That’s something of a stretch, but there is a surprisingly good case to be made for it. Back in 2015, around the time SJWs Always Lie was #1 in its Amazon category for 18 straight months, Tor Books surprised everyone in science fiction by signing John Scalzi to a multi-million-dollar 13-book deal, as per The Guardian.American science fiction author John Scalzi has signed a 10-year, 13-book deal with publishers Tor, which will net him $3.4m.Scalzi is the author of 19 novels, including the highly-acclaimed Old Man’s War, the Star Trek-esque, Hugo award-winning satire Redshirts, and his latest, the near-future apocalyptic medical thriller Lock In.All three of those works have been optioned for TV and film adaptations, and the title of his most recent novel is perhaps pertinent, as the author – who has a long-running blog and a strong online presence – now finds himself effectively working for Tor (part of Macmillan and one of the biggest science fiction and fantasy publishers in the US) full-time for the next decade.The deal was reported at the weekend via the New York Times and has been signed and sealed in fairly short order.This was very surprising, since Scalzi was, in most people’s eyes, a third-tier writer at best, not a legend like Jerry Pournelle or Larry Niven, and definitely not an author capable of filling the shoes of former Tor Books authors like Robert Jordan or the various game tie-in novels that had been providing Tor with bestsellers for years. Scalzi himself once noted how modest his career had been:Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.The problem is that Scalzi was never more than a mediocre mid-list writer who was a) very good at marketing himself, b) a ripoff artist who wrote pastiches rather than original fiction, and c) shamelessly dishonest. He managed to convince everyone that he was far more popular than he actually was – we all genuinely believed he had the biggest blog in science fiction when his site traffic was actually a fraction of mine – and he managed to parley that false perception into lead author status with Tor Books, the biggest publisher in science fiction.Now, signing a lead author who can’t deliver and creates massive opportunity costs is an existential problem for the publisher. Tor Books could have, and should have, been pushing Brandon Sanderson and Charles Stross as lead authors, signing Larry Correia away from Baen Books, keeping John C. Wright in the fold, and locking down the best up-and-coming writers in the field at the time.Instead, they gambled on this guy. And, as is evident from his latest offering, they gambled and lost. Here is a review of his latest novel, which can’t even bother to pretend to be science fiction.The first thing to address after reading this cover to cover is the claimed genre: science-fiction. Most publications by Tor Books are in the fantasy or science-fiction genre. Most of Scalzi’s published works are in the science-fiction genre but Starter Villain is not a science-fiction novel by any stretch of the term. It is set in the present day and frequently references current things like the protagonist’s late father’s 2003 Nissan Maxima, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Zoom and plenty of contemporary political and economic issues. There is some mention or special technologies but none that are considered beyond the realm of possibility. The only genuine science-fiction aspects are genetically modified cats and dolphins that are sentient and play a significant part in the narrative. There is no real explanation of how they became so and readers are just told that research was done and they exist. The novel is really more a parody of the James Bond movies (though not the novels) and I would place it in the same genre as the Austin Powers films. These films had time travel, characters being cryogenic frozen and “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” but they still weren’t science-fiction films. Nor really were the Bond films they parodied despite featuring unique gadgets and vehicles that were generally beyond the technology of the time. Unlike the Austin Powers films, this book isn’t funny at all. I’m sure plenty of Scalzi’s fans found it hilarious and anyone else who finds frequent profanity and snark funny might too.The novel is written in first-person from the perspective of a character named Charlie. He is a divorced, out-of-work journalist who makes his ends barely meet as a substitute teacher. He’s in his mid thirties, living in his deceased father’s home and his only friend is a cat named Hera. This all changes when he learns his enigmatic and rich maternal uncle has died and that he is the heir to his fortune. All he previously knew of this uncle was that he owned parking garages but soon discovers he is in fact a villain.The premise is something that could work really well if done right: what if a normal guy one day found out he was heir to a cartoon super villain’s fortune? Scalzi scuttles this promising premise almost as soon as the novel begins. One of his problems is he obviously doesn’t want to make his self-insert protagonist a genuine villain but still wants to call him one. Even his deceased uncle turns out not to be an actual villain but just an eccentric trying to stop real villainy through legal loopholes and other less evil methods… I chose this one expecting that he would have improved his craft in the twenty years he’s been writing. Yet, this was worse than I could believe and I’m confident that had Scalzi not already had a recognisable name, that this would never have been published. It reads much more like a young adult novel than proper science-fiction; only with a lot of cursing and general self-indulgence.How very… tedious. It’s really rather remarkable. Can you imagine how many copies of ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT the publisher of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson’s bestselling epic fantasies could have sold if they had published it and given it the kind of marketing push they gave imitative mediocrities like Redshirts, that feeble attempt at ripping off Asimov’s Foundation, and trying to push N… K… Jemisin’s second-person abominations on everyone?Instead, the word from insiders is that Tor Books is in hard decline; it probably won’t die as soon as Baen Books, but it is unlikely to survive the disastrous Patrick Nielsen Hayden-era for long. This is what happens when institutions take their position in an industry for granted, forget what it was that put them in that position in the first place, and allow themselves to be run by employees who are more interested in pushing their personal agendas than actually running the business in a professional manner that permits future success.I certainly don’t regret how it turned out. Castalia House regularly publishes category bestsellers on Amazon. Castalia Library is creating some of the most beautiful books in the world. We have our own bindery, our own translation machines, and we’re bringing forgotten books from foreign languages to the English-speaking world for the first time every single week.But as a business professional familiar with the history of science fiction publishing, it’s hard not to look at how Tor Books has methodically demolished both itself and science fiction and wonder what things might have looked like if PNH had been able to understand that a) a midlist writer can never be a lead author, b) the author of a popular pastiche is not going to reliably produce popular original fiction, and c) a publisher should always seek to publish the best authors in the field, not the most politically-harmonious ones.One can’t blame Scalzi for grifting. And it’s certainly not his fault that PNH and the other decision-makers at Tor Books were dumb enough to fall for his grift. But what began as a very bad business decision on the part of Tor appears to be heading for an ending in complete farce.DISCUSS ON SGThe post John Scalzi Killed Science Fiction appeared first on Vox Popoli.