Vox Day

Early life

Vox Day grew up in Minnesota, the son of Rebecca Beale and entrepreneur and jailed tax protester Robert Beale. He states on his blog that he is of English, Irish, Mexican, and Native American descent. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1990, where he studied economics, history and Japanese language.

Music career

In 1987, Day, still using his birth name, was playing in a cover band called NoBoys. He met Smilehouse lead singer Paul Sebastian at The Underground in Minneapolis and the two men put together a band with Day on keyboards and Sebastian on guitar and vocals. They found a drummer, Michael Larson, and a production engineer, Daniel Lenz. The band Psykosonik began recording electronic music at Sebastian's apartment where he had a recording studio and performed in Minneapolis clubs such as First Avenue, 7th Street Entry, and Glam Slam. The band signed with Wax Trax! Records.

Day was a member of the band between 1992 and 1994, and he appeared in the band's video for "Welcome to my Mind". Psykosonik also operated a music company called Power of Seven that provided music for video games by Raven and Bungie.

Video game and writing career

Day and Andrew Lunstad founded a video game company in 1993 named Fenris Wolf. They developed the game Rebel Moon in 1995, and its sequel Rebel Moon Rising in 1997. Fenris Wolf was developing two games, Rebel Moon Revolution and Traveler for the Sega Dreamcast, when it closed in 1999 after a legal dispute with its retail publisher GT Interactive Software. In 1999, under the name Eternal Warriors, Day and Lunstad released The War in Heaven, a Biblical video game published by Valusoft and distributed by GT Interactive. Day holds the design patent for WarMouse (known as the OpenOffice Mouse until Sun Microsystems objected on trademark grounds), a computer mouse with 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, a thumb-operated joystick, and 512k of memory. Day was an early supporter of Gamergate and hosted the GGinParis meetup in July 2015 with Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich.

Day first began writing under the name Vox Day for a weekly video game review column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and later continued to use the pen name for a weekly WorldNetDaily opinion column. In 2000, Day published his first solo novel, The War in Heaven, the first in a series of fantasy novels with a religious theme titled The Eternal Warriors. The novel investigates themes "about good versus evil among angels, fallen and otherwise".

Day served as a member of the Nebula Award Novel Jury in 2004 and in 2007.

In 2008 Day published The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, a book devoted to criticizing the arguments presented in various books by atheist authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray. The book was named a 2007 Christmas recommendation by John Derbyshire in the online conservative magazine National Review Online. Day's 2008 book, Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy, was a finalist for an American Christian Fiction Writers award in 2009.

In 2015 Day released SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, a book about activists online concerned with social justice, referred to disparagingly as "social justice warriors", which was billed as, "[a] guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks." The book was positively reviewed by the conservative online magazine American Thinker.

Day currently publishes a blog called Vox Popoli, which translates from the Latin as "voice of the people" after the aphorism Vox populi, vox dei. He also publishes the blog Alpha Game.

In 2016 Day created an alternative online encyclopedia project called Infogalactic.com from a mirror site of Wikipedia's content. Edits are made to the mirrored Wikipedia content by only those who are granted an account by the existing editors, in contrast to Wikipedia's free and open editing system. This was done to maintain the alt-right viewpoint within the alternative encyclopedia, views that are considered objective by Day.

Castalia House publishing

In early 2014, Day founded Castalia House publishing in Kouvola, Finland. He acts as lead editor and has published the work of such writers as John C. Wright, Jerry Pournelle, Tom Kratman, Eric S. Raymond, Martin van Creveld, Rolf Nelson, and William S. Lind.

In 2016 Castalia House works had two wins at the Dragon Awards.

Expulsion from the SFWA

In 2013 Day ran unsuccessfully against Steven Gould to succeed John Scalzi as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). African American writer N. K. Jemisin, during her delivery of the Guest of Honour speech at 2013 Continuum in Australia, complained that 10% of the SFWA membership voted for Day in his bid for the SFWA presidential position and called him "a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole". Day responded by calling Jemisin an "ignorant half-savage". In the resulting interactions, Day also called writer and editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden a "fat frog".

Day tweeted a link to his comments about Jemisin on the SFWA's official @SFWAAuthors Twitter feed. The SFWA Board subsequently voted to expel him from the organization. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal described Day as "the most despised man in science fiction".

2015 Rabid Puppies Campaign

Based on the success of Larry Correia's 2014 "Sad Puppies" ballot-manipulation campaign, in 2015 Day implemented a slate of candidates for the Hugo Awards called "Rabid Puppies", announcing a slate of candidates one day after the announcement of the Sad Puppies recommendation, instructing his followers to nominate the slate "precisely as they are." The Rabid Puppies slate successfully placed 58 of its 67 recommended nominees on the ballot. Two of the nominations were for Day himself, and eleven were for works published by his small Finnish publisher Castalia House, where Day acts as lead editor. Of those other nominees, two authors, an editor, and a fanzine subsequently withdrew their own nominations; three of these four explicitly cited the wish to dissociate themselves from Day as being among their reasons for doing so. Withdrawals from the Best Novel category allowed space for Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem to move into a finalist position, and it went on to win the Best Novel Award. Although the winning novel was one of the few nominees not on the Rabid Puppies slate, some sources credited the win to Vox Day's backing of the novel.

Day was nominated as a finalist in the categories Best Editor, Long Form and Best Editor, Short Form. When asked why he included himself in the nomination, and what it meant that the voters preferred that no one win the award rather than give one to either Day or a Day-endorsed entry, Day stated, "I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt."

2016 Rabid Puppies Campaign

In 2016 Day continued the Rabid Puppies campaign, posting a slate of finalists for the Hugo Award, including all finalists in the Best Short Story category. Day included himself on the slate of candidates, and was nominated in the category Best Editor, Long Form, the Castalia House Blog edited by Jeffro Johnson in the category Best Fanzine, and his own non-fiction release SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day, published by Castalia House, in the category Best Related Work.

Other Rabid Puppy recommendations of note which became Hugo Award finalists included Chuck Tingle's short story "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing," which went on to win in the Best Novelette category. All nominated works associated with Castalia House ranked below No Award.

Hugo Award nominations

Day has been a finalist six times for a Hugo Award, beginning in 2014 (as a result of Larry Correia's "Sad Puppies" campaign.), when his novelette "Opera Vita Aeterna" was a finalist for the best novelette. The Hugo voters ranked "Opera" sixth out of five nominees, behind No Award.

The list of his nominations is:

in all cases, his nominations have been ranked below "No Award" in the final vote. In response to the 2015 voting Day stated, "I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt."

Personal life

Day is married and has a son. Day claims to speaks English, French, German, Italian, and "some Japanese". As of 2015 he lived in Northern Italy.

Political views

Day describes himself as a Christian nationalist. Milo Yiannopoulos, writing for the right-wing conservative network Breitbart, called Vox Day an "alt-right figurehead". Writing for Publishers Weekly, Kimberly Winston described Day as a "fundamentalist Southern Baptist", but other journalists have made more pointed characterizations, such as Mike VanHelder's assertion in Popular Science that Day's views are "white supremacist." Concerning the notion of white supremacy, Day has said, "white supremacy simply isn't true. Whites are not superior...".

Discography