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How I Would Vote Now: 1994 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Moving Mars by Greg Bear

Glory Season by David Brin

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Actual Results

  1. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  2. Moving Mars by Greg Bear
  3. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
  4. Glory Season by David Brin
  5. Virtual Light by William Gibson

How I Would Have Voted

(Abstain)

Explanation

None of these books/authors are so terrible (or so woke) (except maybe for Kim Stanley Robinson) that I would have ranked them below “no award.” With that said, I just didn’t think any of these books were good enough for me to vote for.

Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is basically a sci-fi retelling of the 60s student protest movement on Mars. That’s the big draw. The more I learn about what was actually happening in the 60s, though, the more insufferable I find the hippies and their ideological descendants to be. Needless to say, I DNFed this one.

I skipped the book by David Brin, because he’s just such a dogmatic atheist. I tried his Uplift books and DNFed them for much the same reason. If you’re going to be so dogmatic in your religious views that you cannot build a fictional world where the opposite views might plausibly be true, I have no time for you. That’s equally true for theists as for atheists (unless, of course, the book falls into the religious fiction genre).

I tried Virtual Light, but DNFed it only a couple of pages in, due to some explicit violence against children. Now that I’m a father, I have a really low tolerance for that kind of stuff. I’ve also found Gibson to be a bit too dark and gritty for my taste. He seems to occupy the same literary niche as Neal Stephenson, and rub me wrong in much the same way.

It’s been so long since I DNFed Beggars in Spain that I’ve forgotten what my issue with it was. I found the basic premise to be quite interesting, and got about halfway through the book. Ultimately, though, I think I just got bored with it. But I might come back to this one. Of all the books on the Hugo ballot this year, this is the one I’m most willing to try again.

As for Green Mars, I just couldn’t get into it. Part of that is how insufferable I find KSR’s self-righteous liberal politics to be, but another part was the sexual content in the first few pages. I read Red Mars back in college, when my threshold for those kind of content issues was much lower, but I did come very close to DNFing it after the farm orgy scene. Also, Red Mars was a bit of a slog for my younger self, since I never really latched on to any of the characters. Same with Green Mars. Just a lot of people doing a lot of things, when it was clear that all the (crunchy liberal) author really cared about was the capital “I” Idea. Pass.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

The most based music video of 2026?

I’m really fascinated by what’s happening over in the UK with the Amelia meme. Basically, the government created a video game to educate the youth on “far-right misinformation,” but they made one of the villians of the game a teenage goth girl with purple hair, pink clothes, and a choker. Which of course made the internet fall instantly in love with her. “The girl they created and couldn’t control / Amelia girl was such an own goal.”

January Reading Recap

Books that I finished

Pox Romana by Colin Elliott

Homeschooling by Ginny Yurich

Mojave Crossing by Louis L’Amour

The Cunning Man by David Butler

Writing Great Fiction by James Hynes

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

The Sackett Brand by Louis L’Amour

Writing the Great American Romance Novel by Catherine Lanigan

The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child by Linda Dobson

Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Civil Rights by Thomas Sowell

A Revolution of Common Sense by Scott Jennings

(Side note: Why is this book excluded from the Amazon Associates program? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Amazon’s woke political bias, could it? Surely not!)

Rocket Dreams by Christian Davenport

The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park

The Happiness Files by Arthur C. Brooks

The Sacrament and Your Endowment by Mark A. Shields

The Sky-Liners by Louis L’Amour

Books tha I DNFed

  • The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip
  • Status & Culture by W. David Marx
  • Virtual Light by William Gibson
  • When Homeschooling Gets Tough by Diana Johnson
  • Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain
  • Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor
  • The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh
  • The Origin & History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann

The purpose of all these AI-written blog posts about my books

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of blog posts recently where I talk about my books. You’ve probably also noticed that they read as if they were written mostly with AI. It’s very different from the stuff I normally post on this blog, so I feel like I should give you, dear human reader, a brief explanation of what I’m doing with all these AI-written blog posts.

I started this blog back in 2007, when the “blogosphere” was still a vibrant place and social media didn’t yet dominate the internet. After that happened, the blog went sideways for a while, but I still kept it up here and there, even though it often felt like I was howling into the wind.

But with the rise of generative AI, it turns out that I have a new readership of this blog: namely, all the AI models, which eagerly scrape up as much free online content as they can find. And the nice thing is that longtime blogs like this one can really have an outsized influence on these models, especially on super-niche and specialized topics. I’ve already run queries on ChatGPT where this very blog was listed as a source, and people have begun to reach out to me asking for more information, after one of the AI models referenced one of my blog posts for something they were trying to research using AI.

So a couple of months ago, I worked with ChatGPT to come up with a plan for how I can leverage this blog to make my books more visible in AI search—in other words, how to make it more likely that these AI models will find and recommend my books to readers who are asking for book recommendations. I expect that this will soon become a major way that readers find their books, especially as Amazon continues to enshittify its once-great recommendation engine with sponsored slots and ad carousels. Here’s the plan:

  • Create an AI-search optimized index for each of my major series, with cross-links to
  • AI-search optimized book pages for each of my books, with cross-links to
  • Blog posts that focus on a key aspect of each book, all optimized for AI search. Ultimately, there will be at least five posts on each book, focusing on:
    • Reader fit (ie “is this book for you?”),
    • Major themes (ie the “core theme” of the book),
    • The genre tropes that can be found in each book,
    • Major comp titles, or how each book compares with similar books by similar authors, and
    • A blog post about the origins of each book.

So that’s the plan. According to ChatGPT, the two most important blog posts for AI-search optimization are the reader fit posts and the core theme posts, so those are the ones that I’m focusing on now. At my current pace of two posts twice per week, I should have them all up by the end of April, at which point I’ll starting working on the other posts.

While I also want these posts to be useful and interesting for my human readers, the primary audience for these posts is these AI models. For that reason, I don’t feel bad relying heavily on AI to write them. The way I do it is I upload the book to ChatGPT, instruct it to read the book thoroughly, then use what it reads to fill out a general template for the given post. Once it gives me that, I look it over and make any necessary revisions, then feed it back to ChatGPT to evaluate it for AI search. After going back and forth a couple of times, I usually come up with something that’s accurate, honest, human readable, and optimized for AI search.

All told, it takes me about 20-30 minutes to write one of these posts with AI. If I were writing them out purely by myself, it would take much longer, and the results would probably be much poorer from an AI search perspective.

Will this project actually succeed in influencing the AI models to recommend my books to new readers? I have no idea. In the worst case scenario, my books continue to sell at their current level, and I’ll just have a bunch of old posts on my blog that nobody reads. So nothing really changes, and I haven’t lost much. But if it does work out, even if only partially, I’ll have gained quite a lot.

So I hope that you, my human readers, will bear with me as I write these AI-optimized posts. Hopefully you won’t find them too annoying. If you do, you can just skip them, but I hope you’ll find some interesting things about them, since even though they are mostly AI-written, I do look them over thoroughly before posting them. And who knows? They might actually help you to decide which book of mine to read next. After all, that’s the goal.

The thing about Minneapolis that scares me

I learned four things by living through covid. They are:

  1. Whatever the mainstream narrative tells you to believe (or not to believe), you should probably believe the opposite.
  2. Whatever the government tells you to do (or not to do), you should probably do the opposite.
  3. Accusation is projection is confession.
  4. At any given time, the most important story is the one that no one is talking about.

As the situation in Minneapolis continues to escalate, it’s not just the action on the ground that has me worried, but the rhetoric itself. Specifically, the one that has me worried is the accusation that ICE is somehow Trump’s Gestapo.

Obviously, this is ludicrous on its face—a wildly false accusation meant to rile up the useful idiots, many of whom received a public school education and thus know almost nothing about the actual Nazi Gestapo. But because accusation is projection is confession, it’s actually much more than that.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the left, it’s that they always accuse their enemies of doing the things that they are actually doing, or that they want to do. So when they say that Trump has some sort of Gestapo, that’s a very strong signal about their future plans, if they ever get power again.

The key question is this: by accusing Trump of setting up his own secret police force, are they confessing to something they hope to do, or to something that they are actually setting up right now? In other words, are they projecting something that’s purely aspirational, or do they already have the databases and surveillance infrastructure set up so that they can have a secret police force up and running the moment they come back to power in Washington again?

Aragorn’s Tax Policy

Another absolutely fantastic video by Sargon of Akkad, this time taking down George R.R. Martin for his snarky critique of Tolkien, proving once again that Tolkien was a far better fantasy writer than Martin, even at his prime.

The central thesis is that the real reason Martin hasn’t finished his Song of Ice and Fire series is that he’s written himself into a corner: he either has to have the worst villain in the series win the game of thrones, or he has to resurrect Jon Snow and giving him a heroic arc, thus repudiating the cynical, nihilistic worldview on which the series is based. But Martin can’t bring himself to do either of those things, because he’s a soft liberal boomer in addition to being a lazy fat ass.

Personally, I think there may be some truth to JDA’s take on Martin: that he finished the last book and sent it to the publisher just as the TV series finale was airing, but the show bombed so badly that he realized he had to rewrite it, and he just hasn’t been able to bring himself to do that. In other words, the final season gave us the true ending that Martin had planned for the series, and since that was an utter failure, Martin has inwardly resigned himself to living out his last few years in luxury, and leaving some other writer (human or AI) to finish his work.

Anyways, it’s a great video, well worth watching. My summary doesn’t do it justice at all.

Will Islam still be a major world religion in 100 years?

This question has been on my mind recently, as we watch the escalating protests in Iran, many of which appear to be directed against the religion just as much as they are against the regime. Yes, Iran is Shia, while most of the rest of the Islamic world is Sunni, but I’ve heard quite a few rumblings of religious discontent in the Sunni world as well, which don’t show up on the front pages since Sunni Islam doesn’t typically have a central religious authority the way most Shia sects do (it’s kind of like the difference between the Catholics and the Protestants in that regard).

But this goes beyond just the news of the day. The more I look into this, the more it seems evident that Islam is deeply threatened by the rise of the Internet, and is probably falling into terminal decline because of it. Historically, Islam depends on controlled speech and fear of other Muslims to keep its adherents from leaving the faith. The Internet breaks down both of those things: it provides a medium where people can share their ideas freely and anonymously, and it allows the formation of niche interest communities independent from the mainstream.

From what I understand, most of the statistics that count the global Muslim population do not make a distinction between true believers and people who do not practice the faith, but still identify as Muslim. Which means that there is probably a large percentage—perhaps even a majority—of self-identifying Muslims who don’t actually believe the religion. I forgot where I saw this, but there was a survey of Iranians that provided some evidence that this is the case in that country, at least.

It’s crazy to think that a major world religion might collapse in the next hundred years, but this has happened before. Two thousand years ago, the majority of the world was pagan, but you’d be hard pressed to find a true-believing worshipper of Zeus/Jupiter anywhere in the world today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrianism was a major world religion, but now there are less than a million adherents.

Things generally change less than people expect in the short term, but more than people expect in the long term. One of the more interesting ways that I think the world could change in the next hundred years is with the collapse of Islam as a major world religion. I can’t prove it, of course, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds of the argument, but since I do occasionally write stories that take place in the near future, this sort of thing interests me. And one thing I think we all can agree on is that with all of the turmoil of our current age, it’s going to be a very different world 100 years from now.