Gentlemen:

“Dod Grile” (Mr. Bierce) is a personal friend of mine, & I like him exceedingly — but he knows my opinion of the “Nuggets & Dust,” & so I do not mind exposing it to you. It is the vilest book that exists in print — or very nearly so. If you keep a “reader,” it is charity to believe he never really read that book, but framed his verdict upon hearsay.

Bierce has written some admirable things — fugitive pieces — but none of them are among the “Nuggets.” There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.

Ys truly

Samuel L. Clemens

That two star review on Amazon sort of loses its sting now, doesn’t it?

I will not fully engage my snark here because Jacqueline Howett does not seem to fit in the same category as professional authors undergoing a review meltdown (Anne Rice for example).   She seems slightly more entitled to a bit of sympathy for her misstep. Her repeated misstep. Missteps ending with the eloquent:

“Fuck Off.”

More’s the pity because the review in question actually suggests that she has promise as a writer, and just needs some fairly serious copy-editing. (Note to self-publishers:  Everyone needs copy-editing.  Get yourself some before you start uploading files. This is one of the responsibilities you assume by bypassing traditional publishing.) Now, because of her public tantrum, she’s now known for being the author who had a hissy fit over her own bad sentence construction. (She’ll be lucky if the following sentence does not become an internet meme: “Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”)

So it doesn’t matter if you’re professionally published, self-published, or uploading things to fanfiction.net.  All public internet whining gets you is a fist full of abuse from folks who love this sort of thing, and a reputation as one of “those” authors. I mean, editors do Google you, and it doesn’t help you if this or this is one of the top results.

Colleen Lindsay:

Thank you for making it clear, through your response to my query, that you are unquipped (sic) to represent fiction writers who are working at the very highest level today.

Best of luck with your list of minor writers, third-rate writers, irrelevant writers, non-writers.

You lose, silly woman.

Patrick Roscoe

I pointed, I laughed, I moved on with my life. Imagine my surprise when today, in my spam filter, I find a comment from someone coming to defend Mr. Roscoe’s honor from such ill deserved mocking engage in an attempt at their own mockery at the expense of myself. Turns out, someone put my Roscoe post up on Reddit and it started a tiny little flame war with Mr. Roscoe’s champion. I’m sort of flattered.

PLOTTING SCI-FI AND FANTASY: Plotting is the engine that makes a story go. You can populate your story with the most interesting characters in the world, have a gorgeous prose style, and present the most intricate world-building imaginable, but if the story has a weak or absent plot, it’ll just sit there inert, failing to engage the reader. S. Andrew Swann will present the questions you’ll need to ask in a SF/F story—and in fiction in general—in order to rev up that idling plot engine.

In other news, Heather Grove has posted three nice reviews of the Apotheosis trilogy over at Errant Dreams Reviews.

Anyway, home now.

Things that appeared while I was gone: DAW’s LiveJournal has a discussion about Messiah.  And I’m appearing in the March issue of The Horror Zine, with a reprint of my short story “Fealty.”

A well-balanced blend of space opera elements, especially large-scale concepts; never a dull moment; interesting characters; Swann’s straightforward writing style; rich setting; carefully crafted plot; just about every chapter had some cool idea in it.

Go over there and look at both, and if you comment on my guest post, you may win a signed set of the Apotheosis Trilogy.

Second, I have a guest blog post up at Buried Under Books, wherin I try to tell the truth about lying.

I’ve also added to the review pages for Wolfbreed; new mentions at Bookworm Blues and (you have to love this title for a werewolf-themed blog) Lupines and Lunatics.

Lastly, I have to mention that I’ve achieved some sort of milestone in terms of internet awareness.  My Wolfbreed series now has an entry on TV Tropes.

UPDATE: Seems to be an issue with the audio book, Audible seems to have not put the second half of it on-line yet.  I’ll let you know when that’s fixed.

UPDATE #2: As of  Feb 4, the book is still down at Audible.  If you have the truncated version, they assure me you’ll be able to download the complete version once it goes back on-line.  And, yes, I find it frustrating. . .

UPDATE #3: The audio is back up here.  The old link appears defunct.

Today the last book of Apotheosis, Messiah, officially comes out.  Not only have I added it to my book pages, but I’m elsewhere on the interwebs pontificating on my penchant for destroying the world.  You also have the chance to win a copy of your very own.

In other Messiah news, the audio book comes out today as well, in case you want the singularity apocalypse fed directly into the ear canal.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more that science fiction has taken a bit of a turn to the right. I’ve also seen more than a few reviews lambasting those authors for their views — which seems to matter not a whit to their sales.

So I emailed four of them — two relative newcomers and two legends — and asked why.

The legends, Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card, need no introduction. But it bears mention that Ender’s Game, Card’s best-known work, is on the Commandant of the Marine Corps recommended reading list as a treatise on what it means to be a leader. The newcomers, Lt. Col Tom Kratman (Ret.) and Larry Correia, both write for Baen.

I think its interesting, though I think the post is conflating the ideas of conservatism and the ideas of libertarianism which are not the same thing despite the occasionally overlapping Venn diagram.  I also think there’s really no “trend” insofar that there’s always been a really strong libertarian streak in SF.

However Mr.Card (hailing from the far conservative side of that Venn diagram) does give a quip worthy of William F. Buckley Jr.

“Back when I cared,” he continued, “most of the writers of my generation were so extremely leftist in their formal opinions, and so extremely elitist in their practices, that it would be difficult to discern where they actually stood on anything. It’s as if the entire Tsarist aristocracy fervently preached Bolshevism even as they oppressed their peasants. But that view is based on observations back in the mid-1980s. Since then, my only exposure to their views has been the general boycott of mine. In short,” he said, “I’m their Devil, but I have no idea who their God is anymore.”

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond in the comments says exactly my point:

SF is not a conservative literature at all, but it gets mistaken for one because libertarianism is wired deep into its DNA. In fact, it is structurally *impossible* for SF to be conservative! I have explained this in depth, with references, in my essay A Political History of SF.

The “rightward drift” is SF’s fundamental libertarianism asserting itself as left-wing gatekeepers in the establishment media become less able to suppress it. People who mistake this as a reassertion of conservatism are revealing their own confusion about the ways conservatism and libertarianism are mixed in their thinking.

“With your ability, certainly you have learned praises before but I just want to involve to the many who have thanked you for what you’ve attained. Your work are one of a kind and show great insight. Thanks for your contributions!”

I almost approved it, since I rarely get spam on new posts. Then I look a little closer and note the slightly broken English. Then I note that while the comment might reflect the post I made on Book Chick City, it didn’t actually mention the post, or writing, or anything else concrete. It could be about anything. Then I look at the URL the poster used: a link trolling site.

Akismet Y U No catch this spam?

I admit, it was probably the right decision.

I might also note that chief among my libertarian friends are a pagan SF author and a long-haired dude who makes guitars for rock bands, while every single progressive I know is pretty much part of the establishment.

Also, watch that podcast, I’ll be recording an interview for them this week. I will let everyone know when it gets scheduled.

Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, “will it make things worse?” This isn’t a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we’re immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes.

I tend to see the false dilemma created by assuming that conservative policies are the only ones that fail to forsee potholes. I mean, look at all the great centralized economies of the 20th Century. But that’s neither here nor there.  What Stross would like to see is an attempt to deal with the future in a positive manner:

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

Ok, I can see that.  But even that paragraph starts radiating the inherent bias that gives the lie to the final clause.  All Utopias, since they ARE the solution, are synthetic monocultures that accept no dissent.  The above essentially tells us in this particular “Utopian” vision, we all must adapt to densely-packed urban living.  Those who much prefer to live in a small town or rural environment would be SOL when it comes to peruse their happiness.  But we can fix that, by controlling the population…  Ooops, now we have China.

The problem is inherent in one of Stross’ premises:

[...] we should be able to create a new golden age of utopian visions. A global civilization appears to be emerging for the first time. It’s unstable, unevenly distributed, and blindly fumbling its way forward. But we have unprecedented tools for sharing information; slowly developing theories of behavioural economics, cognitive bias, and communications that move beyond the crudely simplistic (and wrong) 19th century models of perfectly rational market actors [...]

There is the assumption that some universal global order is inevitable and in some sense desirable. It’s neither. It is not inevitable because the cultural and societal norms across the entire planet are divergent enough that a truly universal social order is only going to be possible by either making it so diffuse as to be largely irrelevant, or so powerful that it can crush the outlying populations into a thin paste. It is not desirable because you are giving your whole social order a single point of failure. With a single global order, you insure that when things finally go pear-shaped (and the one immutable rule of history is that things will) it takes down the whole planet with it. Our current series of crises are a demonstration of the principle: If Greece had bankrupted itself fifty years ago, no one would have cared.

So one answer to Stross’ final lament:

Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …?

Is to say, “don’t put all your eggs in that particular basket.”