Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Story is not reality. And fiction often takes liberties with reality.

While I find the injection of leftist politics or climate change “facts” into every possible TV series, it’s not enough to make me want to put a shoe through the TV.

And my husband knows that if he insists on watching TV while I’m in the room, he will have to put up with my occasional commentary, when I look up from typing and hear something particularly egregious. My commentary is rarely profane. It usually is more like “Pshaw.” And “In your dreams that’s proven.” Or “What world are you living in?”

I find politics in entertainment products annoying, but I also know the left can’t help themselves.

No, it’s the other stuff that really gets to me, and often makes me shout, “Hon, you can’t watch this while I’m here. Not if you like that TV.”

Of course, we’ve been married a long time. When I say that he was usually about ten seconds from turning it off himself.

The other stuff? Yeah. the “of course this is the world and how it works.” That stuff, because it’s just part of the setup slides under the radar for most people. I don’t even know if I catch it because I have a writer’s brain or because I have a small Cold War Injury that only hurts when I laugh, and I ain’t laughing.

Stuff that gets to me: No one is clean. No, listen to me: NO ONE IS CLEAN. Not even the so called hero, who is often the most despicable of them all, but hey he kills bad guys, so he’s wonnerful.

However not only is everyone cheating, stealing and killing as a matter of course, but they’re also engaging in all forms of sexual depravity real and imaginary.

This is why btw in the left’s mind the worst crime is “hypocrisy” because everyone is the worst of the worst all the time, and pretending to be good is only done to make others feel bad. Because why else would you do it.

I often wonder if that’s why every lefty politician (or businessman) once you scratch the surface is a horror show. And which came first. Is it because they all are like this, or because they grew up thinking everyone is like this?

And the entire worldbuilding is bizarre and exhausting, when you bake that in. Look, I’m not the nicest person int he world, but where would I find time to have underage sex slaves? And where would I keep them? And who has the energy? EVEN SUPPOSING I HAD ANY INTEREST. Ditto with a drug habit. (Well, coffee, but–) Or the multiple affairs on the side. Or attending Satanist masses or whatever the heck I’m supposed to be doing according to the left’s perception of the world.

It’s like “Dude, I’m late on a short story and three novels. I’m going to have to pass up on the sex cult this month again. Sorry.”

Then there is the society. No, seriously.

First, the power brokers in the society are always white and what I’d call “Southern preachers” even when they aren’t. Heck, they’re Southern Preachers circa 1980, with the hair and the suits. And these will be corporate officers or whatever.

Have your female character get a job in a corporation and she’d either going to be asked if she’s a Christian, or treated like an oddity and like she’s overreaching herself.

I’ll be honest: I’ve been in the US for almost 40 years. NONE OF THAT HAS BEEN TRUE EVER. Even in the eighties the assumption if you were “smart” is that you were an atheist and any mention of going to church would get you made fun of. Because it was pushed in all the colleges that that was backward and “ignorant.” It was also pushed in all the entertainment even back then.

Unless a corporation is specifically I don’t know “United Baptist Books” (meh. I’m out of coffee. It’s best I can come up with.) You’re not going to get asked about your religion. And even there you’re unlikely to.

And all the characters somehow got brought up in this oppressive ultra-Christian, ultra-conformist society that might once have existed somewhere, in a small town in the South circa 1950 but I doubt it, because I grew up in an oppressively mono-religious little village, and even then there were dissenters and scoffers, and if they weren’t actually frontally attacking the majority they were ignored and tolerated.

AND despite getting brought up in that kind of background and acting shocked at the stupidest things, if a scene calls for them to talk about sex, they reveal knowledge of perversions I never heard about before, and note I learned about sex from Roman mythology first.

Then there are the …. Look, climate alarmism is a thing that in the provincial backwaters of academia and associated fields gets taken for revealed truth. Even though none act as if it were really true. I mean, look, if you really think we’ve passed the point of no return, and are all going to be dead in ten years why are you saving for retirement? I figure the back of their brains is much smarter than they are. But never mind.

But why is it that even the characters who don’t believe in it never laugh and say “that’s nonsense?” No, the characters always say things like “I don’t care if the world burns.” Like there is no room at all to question the nonsense. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the church of holy Gaia is obviously stupid. This is probably virtue signaling, or maybe the writers really being that dumb, but the result is that if you have a modicum of science training, you find yourself looking at the screen and going “They’re all mentally deficient” which adds another layer of horror to the setting.

And then there is the other “of course.” OF COURSE a white character is racist, no matter how they hide it, or even if they work tirelessly for racial harmony. OF COURSE a Muslim character has been bullied and treated badly (note, there is almost no incidence of this. At all. There are more hate crimes against Jews than Muslims. Also my laugh out loud moment was the Muslim guy who grew up in Denver talking about all the Christians putting him down. I was going “Dude, just DUDE. There are more open Muslims than open Christians in Denver, because big city and …. What?”)

The compound world of all these “of courses” is a horrible, nasty place, where every human is feral, women are more discriminated against than in the Middle East and oh, yeah, there is no way to get ahead except by thieving, murdering and defrauding others.

And all of this gets put in the back of people’s heads by not being part of the main plot, just “how things are.” Which means they will confuse it with lived experience.

When you wonder where the left comes from? They come from TVlandia, and it’s a terrible place.

They’re so convinced the world is like that that they can’t even perceive the real world. And that’s before you get to all the alarmism nonsense about climate or whatever is the thing today.

I wish there was a miracle to remove the blinders and let them see they don’t have to be miserable. But if it exists, I haven’t found it.

And I don’t know how to combat this dropping of sludge into the soul except by creating better worlds and keeping pushing them out there.

Under over and around. Because there’s no other way.

What Matters Most When All Is Said And Done – A Blast From the Past from October 2008

Thought out of nowhere — or perhaps not since I’ve “faced” this in many books and stories, from Tom in Draw One In The Dark facing the Great Sky Dragon and knowing there’s no way he walks out of there alive, to the girl in Something Worse Hereafter — in the Wings collection — who knows she’s dead, but there’s a second death and not how permanent, to probably countless others I’ve forgotten.

Those last few minutes fascinate me.  Oh, people die in their sleep, people die without knowing they’re going to die, but I suspect most of us are starkly wide awake for the end and we know there’s no return, that this time there will be no save.  We come into the world without knowing ourselves, and all the time we’ve known ourselves we’ve been alive.  How is it to face the undiscovered country?

This is wholly separate from religion, btw.  I’m one of those for whom faith requires and effort and a silencing of the mind.  I know what they say is on the other side, but is there?  Curiously I never doubt those I love or have loved go on, cats and dogs and people alike.  The world would have to be a nonsensical thing and life less than sound and fury for death to erase my beloved paternal grandmother, my flawed maternal grandfather or the childhood friend who died much too young.  It would have to be a strange place to have forever destroyed Petronius the Arbiter, cat from Hades.  No, somewhere I’m sure they’re alive and still integrally themselves, as is Pixel the “speaker to the humans” orange fuzzball I miss everyday.

But those people — yeah, cats are people too, got a problem? — were special individuals, in their own way saints of heroes or… bigger than life.  As for me, who am none of those, who can tell? I have a vague idea life continues in some form and hope there will be books and cats, if I’ve been very, very good, but the preferred outcome might be that there is nothing but oblivion.  Perhaps this makes me morbid, but my secret wish is that there is literally nothing on the other side.  Just… as though I’d never existed.  After life’s fitful fever (s)he sleeps well and all that.

Once I came  close enough to those final moments that it seemed a sure thing.  In fact, during an eleven day stay in hospital I came close to crossing that gateway at least twice.  (Might have been three times.  My blood ox was so low most of the time, that I don’t remember very clearly.  Brain damaged, I tell you.)  So… what was there? 

Well, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, coming face to face with your mortality at 33 does concentrate the mind wonderfully.  There are so many things I want, so many things I think, so many things I am.  And then when it all came to the end, in the silence at the eye of the storm, it all settled down and simplified.  I regretted leaving my husband and was sure if there was something on the other side, I WOULD miss him; I worried for my boys, then one and five.  But above all, around all, I felt as if the novels and stories I’d never written — at the time I was unpublished and had only written five? novels — were screaming at having to die with me.

Yes, my life changed after I got better and left the hospital.  At many times and places people have told me I need to close the office door.  I need to keep the kids out.  I must swat the cats off the keyboard.  I can’t stop in midst novel to go cuddle my husband.  Pardon me but… poppycock.  What comes after is a mystery, but one thing I know and that is that if any form of awareness or thought or memory subsists, I’ll miss my family and friends.  I’m not a good person, but those I love — and not just in terms of sexual love, but my friends too, those I refer to as being “within the magic circle” yes, even my e-daughters and other friends that I’ve only met online :) — I love deeply and I enjoy their company and I will do so as long as I can.

The other thing is that I started taking the writing more seriously — without neglecting my family or friends.  It went from being a wishful, sort of hobby that might one day be a job, and it became a driving passion.  And the reason I write as much as I do.  I don’t want those stories to die unread, in my head.  Life is too important to waste, unlived.  And stories are born to be heard.

Other than that?  I don’t know.  I’ve faced it so many times in writing — what will it be like in real life, and how will I feel when it comes?  One thing I know — it will come.  It sounds like one of those sixties truisms, like “we’re all naked under our clothes” but life TRULY is a fatal condition, and everyone dies eventually.  To pretend otherwise robs our life of urgency and strength. 

All I can hope is that if I’m required to face it before I expect to, I’ll do so with courage, because whether there’s nothing on the other side; whether the dreary dust-world of the ancients lurks; whether resurrection and eternal life looms…  in all of those, I’m sure that for those left behind the manner of one’s death will count.  For some reason — probably the movie — I’m thinking of the Greeks at the Hot Gates.  The manner of their death sure as hell mattered.

And for the rest, I’ll leave it in the words of one of those men long dead who I’m sure is alive and vibrant somewhere, and probably still writing:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

This morning in the shower, as we were discussing world-building (as one does. Well, one does in my family) the Mathematician reminded me of Esperanto.

So the cue was “But why would their writing be like that” for very odd world you’ll get by the by. And the answer was “because the language is synthetic and created by crazy people.” And then he groaned and said “Esperanto.”

I never learned Esperanto. I think I was in my forties before I stopped feeling guilty over that.

For those of you who weren’t around and aware in the seventies: half of my friends in languages and linguistics were also learning Esperanto in their own time.

I paid for courses in Swedish and Italian and to continue French after not in my curriculum, but I never paid for Esperanto, and back then I couldn’t tell you why. It might honestly have been that I hated — HATED HATED HATED — sanctimony and the whole “We’re learning Esperanto, because it’s the language of the future, when the Earth is united and there’s no more war” just rubbed me the wrong way.

In retrospect, looking at it, it was a completely crazy idea, on the same level as communism, or the UN. And btw, back then I was still stupid enough to think I should work for the UN because that would help with world peace. (This is a peculiar European delusion. They can’t stand to attribute their long stretch of peace of Pax Americana, so the UN it must be.)

And it was completely crazy in the way that even the Heinlein books before he took his world tour were crazy: because they assumed that the entire world would retool to take on the more “functional” culture of the US.

It was a beautifully insane delusion, which completely ignored the fact that cultures are real and stubborn things. To be fair, the left still doesn’t get that. They don’t understand that humans are social beings, and therefore are not just beings of flesh and mind, but beings of culture. And cultures, frankly — though I don’t know how much people get that — are almost like living, sentient beings. Which means they will find ways not to die, including but not limited to, infiltrating the conquering culture.

The only way that universal future culture would work would have been if the US — at the time it would have to be the US — had conquered the whole world in fire and blood and imposed our language and culture, including taking kids very young and raising them away from their parents. (Assuming you didn’t kill all the parents.)

Much less replacing a language with a synthetic language — imagining that synthetic languages would not evolve and separate and become organic — which falls under “if only everyone”.

No one is going to fall in with any of this, which is why Esperanto never happened. It’s why the UN where it does anything is with other people’s troops. (And because it’s a worldwide organization and the sh*tholes greatly outnumber the functional countries, the things it can enforce are usually horrendous, horrifying, and shouldn’t ever happen.)

It’s also why Communism would never have happened without force. The force mostly being financed by the rich of the world or the incredibly corrupt (China) or both, in so far as Communism is a great system to impose all sorts of totalitarianism under the flag of, from Fascism to Feudalism.

Without force, Communism becomes Esperanto. The thing you look at in a few years and go “Oh, yeah, I remember when that used to be cool.”

The thing is, even with force it’s not any great thing. Because think about it, ladies, gentlemen, and small furry animals: they’ve been trying to take over the world for a over a century. 1984 was predicted for… well, 1984. And the thing is, after a crest of looking plausible around the 1970s, they’ve been steadily losing ground.

Because they’re like Esperanto with an army. No matter how much force you use, people will still think its stupid, and they’re not going to learn your made up words. Or if they try they find themselves quite out of words for the functions of every day life, like swearing at your enemies or making fun of your cat.

We’re going to win this. It’s going to be difficult because in a way it’s a struggle as old as mankind. Most of us want to be left alone, but a few bright boys and girls want to dictate everything we do and say and think. (Spoiler, they ain’t that bright. Burned light bulb in coal cellar at best.)

But the current vehicle is beyond silly. And it is one of a parcel of ah… mid century modern ideas hinging on “If only everyone.”

Those just can’t work. They just can’t. Because they might be great for some species. But not ours.

The soonest they die, the best for everyone concerned. And the ideas have to die, not the people. (Sure, you can kill the people too. But that never killed an idea. In fact having martyrs to the cause tends to make the cause seem way more urgent, important and VIABLE than it ever was.)

So, put on your armor of irony and ridicule, and once more into the culture trenches my friends.

Let’s laugh them out of existence.

Let’s talk about AI and the arts.

No. Come out from under the table, you cowards. Seriously. This must be talked about. And not in the “REEEEE someone is stealing mah immortal art” sense. Nor in the “soon, it will all be soulless echos.” We’re adults. Sit your arses down and talk like adults.

Do try not to start any firefights in the comments, and keep the fistfights to a minimum. When you’re done, mop the blood from the floor. Fluffy has the first aid kit.

As you know, I think, I used MidJourneybot as the basis of my new covers. And then I did a whole lot of work to finish them. I think this gives me a unique perspective on the whole “AI art” thing. And the fact that I started life and writing life as ASL gives me another unique perspective on “The AI is gonna write all our novels. Editing will be outsourced to third worlders.” A charming point of view posited in this article which was obviously written by someone outside the industry, and which is well-thought-out, carefully argued. And profoundly wrong. And by outside the industry I mean either, writing or programing.

First what is AI, as we now know it: I got this neat explanation, though I kind of already knew what it was: It is a program that can reprogram itself on the fly by getting input from users.

It is in no way sentient, self-conscious, or as complex (this is important) as the most idiotic of moron cats. Havey, if focused on art and able to take instruction could beat it with all his paws tied behind his back.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s talk about the “morality” of the AI art robots. Note I use MidJourneybot, because it’s not just taking pictures and modifying them, which lends itself — in the hands of unscrupulous users (though note, it’s still the users) — to sailing mighty close to plagiarism.

As for using “posted art to learn” without explicit permission, I think the people worried about it have a completely inflated idea of what AI can do. No, seriously. I’ve wrestled the idiotic thing through six covers, and have more banked, in case it shats itself when I next try it. I can type in “Mona Lisa in the style of Boris Valejo” and get fifty attempts, three of whom aren’t even human, and half of which are men. (And no, we’re not at home to your conspiracy theories.)

And if I wanted Mona Lisa talking to the Thinker in front of a spaceship, in the style of Boris Vallejo…. Well, prepare to see horrors that can’t be unseen. And I don’t just mean hands everywhere. (What’s with MJB and hands, anyway) I mean the thinker with something that looks like Mona Lisa as a cat growing out of his thigh. (And before you ask, yes, I’m using the latest version and the enhanced rendering which costs more. Because I use it for covers.)

To make those covers, it took entire days of shouting (okay, typing, but I was shouting too, trust me) commands at it, plus then merging four renders per cover, sometimes to get a figure “stitched” together. It gets “weird ideas” in its head and won’t let go. Like for reasons known only to its bits and bites, for a while the figure I was trying to render for Luce, despite command of “Blond Male” rendered only as a black female. Then when it got the point, it rendered him ONLY as an anime character. As a joke I actually did an anime cover, for my fans, but it was completely unsuited for the book, of course. Let me see if I have it. Oh, yeah. Hold on:

That joke cover took me…. an afternoon, simple though it is. The real one took a little longer. I did the joke one simply because I was sick and couldn’t think in words.

A friend, who is an artist, got stung while I was going through this, and said “Why don’t you just pay an artist?”

Ah. Good question. The answer it threefold:

I’d love to hire some of Baen’s artists. Say the one who did Darkship Thieves, or the one who did Darkship Revenge (Steve Hickman.) But the truth is I can’t afford them. Certainly not for RE-issues.

Honestly, even for new books, until I get my profile up a little more by a lot of new stuff. I do probably make around 5k per reissue per year. But do note the per year. Upfront, I spend about $600 per book, which must comprise all the editing, etc, and which eats the first month’s profits.

So, I can’t afford a professional artist. The scrambling lot of “trying to break in” don’t want to do book covers. Or if they did, they don’t want to take direction on those book covers. And if you get someone from Eastern Europe or Asia, you risk copyright infringement, because they don’t care, and you don’t know everything. I’ve tried “give starting artist a chance” but none of them worked, and they cost me money.

I can afford something like Jack Wylder or Cedar Sanderson. Jack is doing my covers for the Daring Finds Mysteries, and has done new covers for Shifters, that I need to upload. I pay him about what I can afford. But he’s not right for ALL of my covers (he has a style.)

They do covers as I do covers: Piece together and overpaint, either photos from stock sites, or renders, or midjourneybot.

So, I’ve been doing my covers for a long time, mostly DAZ. But here’s the thing: I can use Midjourney bot because I DO have art training. I’m rusty as all get out. I haven’t had time or mental space for art for about six years, during which time I often didn’t have time or mental space for writing either, but did anyway. BUT I took five years of art classes.

There is nothing in those covers for the Darkship series that I couldn’t have done, myself. It just would have taken me about a month to do each. And that would mean no time for writing. What MJB does is give me the very basic, complete mess, raw materials to create the art from in a day or at worst a week. (The week usually working in the evening, after a day of writing.) Which is why I only really started doing these covers when I got a drawing screen-tablet. Before that…. it was bad. I don’t draw well with a mouse, let’s say that.

But again, note, the limitations: the bot does a person at a time, and if you really want it to work, for all you hold dear, do the background separately. It takes a lot of iterations to get something you say “I can work with that.” AND then you have to break the things apart and re-stitch them together. And that’s if you don’t get a weird run of what the bot thinks you want. Like for a while all my guys looked like Alfred P. Neuman. No seriously. I don’t know why.

Other things: even the best renders will have “signatures” or weird symbols in strange places. I laughed myself sick at the artist who “knew” it was plagiarizing him because the picture someone had shown him had a signature on the neck. (“signature” it’s mostly random scribbles.) This came through while I was erasing a “signature” from a character’s forehead. Anyway, the guy was sure because only HE signs pictures on the neck. Oh, sweet Summer Child, in eternal bloom.

And it really doesn’t do well at any type of complexity. At all. You often get confused light sources, for instance. Or– Never mind.

So, that linked article. The bots are coming for us! Writers. Novelists. We’re going to be obsolete. All that genre trash is going to be written by bots, and edited by Pakistanis and Chinese at minimum wage! Just wait.

Yes, I’m laughing myself sick again.

I’m not saying someday the bots won’t be able to write coherent novels. I kind of doubt it, but it’s entirely possible. I’d think comic books would come first, and yeah, I have a reason for that. It’s a matter of complexity.

Right now, the AI writing bots can write buzzfeed articles. Well, okay, so can elementary school kids given clear directions.

More than that, if you don’t realize it, I’ve known for years that bots can write what I call “scraped from online” non fiction books. I once bought one by accident. I was doing research on Robin Hood. Which means, first I went all over the net. Then I bought books.

This book was clearly all the info from various websites, scrambled to avoid “plagiarism” and some of the sentences, therefore, made no sense WHATSOEVER. Because scrambled.

But each chapter was super-simplistic, and just stated the information. I’ve had emails from places trying to sell me those bots.

These books show up on Amazon (you can put up a book a day with them) and get horrible reviews, get taken down and a new one shows up.

I’m not a hundred percent sure I didn’t buy a Jane Austen fanfic written by AI. It had that feel, both in that the sentences made sense, but nothing else did, and that it confused things no human being would. (Darcy’s sister is Miss Fitzwilliam, for instance. And she was seduced by Whickam at MARgate. And the sentences made individual sense, but you had to keep reading back and going “Wait, what?” because there was subtle not working together.)

Thing is, it’s limited. Right now bots can write simplistic articles. I’m not sure it could write one of my posts. (Yeah, why would it want to? Point.) And more importantly, I’m sure it can’t write a short story. It might be able to write flash fic, if you stand by to edit.

A novel is well beyond it. A novel might ALWAYS be beyond it.

“But Sarah, look how much better the AI art got! AI novels are the same thing.”

No. They’re really not. It’s more like “do a mural of the battle of Agincourt with detail and realism.”

“So it’s more complexity. They’ll get there tomorrow.”

It’s not that easy. Look, we know how to reattach fingers, say. Brain transplants might be impossible (yes, it’s great science fiction but…) because there’s that many more connections. Complexity.

And even AI is not as perfect as you’ll get the idea from say my covers. There was a lot of work. Including working on the eyes so one of the characters didn’t look palsied.

So, I think at a minimum the people who say “AIs will be writing novels next week” are crazy. Sure, there could be a sudden and massive breakthrough, but– I don’t see it.

I do see generating plots. In fact, my husband says there are already some pretty good ones. That’s different. Novels plots are patterns. You can generate patterns with bots fairly easily (And there’s enough analysis on line, it doesn’t need to be extracted from the novels themselves, which might be trickier.) The problem is writing them, after, because that’s never as linear as it seems.

The guys doing the article linked above seemed to be convinced it would be trivially easy to just write the novel from the outline. And they’re reassuring those writers that aren’t formulaic that their jobs are secure. Meaning, they think the dahlings will be secure and have nothing to fear (giggles.)

For the rest of us they foresee unemployment, as you know, the low-paid foreigners edit the bot output to make it as good as average genre writing, and we’re up a creek.

It doesn’t work the way they think. Let’s suppose by a miracle tomorrow the whole thing gets much much much better, to the level of midjourney bot, say.

That still requires a skilled novelist, just like seaming together the output of MJB requires at least a middling artist. (A good one would do way better than I do.)

And the idea that a foreign speaker can “smooth over” any oddities in the bot’s writing is probably the most giggleworthy of all. Why? Well, because let me tell you, as someone who started out ESL I had serious issues with sounding just “off” enough for an uncanny valley effect. And this was enough to put people off. Still is, when I’m ill or not functioning very well.

I was also highly amused by “They will hire” — apparently he thinks there’s a central publishing inc. that will do these things.

But let’s suppose that AI for novels gets that much better that it renders me obsolete?

What then?

Well — I don’t know. I know legislation and litigation to outlaw progress never works as intended, and when it “works” at all the results are horrific destruction.

Would I like to be replaced by AI? No. And I think it would take some doing, since I’m… very me.

But if it were to happen, I guess I retire. And hide in a corner, with my AI bot subscription, ordering and mainlining the Heinlein novels Heinlein never wrote.

I’ll be all right….

This is not a viagra commercial. Merely the writer being ecstatic that she got the book through publication on Amazon, WITHOUT having to prove she’s really herself by drawing blood and sacrificing Hamsters.

This is the last of the re-issues of Darkship. From here on, it’s all new.

And barring major disaster (please no major disaster!) they’re coming.

DARKSHIP REVENGE

The World Can’t Be Made Safe….

But it doesn’t mean Athena Hera Sinistra isn’t ready to try. Flying back to Earth Orbit from her asteroid home, leaving behind unresolved questions and turmoil, Athena becomes a new mother in orbit.

As is perhaps fitting, her daughter is born during battle with an unknown foe.

A battle that ends with Kit – Athena’s husband – missing, and Athena’s ship damaged.

So Athena names her daughter Eris, and goes to war.

What follows is a non-stop fight by a very angry mother, who wishes to make the world(s) safe for her newborn daughter, and other children too.

When the adventure is over, it is just the start of another, where children will be rescued, old tyrants brought to justice, and freedom restored.

If it can be.

It’s lying about the paperback and hardcover, but it will come through shortly, probably.
Post in an hour or so. Writing it.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. – SAH

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Lord Adrescu’s Blade: A Familiar Origins Tale.

A legendary sword, and the man who wielded it.

Lord Danut Adrescu returns to his keep to find a mystery and a warning. A battered young Healer who cannot speak, and a vision of battle with a half-bull monster. What links the two? And what ties them to his new sword, a battle-claimed blade made by the finest Italian swordsmiths?

FROM C. CHANCY: Tell No Tales

Some nights it just doesn’t pay to rise from the grave….Corbin wants to uncover the truth behind her death at a demon’s hands. But her memories have been shattered by the grave, and even with footloose Sighted mechanic Devon Fortunato helping her search for answers, a restless ghost is up against the darkest spells and lies of the living. If they can’t unravel who sabotaged the Cunning Folk circle’s spellcast defenses, the child Corbin meant to protect will suffer a fate worse than death. Corbin’s notes hold clues, but the broken circle would rather die than admit the truth….

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Relief Afar: A Martha’s Sons Short Story.

Even on a lost colony world, secret enclaves have something to offer—but not when an insider sees a newcomer as the enemy.

Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe’s exile gets worse. Not only is he forbidden the lost colony’s city and his family’s freehold, but even his brother’s isolated farm no longer offers refuge. Of necessity, he heads north, away from humanity’s terraformed valley towards the hidden enclave where pioneers push back the forbidding flora and fauna of the planet’s native terrain. They call it Kentucky

Young volunteers from First Landing’s northern families work to terraform the plains beyond the mountains. They’ve known each other all their lives and spent the summer working together. Peter’s presence should be a welcome addition to the small group.

After what he did to protect his brother’s family, Peter has resolved not to fight again—at least not for a good long time. When another man seeks to test himself against Peter and Peter’s past violence, Peter faces a choice. Does he confront what he’s tried to leave behind, or does he show he understands the hard lessons life insists on teaching him?

Relief Afar offers another window into the lost colony world of Not What We Were Looking For. If you wonder what it’s like to build a new life on an unwelcoming planet, and if you want to see what lies in store next for this son of Martha, you’ll want to jump right into the newest tale.

Buy Relief Afar to transcend exile today!

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Tale of the Crane Princess.

Ordinary, everyday shopkeeper Horiuchi Tsurue is running a little general store and mini-café on a small island in Japan’s inland sea, two centuries after mankind was nearly wiped out by a virus.

One day, Yamaguchi Yukiko, the kamaitachi of legend (The Cross-Time Kamaitachi), and her daughter Mikoko, appear in front of Tsurue’s shop, and she invites them in for tea.

That’s when Tsurue discovers she is anything but ordinary. And in the end, the island she is sworn to protect will depend upon it.

FROM WILLIAM STROOCK: The Aftermath of 1976

In a Different 1976
The sequel to The Great Nuclear War of 1975
The Salvation of 1976
As nuclear winter turns into spring, the Rockefeller Administration must rebuild America.
The task is enormous.
Every major American city and state capital has been blasted to radioactive rubble.
The nation’s infrastructure is smashed.
Tens of millions of Americans are displaced and homeless.
President Rockefeller runs the nation from the Western White House in Casper, Wyoming.
A rump congress convenes at the Greenbrier in West Virginia.
Somehow, the nation must hold a presidential election.
Politicians scramble to rebuild their parties and find viable candidates.
Overseas, America’s enemies take advantage of a world without superpowers. Can America fight a war abroad while clearing the nuclear rubble at home?
Meanwhile, a man walks across half a continent to reunite with his family.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202212 Scrapbook

This is a collection of the pamphlets I’ve put out through the month of December. The material is edited and I have added news headlines in-between each article. I am covering current events as the world gets worse every day, as well as analyzing our tyrants and the hope for resistance. I am also grouping the individual essays together by subject matter, at least as much as I can. There’s the virus, the perversions, the economy, our elite rulers, world events and just trying to work out how it all gets put together. It’s a mess, which is actually quite accurate in-and-of itself. Look and see.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: IMMINENT

First I want to make very clear I have no clue what the author’s political orientation is. I say this for HIS protection. Because there are people so crazy they’ll gang up on you if you are recommended by people whose politics they don’t like.

THIS GUY HAS NO ASSOCIATION WITH ME OR ANY OF US. HE DID NOT ASK FOR A RECOMMENDATION. HE DID NOTHING OTHER THAN WRITE GREAT BOOKS AND KEEP ME ENORMOUSLY ENTERTAINED EVEN THROUGH VERY DISRUPTIVE TIMES.

“But Sarah,” you said. “Why can’t you read the books we recommend? Or our books? Or? We’ll give them for free.”

Look, I read what I read. As with what I eat, it’s often not particularly good for me, and it’s “what catches me at the time.” Often even authors I love fail to catch me at a different time.

And I refuse to have my reading become homework, unless I’m researching for something.

Anyway, so let’s talk about this book that grabbed me. (Commission earned from the link below.)

Space Station Noir: Book 1

As the Galactic Empire crumbles, Station Noir is not a safe place for humans, it’s just the safest place left.

Gunny has done better than most on The Station. He commits enough crime to keep credits in his pocket, he’s not a slave anymore, and his alien partner has his back.

Then a simple job goes wrong, and Gunny is given an “opportunity” he can’t refuse. But it’s worse than it seems, and thrusts him into the deadly world of interstellar politics.

Now Gunny doesn’t know what to trust except his partner and the fact that humans always lose.

But losing this time might mean the end of Station Noir, death… or a return to slavery.

If you enjoy non-stop action, interstellar intrigue, and galactic crime you will love Gunny’’s thrilling adventures in Space Station Noir, the 1st book of Space Station Noir. Get your copy today!

So, come listen to the adventures of Gunny and Clive. Do you know it took me till book five to figure out what it was hitting off of?

Gunny is human and the stuff heroes are made of. Clive is one of the aliens who invaded us and destroyed the Earth, just not that faction.

The author might never have read Heinlein (I don’t know) but he Heinleins things amazingly and brilliantly. He never describes anything and we learn everything, step by step. He never describes the aliens except as a cockatiel who got drunk and got his freak on with an iguana. Some form of feathered dino, I assume.

So, anyway, this is what happened: I was looking at a book I was waiting to drop. And here we’ll take a moment and talk about Amazon again. First, they have my associates account back on probation, after three days without, and honestly? I still have no clue why. They’re saying I’m putting my code in a bunch of websites, which I obviously am not. The only people who had their code removed for this was Legal Insurrection that I know, and also completely unjustified, so you know, I smell political bullshit.

Anyway, on top of this, Amazon — and we really can’t do much about it. Everyone does business with Amazon for the same reason that everyone does business with Authority, though at the level they’re breaking things, it might maybe change in time — has made it much harder to find things. Particularly in book, your search might have absolutely nothing to do with what you were searching for.

Now this might be because they don’t discipline Chinese scammers who run around listing things in weird categories. But I’m certain sure I shouldn’t get t-shirts under kindle books. And then there’s the fact the sort by date or even by kindle unlimited doesn’t work any too well.

So I’ve resorted to finding a book I liked and then looking at the “We recommend” as a better way to find my next read. Problem is, you never know if they’re latching onto it for the reason I liked.

The reason I liked the last book was science fiction mystery, but then the recommends were all for “space opera with aliens” which is apparently what Amazon thinks that book is.

Space Station Noir came up in the recommends, and I thought just from the title on, it was utter schlock. Plus it had aliens, which are not my fave thing. So, I tried to swipe left. The d*mn kindle downloaded it, instead. (it is KU)

And then, promptly (our house acts like we have a slow rotating faraday cage around the outside, so periodically access goes away, inexplicably) I lost internet. I was in the uh…. what my grandfather called the Necessary, so I couldn’t just rush out for better reception in another room.

So I started reading it. And Lord, it grabbed me from page one.

It moves fast, it’s engaging, the characters are fun and interesting, the action is non-stop.

I got so mad — did I say I was rational? No — that I was reading it even though I hadn’t meant to download it, that as soon as I had access I tried to force myself to read something else. Only I couldn’t. And then I realized I was doing it out of spite, and that was stupid, and….

So, I’ve read all 5 books. Took me a very long time, because I’m trying to catch up on a hundred things, but–

Look, this is schlock. Maybe. What is the difference between schlock and really good writing?

It’s mostly action, really fast moving — didn’t grab Dan, not enough romance — but in the same way he never explains anything, he slides a lot of worthy moral and philosophical questions into the crazy action.

Sure, his titles are a crime against literature. A fistful of credits! Thing of beauty, ten out of ten, I approve.

And he has a lot of nods at pulp. But I approve of that too. And at this point that should be considered a basic of the culture.

So, if it is schlock, it’s the schlock I dream of writing, in my dreams of glory.

I’m just upset that having finished book 5, I don’t have book six waiting.

So, can you guys buy them and leave him raving reviews so he’ll write more quickly? If we can manage to let him quit his job so he can write more, it would be even better.

Please, I’m asking for a friend for me. Because I want to read more. And I’m hoping he doesn’t end them like Bonnie and Clide, because no. If he does that, we will have words. My words will be mostly AWWWWGH.

Anyway, buy the book. Read the book. If you’re using SF/F for romance this might not hit the spot, but for everything else, I stand by it.

It’s a gonzo cross of adventure and Space Opera, Noir Caper and interplanetary intrigue. It’s ice cream with chocolate topping. It’s being 13 again and reading just-one-more-page at three am.

I want more.

When I was a kid, and the family had a big party, I tended to end up in the kitchen, doing the cleanup.

Before you’re seeing some sort of Cinderella situation, don’t. The biggest problem I had is that at the time I had absolutely no idea that I was an introvert, see. I can fake extrovert — you’ve seen it at cons — but very large parties in crowded rooms drain me so fast you wouldn’t believe. I would run away to the kitchen.

My parents parties were usually a three ring circus which started with 50 invited people and somehow exploded to 150 or 200, by the bring-a-friend system. And the “they said we could drop by system.”

And I cannot — cannot — overemphasize how much my mom, who is a born extrovert finds excuses to have parties. It seemed that every other weekend there was a party for something: birthdays, anniversaries, sports club wins or a party because they hadn’t had a party in a while.

Thing is, culturally and for my family it was unacceptable for the teen daughter to go “AHHHHHH, People. I’ll be in my bunker.” If I tried to do that I’d be rude and anti social.

But if I put on an apron and went into the kitchen to start cleaning I was also alone save for the occasional person dropping by to look for something, but I was “such a nice girl” and “such a useful young lady” and “I wonder why she hasn’t bee snapped up.”

Between the whirling, LOUD gathering, and the “everything exploded over every surface” kitchen I’d take the kitchen every day and twice on Sunday, when the parties were bigger and louder.

Thing is, when I say “everything exploded over every surface” there are things you have to understand. I recently suggested to someone — coff — considering wedding expenses that if I’m given full run of a kitchen for a week or two (on the assumption I’m keeping up writing schedule at same time, btw) and a fridge or freezer to use at will, and $500 I can cater an hors d’oeuvres (things on sticks) reception for 50 to 100 people. (And we can probably get volunteer servers. COFF. Not that you know…. well, it’s just me.)

I know I can do this, because I’ve done it before. (Used to be $100, but you know.) And because I apprenticed at the knee of the best. Only mom, who is an excellent cook, didn’t go in for the hors d’oeuvres thing. That was the opening salvo. Also, I hate to tell you guys this, but when it comes to eating, we Americans are amateurs. At older son’s civil wedding, I looked at the very nice, perfectly wonderful arrangements and thought the equivalent crowd of Portuguese would tear through the available food in the first five minutes and then wander off to eat the countryside. (To be clear not a criticism of arrangements. I think they had leftovers. Because Americans.) I’d say Portuguese eat like writers, but that’s not even true. They eat like locusts. And mom’s parties usually had enough leftovers to feed us for a week (until the next party.)

And because she had a job, she usually only cooked for the party for like two or three days. And uh…. “Used every pot in the kitchen” and “She can’t be throwing bones and bits of vegetables in the sink in expectation of a disposal, because she never had any.”

In other words, mom cooks as I write. Throw things everywhere, trust the clean up after. (The sad thing being usually I am the one cleaning up the writing. Sniffle. Okay, except Sarah C. and Amy B. who are going to kill me for saying I clean it.)

I’m trying to paint a picture. I’d come into the kitchen, apron around my middle, and the first order of business was “Clear the sink so the dish washing can start.” And there the problem started. There were PILED UP, unstable, tottering towers of dishes, spoons, stirring implements, trays, pots, etc on every available surface, including the chairs. And in the middle of each of these piles would be the discards: Bones, fat, dough imperfectly scraped from bowls, bits of vegetables, eggshells, etc.

Which meant I usually started the festivities by making the mess worse. FAR FAR WORSE. Like “First, find a bucket to fill with stuff for the compost heap, and a bag for non-bio-degradable trash. Put them on the floor.” Now start removing the first layer of dishes and making other piles, on the floor. (Though if it was warm-ish or at least not freezing, I often moved them to the patio, just so I wouldn’t trip on things.)

I tried to get on with this phase as fast as humanly possible, lest a guest (or a brother!) came into the kitchen and screamed “you’re making it worse.” Or, you know, tripped on one of the jenga piles rising waist-high on the floor. If I could get through it quickly enough, by the time people came into the kitchen, the piles were orderly, mostly on the kitchen table, on towels, to dry. And if they came later, I was just putting things away in batches, and taking in new incoming piles from the dining room (Soup bowls, appetizer plates, two main course plates, etc.) onto already designated surfaces. This is when older ladies tried to get their sons (or grandsons) to propose to me. (“Such a nice girl. So orderly. So useful.” — not seeing me the rest of the time when I slouched around the house in my brother’s old pullover and my dad’s slippers with my nose in a book and my hair in a mess.)

But if they came in early enough they were usually shocked and horrified and went to ask my mom “Carmen, do you know what your daughter is up to?” Mom who was fluent in my cleaning methods, and by then quite used to them, might poke nose in and go “Not the vintage dishes on the floor. Put them on a chair. Move the pans to the floor” but that was about it. Most of the time, she’d come in, leave, close the door behind herself, and make jokes about leaving the cleaning crew to her work.

Now, why is this relevant?

Our culture, finance, government, entertainment, news reporting, etc. now are various aspects of the messiest kitchen you can possibly imagine.

Periodically, out of the blue, for who knows what reason — notice I wasn’t doing what I did out of a pure heart — someone who really could be doing other things volunteers and takes a giant hit to go and attempt to clean up a portion of it.

Trump, sure. Also Elon, also at a smaller level, a lot of other people here and there.

I was reading at what is going on at twitter in mild horror. (I really need to sign up to pay for a check mark, just–)

And it came to me that Trump faced this plus a million. AS WILL ANYONE ELSE STEPPING UP TO CLEAN UP.

The mess is so unbelievably large and organic, that to clean it up passes through “first make things even more messy.”

On top of which the left are like the worst kind of party goers. They congregate in the kitchen, screaming at anything you do, and trying — at the same time — to make the mess even worse, under the assumption that somehow, if they break everything, then automagically everything will be clean. Also, frankly, because they are unbelievably, bizarrely stupid and don’t realize what a mess it is, nor that there is a problem with it. For instance the celebrutards screaming for the end of fossil fuels really have no clue of the first order effects of such a thing, let alone second or third. They have the kind of finely trained stupidity that takes years and thousands of dollars to make people believe in, so that they could walk into mom’s kitchen as a party started and praise the “organic order” and talk about how as things decayed they would clean themselves.

So…. what do I mean?

1- Don’t look for the guy who comes in and clean everything. I could sort of do that in mom’s place, because it was one kitchen, and though the mess was ongoing, the party had an end. (Okay, often at one in the morning the next day.) This is several messes, and have been going on for 100 years, meaning that you can’t clean them in a day. Or a week. Or a month, or probably a few decades.

2- It’s often going to look worse once they start. Because first you have to get the the bottom of the piles and figure out what is making the jengaed (totally a verb) pile of 100 year old teacups shake if you breathe on them. (And what you find at the bottom is probably unbelievably gross and stupid.) Which means moving everything around. When the left screams about “chaotic staffing” or whatever, remember that first you have to move things around to figure out what’s causing the problem.

3 – Even after you start cleaning, messes will continue growing, because life doesn’t stop, and frankly the left likes the mess and to an extent thinks it’s normal operating procedure. You have to trust the crazy volunteers (even those getting paid) who jump into this, to just do the best they can, incrementally.

4- Don’t discard people because they don’t get it all under control immediately. It’s not going to happen. Just praise them, help them, and keep going.

5- We will do it. Eventually even the greatest mess, you turn the corner, and start cleaning faster than it can propagate. It just takes time and not falling into despair.

6- Despair will be a big temptation, because you’ll be tired, cranky and your hands wrinkled from dish soap, but it looks like you did nothing, and in fact the mess seems to keep growing. Or at least it’s more visible.
Keep your head down, keep DOING. It will get better, I promise. I don’t promise in my life time, because I’m early-old. But it will get better.

Be not afraid. Put on your apron and start scrubbing. Even if everything seems terrible, even if everything seems to be falling apart, choose your area and go to work. You can’t work on everything at once. No one can.

But just go to work, and trust others will join in, some (like Elon) much bigger than we are.

Keep cleaning. We’ll turn this corner.

The Planning Morons A Blast From the Past from March 20 2013

Sometimes I think that reading the news is what I do instead of exercise.  I mean, the whole purpose is to increase your heart rate, right?

Yesterday, Instapundit had a link to the Chinese creating super-genius-babies.  I thought “Okay.  This sounds like everything is going according to my predictions.*)

Of course, I found it a bit disquieting, because this is China, which ruthlessly puts to death toddler girls, rather than allowing their parents to raise them.  When someone who values human life so little starts messing with the genome, it’s disquieting.  Besides… besides, I didn’t think the science was quite there yet.

This is when I made my mistake.  I went to the site.

It wasn’t even the article.  That is stupid enough. It’s also the comments which raise the stupidity to the Nth degree plus one.  But let’s leave the comments for now and concentrate on the stupid  what China reports to be doing.  (Children, when totalitarians with full control of the press say anything, don’t trust AND verify.  Apply that wherever suitable.)

So… This article says that China is trying to improve the IQ of its population.  This was the first thing that made me go “oy” because, well, why is it that communists, supposed to be government by the people, always end up – one way or another – trying to create a new people?

Then we get to the definition of “intelligence.”  If I got the gist of the article right, they’re not looking for raw IQ as such, but for what I would call credentials “Where have you published?”  and “What college did you graduate from?”

At this point my head was hovering towards the desk, and I had to exert effort not to hit head on desk repeatedly because… Who in H*LL confuses credentials with IQ?  I mean, other than our media and the Chinese?  Take my children (please.  I give you a good price.)  The younger one has some testing issues, but the older on has always taken his tests with flying colors, had great grades and graduated from IB which most colleges respect.  So… why did he end up in a state school and not an ivy?  Mostly?  Because we didn’t have the contacts, we weren’t willing to hire a coach to see us through the application process, and we didn’t know where to go and what to do – in other words, the boys were handicapped by having parents who are out of the loop for these things.  I know for a fact some of the kids in their class who went to the ivy league schools are not only not as smart but not as proficient (and no, this is not a mother talking.  It’s damning my kids with faint praise.)

So… anyway, they’re picking these highly credentialed people from Europe and Asia (where of course, connections family, privilege have nothing to do with credentials.  Excuse me, I have some sarcasm stuck in my throat.)  And they’re examining the DNA to determine which sequence is common to all these people.  (Here, the older boy informs me that we have yet to be able to sequence the DNA of ova or sperm WITHOUT destroying them.  So, while they can determine that some sequence is present, by that time the reproductive material will be gone.  Never mind.)

Then, they plan to inseminate ova with this sequence with sperm with this sequence, sit back and wait for their geniuses to appear.

[Hits head against desk, to distract from greater pain of enduring the stupidity of central planners.]

Smart kids – smart people in general – are something I have a great deal of experience with.  And I find that nothing – nothing, except maybe the creation of great art – is imbued with more symbolic meaning by every day people.  And few myths of humanity, including the entire pantheon of Greece and Rome are more out of touch with reality than the myths that surround genius.

Someone in the comments brought up the existence of multiple forms of intelligence and got promptly pounded down.  To an extent that’s right, because “multiple forms of intelligence” has become code for “everyone is special.”  Which is bull hockey.  On the other hand, particularly when you approach triple niners, they will be very high across the board, but usually only one form will manifest.  They will SURELY not manifest all at once, anyway.  In fact, extremely smart kids often develop slower than other kids, at least for  a while. This is something that alarmed us with both of our kids, and  which led us to learn the phrase “Saltational development.”  This means that gifted (really gifted, not the schools idea of this) kids tend to develop in jumps.  Instead of say developing their drawing skill slowly and along a slope, they’ll be doing stick figures while the other kids in sixth grade are doing perspective drawings.  And then one day – you never see it coming – they pick up pencil and draw like DaVinci.  (This is not common, because there’s such thing as finger memory, but younger son pulled this on us.  I think it was a matter of not showing us the attempts, but the psychologist says I’m wrong and it was a matter of things clicking.)  And it’s that way with everything.  And because – particularly the very smart – will ONLY learn what they’re really interested in, this means none of them will be a genius across the board, and often can approach slow in some things.

There is something we in this house call “inverse genius” most often seen in older son, but often exhibited by all three males.  It is something so stupid only a genius could think of it to do it.  (Yeah, I put my finger in the blender while forgetting to unplug it.  But it can’t be inverse genius.  I’m not a genius.)

What I’m trying to get across is that even for people who have experience of dealing with people smarter than them genius, like pornography, is often a “I know it when I see it.”

There are also cultural variations. The reason China is looking for geniuses by credential is that this is the way genius is established in their culture.  Another component, as I understand it, is that Chinese education (and thus what’s considered “very smart”) is mostly based on memorization.  (It’s the same in Portugal, actually.  I was so so at it, so I made do with wild improvisation.  It served.  But my brother, who had an eidetic memory did much better than I)

This means that though the myth is that “genius” is genius, what China is looking for under that name would not be a genius in America.

Then comes the OTHER myth (in the comments, too) where the idea is that the Chinese are doing this to further their position in international commerce.

Children, we count several geniuses and a number of Mensa members among our acquaintance.  I don’t think a single one of them is a millionaire.  (Maybe one.)  And most of them aren’t even middle management.  Hell, if you’re looking for the Mensans in a business building, you’re more likely to find them in the janitorial service than in the boardroom.  (Dilbert got that absolutely right.)

There are several reasons for this (which make raising geniuses such a challenge) including the fact that they’re likely to try to do five or six things at once (older son: art, comics, writing, graphic design for family and friends, pre-med, fencing club.  And the least said about younger son the better when it comes to how he can find a thousand different things to do) which means less concentrated effort than the mildly intelligent person who pursues only one thing.  But also, and more importantly, geniuses tend to be Odds, which means they range from not fitting into any given human group to making other people run screaming.  Reading other people is NOT usually an ability of the highly gifted, either, which means in anything involving others they’re likely to be kept out in the cold.

However, even if we grant China the idea that they’re selecting for the right “genius” – i.e. that the article is not very faithful to their idea – there are other technical difficulties.  While they might be solved mid-century, they certainly aren’t now.  To put it bluntly, and risking offending people in the commenter pool: High IQ correlates, almost always with highly undesirable characteristics of an intellectual and physical nature (which, supposing it gives geniuses any advantage over other people – debatable – still explains why genius IQ hasn’t propagated through the population like wild fire.)  Autism, in some degree, seems to be almost inescapable above a certain IQ – and when it’s not there, you get the sensory stuff younger son has.  Or you get severe auto-immune disorders.  There might also be epigenetics involved, and I’m told that the gene sequence for genius is PROBABLY the same as for utter moron.  It depends on which geniuses get flipped in gestation or after birth.

So… If they’re really trying to do this, it’s one of those crazy totalitarian eugenics things that should make all sane people shudder.

Only it doesn’t.  The educated morons in the comments were going on about how this just means China is going to dominate everything and is leave us in the dust.

Of course, these same educated morons also believe that Chinese economy is doing great… based on reports coming from within a totalitarian regime with a controlled press.

Which proves that perhaps we DO need IQ improvement.  But NOT the way the Chinese are doing it. For one I should hope we have more respect for the infinite variety of human beings than to create them to order.

*[From Hoyt’s Future History – the background to Darkship Thieves and The Earth Revolution — middle of the twenty first century, it’s discovered that Russia has been creating the first form of “mules” – babies gestated by large animals and created from sperm/ova left over from infertility treatments.  This is a way of increasing young population, in order to have enough laborers to care for the increasingly older natural population.  The children are often mentally handicapped, due to a mistiming of enzimes.]

It is of great benefit to my understanding of the world that I live with someone who isn’t plugged in to the internet as I am. Or perhaps I should say, not to the same portions of it that I am.

I mean, Dan is a mathematician, and he works hard and working from home while we appreciate it (We don’t like to be apart) has not helped with the working hours, because now the would-be commute is also work time. And, oh, look, he an go and solve that little niggling problem before bed. And… how come it’s four AM.

I’m not saying I don’t do that too, it’s that, being a writer and working for myself, I also go through times of doing deep dives on this and that, and then coming back to politics, because I’m a politics-interested critter. (It’s not that I have an interest in politics, so much as my early life showed me they have an interest in me. I don’t turn my back on it. Can’t.)

His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.

But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.

And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.

It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.

The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.

This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.

They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.

They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.

Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts ‘yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)

At least now most people know — it took twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.

Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.

A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)

And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.

But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.

On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)

We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.

A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–“

The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.

Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.

Part of it is that we kind of due speak in a code. As I find out every time I have to translate something for not-plugged-in husband. There’s layers upon layers.

What they don’t get is that it’s not a secret code on purpose. It’s more like …. family speak. Which makes sense. I have lost my linguistics shingle in the moves, and at any rate, haven’t exerted my profession in too long to now tell you the proper terms for all of this stuff, but–

There are different types of communication for different environments. In church a sermon communicates better than whispers between the pews, say, in effectiveness. On the radio, you listen to the opinions of the performers/broadcasters. On the blog, at home, around the water cooler, around the kitchen table communication is different. And communication of equals — which is mostly what the right comes from right now — often embeds the history of how this came to mean a thing or more often how this makes us laugh.

Look at your family and chances are there is at least a joke that started in something a now-dead great grandparent said or did, and which got elaborated on or turned into shorthand for something.

Like my grandfather, once notoriously mouth-fumbled (he was one of those incredibly smart men who trips on his own words) “Veal soup” which was apparently a thing in his childhood, and he was lamenting no one made anymore into “Hand soup of cow veal” (homemade soup of veal, but ….) which in my family of birth has become the phrase that signals “You’re being tautological and fumbled the speech.”

Or my mom, in her youth, saw a woman with a one year old daughter, who had lost her her shoe. (Babies seem to drop shoes like rain.) Instead of being a sane human being who realizes a not-yet-walking kid didn’t lose the shoe on her own and can’t answer, the mother was yelling at the kid “Where’s the shoe, Aurora? You’re going to bankrupt me. First you lost a necklace, now a shoe.” My mom imitated this in crazy cakes splendor, including the accent. So, I grew up with it. Usually when mom was trying to find something that had disappeared. (And usually the spiel was aimed at herself. If at me it was as a joke. Like, she knew whatever I’d lost I’d lost because she hadn’t told me she’d need it, or didn’t tell me where to put it.) And it has transmitted to my family, particularly as younger son was known for losing his shoe. Always only one shoe. (This is why in the alternate timeline in which Dan wasn’t called to work, and we didn’t cancel our reservations for vacation in the WTC on 9/11/2001 I know exactly where we would be when the plane hit: In the room, trying to find Marshall’s missing shoe, so we could have breakfast and go out.) This means not only would we say “Where’s the shoe Aurora” to him, but when Dan came back from the car to figure out why the almost-ready shoe and wife haven’t rushed out, so we can go to church, he was likely to be met with said kid crying and said wife snarling the one word “Aurora.”

I have this head image of my great grand kids frantically looking for something, while my grand kids shout “Aurora.” And when questioned they’ll say “I don’t know. I think it’s Portuguese for “I lost something I shouldn’t have.””

Because that’s family communication. Layered and fossilized, and often leavened with humor in the cracks. Which is at this point in the twenty first century the communication to the right of Lenin. Because our origin, out of silence, was in scrappy email lists, boards and blog comments, where we didn’t want to alienate permanent allies, but some things had to be countered.

Which means some of our fossilized jokes and short hand are utterly bewildering.

Sure, the left thinks “boog” or “boogaloo” and never mind “Luau” is some super secret white supremacist short hand. (And I’m still convinced it was the reason for the tiki torches in the cos playing Nazis’ hands. Because they thought tiki and luau meant something TO US. Which they do, but not that way. And it doesn’t symbolize someone is on our side, either. For one Nazis aren’t on our side, and no, we’re not just saying that. We really hate all socialism, and all its false glamour and all its empty promises, and we don’t care if it’s international or national. You see, we understand economics. Sorry.) But then again when the left came out with the mini panic about Hawaiian shirts and thought it was signaling for a conspiracy to overthrow the government, I had to recover from a near fatal laughing fit (well, I have asthma) and explain it to my husband, going way back to the beginning.

It went something like: It started with ACWII, and because it rhymes and is funny, and also to signal this really isn’t something we want, but it still has to be talked about, softened with “Electric boogaloo.”

From there, it of course became by the end of the month just bogaloo or boog. And again, because it’s organic and language of equals, and because it allows us to make funny jokes and memes, it followed the sort-of-rhymes route to Big Igloo and Big Luau.

From there to a picture of a bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts grilling something and explanations of how they were revolutionaries, or they’d share their recipe or something.

Now for us this makes sense, and is funny.

However if you’re the left, whose directives come from above, it’s impossible to penetrate language at that level. All they see is that suddenly, inexplicably, the references to Luaus and Hawaiian shirts are EVERYWHERE. And then they realize there are a lot of guys wearing Hawaiian shirts (Judging form science fiction cons, it’s the favored attire of late middle aged guys who have gained some weight, nothing political.)

And next thing you know the Times is reporting breathlessly on the “Boogaloo boys” who wear Hawaiian shirts and plan to overthrow the republic (From the way that disappeared, I’m assuming the Facebook group they showcased was 39 FBI agents and one young man with Aspergers who was just glad to be accepted somewhere for the first time in his life.)

It makes perfect sense from their point of view because if they were slinging “code” no one else understands around that much, it absolutely would be to coordinate an operation in which they plan to kill us all.

It never occurs to them these are just viral-propagated jokes, and at most — at most — we plan to get on their nerves and laugh. To the extent we plan anything, which ain’t much.

It also never occurs to them that we not only don’t actually want to kill them all, but we’re still praying very hard that this cup passes us by without tipping on the barbecue in the big luau. Because we know what’s actually at stake, and don’t get our idea of revolution from movies where everything is done in a couple hours and everyone goes home after disposing of the popcorn container.

Or that if/when they push us out that far, the result won’t be coded words and a carefully coordinated attack, but hell on Earth that sets fire to the very water.

And you know what? I hope they never have to find out.

As for their occasional freakouts at our “coded speech” point and laugh. It’s all we can do. But be aware the poor saps have some reason for their confusion.

They’re the establishment. Their ideas are delivered top down. They never had to communicate in funny short hand.

Which is why the more they tighten their hand the more we slip between their fingers.

Be water, my friends. And stay frosty.