin, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, and others. The answer is very simple: they are neither creators nor are they genuine men of the Right.

People repeatedly ask me to denounce, disavow, or otherwise attack men like Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, and other men of the Right on the basis of our various philosophical and ideological disagreements. Don't even bother. It's not going to happen. Because I support what they are doing even though I don't agree with them on everything.

It's nearly started!

George R.R. Martin is seriously thinking about starting on his next book:

SANTA FE, NM—Stoking readers’ anticipation about the long-awaited Game Of Thrones sequel, best-selling author George R.R. Martin promised fans Thursday that his upcoming novel The Winds Of Winter was nearly started. “I wanted to let everyone know that I’m sitting at my desk with a nice cup of tea, I’ve got a Word document open, and I’m just about ready to go,” Martin wrote in a blog post on his website, assuring readers that as soon as he cleared off his desk and threw a load of laundry into the dryer, he could pretty much begin. “I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but at this point, I’ve basically already brainstormed a couple of character names and written part of an outline for chapter one. After that, it shouldn’t take more than another three or four weeks until I’m ready to check a few emails, grab some groceries, and put the very earliest touches on the manuscript. Can’t wait!” At press time, the author had been forced to return to square one after realizing he needed a better title than The Winds Of Winter.

If you ever doubted success being a demotivator for a certain type of writer, you need look no further than Martin. Although Scalzi would appear to be giving him a pretty good run for his money. It must be incredibly frustrating to be a mainstream publisher having to deal with these guys.

The evil nature of fandom

Bruce Charlton explains why fandom is not beneficial for either the author or the creation:

I recently attended a talk, reading and book signing done by Sanderson; which was packed with hundreds of fans who turned-out and paid money to be there... and I say fans, because in the Q&A session every single one of the couple of dozen questions was related to the most trivial, ephemeral and superficial aspects of his work. There was not one single interesting, insightful, or challenging question asked by this mass of people; not the slightest indication that the novels were anything other than depictions of magic systems and 'cool' personalities.

Sanderson is an active Mormon, and all of his work is permeated with a serious consideration of religion and spirituality; both on the surface and as underlying structure. But it was clear that for Sanderson's fandom this was of sub-zero interest - invisible and irrelevant.

The phenomenon of fandom is therefore at best trivial and fashion driven, there being more incommon between fans (regardless of what they are fans-of) than between fans and the subject of their fanaticism. Fandom is corrupting and destructive of whatever is good in the authors and works that get caught-up by it; and in its advanced form, fandom embodies subversion and inversion of whatever is specific and distinctive in its subject matter; the aim being to reinterpret and rewrite it in line with currently-dominant, top-down, manipulative social campaigns that ultimately emanate from (and are funded by) the global Establishment elites.

So the phenomenon of fandom is a product of evil purpose; and has a malign influence all-round.

My own experience with various fandoms does tend to support this negative view of it. This is why I prefer not to refer to the Ilk, the Dread Ilk, or the VFM as fans. They are certainly destructive, but not of me or my works, and they tend to be refining rather than corrupting.

A bureaucratic approach to literature

One of the central challenges George R. R. Martin always faced as a writer is that he approaches some significant philosophical questions with the mind of a bureaucrat. This Rolling Stone interview with Martin from 2014 is rather enlightening in that regard:

It's a shockingly brutal story that you tell. The first major jolt comes when the knight Jaime Lannister pushes a child, Bran Stark, through a window because the child witnessed Jaime and Jaime's sister, Cersei – the wife of Westeros' King Robert – having sex. That moment grabs you by the throat. 

I've had a million people tell me that was the moment that hooked them, where they said, "Well, this is just not the same story I read a million times before." Bran is the first viewpoint character. In the back of their heads, people are thinking Bran is the hero of the story. He's young King Arthur. We're going to follow this young boy – and then, boom: You don't expect something like that to happen to him. So that was successful [laughs].

Both Jaime and Cersei are clearly despicable in those moments. Later, though, we see a more humane side of Jaime when he rescues a woman, who had been an enemy, from rape. All of a sudden we don't know what to feel about Jaime. 

One of the things I wanted to explore with Jaime, and with so many of the characters, is the whole issue of redemption. When can we be redeemed? Is redemption even possible? I don't have an answer. But when do we forgive people? You see it all around in our society, in constant debates. Should we forgive Michael Vick? I have friends who are dog-lovers who will never forgive Michael Vick. Michael Vick has served years in prison; he's apologized. Has he apologized sufficiently? Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen someone that we should laud, or someone that we should despise? Or Roman Polanski, Paula Deen. Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you're a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there is no possibility of redemption, what's the answer then? [Martin pauses for a moment.] You've read the books?

Yes. 

Who kills Joffrey? In the books – and I make no promises, because I have two more books to write, and I may have more surprises to reveal – the conclusion that the careful reader draws is that Joffrey was killed by the Queen of Thorns, using poison from Sansa's hairnet, so that if anyone did think it was poison, then Sansa would be blamed for it. Sansa had certainly good reason for it.

The reason I bring this up is because that's an interesting question of redemption. That's more like killing Hitler. Does the Queen of Thorns need redemption? Did the Queen of Thorns kill Hitler, or did she murder a 13-year-old boy? Or both? She had good reasons to remove Joffrey. Is it a case where the end justifies the means? I don't know.

The problem, of course, is how do you seek forgiveness without repentance? And how can you repent without an objective moral standard that clearly states: with this act you have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?

Man cannot find redemption without God, which is why some crazy and godless men make maps of meaning filled with bizarre and imaginary creatures and warnings of nonexistent dragons, while others, less crazy, but still godless, write meandering rapefests addressing the hard questions of tax policy and population demographics.

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.

Some readers have been kind enough to say that my own AODAL falls in between ASOIAF and LOTR in terms of literary quality. But one could, not unreasonably, say that is true of our literary approaches as well.

And yes, I am working on the final edition of A Sea of Skulls. And yes, I expect it will be out, in around 900 pages of print, in time for Christmas. The 40-hour audiobook version of A Throne of Bones should also be available by then. I just finished re-reading it to refresh my memory preparatory to the final push on ASOS.

Put not your faith in men

I have been let down by all of my heroes and role models. Not some of them. Not most of them. All of them. Except one.

I was taught to save by my father. When I bought my first house, he very generously wanted to help me and even offered to contribute something to the down payment. I declined when I found out that I had more money in the bank than he did. He joked that his companies were his savings account; we all know how that turned out.

I was taught character, courage, and taking responsibility by my grandfather. Towards the end of his life, having exhausted his resources on caring for my grandmother, he walked away from the beautiful, twice-mortgaged house he had owned for three decades and left it for the bank.

I was taught leadership and personal sacrifice by my uncle. After attaining fame and great power, he was awarded an important position at one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. He did not resign from it when its crimes were revealed to the public.

I revered Umberto Eco for his great learning and his intellectual insight. When I read Belief or Nonbelief, his debate on religion and God with Carlo Maria Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan, I was astonished and bitterly disappointed by the shallow, superficial, and petty nature of his arguments.

I admired and looked up to one of my father's friends of more than thirty years. I considered him to be the epitome of a good, smart, successful, civilized man. I could not believe it when my father asked him to be a character witness at his trial, and he demurred for fear of how it might look and what people might say.

I always considered The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to be the philosophical gold standard and Aurelius himself to be an exemplary man. Then I read more human history and realized that his son and successor was Commodus, and that he had uncharacteristically failed to prepare an adequate succession plan for the empire over which he ruled.

I cannot tell you how many authors I perceived to be great, only to learn that they were charlatans, conceptual plagiarists, plodders, experts in literary sleight-of-hand, learned historians rather than brilliantly original creators, and in some cases, the apparent beneficiaries of a sprinkling of pixie dust by a flighty passing muse.

Do I look down on any of these men because they lacked the perfection that I naively perceived in them? Do I reject their teachings? By no means! To the contrary, their failings only served to teach me that they were mortal men, not demigods, and that I, too, can hope to surmount my own failings and character flaws. They remain my heroes and my role models today, I merely see them in a more mature and realistic light that shows their strengths in contrast with their weaknesses.

The fact that your heroes are not perfect does not make them any less heroic. It actually makes them more heroic, because their failings are a glimpse into the struggle they faced, every day, with the manifold temptations of a fallen world.

Who was the one hero who never let me down? JRR Tolkien. I loved his books deeply and passionately from the time I read the first page of The Two Towers, and everything I have since read of his, and everything I have subsequently learned about the man has only given me more cause to admire him. One reason that it takes me so much longer to write Arts of Dark and Light than other fiction and non-fiction is that I am always striving to write something I consider worthy of Tolkien's influence, and of which he would approve if he were ever to read it.

Even dead, he's more productive

JRR Tolkien is releasing a new book, The Fall of Gondolin, which sounds right up my alley.

In the latest sad episode of the saga of George R. R. Martin’s next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter, never being published, legendary deceased author J.R.R. Tolkien has reportedly finished another book before Martin could complete Winds of Winter. Not only is the legendary Lord of the Rings author publishing a new book before Martin, but he’s publishing them at a faster rate in general. Tolkein’s new book, The Fall of Gondolin, which will be published in 2018, follows 2017’s Beren and Lúthien, meaning despite being dead since 1973, Tolkien is somehow able to release books at a rate of one per year, while Martin hasn’t released a new ASOIAF book since 2011’s A Dance With Dragons.

The Fall of Gondolin is billed as the first “real” story of Middle Earth, and tells of the fall of the titular city to dark forces. Edited by Tolkein’s 93-year-old son, Christopher Tolkien, the book was reportedly written while J.R.R. Tolkien was convalescing after the Battle of the Somme. The Guardian, which broke the story, provides a summary of the story:

The book, said publisher HarperCollins, sets the “uttermost evil” of Morgoth against the sea-god Ulmo. Morgoth is trying to discover and destroy the hidden city of Gondolin, while Ulmo is supporting the Noldor, the kindred of the elves who live in the city.

The story follows one of the Noldor, Tuor, who sets out to find Gondolin; during his journey, he experiences what the publisher described as “one of the most arresting moments in the history of Middle-earth”: when Ulmo, the sea-god, rises out of the ocean during a storm.

When Tuor arrives in Gondolin, he becomes a great man and the father of Eärendel, an important character in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. But Morgoth attacks, with Balrogs, dragons and orcs, and as the city falls, Tuor, his wife Idril and the child Eärendel escape, “looking back from a cleft in the mountains as they flee southward, at the blazing wreckage of their city”.

It might seem shocking that a deceased author could publish two books in his popular fantasy series in just two years, while Martin has taken over 7 years to provide fans with the penultimate chapter of his series and seems unlikely do so before HBO finishes Game of Thrones, the television adaptation that had to chart its own course after lapping Martin. However, it’s worth noting that, being dead, Tolkien needn’t be distracted by things like LiveJournal or WildCards books, so he has a distinct advantage.

Look for The Fall of Gondolin sometime this year. Don’t bother looking for The Winds of Winter. It’s never coming out.

They may well be right. I strongly suspect that George RR Martin simply can't write at the same level as his previous books in the series anymore, and he knows it. Being a gamma, he'd rather not even try than take the risk of trying, failing, and destroying his literary legacy.

That's my current theory, anyhow. And it's totally not based on any concerns about the rest of A Sea of Skulls living up to the first two-thirds....

Another Twitter "suspension"

The Z-man is the latest to be kicked off Twitter:

My twitter account was suspended for violation of their rules. The specific violations were that I was threatening to post personal information about someone and that I was contemplating suicide. Neither of those things are true, but that does not matter in these issues. What I think happened is some anti-Semites, who support the deranged loon Paul Nehlen, took issue with me saying Nehlen is a nut. Soon after, a lunatic started spamming me on Twitter and then my account was permanently suspended by the twitter police.

I’m not all that upset about it. I have been thinking about cutting out social media from my internet life. I was never into Facebook. I never saw the point of it. I’m not that interesting and neither are my friends. If I need to see cat videos, I have a cat at home. I never really liked twitter all that much, but I figured it was a good way to promote the site. It was mostly just a time waster. The increase in traffic from my activity was pretty much zero. My readers know where to find me, so twitter added nothing and just took away.

I’m still up on Gab, but I’m done posting there. Frankly, I’m tired of “white nationalist” types that have made Gab their home. I probably have muted two times the number of people I follow. It’s a free country and I think those people have a right to speak their mind on-line, but I just don’t want to hear it or see it. I’ve reached my limit on that stuff. It’s like being chained to a lunatic. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, you can’t help but notice the lunatic. The solution is to divorce myself from the whole scene. Goodbye lunatics…

Apparently tcjfs was kicked off too. As for the rest of it, the reality is that very few people are cut out for blogging long term. If it doesn't come to you naturally, then you're going to burn out sooner or later.

As for the usual "Alt-Right is over" theme, that's a uniquely American perspective that confuses political philosophy with political movement, ideas with groups, and understanding with branding. When the White House is denouncing and firing globalists, European nationalists are winning elections, and Big Social is enduring everything from Congressional summons to attacks by SJW gunwomen, and self-styled conservative opinion leaders are increasingly irrelevant, the Alt-Right is the exact opposite of over.

Remember, winning is a process, not a conclusion. And as for me, I'm still not tired.