The Engines Of Creation

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So there is this thing going on around twitter that says that what is sinking Disney is not wokness, it’s bad story telling.

Of course, my immediate reaction was:

But yeah. Indeed, it’s the storytelling. Or it’s mostly the storytelling.

Look, partly it’s that they used to have much better story telling skills, which means that we’d swallow more.

As some of you know, I’ve been re-reading a series, which I just realized must have been published in the eighties. I read other stuff in between, but go back to the next book when I’m depressed or out of it. It’s been that type of week. The series is great, if you ignore the initial dubious premise for how the war started/is set up. It’s not — quite — mil sf, in that while in the military, it’s a small detachment given special missions, outside the hierarchy. I.e. the kind of “mil sf” I could write myself. And there’s righteous fights, an evil villain, misguided support stuff, etc. etc. etc. Just… fun.

Except on book 9 I came across a long long long screed on how both the US and the USSR wanted the best for their peoples and maybe the ‘true way’ lay between their approaches. There was much handwaving about Unions and evil capitalists and “just as bad.”

Now, what’s miraculous? I didn’t remember this AT ALL. And it’s one of the books I read before, because I came across it while unpacking the fiction library. But I had no memory of that.

I also had no memory of several pages and pages and pages talking about how terrible global warming was, and hydro carbons and — stomp stomp, panic panic — nuclear power, because of Chernobyl.

No memory of any of that either. Though if we’re going to consider which one is more outrageous is my forgetting the “The USSR and the US are trying to do the same” which I call the “both sides” fallacy. I’ve always despised that with such a white-hot rage that I once almost punched a close friend (and he was a close and true friend) for casually saying that.

But I’d read that at one time, and completely forgot it. What this tells me is two things: it was so pervasive in everything that I just ignored it/skipped over it, like graphic sex in romance novels. (Not because I’m prudish but because most of it is unnecessary and tedious.) And that the series was still good enough to be fondly remembered.

This combination worked. See my friend, not a stupid person, parroting that line at me of all people. Because it was so pervasive you assimilated it, even if you only read it a couple of times per year. And you repeated it either because you believed it or because you assumed everyone else did.

This way was the overtton window moved.

It had help. Unless you really trusted someone, you didn’t talk about your real beliefs/politics. Because thing is, with the media, and art and everything controlled by them, you (we) thought you (we) were alone. Or a very tiny minority. A lot of people on the right who are more respectable than us (coff) and rely on the MSM still believe this. It’s part of the reason for so many RINOS. They think they’re fighting a rear guard.

But the left knows they aren’t. In fact, as reality came out to smack the left again and again, starting with the fall of the USSR and moving on to the internet giving us a forum and us realizing we were far from alone, and might be (are, trust me) the overwhelming majority, they’ve grown more hysterical and desperate.

Part of that desperation has translated into more and more esoteric involvement in things like Gramscian ideas about races that are natural communists, and therefore attempts to create a for-real racist class system in the US. Just reversed from what the democrats supported 100 years ago, but just as evil, made up, and dividing people in “what now?” categories then treating those as absolutes.

The other part has been how rapidly their focus on “what must be said/done” today shifts.

I told here before that when I first broke in, early oughts, I believed staying quiet was enough not to be blacklisted/cancelled. Turned out either it already wasn’t, or ten years later, you needed to be VOCAL in your support for the VERY LATEST crazy, or you’d be at best sidelined, at worst suspected of being the enemy and driven off.

The problem with demanding “affirmative support” is that it does something to the creative brain. No, seriously.

I started hitting editors asking me what the “thesis” of my novel was. This would shut me down hard. Even when it was from a friendly on-my-side editor, it shut me down hard. Because that’s not how my brain works. Sure, my beliefs and ideas come through — mumbles again in “I wanted to write a space regency, WTF it’s all about individual liberty, suddenly?” — but the story is the story. Sometimes I figure out what it’s about half way through — cough A Few Good Men — and sometimes I figure what it’s about as people start emailing me to tell me they loved x. Because to me the story is about the story, and making the story satisfying and GOOD.

I think the pressures of “you must affirm all our principles, and the story must be shaped by our” — increasingly crazy — “ideas” is shutting down the true creatives.

All they have left are the people who can write to the last yota to speck. Now, mind you some of those are competent. But when you demand they cram in a whole bale of insane, even the competent ones will buckle.

I bailed from everyone but Baen 21 year ago, and so am not sure how bad it is, but the tearful comment from a young writer on a panel saying this had hurt her novel that “You’re not allowed to have women have defects or weaknesses. It makes them so boring as characters” is a clue to how far the crazy has gotten. She worked for a big house. Rhymes with bore. So, you know….

I think it’s literally impossible to tell good stories in those circumstances.

Fortunately we have indie and reissued old stuff. And the reissued old stuff is not going to sell “both sides” crap to most of us now. And the global warming… well, those with memories aren’t going to panic, either. (I think right now, where I type this, I’m supposed to be under a mile of ice or so, if you go by the 70s established science.) And that I know — I only follow a few authors — most of Baen is still quite readable.

And I have gone indie and freed myself to write what I need to write. Even the stuff that’s a wee bit nuts. Because hey, someone has to and I can.

Anyway, the good news is that the more crap they produce the more people find the alternatives. And the harder it becomes to sell their communist week-old-fish.

Movies… well, my husband has been playing with AI. Yes, I know, but honestly, if I had the time, I’d do it myself. (No, he doesn’t have the time either, but we’re trying to work at finding him time.)

We are actually and for real winning the culture war. Because they thought it was a top down thing. And it was for a while. However, the table is about to flip if it hasn’t already.

Which means in the end we win, because culture goes before politics.

Much better than 40 years ago when we assumed only the left could create and therefore swallowed the sewage with the wine by default.

Be not afraid. We got this.

153 thoughts on “The Engines Of Creation”

  1. Great insight – I’ve come to the point where I don’t even check the “new books” shelf at our libraries because I know it will be mostly smuckdecky stuff. I am digging into the shelves and taking home the old stuff, Sci-Fi, mystery, ‘spy’ novels etc. as they have an actual plot and are able to entertain.

    I dug out some old “Matt Helm” novels and they are still a hoot – realistic… not so much but they do entertain. H. Beam Piper and the folks writing back then put out some good stuff I am going back to. As for the Hugo… cough… we won’t discuss that.

    The independents I have found by just tooling around on the webs and digging in Kindle, etc. have also provided me with some good stuff. I ‘side load’ more on my little nook reader then I ever buy anymore. with that, I’m an example of someone who was/is lost to the current media and entertainment industry and doing just fine.

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    1. The Hugo is more valuable now as a guide to what to avoid than it was in the Olden Tyme as a guide as to what to seek out. LOTS of great books never got a Hugo in the old days, but if a book has a Hugo award and it’s post around 2010, I don’t bother opening it unless I’ve had good worth of mouth.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. H.Beam Piper’s “Space Vikings” I always considered should be a textbook in schools on how to lose a civilization. Great book, gotta dig it out and read it again.

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  2. I’d say the bad writing is caused by the DIE forcing out competent authors for people selected for DIE quotas, combined with the non-stpry requirements.

    Some of the breakdowns of recent film bombs really point to this. Captain Marvel actually had a good movie buried in it, but they broke the sympathetic are by trying to tell it out of chronological order.

    Eternals suffered because it was a massive enable movie (aka ultra-hardmode) run by a rookie team who’d never directed anything bigger than a Sundance Festival feature.

    Even Force Awakens should have been a fantastic restart for the series, but was crippled narratively because they refused to allow prior characters to be real living legends, and refused to allow the new characters to be anything more than blameless victims with no agency.

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    1. Captain Marvel actually had a good movie buried in it, but they broke the sympathetic are by trying to tell it out of chronological order.

      That wasn’t even close to the worst problem with the movie. It’s not that the character arc was broken, it’s that there was no arc. (And no character, either.) The only problem she had that needed to be resolved was to stop listening to people who did not see how awesome and perfect she already was, and understand that she was awesome and perfect. (Paraphrasing something either Literature Devil or Critical Drinker said.) Making her not have to struggle with anything made all the rest of the movie pointless and weird.

      For example, when Jude Law challenges her to a final showdown, and she just blasts him, it doesn’t even get the laugh that the sword fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark got, because the audience already knows Captain Marvel is overpowered and could have squashed him like a bug any time throughout the movie. His challenge to fight hand to hand is also odd, because it’s a payoff with no set up. There was no inner emotional struggle for her to face up to by facing up to him. She’d never lost to him before, he’d never done anything to suggest that unpowered combat was a thing for either of them. It was just a moment that was there because something like that is supposed to be there, the writers were sure of it, because they’d seen other movies before. What Carol Danvers needed was a flaw to overcome (and some personality beyond Resting Bitch Face). That’s not fixed by doing the story chronologically.

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      1. Two aspects: Movies are now very strictly bound what’s called “beats” basically from a scriptwriting book from a while back that specified exactly what ups and downs should happen to the MC on which page of your script. A page of script is generally a minute of movie, so this ends up a prescription for when the hero discoveries the problem, when they get trained, when they try too early and experience the big setback, when they lose faith, then regain faith, when they come back and overcome the problem, and how much final story wrap up there is.

        This is why everything seems the same. Scriptwriters are all performing the same pattern in the same order to the same beats. This is also why we are seeing the “scrambled chronological order” thing by the “mavericks” in the industry – even the studio heads are bored with the prescribed beats, so we get “What? Wait, is that before or after this?”

        So take that rigid structure and overlay the mandates from on high to never portray any of the oppressed classes in any light other than perfection, and you get formulaic stories with cardboard characters.

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        1. Movies are now very strictly bound what’s called “beats” basically from a scriptwriting book from a while back that specified exactly what ups and downs should happen to the MC on which page of your script.

          The book is Save the Cat, and the problem is not the book, or “beats” (seriously, “beats” go back to Syd Field and Wells Root, they are not new), the problem is presenting a structure as a substitute for creativity to executives. Execs, from the beginning of the industry, have had an inferiority complex because they feel like they should be important, but they don’t do the things that people see on screen (and mostly are incapable). So every now and then a guru comes along, dumbs things down and makes them seem easy (mostly through trendy terminology) so that the suits can feel creative and feel confident talking the lingo with creatives, and thus able to talk down to them.

          Rigid structure in any Hollywood screenplay is a good thing. Die Hard is a model of structure. But giving non-creative people creative control, and you get shit like valley girls going “oh, this is the Dark Night Of The Soul! I looooooove this in stories!”

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          1. Certainly correct on story “beats”. The execs imposing it as a rigid rule is what I was trying to get across – and what I recall the author of that book, Blake Snyder, has said: He was making a point about movie script storytelling structure, not writing a prescription. But as you note, the book was sadly simple enough that the execs could read it, and then they imposed what they got from it as a structural rule on everything they greenlit.

            Once you understand what Snyder was describing, you can’t unsee it in almost every frelling movie: Training up section here, major setback with death of mentor here…

            Straczynski had a similar lament on his TV scriptwriting book – people were coming up to him thanking him, saying “I followed your step by step rules and sold a script!” to which he effectively said “I was trying to teach an art, not drawing a paint-by-numbers coloring book!”

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            1. Straczynski’s book is well worth reading, in any case. Not the very best, but up there.

              And it got him an invitation to the opening of one of the Matrix movies (I think the first one) that he was completely befuddled by, because it came out of the blue. Turned out the Wachowski (then-)Brothers had applied what they learned from the first book to the first Matrix movie, and wanted to thank him.

              As for Blake Snyder, it is instructive that most of the damage has happened after his death. He cannot contradict the stupider interpretations, now.

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              1. I’ve long maintained that Hollywood’s problem is that when they spend a million bucks on a special effect they can tell when they got their money’s worth, but they cannot distinguish the difference between a million dollar script and one worth ten cents.

                Add to that the fact that every step of the way everybody involved – from producer to director to leading actors to supporting actors to interns – thinks they have the knowledge, understanding and skill to “punch up” the script and make their part it terrific.

                I cannot now recall which movie this anecdote comes from, but think of the process as if halfway through Die Hard Hart Bochner, the actor playing cokehead Ellis, proposed making his character the hero negotiating the surrender of the terrorists after they’ve killed John McClane (and incidentally winning Holly Gennaro’s eternal gratitude and heart.)

                The amazing thing in Hollywood is not that so many bad films get made, it is that any good ones escape their process.
                ~
                Rgrds,
                RES

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      2. One thing I will point out is, the only reason her apparent only personality is ‘resting bitchface’ is because they started and ended the movie with her post-mod, and didn’t show any other personality until flashbacks in the 3rd act.

        If they had instead shown it in order, the audience would have been introduced to the character when she actually had a personality and did things, so when she vanished and came back as a gynoid, it would have had some sort of emotional impact.

        But that’s not what they did. They introduced her in resting bitchface state, and everyone just talked about how she’d been different. So by the time you actually see it, it’s really too late to see her as anything else.

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        1. One thing I will point out is, the only reason her apparent only personality is ‘resting bitchface’ is because they started and ended the movie with her post-mod, and didn’t show any other personality until flashbacks in the 3rd act.

          I am a lifelong film nut, studied screenwriting for over a decade, and dropped out of film school. I am also a structural editor who tells authors what is not working about their books and how to fix it, and gets paid to do so, including Sarah, who handed me Bowl of Red last year and asked me why it wasn’t working, and was thrilled that the two relatively minor changes I suggested got ecstatically happy responses from her beta readers. I know what I am talking about, and I meant what I said.

          Carol Danvers did not have personality before the transformation. “Higher, further, faster baby” is not a personality, it’s a lame attempt to re-create “the need for speed” moment from Top Gun. “Boys always pick on me because I’m so awesome” is also not a personality.

          Now, it may be fair to say that Larson’s performance was less hard-edged in those scenes. But as written, chronological order would not make a difference, because there still was no personality, there was only some tropish traits pretending to be a personality.

          Had they given the character actual character, then the out of order thing would have worked, because the script is structured as a mystery: who was I before? Which is a trope that goes back at least to early films noir in the 1940s, and has worked many, many times before. Siesta is a movie where that works (though most consider it a bad movie). So is The Long Kiss Goodnight. And The Bourne Identity. And Memento. Hitchcock’s Spellbound isn’t a one-to-one, but has a similar amnesia and piecing past events together motif. It can be done, and the structure does not kill it. But lack of audience investment in the character because there is no character does.

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  3. Disney and other companies now hire for things other than merit, and once you start doing that, the quality of your product is doomed to start slipping because you aren’t aiming for what works, you’re aiming for what looks good.

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    2. Also they’ve been hammering some of the folks that made things work. John Lassiter KNOWS how to tell a story from some of the earliest PIXAR shorts to many of the early PIXAR movies he helped drive the stories. The first 10 minutes of Up with the love story is a better meet cute (and more gut wrenching) than anything seen on screen since some of the movies of the 40’s and 50’s. Hell “Tangled” by Disney animation which was a apparently a godawful mess stuck in production hell in itsearly versions. Lassiter came in and helped them polish the story and made it the start of a new cycle of halfway decent movies. Brad Bird also helped as he knows how to make a story, Look at Iron Giant (yes pre Disney) or even John Carter of Mars. Yes it was a total flop and yes they grrrl bossed Dejah Thoris a fair bit. But many of the beats of “A Princess of Mars” are still there The big issue is it felt derivative BECAUSE all that other later stuff cinematic uses a LOT of the tropes that E.R. Burroughs originated/expanded in the Mars series. There was a lot there (the Therns and how they fit in) that would have led beautifully into story lines from Gods of Mars and Thuvia.
      Of late Disney has really leaned towards maintaining existing intellectual property (thus all the live action remakes) mixed with the weird obsession with DEI. Encanto and Moanna were probably the last NEW things they tried and the music really made those two. They broke Star Wars although Clone Wars and Bad Batch are excellent someone forgot to tell Dave Filoni he was writinf a kids show. Marvel has kind of been in a slide since the end of the Thanos stuff (again some of the TV like Loki was fun if not great art).

      Truthfully NOBODY in Hollywood seems to want to try anything new. With Special effects costs dropping it should be possible to do things like historical dramas that would have been impossible without huge expensive back lots before. Things like “To Say Nothing of The Dog” or “His Majesty’s Dragon” would be enjoyable and play into the love of Victorian/Regency period stuff. Sadly most post 1970 or so novels in the main line of fiction are 1) unsuitable for film as they’re primarily character driven (show don’t tell) 2) Generally absolute dreck. These MIGHT be more suited to limited series, but again some of those have been flops (Rings Of Power anyone?) because the target audience (in ROP case Tolkienophiles) knew the material FAR better than the writers and cringed horribly at the weird DEI changes (and the generally weak writing).

      It is NOT quite at the level that you can whip off your own Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Star Wars etc and throw it on youtube or such like as there is still a high entry barrier due to hardware and skill issues that even 50’s/60’s class tv sitcoms would require. But that day does seem out there on the horizon and I suspect it will be as disruptive to Hollywood as independent publishing is being to the Big 5.

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        1. The Reader believes Disney is intentionally destroying intellectual property that the normals they hate want to watch.

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          1. They may be destroying the contents of the IP but through keeping the general characters, story line, (and lightly rejiggering the music in some cases) they make it so you can not easily use them. They themselves stole from The Brothers Grimm, Mssr. Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson, but the tweaks they made to the story are clear and heaven help you if you try to use the stories and leave their info /additions in. They also want to keep the IP alive for the merchandise income thus we get Frozen III IV V etc ad infintum et ad nauseam.

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      2. Lord Darcy. You wouldn’t even need that much in the way of special effects. Costuming, yes, but Garrett’s magic is rather subdued by current standards.

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          1. I recently discovered that I’d never read Zelazny’s A Night In the Lonesome October and, having corrected that, think it would be a terrific film.

            For that matter, his Amber series could be readily done with available SFX.

            I’m currently listening to the audiobook of The Puppet Masters and cannot view footage of mass protests without wondering what they’d look like with shirts off (a nauseating thought, and not merely because of the image of the Masters riding them.)
            ~
            Rgrds,
            RES

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        2. Indeed the vaguely steam punk universe with magic of Darcy would make a lovely streaming series as the effects are limited and not even as stressing as say the Harry Potter magic. I suspect the issue there is rights. Randall Garrett’s stuff seems to be always going in and out of publication. A whole bunch of Garrett’s other stories are public Domain as the were held by minor magazine publishers who held them missed the renewal dates (primarily due to be defunct ) back when that was a thing.

          I’ve always thought S.M. Stirlings “Peshwar Lancers” would be fun (perhaps filmed by Bollywood :-) ) but the rather colonialistic nature of things mean it hasn’t a paper dogs chance in hell of making it to screen.

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          1. I suspect the big issue with Darcy is that this is a Catholic Christian society where the Reformation never happened. Not to mention it has accepted and blessed the concept of magic-as-science, finding ways to incorporate it into society while remaining true to the faith.
            Poul Anderson’s, “Operation Chaos,” stories would be fun, too, but they also have an explicitly theistic framework: God exists, Satan exists, the battle between good and evil is real, and so forth. Not something our current cultural arbiters can handle.

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            1. Yeah the healers being priests would send the brahmandarin types all squicky. But given its relative ease of creation perhaps we;ll see it from an independent when things get a smidge better.

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  4. Not only can’t the “woke” (or forced to be woke) authors write an entertaining story, they apparently can’t write/create good story worlds.

    IE: Future societies have to be Bad Societies and there’s no hope for the characters.

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    1. Or the future society are impossibly perfect woke utopias where any wrongthinkers are out of sight and out of mind, probably buried in a mass grave somewhere.

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  5. You can’t be creative if you are forced to write between the lines and the lines keep moving on you. Just think how many millions if not billions of dollars those same retards now cannot spend on lefty retard politicians? (Like Joe Biden, My apologies to all Mentally handicapped for the comparison) Or to support their lefty retard ideas by forcing those ideas on to others. And no I don’t mean the Mentally Challenged, they are not as retarded as democrats/communists/lefties. Every flop, is more money they can’t spend. Which will soon lead to no one wanting to finance their DIE crap any more.

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  6. Re: the girls not being allowed to have flaws. This is something that strikes me because I have recently seen how much better flaws makes stories.

    First, I want to thank whoever mentioned literature devil, I forget who it was. Watching his videos (which go very nicely with this essay) made some things click for me and got me writing. What I found was that, for me at least, it is vastly easier to create a story built around flaws and narrative consequences. The whole story outline basically built itself since I could always refer back to the flaws of my main characters to see what sort of trouble they should get into.

    Second, on the subject of Indy, I have drifted over to webnovels in preference to regular novels. There is one in particular that I am currently following that the author has mentioned is in part inspired by his dislike of the way Hollywood had done “strong female characters”. Since he also like classic op protagonist webnovels, this one has an op female protagonist. But how does he make it good? By making the protagonist a legit psychopath — and not just a psychopath, but a very, very female psychopath. She basically lies to everyone all the time, and this tends to catch up with her.

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    1. LD’s analyses are great. He’s a born structural editor. It could have been me that mentioned him, and his analysis of Turning Red and how it missed being a good story by focusing on the wrong character as protagonist is particularly trenchant.

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      1. Yeah, that was one of them. What really struck me about his critiques was how he takes really bad stories, and points out how to make them good, while making sure to keep all the cool bits. Like one video he had on The Force Awakens went through various scenes, and you could have the same visual spectacle and action sequences etc, and just with surprisingly minor tweeks it could be a much better story. For example, instead of random thugs at one point, if it was people from earlier in the movie then the same action sequence would have had completely different narrative consequences. So it really helped me understand how to have good stories that do not give up the fun fantasy stuff.

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        1. If you can make it through his loooooooooong analyses, Mauler does a really good job on The Force Awakens, too. Each installment is like four hours, and I think he’s still not finished with it (partly because he incorporated the sequels into it as it went along).

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          1. The nice thing about Mauler’s analyses is that he’s so very pleasant to listen for the many many hours it takes him to eviscerate the movies.

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        2. I find myself doing that. I tired to watch Kingsman, and was seriously ticked off by the scene of the agent in church – where of course he angrily and bitterly accuses them of hypocrisy and uselessness just before the villain’s superweapon turns them into mindless psychos. My first thought was, that would have been a much stronger scene if he’d walked into a normal church, where people welcome him, the church announcements include a fund drive for the local food bank and, “of course you’re staying for church lunch! We have more than enough!” Then the scene where these kindly folk are driven mad has much more impact and the operative could come away remorseful for having misjudged them and determined to keep the villain from doing it to anyone else. But no, gotta fo for reinforcing the stereotype.

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    2. I’ve recently helped a new author work her story into publishable form (book 1 published 9/22). The MC is half human, but her mixture of flaws and strengths make her extraordinarily relatable–which is to say that readers empathize with her.

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  7. You did notice they are at the King has no clothes on stage?
    Today Claire Makaskel excoriated the NYT for Fact Checking the President.
    A Politician, complained that for once in a hundred years the NYT actually did it’s job and committed a random act of Journalism. She in essence admitted the King Has No Clothes on. (Nor brain cell left functioning) And the two idiots with her agreed, with her. Crazy years indeed.

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    1. John Stewart’s big return is apparently getting tripped up for similar reasons. He poked fun at both Trump and Biden, and the left is outraged.

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      1. “…the left is outraged.”
        Are we at the stage yet where we can use initials alone for that (TLIO), a la LOL, IIRC, LMAO etc., and have everyone understand? Just a thought… ;-)

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  8. I started hitting editors asking me what the “thesis” of my novel was.

    “If it had a thesis it would be a research paper, not a novel.”

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      1. XD no, your meaning was perfectly clear in context.

        They probably would have deserved being hit, though.

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  9. When I wrote GURPS Adaptations (a guide to how to turn your favorite novel, or graphic novel, or movie, or opera into a roleplaying campaign), one of the things I put in was a text box titled “A Theme Is Not a Thesis.” The theme is the topic that the story’s events and situations all relate to in some way; the thesis is a particular thing the author is trying to assert or prove about that topic. It’s perfectly possible for a novel to have a theme but not a thesis. And you don’t necessarily know what the theme is before you write the novel, or even as you write it, not in a conscious, verbalized way. For roleplaying games, at least, what I know is that one type of character, or situation, or incident belongs, and another doesn’t feel right.
    I’d oddly reminded of the college rules for sexual encounters that demand that every act must be verbally described and agreed to before any action takes place. No room for spontaneity!

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      2. Yeah Younger Daughter at an Engineering school and her buddies noted that. The males had just dropped out of anything social and were very withdrawn. They had moved to the Wargames rules of engagement “the only way to win is not to play”. I sometimes wonder if this is not a lefty strategy. Women of that age that are married/mothers are FAR more conservative than their unmarried equivalent. The left is keeping their strongest support group frustrated and miserable by saying “Look you could live like the jerk guys and have meaningless sex which will satisfy your needs” which the brahmandarins know can’t work because most humans want more out of a relationship. We’re built for pair bonding (Be it by evolution or by the Author’s divine intent) and by interrupting that flow by making the males withdraw they create an army of voters who can’t analyze the problem because they don’t realize it is a problem. To some degree I think this is putting to much faith in the capability of the opponents but perhaps they’re just using time honored techniques that even they don’t fully understand.

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        1. “The left is keeping their strongest support group frustrated and miserable”

          It’s their playbook. They did it with Black people since back when they were Negroes – it’s one of the reason Thomas Sowell and Walter B. Williams so detested them. They also did it with Spanish-speakers by not teaching them English in the schools, ensuring they would not integrate into broader American society as pretty much every prior ethnic group had done.
          ~
          Rgrds,
          RES

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          1. The not teaching them English thing, like so many other things the left does, has a reasonable-sounding premise if you don’t look into it deeply enough, so you get a lot of well-meaning people fooled into going along with it. It’s true that education works better at younger years when the language of the classroom is the kids’ native language. I.e., a kid who grew up speaking only Spanish at home will learn math, science, and English better if taught them in Spanish than if taught them in English. Because kids learn better if they understand the words the teacher is saying.

            So far, this is all sounding reasonable. But the thing is, they will only learn English better if taught in Spanish… if English is actually on the syllabus at all. But by judicious linguistic handwaving, the left managed to conflate “teach them in their native language” with “teach them Spanish, not English”. The left swims in a sea of lies, and equivocation (a.k.a. good ol’ motte-and-bailey) is one of their favorite methods of lying because so few people manage to spot it.

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            1. I used to be a tutor, long ago, at a community college in San Diego county, very near the Mexican border. There were a lot of students there with Spanish surnames. And in the course of working there, I came to realize that the students I saw fell into two groups. There were the ones who had some problems with English vocabulary and syntax, but who basically could express themselves in it; and there were the ones who struggled to express themselves at all. The first group had gone to high schools in Tijuana where they were taught in Spanish. The second group had gone to high schools in the United States where they underwent bilingual education—which seemed to leave them unable to express themselves in either language. I don’t know what kind of Spanish language instruction they got in US schools, but it wasn’t comparable to what Mexican schools were providing.

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              1. ESL in the US changes what type of Spanish they’re taught pretty much at random, and the person who is teaching it usually can speak both English and Spanish, but doesn’t know the actual rules for any of it– or it’s just too much work to teach the rules of the language. (The grammar rules are actually different, we ran into this issue in my Spanish class where the teacher knew the ONE south American Spanish that had a big rule exactly backwards from every other Spanish speaking country in South America. And it wasn’t Mexico.)

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      3. My return to the college system to get my degree was built on the idea that I had one semester’s worth of school left. Exactly one semester, no more.
        And just that, during the tail-end of the Crow Flu, on a mostly-empty campus two days a week (and one day a week of Zoom lectures I could sleep through) was demoralizing. I thought it was bad in 2006, I’d read the stories, but damn…I’m not sure how anyone graduates from college these days without at least one major psychological disorder.

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        1. Why would they want to, since they’re simply trying to emulate their professors (who have multiple such disorders) as best they can. :-x

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            1. It’s almost a given that to do well in college (not STEM, but the “opinion” courses) one needs only to regurgitate whatever the prof says. So yeah, in those “disciplines” I’d say that the two (the people and the places) are essentially identical.

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  11. I also had no memory of several pages and pages and pages talking about how terrible global warming was, and hydro carbons and — stomp stomp, panic panic — nuclear power, because of Chernobyl.

    The global warming stuff was in almost literally every SF novel in the late 1980s. Though the Chernobyl/anti-nuke stuff I only remember being all over the place for about a year, maybe two. Probably because the Iron Curtain fell not long after, and that was a shock to the system.

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      2. There is danger in nuclear power. There just is. Granted, far less so with molten salt (Thorium) reactors, but even then, there is some danger.

        But yeah, the problem with Chernobyl was the bureaurcracy and the communism.

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        1. Aye. It ain’t Tinker Toys…. but it CAN be made if not safe, at least not crazy. At least the USA crazy was generally small scale to discover “Oh, that’s a BAD IDEA” – like putting all the ‘worth’ on a single control rod (Idaho…).

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          1. [Reviews the incident.] Yikes! I had heard of it before, but thought the accident was at Hanford.

            The Manhattan project had its share of fatal accidents, two with the same plutonium core. The first was a classic, but fatal oops (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core), while the second combined stupidity and arrogance. Protip: Using a screwdriver with barely subcritical material is a lousy idea.

            In college, I interned at a steel company that supplied structural material for some nuke plants in the Midwest. We were told that the containment buildings (which is what we were working on) was sufficient to handle the largest explosion the plant could (likely) generate. The containment building at Three Mile Island was not stressed that way, though there was a large hydrogen bubble that could have made a large enough explosion to cause failure. OTOH, the operators were able to mitigate the bubble before things got worse.

            What the actual effects of the radiation leakage were seems to be a matter of debate. The anti-nuke activists say it was ” ‘orrible beyond belief”, while the other studies say “dunno, or not so bad”.

            IEEE Spectrum did a good article on human factors failures with respect to TMI a few years after the accident. I’m hoping the recommendations were followed, assuming those actually made sense.

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      3. One of the greatest unmentioned scandals of Chernobyl is, no-one ever said who designed the reactor that way. The engineers managed to successfully write themselves and their abject failures out of history.

        Just about as bad as the M14 torpedo designers. They just vanished after their failure was obvious.

        As though the designs had sprung from the ground fully formed without human hand…

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        1. If you apply enough stupid you can make anything blow up.

          The no-containment design, yeah, but I understand that was a political rather than engineering decision: Unlike Inferior Capitalist Designs, Superior Soviet Engineered Graphite-Moderated Nuclear Reactors Do Not NEED Any Containment, Comrade!

          Note the more standard Soviet-built PWR Zaporizhzhia plant occupied by the Rookies in the contact zone over in southeastern Ukraine have containment structures like western designs.

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    2. There’s a movie starring the late (sadness) Rutger Hauer where Global Warming was part of the backstory. I allowed myself one big eyeroll at that then enjoyed the movie for what it was. The movie was Spit Second. (“Where are we going?” “To get bigger guns.”) And, yeah ,it was fun.

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      1. Split Second was not only fun, but had better performances all around than such a movie generally deserves. I remember one reviewer at the time saying that the actor playing the sidekick deserved (and would never get) an Oscar nomination.

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        1. Rutger Hauer may have been in the occasional bad movie (thinking of Flesh and Blood as an example) but he was never bad in whatever he was in. At least, not in anything I’ve ever seen. Been a fan since I first saw him in LadyHawke. And he was damn scary in The Hitcher.

          That has been your fan geeking ramble for the day. ;)

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          2. Yes, LadyHawke! I adore that movie!

            A much more campy movie where he plays the mentor rather than the hero is CrossWorlds.

            “I can’t do this by myself!”
            “Why not?”

            More serious, but still fun: Blind Fury.

            Very serious and very well-done: Escape from Sobibor.

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  12. I’ve enjoyed Karl Gallagher’s Censorate stories a lot, they are obviously allegories to contemporary Cancel Culture and have a deliciously small-l libertarian angle on would-be censors. Karl was a frenemy at Pioneer Rocketplane when I was at Rotary Rocket.

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  13. I read some story about space cats recently where the author was trying to say that pumping gigawatts of EM energy through the atmosphere from space was somehow ecologically better and safer than nuclear and hydrocarbon sources. Hmmm. Did somebody not think this through? Gigawatts of microwave energy through the atmosphere?

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    1. Exactly – it went the same with indy musicians early on, when they pulled away from the Big Recording Companies, and built little but professional grade studios, made their own recordings, pressed and packaged their own CDs and made a few dollars by selling them at live events. Going to streaming YouTube channels might have helped build a fan base, too.
      Indy authors went the same route by operating as their own Teeny Publishing Bidness in the early Oughties … and now I think that indy movie makers are on the verge of doing the same.
      When the tools for creativity are available at a price that entities outside of The Big Producers can afford… the independent creatives will take their ball and do their own thing.
      There’s a degree of dreckitude among it all … but there always was anyway.

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      1. Sturgeons Law is universal and always applies. 95% of everything is crap (or if not crap at least definitely not memorable). Having independents doesn’t change that. It just means that some editor/publisher is not throwing out various gems because they don’t have the required narrative.

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        1. The thing I see on the horizon is the speed of AI-generated content means an AI tasked with creating “full motion live action scene 32 with dialog” would be able to generate a gazillion cut-together versions very quickly. You’d need another AI that could whittle down the least crappy using some of that snazzy large model learning, then a live person could look through those, use the best as a starting point, and hot “go” again, ending up with a usable scene 32 in a lot shorter time than the current script-shoot-edit cycle.

          The first part, “make a scene 32 a gazillion times” is basically here. The winnowing and tools to enable adding human creativity and judgement, not yet.

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      2. I believe what’s happening today in all the indy venues is the classic “evolution in action” (thanks, Larry and Jerry ;-) ); who/what survives and prospers is being determined by the environment (IOW, the consuming public) rather than by a few self-appointed gatekeeper “experts”. And it’s about time.

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  15. With respect to audio, the (so called) AI is amazingly wonderful. It streamlines a bunch of stuff that’s really tricky to do.

    For instance, I’ve got some files of my grandmother singing that I ripped from cracked acetate discs. Restoring them has been an ongoing project I tackle for a bit whenever I’m starting to get confident in my skills. (And set it aside again once I’ve been humbled.)
    The pro level software available now is capable of mostly automating the process. And I cannot express how amazing that is.

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  16. Podcast of the Lotus Eaters is covering a new Canadian law that apparently makes it illegal to take a child out of the country in order to avoid having the child become transgender, or to convert the child back to his or her birth gender.

    One of them wondered –

    What happens when a mother takes her child from Canada to Florida, and her child reverts back to the child’s birth gender? Does the Canadian government demand that the mother be extradited from Florida back to Canada?

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    1. Anyone remember Elian Gonzales?

      Vladimir Poutine will call the Bribem Administration, or some minion in Deep State, and then DeSantis or his successor will have to decide whether to stop the feds.

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    2. Then there was the kid whose parents were arrested for trying to bring him to the U.S. after British National Health refused treatment for his rare condition.

      Not only does socialized medicine have Death Panels, they won’t let you seek out alternatives on your own either. How long before Canuckistan cracks down on all those people traveling to the U.S. to pay for their own medical treatment? They’re banning guns because a few hundred people a year are shot; meanwhile, ‘MAiD’ is killing hundreds every WEEK.

      During Covidiocy, the Italian socialized medical establishment refused treatment to anybody over 70 for any reason. Injury, heart attack, stroke or cancer? Tough shit. Just go die already.
      ———————————
      Under socialized medicine, each patient incurs expenses which end when the patient dies. In private practice, each patient provides profits which end when the patient dies. Which patient would YOU rather be?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Don’t be too sure it isn’t happening already. As long as you are outside of a hospital you can cross the border for treatment. Just don’t cancel the months (next year’s) appointment. Cross the border. Even legally. Not difficult to cross the Canadian border. Just have your passport, it isn’t even stamped. Not like there is a Canadian border agent asking why you are leaving Canada. US is asking why entering US. Answer is “vacation”. Give the hotel staying at. I’ve never even seen a dog at the border stations. Mostly we cross at the smaller ones, but we have crossed at one of the bigger BC crossings between Vancouver BC and Seattle. Doesn’t mean they don’t have dogs stationed at the border crossings, just we’ve never seen one. We’ve crossed with an RV.

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  17. Reading a multi-story series where the 3rd installment took an historical event that still does not have a resolution, what happened to the kidnapped kids and infants, and why. Essentially experimented on to further along evolution first to endure fast coming new ice age, secondly to endure fast coming global warming. No preaching on global change created by humans, just the on going repercussions if governmental think tanks are allowed unethical hidden actions. Also a little of humility for the heroes who based on their superiority presumed that the survivors of what had gone on needed their, or anyone’s help.

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  18. The thing is…the great engines of creation are being driven by people who are morons in everything but playing political games.
    Video games have been taken over at the AAA (and God and Cthulhu help us, the new AAAA level) by people whose backgrounds are almost entirely in packaged foods and goods. Which is why “big budget” games these days are so generic and bland-because the people in charge of them come from a place where they don’t need to be original, they just need to be the same as the nearest competitors and cheaper to produce. (Malcom Gladwell might be a massive divot otherwise, but his discussions about pasta sauce and how he managed to beat the current canned sauce leader in the late ’80s/early ’90s is something to behold.)
    Movies and TV shows? The “creative process” is being run by a terrible Venn diagram of techbros who are looking at data-driven trends that are showing up badly, the survivors of the “fake geeks” from the Geek Cultural Collapse of 2014-18, and/or the children (both biological and psychological) of the last generation of creatives that will keep making terrible shit because they have the sort of rabbis that will protect them from anything short of mass murder on live TV. And all of this is marinading in a third/fourth-wave feminism/Maoist Marxism/high-nihilism stew that is reducing whatever meat and bone is left to the same formless, tasteless sludge.
    Comic books? If the Big Five American comic book companies survive the next few years, it’ll be because companies poured money like water into those rat-holes. And even then, it’ll be like Chrystler-having victory thrown away by people who hate what the leadership trying to save the industry have to do. Be prepared to enjoy manga, manwa, and other Asian imports for at least a generation or two.
    Animation? Probably the only good thing right now is that assuming Sony doesn’t own the distribution rights for anime outside of Japan, most studio realized that American distribution and localization companies do not have their best interests at heart and are going to switch over to handling it themselves. Which may not be good, especially if they go to the Japanese model of a single release sequence to make people have FOMO reactions for physical copies. Western Animation might survive, but it won’t be via Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks that we’ll see new things from.
    Books? Outside of Baen and the indies, be prepared to see those have…issues as well. Outside of very popular authors (and those made that way), there won’t be a lot of paperback books…just hardcovers and ebooks priced almost as much as hardcovers.
    (If “traditional” media isn’t a money-laundering system for E!Democrats, I would be very surprised at this point. Think of all the people that got multi-million-dollar advances, yet their books never sell, and nobody asks for the money back…)
    And good luck in getting physical copies of older media unless you get it now, because the Future Is Digital (and the Force Is Female) and Disney might be the first company to no longer produce physical media while forcing you to subscribe to their streaming service.
    But there is a little bit of a light at the end of this tunnel and it’s not a genetically engineered giant cat bunghole.
    Whenever the engines of creation are mishandled like this…the backlash and the creativity that comes afterwards is always astonishing.
    The trick is to survive until then.

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  19. One BIG problem with woke storytelling is that the wokistas do not have any good stories to tell. This is because no woke story can be both plausible and interesting. Envy poisons human relationships, the economics can’t reach beyond the family, the family threatens the woke power structures …

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  20. I’ve been watching Korean shows on Netflix lately. They’re partly formulaic in terms of how a given series is laid out, but at the same time, the stories seem to be truly creative. Of course, everything is within that culture, so no nudity, minimal bloodshed, and even a kiss is a big deal. They have some historical, fantasy, drama, comedy, goofy, etc. And you can’t be playing with your phone since you need to read the captions! Sounds like I’m selling, but believe me, these aren’t for everyone. Maybe I’m the oddball.

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    1. I remember years and years ago, when C and I saw the film of The Home and the World, made in India under Indian conventions. The sexual tension between two of the focal characters was built up without any overt action, at length, to the point where the eventual kiss was more emotionally intense, and more dramatic, than copulation would have been in an American film of the eighties or nineties (which is when we watched it).

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  21. Sure, my beliefs and ideas come through — mumbles again in “I wanted to write a space regency, WTF it’s all about individual liberty, suddenly?”

    Apparently, judging by what keeps coming up in my stories, I believe in heroes. Larger than life, over the top, “may God defend the right” heroes.

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    1. I tend to prefer that sort, by a large margin, to the “slice of life” yawnmakers so beloved of many English teachers back when I was in HS: “He got up, ate breakfast, went to work, worked at (something, usually boring), talked to some people (also usually boringly), went home, had supper, and went to bed.” Lather, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. The few who didn’t push that crap as “real lit’ra’chur” were a breath of fresh air.

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  22. “Gramscian ideas about races that are natural communists”

    I have no idea if it is real (or just my usual paranoia – I generally respond to questions with “It’s not whether or not you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough” after the last few years/decades, whilst sporting my new tin-foil beanie) but …

    It’s almost as if ‘they’ have decided that the trial run/attempt at replacing “those of European stock” with “those of African” has been given up on as a lost cause, a failure (still a useful destructive weapon* but ‘those people’ are neither competent or compliant enough). They played with the idea of Chinese for a while, but the imminent collapse of China seems to have stymied that. So, they now seem ‘hell-bent’ on pushing those from “the Indian subcontinent” as the favoured option.

    Look at (what used to be Great) Britain, an installed Indian Prime Minister, a (en bloc frauded in) Pakistani London mayor, an installed Pakistani Scottish First Minister, and that’s not counting the unending list of senior officials, company CEO’s, other mayors and heads of institutions. Amazing how many there are in a country that remains 81.7% white (and 74.4% white British), with only 9.3% “Asian” and 3.1% Indian/Pakistani?! (I particularly like the TV/movie/ad portrayal since only 4% are black too, yet you’d whites, especially men, were unicorns there).

    Had a look at Canada recently? Australia, New Zealand and … America?

    Have they decided that the most ‘compliant’ and communist “race” is … Indian?

    Can I just say, that as a “reader”, the one thing that is ‘annoying’ is the shifting of the Overton-window even for those on ‘our side’. The woke is now all pervasive, and apparently simply accepted. How? Can you name a single author who ‘doesn’t’ have, not just a strong female character, but a ‘regularly kicks mens butts’ one? (yes, we all know about “enhancement” et al, but … surely an enhanced male would still triumph, no) and even the average woman is always just so much better than even the hero male meme (I’m reminded of the modern adaptions of Sherlock, where average women regularly stymie his unparalleled intellect, because ‘vagina’). I’m now understanding that, possibly apocryphal, young boy who ‘wanted to be a girl’ because ‘the girls have all the adventures’ (and I only read military sci-fi). Just sayin’. (Yes men/boys like strong female characters, but they’d like some ‘like me’ characters and less super-caricatures they know are hilariously wrong more – looking at ‘even’ you JR).

    Liked by 1 person

    2. I have a mil-sci-fi series with a female lead who loses fights. It is an older (2012-16 or so) series. But the main character does sometimes defeat males. (She’s not human, though, so it might not count by your description. [Cat Among Dragons series])

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    3. Current series reading one female lead, by own admission, is tiny. Wins against men only because she is trained law enforcement, and the ones she takes down, aren’t, plus the surprise factor. Either she gains upper hand quickly, or does not happen, repeatably. Does have one advantage that shocks the perp and allows take down, but if ignored, then she loses. One drag out fight her thought processes are telegraphed to the reader. Guy she is stuck tackling is trained, and good. He gets away. Partner “Did you resort to gouging, nails, i.e. untrained female sibling type fighting, everything short of biting. Her, “yes”. Holds out hands for forensic samplings “I wasn’t going to stop him. No way.”

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      1. I guess I phrased my ‘moan’ poorly (it’s a talent – I’m one of those people who always has the perfect argument and/or rejoinder three weeks after the discussion in question is over. I claim it’s because my mind works faster than my mouth, or fingers, in that what I ‘think’ is a carefully constructed, cogently argued, logically progressing ‘story’, with added side-points to clarify along the way. What others ‘hear’ is a beginning statement, some random snippet where I went off at a tangent “clarifying”, then a conclusion that seems to have nothing to do with what I started with. It’s hard being me!).

        I (think) what I was trying to say was that, whilst such people and characters exist, it has now become not even de rigueur but assumed(?) guaranteed(?), even on our side, that such a character will always be included. It’s part of the ‘oppositions’ mantra that every story ‘must’ have the required diversity, that is ‘now’, at least in part, apparently part of us too.

        I have no issue with the strong female, non-white or gay character leads, I’d … just like there to be the occasional story where there don’t ‘have’ to be any (the opposite, no strong white males is now apparently de rigueur – I made the mistake, as someone who is follically-challenged and used to like watching Bruce Willis and Jason Statham no-thinking-required-movies, of watching “The Beekeeper”. It was an OK story, but the only whites were, predictably, bad-guys, the white women are corrupt but they have ‘reasons’, the hero is a black woman, all the police/FBI/etc. good guys are non-white and … they even went so far as to ‘tan’ Jason up to make him look “better”. It was, literally, the Babylon Bee “Netflix adaption of” meme made real. Sigh!).

        I’m former military (30+ years), I’ve trained in martial arts since I was four. I shoot competitively. I know some of the absolute best female military, shooters and martial artists ‘in the world’ and … they’d all acknowledge that ‘muh level old’ me could (physically) beat them easily (not without getting hit, but amped up I probably wouldn’t even notice). The best martial artist, and not a small petite woman, cheerfully admits with all her knowledge, experience and skill (all of which are another level to my poor showing), in a ‘real’ fight she’d be doing well to just escape harm against … an average, untrained angry man. That is reality (I think Warrior Poet Society did a video with one of the top female shooters, and he disarmed and incapacitated her in seconds. She has changed her entire approach to self-defence because of that one ‘welcome to reality’ wake-up-call). The people who claim otherwise, are always the least knowledgeable, so about normal for the modern world regarding … everything. (There are examples of women ‘taking down’ bad guys, but that is with guys who, even unconsciously are complying. Not complying and seven men will struggle, and most women wont survive).

        Point? All men and boys are aware, if only peripherally, of this. The strong kick-ass woman is a fantasy they ‘know’ will never be reality. Reading them is escapism, but becomes a turn-off when it’s every story, and every lead character.

        Or maybe I’m just old.

        (carefully climbing off my soap-box).

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          1. Precisely why I’ve read and enjoyed yours (and often women seem, to me, to write men better than most men). But whilst women write women because it’s easier (being a woman), men ‘seem’ to tend to write women because not to do so isn’t acceptable now?! (Look at my favourite JR series, where the main protagonist is … a 14 year old girl, who beats the men at … everything).

            I know there are a lot of strong, capable, competent, intelligent and skilled women out there, I’ve been lucky enough to meet, train and work with so many. But there’s strength without assuming roles that men are just better at (I didn’t mean kick-ass, as in strong, I intended it literally). It’s like the whole women must be lauded only if they choose to ape men in roles men are just better at, whilst diminishing the roles ‘they’ are better at (by far). Writing women who are many times in fact ‘faux men’, doesn’t (amazingly) leave us without the particular gifts and strengths women have, but does (intentionally) diminish men to … almost unnecessary status.

            I could understand it with the incompetent biased leviathan controlling who would be allowed to publish, do what they say or starve, but now?

            Don’t get me wrong, I’m still buying and reading, it’s just I find myself reading more “foreign” (usually former eastern European) authors now. They, like feeling/expressing patriotism, haven’t succumbed (or escaped by being late to the indoctrination party) to the woke.

            I’m fully aware I’m probably missing some great authors and books (who fit my weird set of wants) , but I keep looking for hints and tips, as already given above.

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            1. Most of my strength — I like to think I”m still strong — is female strength which is … support personnel and keeping everyone sane/together while the guys do the heavy stuff.
              BUT if called upon, I could once upon a time shift. I’m OLD now.
              I will agree that when trying to write strong women most moderns male and female just write unpleasant women

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        2. Also, begging your pardon, before I hit menopause I was a strong, kick-ass woman. they fricking exist. Now, beating up men much stronger than I? No. But hey, that’s why G-d gave us sneaky. Also knives.

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            1. Vile Calumny! WEAPONIZED umbrellas, which mom and a specialized craftsman took a lot of trouble to create, and which disappeared, lo, 31 years ago on the move from NC to CO.
              I have no idea why. People couldn’t know what it was.

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      1. Younger son, yes. Let’s say both he and lovely fiance tend to be very glad he changed his mind. :D
        On that, I actually write males more easily than women. MANY reasons: I grew up mostly in my brother’s circle in a highly segregated society (by sex) so my role models and behavior trended male, of course.
        The problem is my orientation.
        I’m … well, right now I’m Dan-sexual, but I was before I found him INTENSELY heterosexual.
        I have LOTS of trouble writing men who are attracted to women.
        I figure of the two: writing all women characters or writing A LOT of gay males, the first is less likely to drive people bonkers.
        Note that some of the gay males still break through.
        Each artist has limitations. We do what we can with the tools and mind set we have.
        I think some of what Jerven is identifying is the mind-set. The “We prefer women protagonists” and in fact the inability to sell a male action protagonist — or even space opera. Even a gay male. Trust me, I tried for years — explicit or not goes back at least 40 years, unless you were already established.
        IOW the boat is mid-travel. it’s going to take a while to turn around. Be patient with us. We’re working on it.

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        1. Patience, what’s that?

          You aren’t aware that I was the annoying little bugger who requested that Richard Adams hurry up and write another “dog book instead of all those silly rabbit stories”.

          A person who, pre-joining up was one of the formative ‘annoyances’ for Robert Jordan (so much so he even wrote me a personal letter asking that I be “patient” [manic laughter] too.

          I also maintained an on-again-of-again (depending on deployments) correspondence with Sir Terry after “accosting him in the street” as he put it. To me I merely mentioned in passing my enjoyment and … “would he please hurry up and finish the next Vimes book” to someone who made the mistake of sitting next to me in a cafe. Two more coffees later, with me rhapsodising about identifying with Sam (and possibly fancying Esmeralda just a bit) he promised to “do his best”. So, if you too enjoyed Sam … you’re welcome [I know, he was writing him anyway, but don’t disabuse me of my fantasy I ‘helped’].

          I’m … not good at patience, but I’ll try.

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            1. I was on detached duty at RNAS Yeovilton “liaising” with the CAW so, (apparently sacrilegious) not being a drinker (I can Quaff with best of them, since spilling most of it saves later embarrassment), spent time in any out of the way coffee shops.

              Talk, other than books, was mostly about school, bullying and it’s effects (being a spur to effort, for those who survive) and games (computer) and how strange people are.

              I’m one of those “lucky” people who has met (in the broadest sense of the word) many famous people. Boris Johnson, Dudley Moore and Sean Bean each (separately) drank in my numerous local pubs. I met Lady T. a number of times (well she walked past me, and borrowed a handkerchief once), sundry Prime Ministers, Heads of State and even President Reagan (if being within a 100 yards of, or him walking past a room I was hiding in to eat my lunch counts and being nodded to), President Trump even thanked me for my umbrella once (for which your SS still haven’t forgiven me – an NTOI version in case you wondered). Sundry royals of course. I was one of a crowd cursed at by Hillary (for not being suitably obsequious) Etc.

              I’ve come to the conclusion I am one of lifes “extras”, in the background unnoticed (if this was Star Trek I’d definitely be wearing a red shirt), so it was ‘nice’ someone famous, and a personal hero, deigning to chat as if my opinions and thoughts counted (unlike so many elitists and the famous).

              Liked by 1 person

  23. Anyone know what series Sarah is talking about?

    As for stories and messaging – this why I read Japanese light novels and warhammerv40k books more than anything.

    Like

    1. Nope. The one I thought of doesn’t have any climate stuff, although I think there may have been a little anti-nuke nod here and there.

      Like

  24. We humans don’t have the math the climate shriekers need to even begin to predict the future.

    Plus they want to shut down farms and stop food deliveries (i.e., trucks), air-conditioning, and heating.

    If we were a compassionate people, we’d build them all little geodesic dome habitats, toss them inside, and lock the doors.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. If we were a compassionate people, we’d build them all little geodesic dome habitats, toss them inside, and lock weld the doors.

      FTFY
      ~
      Rgrds,
      RES

      Liked by 2 people

  25. Except on book 9 I came across a long long long screed on how both the US and the USSR wanted the best for their peoples and maybe the ‘true way’ lay between their approaches. There was much handwaving about Unions and evil capitalists and “just as bad.”

    Now, what’s miraculous? I didn’t remember this AT ALL. And it’s one of the books I read before, because I came across it while unpacking the fiction library. But I had no memory of that.

    I also had no memory of several pages and pages and pages talking about how terrible global warming was, and hydro carbons and — stomp stomp, panic panic — nuclear power, because of Chernobyl.

    This is something I (years and years ago) used to do all the time when reading, minus the total-amnesia thing. The (huhh?) left-libertarianism of “The Dispossessed” or the proto-globalism of many early (e.g.) Poul Anderson books, or the Ice Age is coming or Global Warming will fry us or overpopulation will starve us of… far too many books to count, can be simply set aside and ignored until later, by some of us. Under some vague relative of Poe’s old-but-goodie “willing suspension of disbelief.”

    This cannot save a bad story, of course, but it can rescue a basically good (or decent) story from the cocoon of crap it otherwise must try to be massively good enough to escape. (Till it’s time to weigh story vs.crap-load at the end, if you make it that far.)

    Much later I realized it was me, as reader, essentially editing the thing on the fly, into a far-better (or for me more readable) form than the so-called professionals had put it in to publish.

    And of course if your college + graduate school reading includes stuff like Jerry Pournelle’s “A Step Farther Out” or Gerard O’Neill’s in-space colony stuff, that whole trendy-doomy “Limits to Growth” thing fades pretty badly.

    Lately, I’d gotten out of the habit; but found myself returning to it for Becky Chambers’ “Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.” There is, or at least was for me, a good story with good characters somewhere in there.

    But the setting is littered with elements (“tropes”?) from the WEF-rats of Davos; implanted ID chips, bug-eating, “humility” for humans, Mars as a Davos-clone for the rich and uppity, a sort of universal galactic alien bureaucratic state — all of it taken for granted by everyone as a kind of “just the way it is” normal (though with a few notably Deplorable exceptions). Almost as if a raft of Editorial Suggestions had bonsai’d the natural form of the story into… something quite virulently alien to it.

    So I won’t likely read much more of these books. It’s hard to do that when your eyes keep crossing.

    I’m too used to simply reading stuff that just makes sense, as-is, these days. Like many Writers Who Hang Out Here produce, and very reliably.

    “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm,
    Once they’ve seen gay Paree?”

    Liked by 1 person

  26. “… stomp stomp, panic panic — nuclear power, because of Chernobyl.”

    Chernobyl is an argument against trusting Russian engineering and maintenance practices.

    American nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, in continuous operation since the launching of the USS Nautilus 17 January 1955.
    ~
    Rgrds,
    RES

    Liked by 1 person

  27. “I started hitting editors asking me what the “thesis” of my novel was. “

    A novel does not have a thesis. A work built to convey a thesis is a sermon, a parable. Novels lack didactic purpose, they are works whose purpose is to entertain, sometimes by depicting novel modes of thinking or social organization.

    As Mr. Twain advised at the beginning of The Adventures of Huck Finn:

    “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
    BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
    per
    G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

    That is the real reason the book is suppressed. They don’t want other authors to observe the precedent
    ~
    Rgrds,
    RES

    Liked by 1 person

  28. Just a note, I am reading this on my Jetpack reader, just now, while sitting I the Emergency Room waiting for the nurse to call Jasini to be examined, but when I did my usual “visit site” option, it said the “site was blocked due to content filtering” note it was accordingtohoyt.com that was blocked, not Jetpack.

    Like

      1. It means that they’re censoring you as dangerous content I could open up in Jetpack but when I went from that to your regular site they block your regular site your seditious or something go figure. You’re not suitable for people to read in the hospital. LOL

        Liked by 1 person

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