Uncategorized – Page 55 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Would you kill baby Hitler?

So the March for Life happened recently, and Ben Shapiro did a live show where he used a thought experiment about going back in a time machine to kill baby Hitler to make a pro-life argument. His argument was that you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler; instead, you should raise baby Hitler in a more loving home so that he doesn’t grow up to be Hitler. In other words, you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler because babies are always innocent, and killing babies is wrong. Fair enough.

But the left immediately went crazy over this argument, calling Shapiro a nazi for defending Hitler, or just making fun of him for coming up with such a ridiculous idea. Never mind that it’s a thought experiment. Never mind that it raises valid moral and ethical questions, which those on the far left refuses to address.

Everything you need to know about this controversy is basically summed up in the video above, where Sargon of Akkad does a point-by-point critique of The Young Turk’s cringeworthy reaction. At this point, Sargon’s video has more views than TYT’s original video, and YouTube is deleting downvotes on the original.

I think Sargon is right. I think that Ben really hit a sore spot on the left, because they’d all kill baby Hitler if given a chance, and they don’t want to admit it. Not only is it bad optics, but it also points out the lack of moral foundation or principles on the far left. After all, if they’d go so far as to kill a baby, simply because of what that baby might turn out to be, what else are they going to do?

For the left, Nazis aren’t merely on the extreme end of the scale of good and evil; they are the scale. This is what gets to me. Black Pigeon Speaks put out a video on YouTube that has since been taken down, because it is true, and because it gets to the heart of this issue. Civilizations always have founding myths, which accomplish three things:

they tell the civilization’s origin story,
they define, in cultural terms, the difference between good and evil, and
they describe what the civilization holds to be sacred.

For example, traditionally in the United States, our founding myth has to do with the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the Revolutionary War. Our civilization was founded by pilgrims and pioneers, who lived under British rule until the King became tyrannical and we rose up to declare our independence. In cultural terms, good and evil are set out clearly in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The thing we hold most sacred is our liberty.

You can also see this reflected in our coinage:

E Pluribus Unum — “from one, many,” harkening back to the Revolutionary War and our civilization’s origin story.
In God We Trust — recognizing the Judeo-Christian values that informed our founding documents, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Liberty — the thing that American civilization holds most sacred.

In the Black Pigeon Speaks video which has since been taken down, he argues that Western civilization adopted a new founding myth after World War II, and that this new founding myth is responsible for much of the cultural and moral decay we’ve experienced in subsequent decades. In this new myth:

our civilization was born out of the horror and devastation of the world wars,
Nazism became the definition of evil, and
the Holocaust became the most sacred aspect of our civilization.

The Nazis were clearly evil. I’m not disputing that, or the reality of the holocaust. Killing six million Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, and mentally and physically handicapped in gas chambers designed specifically as engines of mass genocide is incredibly heinous, on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. There is no downplaying or excusing that kind of horror.

But without defending the Nazis in the slightest, that doesn’t make them the most evil regime in history, or even the most evil regime of the 20th century. Stalin was just as genocidal, possibly even more so, and I would argue that he was worse than Hitler. Mao was arguably worse than both of them.

Hitler wasn’t just a monster: he was a man, like any of us. Jordan Peterson is right: we should never make the mistake of thinking that we’re morally superior to the Nazis, because if we were in similar circumstances, we’d probably make similar choices. That’s simply the reality. Hitler isn’t the boogeyman, and the Nazis are not the definition of evil. They fall on an extreme end of the scale of good and evil, but we should never mistake the Nazis for the scale.

Which brings us back full circle to the pro-life argument. How do we know that we aren’t more evil than the Nazis? The Nazis exterminated the Jews out of fear and hatred, but we’re killing our own babies in many cases out of nothing more than apathy. The Nazis at least believed that the Jews were behind the collapse of German civilization, and used that argument to justify their argument that Jews were non-people. What argument do we use to justify treating the unborn as non-people? Certainly not a scientific argument. And we’ve aborted ten times as many victims of the Holocaust, so it’s not like the Nazis were worse in terms of scale.

I genuinely believe that future generations will look back on us with the same horror and revulsion that we look back on the Nazis. And honestly, I can’t say they’ll be wrong.

So would you kill baby Hitler? It’s a valid question that raises some very important points. Not only would I not kill baby Hitler, but I wrote a short story about a time traveler who stopped Hitler not by killing him, but by altering the course of history in a very different way. If you haven’t already, you should check it out: “Killing Mister Wilson.”

Anyways, those are my thoughts on the subject. Also, TYT has hit a new low for cringe. I suppose that’s par for the course when your network is named after a genocidal regime.

Son of the Black Sword by Larry Correia

This was a damn good book. One of the best epic fantasy books I’ve read. I started listening to it on the Baen Free Radio Hour, where it’s currently being serialized, and decided to pick up a copy. It did not disappoint.

This book reminds me of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, in the sense that it takes place in a dystopian fantasy world where things didn’t turn out all that well after the hero of prophecy saved the world. It’s not difficult to imagine that after hearing Brandon pitch his book, Larry turned to the guy next to him and said “hold my beer.”

That said, Son of the Black Sword is very different from Mistborn. For one, it’s brutal and violent in a way that Mistborn never was. I wouldn’t exactly call it grimdark, since there is still an underlying sense of honor, and even a fair bit of optimism if you dig deeply enough.

However, you really can tell that Larry gets the kind of person who does terrible, violent things for a living. He knows how those people think, he knows how they see the world, and he knows how they interact with each other. He also knows what world dominated by those people looks like, which is definitely the world of Son of the Black Sword.

More than that, Larry understands and respects the relationship that exists between a warrior and his weapon. My favorite character was the sword Angruvadal, and I didn’t even realize it until the end. Angruvadal is a magic sword with a mind of its own, but it never really speaks or has any independent thought, other than whether its bearer is worthy and how best to serve its bearer if he is.

For me, the thing that makes or breaks a good fantasy book is whether the story is meaningful. I don’t really care for books that preach, but I don’t like books that are nihilistic and cynical either, which is why I never really got into George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Son of the Black Sword scratches that same itch for dark and gritty fantasy, but there’s still a sense of meaning beneath it all. Good doesn’t always triumph over evil, but the author still acknowledges that good and evil exist within the hearts of the characters.

I am so freaking excited to read the next book!

A Native American take on cultural appropriation

Saw this on my YouTube feed, though it was interesting.

Most of the time, discussions about cultural appropriation either devolve into everyone competing to be the most outraged, either on behalf of some minority group (which they usually don’t belong to), or over all the “snowflakes” who are outraged about it, not realizing their own hypocrisy.

Will Witt has done some “owning the libs” type stuff before, but this video was surprisingly thoughtful and sincere. It made me rethink some of my own opinions, and I think you’ll find it interesting as well.

In the end, there is far more that unites us than divides us.

“The Open Source Time Machine” now available on The New Accelerator!

The good folks over at The New Accelerator have picked up another one of my stories! This time, it’s The Open Source Time Machine. If you’re already a subscriber, be sure to check it out, and if you’re not a subscriber, it looks like they put out a new weekly story for the very reasonable fee of £1 per month. If they’ll publish me twice, you know they can’t be that bad. Be sure to check it out!

Read “The Open Source Time Machine”
at The New Accelerator

Halo Landfall

Here’s a little bit of nostalgia to start off your week. Remember this? For years, I thought it was either bootleg footage or a fan project. The only video I could find of it was on some kid’s YouTube channel at 144p. But no, it’s official Bungie. Here it is in HD.

Reconsidering my newsletter

One of my writer friends made an interesting comment the other day. We were talking about email newsletters, and he pointed out that Jordan Peterson’s 5th rule, “don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them,” also applies to newsletter subscribers.

Obviously, I don’t think that my newsletter subscribers are my children. But the principle is the same. We tend to care more about people that we like, and are more willing to spend time and energy on them. When we dislike people, we either try to avoid them or we end up harboring resentment in some fashion.

My goal for my author newsletter is to attract casual readers who have read, at most, only one or two of my books, and convert them into loyal fans who eagerly await my next book. Until now, one of the things I’ve advertised is that I have a free and a 99¢ book with every newsletter. I have enough books out that I’ve been able to keep that up for the last two years or so, although most of the freebies have been short stories.

But I worry that I’ve been training my newsletter subscribers to only pick up the free books, or to wait until the book goes free. That’s a problem. I don’t mind giving away free books from time to time, but I’m not going to give away the store, and if readers come to expect that then I run the risk of breaking Jordan Peterson’s 5th rule.

So I’ve decided to make a change to my email newsletter, or at least to how I advertise it. Instead of giving away a free and 99¢ book in every newsletter, I’m going to look into other ways to provide value and convert casual readers into fans. Don’t get me wrong—I still intend to share free books from time to time. Just not with every newsletter, or not a different selection with each one.

I do want to share more book recommendations, especially since one of my new year’s resolutions is to read a novel every week. What I’ll probably do is set up another blog using MyBookTable with all of the book links, so as not to mix my own books with the ones I’m recommending, and include those in a newsletter every one or two months.

In the last few months, I’ve also been sharing updates on my writing with each newsletter. That may be a better place to share that stuff than here on my blog. What do you think? Blogs are better for public discussions, since they’re indexed by search engines and usually have a comment section with each post.

Either way, I definitely need to update my newsletter templates. I cranked those out way back in 2015, and they’re not too pretty. My girlfriend is a programmer, so maybe I could persuade her to help me out with that. But first, I should probably figure out all what I want to put in them.

What do you think? Are there things you’ve seen in other author newsletters that you’d like to see in mine? Any other interesting ideas or approaches? I’m open to anything that adds value without giving away the store.

On Basilisk Station by David Weber

The Honorverse is what Star Trek wants to be when it grows up.

That’s the best way I can put it. On Basilisk Station is the first book in the series known as the “Honorverse,” which taken as a whole is David Weber’s best known work. Like Star Trek, the Honorverse is a far-future sprawling space opera epic full of exotic planets, interstellar empires, big starships, and big space battles. Unlike Star Trek, though, the Star Kingdom of Manticore has a military that actually functions like a competent, professional military (most of the time), and doesn’t have stupid rules like the Prime Directive that exist solely for the characters to break them. Also, the technobabble isn’t just babble, and the practical implications of the science fiction technology are fully explored.

The thing I liked most about this book was the political intrigue, though the characters come in as a close second. In fact, the two are intricately connected, as the intrigue grows out directly from the interactions between the characters. Like Ender’s Game, it all comes down to leadership, and like Orson Scott Card, David Weber has a keen grasp on human nature and what it takes to be an effective leader—and an effective follower, for that matter.

But unlike Card, Weber also has a keen grasp on how governments and bureaucracies operate, for better or (more likely) for worse. None of the characters in On Basilisk Station operate in a vacuum; they are all constrained by their loyalties, duties, and responsibilities, and their place in the chain of command. They are also constrained by the organizations and nations to which they belong, which in turn have their own positons and agendas, some of which run contrary to the personal beliefs and convictions of the people within them.

Weber is a master not only at pitting smart, competent characters against each other, but at pitting bureaucracies, parties, and governments against each other in ways that make you root for the little guys caught in the middle of it all. And above all else, Honor Harrington is a character worth rooting for. In a fight between Honor and any Star Trek captain (with the possible exception of Kirk), my money would be on Honor.

On Basilisk Station was an excellent start to what promises to be a highly entertaining series. I look forward to reading more!

New short story goals

In the last few months, as I’ve reworked my business plan, I’ve put a lot of thought into what I want to do with short stories. I’ve written about two dozen of them so far, and while I don’t expect to be known as a short story writer, I do expect that short stories will play an important role in my career, especially with the way that the publishing world is changing.

Objectives

Short stories are a great way for readers to try out new authors, without all the cost in time or money of a novel. It’s also a great way to build a hybrid career, as the professional short story markets have few of the hangups of publishing a longer work with a traditional publisher. It’s not extremely lucrative, though there is money to be made. More than that, it’s a way to gain cache and build your brand, especially if your stories get picked up by a major magazine or anthology in your genre.

So that’s my main objective with short stories: to use them to build my author brand and grow my readership. Self-publishing plays a role in that, but not nearly as much as the professional markets.

Writing

To get picked up by the professional markets, I need to have stories to submit to them, which means that I need to be prolific. Consequently, my goal from here on out is to write a new short story each month. That’s a pace I can maintain that doesn’t interfere too much with my other writing. It can be refreshing to take a WIP break from time to time, and short stories only take a few days at the most.

I know that Dean Wesley Smith says that you should never revise anything, and I’ve been following that advice until now with my short fiction. However, I do feel that it can strengthen my writing significantly to cut the word count by 10%, especially for short fiction where the strongest writing tends to be economical. So I’ll most likely do that to all my stories from now on.

Submitting

In general when submitting, it’s best to start with the top-tier markets and work your way down. This is the order in which I prioritize my submissions:

SFWA qualifying markets
Professional paying markets (6¢ per word or higher)
Semi-pro paying markets (between 1¢ and 5¢ per word)

I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with token paying markets (less than 1¢ per word). Probably not for anything other than reprints. They don’t really put me any closer to my goals. Also, I’m not sure if I actually want to join SFWA, but I do want to qualify for it through my short story sales. Never join a club that would have you as a member, etc etc.

As for non-paying markets, I’ve decided not to submit to them after all. It’s been pointed out to me that giving something away for free after you’ve charged other people money for it is a dick move. Also, there aren’t really any non-paying markets that would bring me closer to my goals. All of the markets with serious cache also pay professional rates, at least in science fiction.

Self-publishing

Until now, I’ve self-published my short stories either immediately after their first sale, or after I’ve submitted all of the professional markets. My guiding philosophy has been that unless there’s a significant opportunity elsewhere, it’s better to self-publish something than to keep it on your hard drive.

However, self-publishing short stories doesn’t help me get much closer to my objectives. Certainly keeping a bunch of singles up for sale doesn’t help much, and it might actually hurt by cluttering up my book pages. They’re good for the occasional newsletter giveaway, or for first-in-series and other stuff, but that’s about it.

Dean Wesley Smith says to charge $2.99 for individual short stories in order to get the higher royalty rate, but I’ve tried that for the last couple of years and haven’t seen much benefit from it. Unless you’re known as a short story writer, I just don’t think short stories are good for making money. Because of that, and also because I’m going to be using them for giveaways and promotions, I plan to sell all of my short fiction (under 10k words) for a token 99¢.

Considering how it’s rude to give something away for free immediately after selling it, I plan to refrain from self-publishing until both the first-publication and reprint markets have been exhausted. That’s because I plan to make my short stories free when I first self-publish them, at least for the initial few weeks. Again, better to put something out for free and raise the price than it is to charge for it at first and make it free later.

When enough short stories have accumulated to put into a bundle, then I’ll unpublish all but the one or two best-rated or most popular singles, and put a link to the bundle in the back of those. In that way, the short story singles will help to sell the bundles, which make more money anyway, since I plan to charge $4.99 for them. This also helps to clean up the book pages, by replacing singles with bundles over time.

So that’s the plan. Submit until all professional and semi-pro markets have been exhausted, then self-publish as singles until there’s enough to put in a bundle. And hopefully sell a bunch of stories to the major markets.

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

I love the Vorkosigan books. Miles isn’t in this one, but a bunch of other characters are. It’s the same universe, with the same fascinating history, just with a bunch of new and interesting complications.

Ethan is from a world where women do not exist. The uterine replicator has rendered them obsolete, and a colony of fundamentalist MGTOWs has established a functional society where everyone is male and no one has ever seen or interacted with a dreaded female. But make no mistake, Ethan is not a MGTOW. He’s Athos’s best doctor: professional, responsible, and conscientious to a fault. And that’s why the council of elders has sent him on a mission to acquire female reproductive cultures before the ones on Athos all die out.

Along the way, he gets caught up with the Dendarii mercenaries, specifically one Commander Elli Quinn, and is soon caught up in the machinations of the Cetegandans and House Bharaputra, who are involved in some less-than-ethical bioengineering schemes that have brought the galaxy to the verge of war. If Ethan fails his mission, Athos itself might be nuked back to the stone age. But that is nothing compared to his most difficult task: learning how to work with a woman.

This book was a lot of fun! I have yet to read a bad book by Lois McMaster Bujold, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint. Lots of action and adventure, with dashing, resourceful heroes and frighteninginly comptetent villains. The all-male society of Athos was both fascinating and eminently believable, given the technology, and the interstellar espionage was loads of fun.

This isn’t the best place to start if you’ve never read any Bujold, but if you’ve already read The Warrior’s Apprentice and a couple of other Miles Vorkosigan adventures, you’ll really appreciate this book. Definitely one of the highlights of the series.