Whatever

The Feedly Issue, Apparently Resolved

Posted on August 2, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      10 Comments

I’ve been told for a while that people were having a problem accessing my site via the Feedly RSS feeder, which I have steadfastly maintained was not because of anything I had done. And I was right — apparently there was a longstanding issue between Feedly and WordPress which kept timely updates from WordPress-hosted sites from happening. Someone who has been working on this issue has informed me that Feedly and WordPress finally ironed out the technical issues that had been causing the problems. So now you’ll be getting updates from Whatever around the time they actually go up, not hours or sometimes days later. This makes me happy. Again, nothing to do with anything I’ve been doing, but I (and anyone using Feedly) should benefit just the same.

With that said, if there are problems in the future with Feedly, for whatever reason, remember: It’s not me. I’m not touching anything. I’m just doing my thing. Thanks.

— JS

Hello From Norway

Posted on August 1, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      18 Comments

Left the house almost exactly 24 hours ago and it’s been a long 24 hours. But I am in Oslo and ready for NorCon this weekend. But first: A whole lot of sleep.

— JS

“And Just Where Do You Think YOU’RE Going?”

Posted on July 31, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      11 Comments

Spice the cat knows something is up and she is not wrong: Tonight I am heading to Europe, where I will be for the next two weeks. First in Oslo for Norcon, where I am a guest of honor, and then in Glasgow for the Worldcon there, where I am DJing a dance and also, as it happens, up for a Hugo. There entire Worldcon program is here, and you can find what I’ll be up to by searching on my name.

I’ll be checking in here, but you can expect the updates to be short, because, you know, going to another continent and hanging out with people in the offline world, which does exist, believe it or not. You can of course also find me on Bluesky and Threads.

I hope when I come back Spice will remember me. Two weeks is a long time for a cat brain. We’ll see.

— JS

Some Number Crunching on Career Sales, 2024

Posted on July 30, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      42 Comments

Tucked into yesterday’s announcement about the new 10-book contract with Tor is this notation:

John Scalzi has become one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation with 4.5 million books in print in the United States. 

Let’s discard the “one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation” bit as PR fluffery — which is easy for me to do since I wrote that bit — and focus on the “4.5 million books in print in the US” bit. What does that figure actually mean, in terms of my real-world sales?

Well! Let’s get nerdy with this stuff, shall we:

1. “In print” does not mean total sales. This much should be evident when you go into a bookstore and see copies of my books on the shelves. If they’re on the shelves, axiomatically, they haven’t been sold yet. I’ve published 17 novels with Tor since 2005 and none of them are out of print, so at any one time there are (at least) tens of thousands of physical copies of my books in stores, waiting to be purchased. If they aren’t sold and the bookseller wants the space for something else, they go back to a warehouse owned by Macmillan (Tor’s parent company), where they either go back out again to a different bookseller, remaindered (i.e., sold at a steep discount at the end of a publishing run), or pulped.

Back in the day it was not wholly unusual for a publisher to print a large number of copies of a book, have the sales be a modest fraction of the print run, and then remainder or pulp the rest of the print run, simply as the cost of doing business. These days, however, print and distribution technology are sufficiently advanced that print runs rather more precisely correlate with the number of units sold. I was recently offered the chance to buy remaindered copies of one of my hardcovers (it had moved into the paperback phase of its life), and the total number of remaindered copies available was… a few dozen. That’s a pretty impressive estimation of a print run on the part of Tor.

(Additionally, “in print” means something different for ebooks than for physical books. For physical books, it means actual printed copies of a book; for ebooks, it means having a digital file available for sale on a server. The correlation between “copies in print” and “sold copies” for ebooks is very nearly one to one.)

My professional life did not overlap the “print a bunch of copies” era of publishing; Tor has always been fairly conservative in my initial print runs (not stingy, merely attentive to previous sales and estimating from there) and then would do additional print runs when necessary. Also, ebooks have been a significant percentage of my sales — there’s a reason I more regularly hit the New York Times “Combined Print & Ebook Fiction” best seller list than its “Hardcover Fiction” list. What that means is I suspect my “in print” and “total sales” numbers are fairly close… as they would be for most authors these days.

So, no, I have not sold 4.5 million books from Tor in the US, given both the current number of printed-but-unsold copies on bookstore shelves, and the print run overages since 2005 that were either remaindered or pulped. I suspect of those 4.5 million, I’ve probably sold 4.3 to 4.4 million of them. Which is still, you know, okay.

2. I’m going to use the “4.4 million copies sold” estimation for this next part:

Over 17 novels and 19 years, 4.4 million averages out to roughly 259,000 copies sold per novel, and roughly 231,000 copies sold per year. Which does suggest that what Tor currently advances me per book on average ($261,000, going up to $300,000 when the new contract kicks in) is… pretty spot on in terms of my sales profile. This is not, you should know, horribly surprising: Tor knows how many books I sell for them, and the general rule of thumb for book advances is that publishers will advance you an amount that they think you are likely to earn over the life of the book, because writing actual royalty checks/sending royalty direct deposits is a bit of a pain (Update, 8pm: I meant to write “life of the hardcover” and had a brain fart, sorry). So, on average, my publisher hits the mark on my advances. Well done, Tor’s accounting department!

The reality of copies sold per novel and how many copies of all novels sold per year is, of course, much messier. I regret to say that I did not sell 230,000 copies of Old Man’s War in 2005, even though it came out on January 1st and I literally had the entire year to register sales. I sold, at best, 7,700 copies, because that was the entire run of the hardcover (and OMW didn’t initially have an ebook; the first Kindle wasn’t released until 2007). On the flip side of this, the Tor press release notes that each of my last three books, The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain, respectively, “have each broken [the] previous record for the fastest-selling Scalzi novels of all time.” So my sales velocity, I am happy to say, has been increasing as I go along.

With that noted, it’s also no secret that the majority of my sales are in my backlist. Old Man’s War may have only sold 7,700 copies at most in its first year, but once it hit paperback in 2006 sales really took off… and have remained essentially unchanged, year in and year out, for almost two decades. It is unquestionably my best selling title across my entire publishing career. This in turn feeds the perennial sales of the rest of the OMW series, and when the seventh book in the series is released in 2025, we’ll likely see another sales bump across all six previous books in the series.

I now sell well out of the gate, which is fantastic — but selling backlist, i.e., where the expenses for the publisher are already priced in and now the title is generating pure profit, is what makes them happiest of all. Again, all of my novels for Tor are still in print and are still selling briskly, some more than others, but all well enough. Those annual backlist sales figures are likely to climb the more books I write for them.

So, no, not every novel of mine has sold the same, and not every year has seen the same amount of sales. “Average” is not useful here. But when it’s all added up it’s pretty clear (to me, anyway) that I’m compensated fairly by Tor in terms of advances, and that Tor, in turn, is getting a fair return on what they pay me up front.

3. It’s also important to note that the numbers offered above by Tor represent the floor for my sales (and print runs), not the ceiling. For example, the majority of my audiobooks are published by Audible, and those sales numbers aren’t part of Tor’s estimates. I’m happy to say that Audible has done very well by me in terms of marketing and sales (heck, they made a TV ad for Starter Villain) and that my sales in audio, especially for recent novels, are directly comparable to my sales in print/ebook.

Likewise, foreign language sales are not covered by Tor’s numbers, because the company doesn’t publish me in any language other than English. Most novels of mine are picked up for translation, and while each individual edition in a foreign language may or may not rack up huge sales (it’s difficult to shift a massive number of units in, say, Latvia, which has only 1.8 million citizens total), in aggregate they can add up nicely. At this point my work is available in three dozen languages, a fact I am continually delighted with (thank you, my foreign language publishers!).

There’s also my non-Tor writing, which includes but is not limited to non-fiction titles, novellas and specialty titles mostly released through Subterranean Press, collections, anthologies and individually-sold short stories, and so on. Fun fact: For a while there, my best-selling book was not one of my novels but Book of the Dumb, a 2003 humorous collection of stories about real-life people doing regrettable things. It sold 150,000 copies the first couple of years it was out. You can still get it (but why), so those sales numbers are probably still ticking upward very slowly. The SubPress titles are mostly limited editions in print but are available indefinitely as ebooks, and I’m happy to say some of them, particularly the “Dispatcher” series, are chugging away quite nicely.

Further muddying the waters in terms of “sales” are the titles that are available as part of a subscription service. For example, the audio versions of the “Dispatcher” novellas are part of Audible’s subscription service, so people who are Audible Plus members can listen to them for free, although they are also available for sale as well. They’ve sold enough to be New York Times bestsellers in the Audio Fiction category, and I know they’ve been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, but I’m not entirely sure what the ratio between sales and subscription listens is. Likewise Amazon sent me a nice little trophy commemorating the fact my short story “Slow Time Between the Stars” got a quarter of a million readers, but it’s available as a free read for Amazon Prime subscribers. Do those quarter of a million readers count as sales? As the story being “in print”? Who knows! I got paid for all of them, which is the important part.

Maybe they and sales could be covered by another umbrella metric: “published reads,” in which work for which I was paid by a publisher was then accessed by a reader, who paid for it either directly (via sales) or indirectly (via subscription). A “published read” metric would then also cover much of my foreign-language audio, which is accessible via subscription services rather than available for individual sale.

4. Add all of this up, what does it mean? Again, mostly that the 4.5 million “in print” figure offered by Tor is a floor, not a ceiling. Without torturing my agent by making him collate every single foreign print run and sales figure, or digging out my own records on pre-2008 non-fiction titles (for whom I had a different agent, who has since left the business), I would conservatively estimate my total sales figures, in all genres and formats worldwide, are close to double the Tor “in print” estimate. If we throw in subscription readers and listeners into a “published read” figure, it goes up another million or so, easy.

So, maybe 10 million in total sales/published reads over nineteen years. For various reasons, that feels reasonably accurate to me.

That’s… pretty good. And so long as I’m not eaten by a bear/hit by a bus/contract brain worms, etc, there will be another fifteen years, at least, before I turn in my last novel and coast on royalties into retirement. More than enough time to add to those numbers.

I’m going to get to that. Uhhhh, after I get back from this year’s Worldcon.

— JS

About That (New) Deal

Posted on July 29, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      85 Comments

(Checks Reactor to see if the news of my new multi-book, multi-year deal with Tor Books is up)

(It is)

Welp, time to wake up my fictional interlocutor.

(Nudges the fictional interlocutor with toe)

Nnngh. What is it?

I have need of your services.

Why?

Because of this:

What? You’ve signed another long-ass contract with Tor?

Yes.

Again?

Yes.

Already?

Evidently so.

Does this mean your current 13-book contract with them is done?

No. I’ve still got six books on that one.

… but now you’ve signed a contract for another ten books.

Yes.

When you’re barely halfway done with the first one.

That’s right.

Dude, I am so confused right now.

It’s simple, really. After The Kaiju Preservation Society was out in the world for a while, me and my team looked at how things were going, in terms of overall sales and income and presence in the market. And it turns out that things had been going really well. Of the five books Tor had put out since the 2015 contract started, four of them had been New York Times bestsellers, all had been optioned for film/TV, and there had been rather a few award nominations and wins. Equally significantly, through sales and directly-related income, I had earned a multiple of the up-front financial figure attached to the 2015 contract. My overall sales strongly suggested Tor had also recouped and then some. The extremely successful release of Starter Villain since then has only added to all of that.

But more than that, I felt (and feel!) very comfortable with the team at Tor. They’re some of the smartest people in the field of speculative fiction, and the savvy moves that the Tor Publishing Group have made in the last several years, from bringing in Devi Pillai as publisher to the establishment of imprints like Nightfire and Bramble, have made it one of the most exciting publishing houses in the world right now. There’s buzz and energy at Tor. I wanted to keep being part of it, and to keep adding to it.

So, just before Starter Villain came out, I and Tor started talking about extending that partnership further. We both knew we wanted to keep working with each other, and we both felt like now was the right time to figure out the details of that, so that there would be no “end of contract” anxiety on either side of the table. We hashed everything out in the first half of the year and since then have been waiting a bit for the right time to announce it. That’s today.

So you’re writing books on the 2015 contract and the new contract?

No, I’ll finish up the books on the current contract, and when that’s done the books on the new contract will start up. It’s sequential rather than simultaneous.

And you publish a novel a year.

More or less. Some years I’ll publish one or two, others I’ll publish none. It averages out to about one a year.

That means that when you’re out of contract you’ll be…

About seventy years old, yes.

I mean, holy crap, dude.

I agree it’s wild to think about. It’s possible this is the last book contract I will ever sign. Or, at the very least, it’s the last book contract I’ll ever need to sign.

Are you at all nervous about making a commitment of this length?

No. Bluntly, this is a gift. I know what I’m doing with my professional life for the next fifteen years at least, and I know I have the support of one of the best teams in publishing. And because both Tor and I are assured that my SF/F novel output stays at one house for what is likely to be the entire length of my publishing career (35 years!), we can do cool and creative things with the backlist in concert with new releases. This contract is about security and options, both for me and for Tor.

Well, and money.

I mean, yes, right, that too.

So, how much?

In terms of the advance, $300,000 per book. This is a bump up from the 2015 contract, although when you factor in inflation, etc, in real-world economic terms I suspect it’ll be somewhere near the same amount of upfront money.

You could have held out for more!

Maybe? But why? I’m not exactly starving at the moment, says the man who owns a church building and a six-necked guitar. Also, as with the 2015 contract, this isn’t about absolutely running up the score on advances. It’s about building and continuing a stable, predictable long-term relationship between me and Tor, with advantages for the both of us.

Since we are both in it for the long term, there is ample opportunity for both of us to make money through the entire life of the contract(s), as indeed we each have to this point. Both Tor and I are getting a good and fair deal here, and that is the best kind of deal: One where both partners are happy and working together in harmony, to, you know, make even more money.

What I’m saying is, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

You’re not worried about having to write sixteen more novels?

In what way?

Coming up with ideas, for one.

I’m going to be honest with you, of all the things I worry about in this life, coming up with story ideas is not one of them. I mean, my next novel is about the moon turning to cheese. And it has what I think is some of my best writing yet. So, I think I’m going to be fine on the idea front.

Beyond that, I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that I like doing it, a lot. And while it’s fun to write other things – I’ve especially enjoyed doing screenplays for Love Death + Robots – I’m all right having those things be the side gigs to my main thing, writing novels. It’s nice to know that whatever else I do, I have a writing home to come back to.

Aren’t you worried about “Artificial Intelligence” coming to take your job?

Not until I am 70, at least.

On a less flip note, this is a good place to point out that one of the requirements of my new contract is that my books have to be worked on by actual live humans. My book covers will be made by humans, who will be paid for their work. Editorial work will be done by humans, who will likewise get paid. This is a meat shop, folks.

This doesn’t mean the humans can’t avail themselves of up-to-date technological tools; I do the same. But just as every word in my novels is contractually obliged to be written by me, a human with a brain and imagination, so are all the other aspects of the book-making experience now obliged to be the work of, you know, people. Please, other writers, also make this part of your contracts moving forward.

Hey, can you talk about audio for a sec?

Sure. The audio versions of my novels will continue to be handled by Audible, who have been an absolutely lovely partner to work with, and with whom I am delighted to continue my association.

Do you have anything you would like to say to readers and fans?

First, that they are the reason I get to continue to do this whole “writing novels” thing at all, so really, I thank each of them from the bottom of my heart. Second, if they are ever wondering if I have another novel coming out soon, all they have to do is ask themselves: Is John Scalzi alive, and is it a year before 2039? If the answer to both these questions is “yes,” then yes, I will have another novel out soon.

Do you have anything you would like to say to haters and detractors?

Bwa ha ha hah ha! Sorry, dudes. I’ll be around.

You should probably thank some people now.

Absolutely: First, my agent Ethan Ellenberg, who spearheaded the negotiations on our end and as always did a terrific job at it. At Tor, my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my publisher Devi Pillai, who agreed that we should all be in business for a long time yet, and Alexis Saarela and Sarah Reidy in Tor’s PR department, who picked the right time to tell the world about this. Also Bella Pagan and Michael Beale at Tor UK, who have been fantastic through the whole process. And, naturally, my wife Kristine, who is generally awesome and specifically was my early sounding board about committing to an even-longer-term deal with my publisher.

So, shouldn’t you be writing a book right now?

No, right now I’m on summer vacation, and am heading to Oslo and Glasgow. But when I get back from Worldcon in a couple of weeks? Yes. Then I’ll be writing a book.

Cool. Are we done? I’d like to get back to my nap now.

Yes, sleep well, fictional interlocutor!

Nnngh.

Your Saturday Sunflower

Posted on July 27, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

Beauty is everywhere, if you care to look.

— JS

Reminder: They Actually Are Planning a Dictatorship

Posted on July 27, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      44 Comments

I’ve been having as much fun as anyone this week watching Trump and the GOP knocked off-kilter by Kamala Harris’ entrance into the presidential race, and I’m certainly guilty of adding to the stack of “Couchfucker Vance” memes out there in the world, but while we’re having fun, please do remember that Trump and his friends really absolutely 100% intend to end participatory democracy in the United States if they get back into power:

“After repeating his usual unfounded claims about mail-in voting, Trump launched into an appeal directed at Christian voters. “Christians, get out and vote!” yelled Trump. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians!” He added, “You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

The most charitable reading of that is that Trump is saying his next administration will be so popular that whomever succeeds him will win the vote in such an overwhelming landslide that Trump’s most fervent followers don’t have to rouse themselves to leave their couches. But inasmuch as his last administration was such a failure that he ended up being voted out, he then attempted sedition to overturn a fairly decided election, and he’s already admitted to planning to be a dictator “on day one” if he gets back in, if you buy into that most charitable reading you are, at best, a dimwitted child. Trump is monologuing his evil plans here, because he has no sense and can’t not. You can most assuredly believe he means it.

So by all means, let’s continue the mockery, because what Trump hates most of all is ridicule. But also let’s remember that he really will be a dictator if he’s allowed anywhere near the White House again. So along with the ridicule, please, if you’re US citizen 18 or older, register to vote if you have not already, check your registration to make sure it’s still valid, and remember to vote on November 5 (or earlier if your state allows early or mail-in voting).

— JS

Hay Bales Sling, Are You Listening

Posted on July 26, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      14 Comments

The terrible pun in the headline is its own reward (or crime, depending), but I will say that I was moved to look out the office window because I heard an odd noise and couldn’t place what it was. What it was: The hay baler, wrangling the hay bales into shape. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

Even after all these years in this house, I am still tickled that I look out the window to a hay field, and then turn to my computer and write science fiction. Every novel from Old Man’s War onward overlooked this very hay field. You wouldn’t know to look at them! And yet.

Also, hello, we’ve made it to Friday. What a week, huh?

— JS

It’s Harder to Stab When You’re Being Punched in the Face

Posted on July 25, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      65 Comments

Peruse, if you will, what I believe is one of the first press releases from the Harris campaign, released after a Fox News appearance by Donald Trump earlier today:

Two points to make here. The first is that not only are the gloves off, they were never on in the first place. The second is that one advantage that the GOP had in the last two election cycles — the presumption that the Democrats would always “go high” when they went low — is very clear no longer operable.

I don’t know if Trump and the GOP are actually prepared for the Harris campaign to treat them with the respect they deserve, which is to say, none whatsoever. This is different than saying that Trump and company aren’t prepared to go low; they’ve been in the gutter so long that it’s now their high ground. What I’m saying is that it’s harder to effectively stab your opponent when she’s busy punching you in the face, and wearing brass knuckles when she’s doing it.

Which is again a reminder: 2024 is not 2020 or 2016. I’m curious to see if the Trump campaign will be able to understand that.

— JS

Smudge, Leading His Best Life

Posted on July 25, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      13 Comments

In all the hubbub of the last few days, thought you might appreciate a soothing picture of a cat. I know I sure do. And Smudge is a world leader in just following his bliss. We would all do well to follow his furry example.

— JS

When Hugo Nonsense is Handled Right

Posted on July 22, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      59 Comments

The short version of the video above: At least one absolute fucknuckle of a person was (stupidly, obviously) attempting to game the Hugo awards this year, and the fraud was caught and disallowed in the tabulation. And then, the Hugo team, via press release and the video above, immediately went public with the situation, because transparency of action is actually a thing. There are some things the administrators can’t legally divulge, and they note this as well, and that, too, is a welcome act of transparency.

Look, I am not unbiased here — I am a Hugo finalist this year, I’m on the program for the Worldcon, and heck, I’m even DJing a dance at the convention. For all that, and especially after the shitshow of last year’s Hugo administration, the determination of the Glasgow Worldcon to be as open as possible about the Hugo process as well as other things usually mostly behind the scenes (including this year’s WSFS business meeting) genuinely impresses me. In a perfect world, the Glasgow conrunners would not be called upon to restore faith in the integrity of the Hugo and WSFS processes. But this is not the world we live in. Glasgow is meeting the moment in this imperfect world, and I appreciate that they are doing so, calmly, factually and forthrightly.

Also, to the person or persons going out of their way to try to screw around with this year’s Hugo: You just threw a whole lot of money into the trash, pal. Please go lick a wall socket at your earliest convenience. Thanks.

— JS

Biden, Harris, Trump and 2024

Posted on July 22, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      143 Comments

Slow news weekend, am I right?

Some thoughts on the current state of things, in no particular order.

1. I was not a fan of the idea of Joe Biden leaving the race, and I still have my suspicions that Biden was done dirty by the Democratic Party. I’m not happy about that. This is not because I am some extreme Biden partisan, just mostly because it looked and felt like panic and flailing around for weeks at a time over one bad debate. However, in the fullness of time and roughly 20 hours of hindsight, I’m beginning to wonder how much of the flailing about was actual panic, and how much of it was carefully choreographed messaging leading up to Biden choosing to step aside.

Let me be clear about one thing: If Biden had had a decent debate, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. I think his bad performance there was real, indicative of some substantive issues, and I think the initial freak out on the Democratic side was real, too. But I think it’s possible that at some point, once Biden himself decided he was a liability, the panic stopped being real and started being something managed. The goal: keeping GOP energies invested on the wrong target until such a time that the announcement of Biden’s departure from the race could be made with maximum impact. If it was indeed this, a strategic roll with a punch leading to an effective counterpunch, then I feel less bad about Biden leaving the race.

2. That’s a wonderful rationalization you have there, Scalzi, I hear you say. And you’re not wrong! It feels far-fetched as fuck. As a rebuttal, however, consider that the announcement was made on the Sunday after the Republican National Convention, and after the Sunday morning political talk shows were put to bed, i.e., after the GOP political capital was spent slagging Biden, and when professional spinners would be caught flat-footed by the announcement. Biden’s news was quickly followed by his endorsement of Kamala Harris, which in turn was followed by a flood of endorsements for Harris across the Democratic political firmament, effectively slamming the door on any serious challenge to Harris at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

If you think something like that just happens spontaneously, well, one, bless your heart, and two, you’re wrong. This was a work, a rope-a-dope, and a strategy to energize the Democratic base and to toss what little momentum the GOP had coming out of their convention down a deep, dark hole. And it worked! Harris raised an huge amount of money for her campaign in its first day — $49 million at least, and I’ve heard up to $70 million — and the GOP messaging was in disarray, limited largely to Trump whining on Truth Social, Stephen Miller freaking out on Fox News, and Mike Johnson trying to suggest that the Democrats can’t do that, it isn’t fair. Which is just what the Democrats wanted out of this.

So, again: At what point did the panic stop being panic and start being a strategy? Because at some point, it did become a strategy. Hindsight suggests to me it was at some point before the Republican convention. But of course I don’t know, and I could be wrong on the timing. I just know it happened.

3. So let’s talk about Kamala Harris for a moment. To begin, I am 100% fine with her being the candidate presumptive. Long-time readers may recall that in the 2020 Democratic primary cycle, she was my first choice candidate. Here’s the link to the whole piece, but since I figure most of you won’t click through, here’s what I wrote at the time:

She’s hella smart, pretty savvy and I think her background and daily practice in politics shows she’s not scared of anyone, least of all the Republicans. I also suspect that she would put together a very fine cabinet of equally smart and savvy people and be the best chance to reverse the four years of stupidity and cupidity we’ve endured to this point. Is she perfect? Lol, no. But I don’t need perfect at this point, and additionally I think she’s smart enough to know where she’s not smart enough, and will collect people to her to compensate. Also, she’s not old as fuck, and her personal baggage seems dealable. Plus she’d shred Trump in the presidential debates like he was a chicken straight out of the crock pot. Yeah, I’d watch that.

Hey, you know what? Almost all of that still stands! Plus, now she’s gotten three and a half years of being Vice President under her belt, and it was an actually useful Vice Presidency; she did a lot of policy work and made a lot of tie-breaking votes in the Senate. She understands the presidency gig better than nearly anyone else the Democrats could have hauled up on short notice. Indeed, I have a very strong feeling that if there had been resistance in the Democratic camp to Harris sliding into the candidate role, Biden would not have stepped aside. He’s an institutionalist at heart, and a brokered Democratic convention would be chaos.

4. What are Harris’ disadvantages? Bluntly, she’s a black woman running for president in racist and sexist country where straight white men freaked out so hard at the Obama presidency, and the possibility of Hilary Clinton back in the White House, that the majority of them voted en masse for a felonious grifter in 2016, and then did it again in 2020. Do not kid yourself that the majority of them will do anything but in 2024, either. The question is how many of the straight white women they will take with them when they do.

(You may or may not think this is a reductive observation, but if you do, I suspect you may be a straight white person who decided not to vote for Clinton “because of her emails,” or because she was “unlikeable,” or whatever, i.e., you were looking for any reason not to vote for the candidate who was actually qualified for the job, in order to vote for the unfathomably shitty person the other side hauled up out of the incompetent depths, who had no platform besides his own cretinous id and still does not. It’s 2024, I’m done pretending that sexism and racism, implicit or explicit, aren’t huge fucking motivators for the white people vote here in the US. You can rationalize it however you like; I understand it’s important for one’s self-image to do that. I’m not inclined to buy into the rationalizations any more.)

The current iteration of the GOP has been mask-off racist and sexist for some time, and Donald Trump sets the tone for the party on this score. Be expecting the whole array of nonsense from them, from dog whistles to flat out racist and sexist shit, said out loud, and also all over the former Twitter by Trump’s pet fascists and/or Russian bots. I guarantee you it will be nothing Kamala Harris has not heard before, but you might see a couple of new ones. The GOP outsourced their policy making to The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, which is already deeply unpopular, probably because it’s terrible for anyone who is not already a billionaire cryptofascist with a cross fetish. The GOP can’t go after Harris on policy grounds, and Trump doesn’t do policy anyway. So expect endless variations of she’s an uppity black woman for the next several months.

5. What about Joe Biden? Fun fact: He’s still president and will be through noon on January 20. He doesn’t have to worry about getting re-elected anymore, and the Supreme Court has rather stupidly decided that presidents are now kings and don’t have to be answerable to anyone for anything, as long as what they do is “official business.” So that will be interesting. I don’t think for a second that Biden would do anything with that remit close to what Trump would do with it — Trump would fucking have US citizens imprisoned and murdered because that’s what he always wanted anyway. Biden’s not that guy, and he wants Harris to win the election. But there are a lot of executive orders between now and then that he can manage that could help those who need help, and vex those who need vexing, and to draw comparisons between the parties and their positions. The Supreme Court’s stupid decision certainly could bolster that. Thanks, Supreme Court!

Also, Biden has manifestly changed the narrative around both himself and his presidency. I didn’t want him to stop running for re-election, but choosing to do so allows for a “country over self” positioning that’s a hugely effective contrast to Trump’s “I’m running to avoid prison and to get revenge” narrative. It also allows a fresh reframing of the Biden administration’s achievements and accomplishments, and positions Harris to say she will continue them. Biden can lean into the whole “Grandpa Joe” thing now, and have it seen as a positive rather than a negative.

And now, when he goes after Trump and the GOP in his “Dark Brandon” guise — and he will, oh, boy, will he — it will be a delight. Trump, who doesn’t have it in him not to punch back at Biden, will be wasting his time and energy fighting with the wrong person, and the GOP will have no choice but to follow him down that hole. Which is to say Biden has opened up a whole new front in the messaging wars, and it has the potential to be glorious.

6. Okay, let’s get to some short stuff:

Joe Manchin says he’s going to re-register as a Democrat to run for president! He can go fuck himself. Also, it’s already too late for that. I mean, he could do that, and he could go to the convention and see what he gets there. But as noted above, the whole of the Democratic firmament is already aligned with Harris. It was a done deal before it was even announced. By the way, “go to the convention, see what it gets you” is what I will be saying to any johnny-come-lately on this matter. Do it! Mount a challenge! Throw away your career in Democratic politics! I’m sure it will work out fine for you.

(Update, 12:11pm: Manchin did, indeed, go fuck himself.)

Mike Johnson says the GOP will contest Harris at the top of the ballot! He can go fuck himself too. It’s 100% certain that the GOP, having already abandoned the concept of democracy in its rush to crown its new King of Orange, will try all manner of complete fuckery so people can’t vote for the candidates of their choosing, of which this would be just one example. I do have some faith (now, maybe not before the last couple of days) that the Democrats made sure their “i”s were dotted and their “t”s crossed in a legal sense before they did this thing. Again: The GOP doesn’t do democracy anymore, so they will absolutely try to keep Harris off the ballot. Let’s see how that goes.

Who will be the Vice Presidential candidate? A white man from a swing(ish) state. Elsewhere I have already suggested Mark Kelly or Andy Beshear, and other people seem to like Josh Shapiro. I have no real personal preference, although the nerd in me likes the idea of an astronaut VP. But bluntly, this is a racist and sexist country, remember? Having a white dude from a swing(ish) state is probably worth just enough votes to make it useful.

7. Can Harris win? Yes, I think so. It’s not 2016 or 2020. Here in 2024, the Supreme Court, with six conservatives, three appointed by Trump, has already gutted people’s rights, and Project 2025 makes it clear that the plan is to gut even more, and to make living in these United States objectively worse for almost everyone. Donald Trump is 78, mentally declining, a convicted felon, a sexual assaulter, a seditionist, and a bellowing fountain of rage who sees everything in transactional terms. He literally cares nothing for anyone who isn’t him and surrounds himself with the worst possible people. His new Vice President pick JD Vance is a perfect example of this, a craven opportunist who spends most of his time being warm and cozy in billionaire Peter Thiel’s pocket.

Trump has never won an election by popular vote; he won his sole national victory in the edges of the electoral college. That’s the way it is, and a win is a win, but the point is that Trump has never been popular. He’s not any more popular now than he was in 2016 or 2020, and here in 2024 he has a hell of a lot more baggage.

Harris isn’t perfect, and she’s not the perfect candidate for a racist and sexist country. But there will be people who will want to vote against Trump, who will be happy to give her their vote. There will be people who will want to vote for her, independent of whoever the other candidate is or would have been. The Venn diagram of those two groups closely resembles a circle, but there’s enough on the margins for a victory.

To put it another way, after eight years, we know what the hard cap is on Trump’s support. We don’t know what the cap is yet for Harris’ support. History does suggest that cap is higher than Trump’s.

So yes, she can win. And she will have my vote.

— JS

New Books and ARCs, 7/19/24

Posted on July 19, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      14 Comments

Thanks to travel and life and not a small bit of laziness, it’s been just a bit since we’ve had a stack of new books and ARCs for you, but we’re making up for some lost time with this very excellent collection of arrivals here at the Scalzi Compound. What here would you like to have for a summer read? Share in the comments!

— JS

New Cover: “Take On Me” + Why So Much Music From Me Recently

Posted on July 19, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      15 Comments

First: Yes, the A-Ha song. No, I didn’t try to hit “the note.” I wouldn’t have hit it and none of you would have been happy with the result. I suppose I could have just pitch-corrected the note into the right place, but you would definitely notice. My falsetto was barely holding on as it was. Anyway, this version of the song is… a little strange. I put a trap beat to it, just to see what that would be like, and everything went kind of sideways from there. This is probably as close to ska as I’ve ever gotten? But if I called it actual ska, I think every member of The Selecter, past and present, would manifest at my house to kick the crap out of me. So: It’s just me being weird, y’all. Hope you like it.

Second: I think many of you have noticed I’m putting out a lot of music recently, both covers and original stuff. There are a bunch of reasons why I am doing that. One, I have all this damn musical equipment and I need to justify the expense. The guitars are neat decorations, but they really should be used. Same with the keyboards and the digital audio work stations and all the plugins and what have you. Two, and correlated, the only way to get better with all this stuff is to use it. I am technically an at best modestly adept musician, but I’m getting better and I like learning more about my musical instruments and programs. Which is a third thing: Fiddling about with music, especially in the DAW, gets my brain into a happy zone, where I dive in and tweak things for hours and get lost in the hobby for a bit.

The fourth thing is, hey, the world’s on fire and I find myself less inclined to write about it here — as I’ve said many times before, there’s only so many variations of “don’t fucking vote for fascists” I can say before I bore myself, much less you — and while I’m not shying away from the messed up reality we all exist in, because I do actually live in the world, I don’t find it energizing to write about it at the moment, like I did before. Nevertheless I also know that if I don’t do creative stuff regularly that’s not “job,” I tend to get psychically constipated. I need to do something with my brain to be happy. For the moment, music is scratching that itch, so I’m doing a lot of it, and posting the results here. Is this a permanent thing? We’ll see! My personal suspicion is eventually my brain will come back around to writing. But in the meantime, here’s me covering 80s tunes in goofy ways.

A fifth thing, tangentially related, is that behind the scenes, Athena and I talking a bit about what we want to do with Whatever in the future. It’s been a shared site for a while now with both of us writing and working on it, and in a larger sense we’re looking into how it will best fit into other projects we are doing jointly and individually. There will be more on that later (I’m not trying to be mysterious, we’re just still working on things). I will say Whatever isn’t going anywhere; if anything, and if all goes in the direction of what we’re hoping, the site will be hopping with cool stuff.

While we’re working on that: Here, have some tunes.

— JS

My Site Still Up In the Crowdstrike Shutdown

Posted on July 19, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      13 Comments

And to celebrate, here is a picture of a cat on a car roof.

My sympathies to you today if you were planning to travel by air, or withdraw large sums of money from your bank account. It’s kind of a mess out there at the moment. I’m going to stay home, but then, that was my plan anyway.

— JS

New Podcast Appearance: “Re-Creative, Episode 45”

Posted on July 17, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Here’s the link. On the podcast I talk about several things, including writing, my very first Worldcon, and why I do noodle-y electronic music music for fun, if not for profit. The podcast runs about 71 minutes, and I first show up a couple of minutes in. Fun fact, Joe Mahoney, one of the podcast’s cohosts, was the very first person ever to interview me in my guise as a science fiction writer, at Torcon (that year’s Worldcon) in 2003. That was before Old Man’s War came out. It was a long while ago. And yet, here we both are. Time is a funny thing.

— JS