Part of what makes a SF story good is that it presents the plausible in an interesting way. Or maybe it’s the interesting in a plausible way. Maybe hopeful, maybe dystopian, but it takes current trends or historical cycles and projects them into the future in a way that people can easily buy into it, nodding their head and muttering I can see that happening. Continue reading Future history →

The Supreme Court of the US just upheld the ObamaCare subsidies in direct violation of what the clear letters of the law said, in spite of what Johnathan Gruber, the architect of the law, said about it and the intentions. Chief Justice Roberts will go down in  history as one of the worst, most destructive justices ever on the SC. With this decision, political expediency will now trump the constitution, and the actual letter of the law as written, every time. No longer can a person who reads the law know the law, because it quite literally means whatever the guys at the top want it to mean at that time. And that’s bad, because wise, limited government sorts are never the ones that rise to the top of the heap.

Time for impeachment… But who am I kidding? None of those idiots in Congress have the balls or the brains, because they see too much personal profit in it for themselves.

The Tor/Macmillian boycott is on.

Long story short, for those that don’t normally follow such things, is that several high-ranking people at Tor books, one of the big names in science fiction / fantasy publishing, said some very nasty things about their conservative / libertarian customers, and even some of their own authors. They were asked to apologize,  and the corporations were asked to enforce their own code of conduct. Some general non-apology apologies and patently insincere disclaimers were trotted forth, but nothing really was done by the corporations. The offending people, Irene Gallo,  Patrick Nielsen Hayden, his wife Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, and author John Scalzi, are still employed and have not even  been formally or publicly reprimanded. In other words, the employer tacitly endorses their employees saying things like referring to their own authors works as “bad-to-reprehensible,” and calling the author’s supporters “extreme right-wing to neo-nazi”.

Gee, I can just feel the love from here. Details at Vox’s blog, Peter Grant’s place, Hoyt’s, and many other places in the SF/F blog-o-sphere. So, if you like Tor SF, keep reading, but but use the library. If you think you just must buy your favorite Tor author, buy used and hit their tip-jar. Or, check out competing publishers like Baen or Castalia House, which don’t treat their authors and fan base like crap.

Sorry I’m late to the party. Long story short, Tor Publishing bigwigs behaved badly, even calling some of their own authors “bad to reprehensible,” while calling pretty much every SF/F fan to the right of Mao a nazi, etc.  People wrote to Tor complaining. Tor claimed it was all bots and astro-turf. So the call went out to write an email about it to three people, saying “I AM NOT a bot.”

Details here. And here. more links with more background at those two places.