Silent Answers to Loud Slanders

In response to the observation by Vox Day that the books and stories on the Sad Puppies slate of recommendations routinely overmatch the Hugo nominations offered by the conformist establishment of the past decade, one Glenn Hauman of Comic Mix is asking the fairminded and tolerance-loving fans of science fiction to go onto the Amazon sites of various books and works of any nominees for the Hugo awards recommended by the Sad Puppies, and leave or laud negative reviews. https://archive.today/UCk4j

Mind you, he is not asking for the Evil League of Evil Authors to be scribbled on by fake reviews, but merely those persons who, in our humble opinions, we asked our readers to consider nominating for a Hugo, based on the quality of the work rather than any political considerations.

Dear readers, I recommend bringing his call to violate the Amazon reviews system to Amazon’s attention. Also, one may leave comments on a fake review so as to warn innocent shoppers who might read it and be deceived.

And Mr. Hauman of course must apologize and repudiate this petty act of incompetent crowd-sourced graffito.

And I read on the blog of my publisher the following:

This time from one Carrie Schutrick, who pretends that she’s read John C. Wright’s Book of Feasts & Seasons:

Ghastly
By Carrie Schutrick “Neon Fox”on April 14, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition
I would like to make something clear: this book gets one star only because it’s apparently been copyedited. In this day of self publishing, that’s not a given, so a lack of typos and a writer who seems to have a grasp of the use of the semicolon are things to celebrate.

The content, however, is horrifically bad. To take only one example, there’s the inexplicably Hugo-nominated story “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”, in which a woman whose daughter has just died of cancer is granted a visitation from Saint Nicholas, and the girl is resurrected because her mother becomes Catholic enough to deserve a miracle. (And there’s a miracle Christmas tree, even though Saint Nicholas makes it a point to say that he doesn’t smoke a pipe because he lived before people started doing that. Et tu, Queen Victoria?) The perversion of Catholic doctrine around the problem of evil is…well, one hesitates to call it “blasphemy”, but I cannot think of a term that better fits.

I rather wish I had actually purchased the book, because then I could ethically burn it; it’s considered bad form to do such a thing to a book belonging to someone else.

Vox Day remarks:

They’re so sneaky, aren’t they, just happening to show up and post the first and only one-star reviews the very day that someone told them to do so. As before, I reported it for abuse and inappropriate content.

Myself, I am rather pleased that my honored and beloved readers immediately pointed out the lies and flaws in this alleged review.

As for Mr Hauman, I suggest he go back to drawing goatees and eyeglasses on the images of lingerie models from the magazines he keeps in his bathroom.

As for Miss Schutrick, whom I suppose to be a crazy cat lady, I owe her sardonic thanks. She sold at least six books for me in one evening, purchased on the spot by kind readers offended by her petty venom.

UPDATE: Those six books I mention above were only those known to me because readers dropped me a note so saying. My publisher reports another hundred copies of FEASTS AND SEASONS were purchased in the last 48 hours as a silent answers to loud slander.