Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Ludic Reading and the Gatsby Wars of 25 by Charlie Martin

So, some dispatches from the Great Gatsby War™. This is really another border skirmish between people who read what they’re told, and people who read for pleasure. I’m going to suggest that the “read what you’re told” people and the “read for pleasure” are missing an essential point, and that is that you have to learn to read for pleasure too. The core issue here is that the “read what you’re told” people don’t understand that, or just don’t care, while those of us who do read for pleasure are unhappy not just that our stuff isn’t being read, but that the “read what you’re told” people are actively discouraging reading for pleasure, whether they know it or not.

I learned to read sometime before 1960 in Alamosa, Colorado, which is pretty much the definition of a little tiny prairie town. It had a college (Adams State College then) that was primarily a teacher’s college, and its main claim to any sort of standing as a town being that with a population of all of 7500, it was the closest to a major metropolitan area closer than Taos, two hours away. And Taos was a little bitty artist’s colony.

Still, I started reading early — I can’t really remember a time when I couldn’t read. Most of what I read at first was comic books, but when I was about 8, I progressed to Tom Swift, Jr, thanks to a couple of books I received for Christmas. But by then I was hooked.

But I also knew I wasn’t supposed to like that stuff. My parents really didn’t like me reading comic books and I had to beg for quarters to walk to the Arapahoe grocery store to buy them. Two of them at a tine, they were 12¢ each then. And the “appropriate” books in the tiny corner bookstore were all “appropriately” boring for an 8 year old boy. Besides, I read much better than the kids books at the time.

Time passed, and I continued reading for pleasure. Soon enough, I read well enough to start in on my father’s books, of which he had a crapload, being a pleasure reader himself. I read many of the Hornblower books, and then, because I liked sea stories, my father handed me Moby-Dick. I remember I made it as far as the chapter on Whiteness before I said “what is this crap?” and put it down. But there was lots more to read — I managed to buy a couple more Tom Swift’s with birthday and Christmas money, and then — foreshadowing music please — my father, tired of me begging for more to read, handed me Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. And from then on I was a science fiction fan, reading all the Heinlein I could get ahold of — Heinlein at least was actually in the Alamosa public Library. That was followed by Asimov, Clarke, Poul Anderson, all the greats. I was thoroughly hooked, reading probably 50 or 100 books a year.

The whole time, teachers were telling me I should read good fiction, or histories, or dry as dust biographies. (Not all of them were dry as dust — I remember a biography of Jim Thorpe, who I liked because he was an Indian just like me.)

The thing was, all those good books they handed me were only good in the sense that they fit into the prescribed lesson plans, with quizzes and discussion questions and 15 or 30 page a night reading assignment on which you would be tested.

Honestly, it was downhill from there. I didn’t read as many comic books — my parents had thrown away my two-foot stack when we moved from Alamosa to Pueblo when I was nine — but by then I’d discovered paperbacks, and not long after that Analog Magazine. Which I carried with me and read whenever a chance came up.

Teachers were still trying to get me to read good books. A ninth-grade teacher gave me a paperback copy of Arundel by Kenneth Roberts. I tried but it was full of people doing silly things.

And then I got started on Ayn Rand in high school. Which I loved. And which was also not good literature. My poor English teacher literally fleered when I gave her a book report on Atlas Shrugged.

In grad school, I was reading Hemingway short stories, and my friends who were English grad students tried to get me to read Faulkner and Fitzgerald, including — you knew it had to come up sometime — The Great Gatsby. And I was still looking at it and saying “why?” while they told me how deep all that stuff was.

However, I now had a solid grasp of why I didn’t like them, at least. I was reading for fun. If I wanted to read something with problem sets, I had linear algebra.

About then, I ran into Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell. It was a study of the psychology of reading for pleasure, something he called ludic reading — which just means reading for pleasure but is far more scientific being drawn from latin ludus, “to play.” It’s a very interesting book — over the years I’ve owned several copies as they got loaned out or sold during a massive book cull — that identifies two main approaches to ludic reading. Type A is reading to calm anxiety, to escape from the ordinary world; type B is reading to engage so deeply with a narrative that it heightens imagination and deep immersion.

I have my doubts about the distinction, but what’s most interesting to me about type B is that measurement with EEGs, heart rates, and eye movement indicated that type B readers were entering a state very much like a hypnotic trance. In fact, Nell called it a “ludic trance”.

Another characteristic of this ludic trance was that if someone was interrupted, it took time for them to return to the ordinary world. It was literally an altered state.

The point I found most interesting was that there was one thing that could pretty certainly prevent ludic reading: being told ahead of time that you’d be tested on the contents. Needing to remain conscious of the text prevented becoming immersed.

I think this is the root of the Gatsby Wars. When a teacher assigns The Great Gatsby today, it’s with the expectation that students are going to have to answer questions about it. While it’s clear some people do find pleasure in reading it — H.L. Mencken, the great cynic, called it “nearly perfect” — but that expectation of being tested on it breaks the trance for most.

In other words, turning it into an academic exercise probably destroys the experience for many people.

A lot of the Gatsby Wars have been focused on people on one side, like Larry Correia, pointing out that they sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies to people who are reading for pleasure and contrasting that, people sneering that mere genre authors think their books should be taught as literature, har-dee-har-har.

But Larry, and Brad Torgersen, and others on that side of the controversy aren’t actually insisting that their books are Literature, as much as they’re protesting that reading for pleasure has been discounted.

We can check that. First of all, a lot of the books that are taught as Literature today were at the time great commercial successes. People were reading them for pleasure. Dickens’s readers literally crowded the docks of New York City waiting for the next installment of Master Humphrey’s Clock anxiously waiting to find out whether Little Nell was dead.

Shakespeare, often mentioned by some as not being a fun read, I think gets that status from a combination or two factors: first, it really is written in an archaic dialect of English to which a reader needs to adapt; and second, when it’s assigned in class, it comes along with that dread ludus-killer, the questions on the test.

But people did go to Shakespeare’s plays for pleasure — he was famously derided by the elites of the time but he made enough money off the plays to establish an estate in Stratford — and people today read him for pleasure, and go to his plays for the fun of it. (At least sometimes. I’ll rant about what modern productions do to his plays another time.)

I actually started reading Shakespeare for pleasure thanks to an English teacher in High School — Mrs Kelly, not the one who fleered at Atlas Shrugged, which was a shame as I’m sure she could have managed a majestic fleer — who made the class read Julius Caesar out loud, going a few lines at a time from student to student. A lot of my classmates clearly thought it was a stupid thing to do. Gringo kids read in a dull monotone, and the Chicano kids’ accents became much more pronounced, nearly to incomprehensibility. But some of us, the theater kids, got into it, and discovered it made much more sense when read aloud.

And I think that, finally, is the key to the Gatsby Wars. It’s not whether or not Gatsby was a good read — some people thought so, but it was a commercial flop and didn’t take off until it was being assigned in literature classes — but whether or not the teachers teach these books, and other books, as being fun to read.

No, I’m not calling for a French Revolution. As I had to tell an editor at one point — he didn’t take it well, btw — there is a reason I didn’t have my character lead the future French-Revolution analog in the Darkship series. Because the d*mn thing was a proto-communist attack on civilization, as any attempt to impose equality on human society always is. The only equality we should have is equality under the law. Other than that, the only way humans can be made equal is to kill them all. (Which admittedly the French Revolution make a good attempt on, and people like Mao really made a good start on. Though nothing like the total population reduction the WEF has been hankering for.)

However the storming of the Bastille is a good image. Particularly since we now know that the Storming of the Bastille was not what you’ve been told in school, and it certainly is not what the French school children were taught.

It wasn’t a glorious fight, but an episode of deranged mob violence, that freed very few people (who were in the right place) and set the tone for the absolute insanity that was to follow. And yet, it is an important image.

Every July 14th the storming of the Bastille is celebrated in the same way that the fourth of July is here. Well, not exactly the same way. My best friend from childhood married a Frenchman and became a citizen at the same time I became an American citizen. I will tell you my husband bought me a plethora of fireworks and we had much fun that fourth of July, but my friend got to dance with the mayor of her French town, an indignity I was spared. Okay, it’s a joke, son. And not. The french celebration is more “official and top down” as opposed to every American blowing a couple hundred dollars on fizz pop bang and pretty lights in the sky. (Yeah, we have official celebrations too, but it ain’t the same.)

The point being the french are inordinately proud of that bit of mob violence even though it freed exactly seven people:

It’s true that the Bastille was stormed by a crowd, but at the time it was only housing seven prisoners, and none of them were known to have been rebelled against the crown in any notable way. According to records, the seven prisoners in the Bastille at the time were four counterfeiters, two ‘madmen’ and a nobleman accused of sexual perversion.

The thing, though — hear me out — is that it was not the real Bastille storming that is being celebrated. And it wasn’t the real Bastille storming that kicked off the horrors of the French revolution.

No. What kicked off the French Revolution was the perception of the abuses of the elite, the perception of the corruption, money wasting and sheer immorality of the elite.

A lot of that was propaganda. But not all. For instance, their elite wasn’t so much wasting money as truly abysmally bad at administering it — and society in general — at a time of great technological/social upheaval. They were however just as perverse as they were painted, something I didn’t know until ten years ago when a side-mention in a book about something else sent me hunting for personal memoirs and such, and I realized that that part of the incendiary propaganda that led to the revolution was not a lie. Hollywood’s most depraved parties had nothing on the French Aristocracy under l’Ancien regime.

The abuses were probably also true, though not uniformly distributed. I’m sure they had a lot of very decent noblemen doing the best they could, but the problem is that the system itself was so biased that abuses were inevitable and wouldn’t be thought about overly hard. There was no reason to avoid them.

Combine that with the fact that people — individual people, peasants — were growing more powerful in fact due to various technologies, and that this sclerotic elite didn’t even understand the new technologies or how relatively prosperous and capable the people were becoming, and you have the setup for a massive amount of growing anger. The anger of the many against the few who are perceived as holding a foot on the majority’s neck.

The problem is that, for various reasons, including the lack of an idea of individual rights in French society and the fact that intellectuals who felt hard done by the the hereditary class system were the ones stoking the fires of revolution, plus the fact that the ancien regime held on long enough for the anger to build, when it blew up with that major act of mob violence, the French revolution had already lost the plot. Instead of fighting for equal rights or equal opportunity, they fought for equality. I.e. they upended what they had in which some people were superior and deserving of more by birth into everyone being equal and DESERVING OF EXACTLY THE SAME BY BIRTH.

This is the same mistake made by all communists, including the DEI cultists in the US, who assume that if people have different results it must be because of unseen discrimination because — I don’t know, guys, apparently they never met more than one human being? — they think of humans as widgets, who are all exactly alike, and devoid of external controls on them will all do the same and achieve the same results.

The truth, if you need to hear it, is that we are all completely different. We’re CREATED equal, in the sense that we’re all endowed by our creator with the same rights. other than that, we’re all completely different. Take the person I live with, my other half, the person I’m closest to in the entire world. If you asked him to write a political-cultural blog every morning for years, he’d probably try to crawl under the coffee table and braid his hair (It would fail as his hair is very short) in hysterical avoidance.

On the other hand, there are the things he does because he just finds them laying about and no one is doing them, like in the first week of lockdown during the COVIDiocy, he created a program that pulled the latest (some updated daily) numbers of people diagnosed and hospitalized or having died from Covid in every county in the Union.

If you asked me to do that, I … would need ten years. Partly because my head doesn’t even bend that way.

For each of us, doing what the other considers fun, or relaxing, of just interesting, would be considered a form of hell for the other. Even when we read the same non-fiction, our take-aways are completely different. (This is actually great, as we always have things to talk about.)

Anyway, part of what sent the French revolution down that appalling path is that no one was thinking very clearly by the time things blew up and blew into insanity.

The Bastille had in fact been a notorious jail for centuries. People had been consigned to it with nothing but a note from the king. And once in there, they disappeared.

The fact that it wasn’t that by the time it was stormed, doesn’t mean it had not been that before, or that it wasn’t a symbol of what had been done to the French people for centuries.

I would like us to not storm the Bastille.

Look the anger is there, for both good and bad reasons, and though there are a few propagandists — there always are a few propagandists and in this case there are… ah… foreign interests who are very good at propaganda and who are trying to get us to blow up. because the only thing that can destroy America is America. The others aren’t even close to being a problem.

The most valid reason for being angry is the entire lockdown over Covid. A ridiculous ploy that used the virus as an excuse but (I’m convinced) had as its true goal the theft of the 2020 election. All of us were robbed by the lockdown, and everyone is angry about it, including the ones who aren’t aware of it.

Old people died alone. People didn’t get to say goodbye to parents and relatives who died. People’s checkups were postponed or stopped, leading to a lot of cancer becoming lethal when it shouldn’t have been. Children lost years. Older people lost functionality. And there is credible evidence that the vaccine robbed a lot of people of their health. Even those we lost to the virus were lost because the most effective treatments were demonized and forbidden, because they wanted to force their vaccine.

There is a lot of anger just under the surface. No one has forgotten and only true saints have forgiven.

But what the entire thing and the subsequent steal did was show that there was a lot of gaslighting going on. And break people’s trust in government. (At least as much as the black plague wounded faith in G-d, or at least in the church.) People’s trust in science and the institutions is also pretty shot.

This leaves us with a very big drop before we find things we believe in.

It is people’s — relative — trust in the new broom, in this case Trump and the people he brought in, and the fact that we managed to overcome the margin of fraud in November, that is keeping us from falling through the thin veneer of normalcy and go insane.

Let me put it this way: when the people find out that they’ve been preyed upon by monsters, it is important that the monsters’ be exposed and slain.

You can either do it by letting the crowd run mad and kill real people, a process that tends to end with everyone being killed in turn, because revolutionary fervor becomes private vengeance and envy, and Madame Guillotine is always hungry, or you can slay the processes that allowed the abuses to happen. The processes that created monsters.

We have a lot of processes that need to be reformed, and G-d bless and keep people like Data Republican for all she’s doing. G-d bless Musk too, and grant him the ability to land on Mars.

Our Bastille, however, is our secret services.

They were never as good as they are advertised to be. The people who were duped by the Soviet Union certainly don’t know everything that happens in the country and they don’t control much of anything.

But are they as monstrous as the Bastille? Are they capable of bringing disproportionate punishment and perpetrate random and horrific evils for reasons that seem unfathomable to us and might very well be unfathomable — or just corrupt — for them?

I don’t know. And neither do you. We do however have suspicions. We have legends of men in black, and we attach our suspicions to things like the Kennedy Assassination; the MLK Jr assassination, and yes, Epstein’s list.

Look, I’m iffy on the first two, and the last I’m fairly sure was some kind of a secret service honeypot operation, a way to have blackmail on people.

The first two … I’m fairly sure JFK was killed by the Russians and G-d only knows why and how MLK Jr. was killed.

Epstein, though… The list might or might not exist where the government — the official government — can get to it. But it is important.

My only caveat is that I think people on the street care less about Epstein — they assume everyone rich or powerful is a perv — but care a lot more about MLK Jr. and JFK. There is a subgenre of literature about those assassinations. They haunt the public imagination.

However Epstein could flare into sudden relevance and become a focus of anger with very little propaganda effort or — and more likely — by something coming out that centers on it. Not even on the goings on, but on the blackmail resulting from the goings on. If someone is proven to have been blackmailed, and if the consequences hit the public hard — say in letting a stolen election stand, for instance — the issue will suddenly flare up, as the sudden hatred for the Bastille flared up.

Not only did ninety something attackers get killed in storming the Bastille, but the governor of the Bastille and the guards — who were, by that time, innocent men — were dragged out and killed.

Listen to me: I don’t know if ANYONE reading this has an in to Trump, Vance, Kash or Bondi, but this is very important: it’s not “We’re not hiding anything” or “We simply don’t have that information” that is going to save us from the madness of the French revolution.

The monsters MUST BE SEEN TO BE SLAIN.

The only thing that could have stopped the French revolution in its tracks would be for the governor of the Bastille to throw open the doors and show who was there, and why, and more importantly WHO WASN’T THERE.

I don’t care if there’s no there there for the assassinations. And I don’t care if Epstein’s list doesn’t exist all in one place. The games that Bondi played around the would-be release told us that she’s either a fool or a villain. She either lied, or she got rolled.

Either way, it means a core of the ancien-regime holds on, and who knows what hides in the deep recesses of the ancient and evil prison?

Who knows what our secret services have been up to? Who knows who they serve? We have reason to believe it is certainly not the people.

THE DOORS MUST BE THROWN OPEN before something happens that causes a crowd to coalesce and go insane.

Mr. President, you promised. And I will grant you that you are our Vimes, or perhaps even our Moist Von Lipwig, which means you’re working behind the scenes to get the results you want. Or for those who don’t read Pratchett: our president is so twisty he can go down a corkscrew without touching the sides.

But you promised. You are our new broom, and we’re trusting you to sweep.

Your time is limited, and you’re at the mercy of a sudden and explosive event. The clock is ticking.

I don’t want us to storm the Bastille. And Madame La Guillotine should stay in France, where — if anywhere — it belongs.

But the only way to avoid the storming of the Bastille; to make sure it doesn’t happen, is to open the doors, and show what is and isn’t there.

It’s time.

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. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JEFF DUNTEMANN: The Everything Machine

Carrying 800 passengers and their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony, starship Origen’s hyperdrive self-destructs, marooning its passengers near an Earth-twin planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. While settling in, the inadvertent colonists name their world Valeron, and discover that Valeron is scattered with hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines—but there are no aliens nor any other trace of them.

Each replicator is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl half-full of fine silver dust. Beside the bowl are two waist-high pillars about 8 inches in diameter, one pale silver, the other pale gold. Tap on either pillar, and the pillar makes a sound like a drum, one pillar high, the other low. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any sequence, and something surfaces in the bowl of dust. Simple sequences create simple and useful things like shovels, knives, rope, saws, lamps, glue and much else. Complex or random sequences create strangely shaped forms of silver-gray metal with no obvious use. 256 taps on the pillars can create any of 2E256 different things; in scientific notation, 1.16 X 10E77.

That’s just short of one thing for every atom in the observable universe.

The artifacts are dubbed “drumlins,” for the sounds the pillars make, and the replicators called “thingmakers.” Drumlins have strange properties. Although virtually indestructible, drumlins can change shape, especially when doing so will protect a human being from injury. Drumlin knives will not cut living human tissue, but they will cut living animal tissue or human corpses. Press a drumlin knife against your palm, and it will flow and flatten out to a disk. Pull the knife away, and it will slowly return to its form as a knife. Some claim that drumlins read human minds and grant wishes. Others insist they are haunted by invisible and perhaps hostile intelligences.

After 250 years on Valeron, the colony prospers. Starship Origen is still in orbit, and a cult-like research organization called the Bitspace Institute vows to repair Origen’s hyperdrive and return to Earth. With millions of drumlins catalogued using the thingmakers, Valeron’s people live well and begin to lose interest in returning to Earth. This threatens the Institute’s mission, prompting it to launch a covert effort to undermine public faith in drumlins. A low-key war begins between the Institute and those who value drumlins–including farmers, rural folk, an order of mystical women, and several peculiar teen girls who have an unexplained rapport with the thingmakers and their mysterious masters.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Escape Velocity

An optimistic collection of six stories revolving around leaving Earth, or living (and making a living) further out in the solar system.

Xanadu–Sometimes, making a profit just needs an outside perspective for why it hasn’t yet.
Turing’s Legacy–It takes love to make a person. And maybe an accident.
Theory in Practice–Psychological care may well be more important in a closed environment.
Reasonable Accommodations–Microgravity could be an answer to some disabilities.
You Can’t Go Home Again–The effects of long-term isolation on asteroid miners explored.
Everyday Miracles–What could push someone to emigrate to a new off-planet colony?

FROM EDWARD THOMAS: Secret Empire (The Troubles of George McIntyre Book 3)

George McIntyre’s troubles are not over, as he and Ginny must learn to get along with their numerous Valkyries and robot girlfriends. And the police, who are reluctant to cooperate. Jimmy Carlson and Kim Park solve the Alcubierre warp bubble puzzle, creating a whole new world of possibilities for trouble. Leading Jimmy to ask Enrico Fermi’s famous question: where is everybody?

Follow George and the Angels as they rescue wild Toasters and find hints of mysterious spacecraft flying past Barnard’s Star.

FROM BRIAN HEMING: The Lives of Velnin: The Black Citadel

Swordfights. True Love. High Adventure. Epic Battles. Action. Magic. Reincarnation.

I was 17 years old when I died for the first time.

I parried the guard’s cut, feinted high, then swung Swelfalster, blade of the fallen star, low for a slash at his unarmored thigh. I scored, a line of blood dripping down his leg, and danced back before his counterstroke landed.

This is the chronicle of Velnin, Crown Prince of Tarmel, told through the dying words of his first incarnations. Vel is sent as a spy to the territory of the Black Citadel, investigating a newly rising power, the dark rumors surrounding it, and the fearsome might of its army: the Black Legion.

In his journey he encounters the charming Aloree, diplomat of the neighboring kingdom of Talore. Healer, magic-user, diplomat, bookworm, her beauty belies hidden secrets within her.

A fast-paced epic fantasy of swords, love, magic, and battles. Vel must protect the people of his kingdom, and make whatever sacrifices he must to end the horrors perpetuated by the Black Legion. But must he sacrifice true love itself for the sake of his people?

FROM DALE COZORT: Jace of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novella (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 1)

A Snapshot Jungle Adventure?
Strange new people and animals keep appearing in an alternate history or alternate reality Africa otherwise isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. In that strange version of Africa, oddly familiar events keep happening.

*An out of place passenger liner is torpedoed by German submarines.
*A castaway boy is raised by man-like apes.
*Brutal slave-raiders sweep in to destroy peaceful communities.
*An 18 year old damsel finds herself in a lot of distress.
*Men talk with elephants.
*Men and ape-man fight to the death.

Sounds like that has all been done before a time or two, right?

Jace of the Jungle delivers an homage to the pulp era Jungle Adventure story with a New Pulp novella just as action-packed as the old pulp adventures. Fair warning, though: Jace starts out considerably darker than the old pulps and goes places the pulp era stories couldn’t.

FROM DAN MELSON: The End of Childhood (The Politics of Empire Book 3)

---

The die is cast.

The Empire has caught the fractal demons marshalling troops for assault, and there is no avoiding the decisive Armageddon between humanity and the fractal demons. Both sides have their strengths and there is no certainty about the outcome. While the Empire is free-falling towards open war, Grace is tasked with nudging the odds a little bit, ferreting out traitors to humanity, bribed with the seeming of the most precious gift possible but with a nightmare catch.

Then at the moment of the first skirmishes, personal tragedy strikes, clearing the way for a long-delayed impulse, which results in horror and more personal tragedy.

But out of the disaster, a new Grace emerges – one ready to stand on her own, fully realized as a potent force in her own right.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Khuldhar’s War

The war was over, but where was the peace the victors had promised?

Geidliv the Tyrant was dead, and the rogue nation of Karmandios now lay in ruins, its people prostrate before the occupying armies of the five allied nations. But now the winners are quarreling among themselves, and where brothers fight, enemies will enter to widen the gap.

Merekhet is a man torn between competing loyalties, tormented by guilt over his past failures. Raised the scion of a Karmandi noble family, he discovered upon puberty that he was in fact the son of a senior war commander of the telepathic People of the Hawk. Yet he could not entirely disavow his mother’s people, and thus became entangled in Geidliv’s regime and his nephew Khuldhar’s doomed attempt to fight it.

Now Merekhet has evidence that Geidliv used telepathy and the bioscience of the mer-people to create a living weapon from Khuldhar’s genetic material and hid it in plain sight. Worse, a former ally now estranged is seeking that weapon, and must not be allowed to capture it, lest all the world of Okeanos fall to far greater tyranny than Geidliv could ever have hoped to create.

Merekhet must regain Khuldhar’s confidence, and together they must find the five young men who are the keys to Geidliv’s final vengeance weapon.

BY KEES VALKENSTEIN, TRANSLATED BY DWIGHT DECKER: The Vanishing-Machine

What is a vanishing-machine?
Two fifteen-year-old boys in rural Holland find out when they come across an abandoned machine that can make things invisible. They first use it for mischief on the farm, then things get a little complicated when the machine’s American inventor, two bumbling detectives, and the eccentric master criminal who stole it turn up.
The Vanishing-Machine is a humorous science-fiction novel published in the Netherlands in 1917 and translated into English for the first time. With translation notes, map, new and vintage illustrations, and historical background.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Lights Out and Cry (The Shifter Series Book 5)

It is New Year’s Day in Goldport Colorado, the most shifter-infested town in the known universe.
At the George — the diner where shifters gather — Kyrie is about to give birth, Tom is getting psychic messages from the Great Sky Dragon and Rafiel is looking for information on why the mayor exploded.
Fasten your seat belts. This is going to be a fast ride into adventure and shape-shifting, after which things will never be the same.

FROM KAREN MYERS: On a Crooked Track: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 4)

Book 4 of The Chained Adept

SETTING A TRAP TO CATCH THE MAKERS OF CHAINED WIZARDS.

A clue has sent Penrys back to Ellech, the country where she first appeared four short years ago with her mind wiped, her body stripped, and her neck chained. It’s time to enlist the help of the Collegium of Wizards which sheltered her then.

Things don’t work out that way, and she finds herself retracing a dead scholar’s crooked track and setting herself up as a target to confirm her growing suspicions. But what happens to bait when the prey shows its teeth?

In this conclusion to the series, tracking old crimes brings new dangers, and a chance for redemption.

FROM MARY CATELLI: A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

AND OH, YES: Younger DIL is selling this weekend, at the Wichita, KS, Comicon.

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: EFFECT

Coming to oneself means regaining consciousness. I don’t recall ever hearing it used in English, (though the expression is the same) but in Portuguese “vir-se a si” is the expression explicitly used to denote waking from a swoon. (We tend to just say waking. Which I didn’t want to use because of the aggregation to woke which, like all leftist speak means the opposite of the plain meaning of the word.)

I was contemplating this post when in a group a friend linked this post: American Strong Gods, Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century.

And I realized if not the main point I was trying to make, it is a strong supporting point. He talks about the end of the long twentieth century in which the whole world aimed for a vague “open society” that was the opposite of nationalism, as a way to fight long-dead-Hitler (Or prevent a recurrence of fascism.) And how Trump is the long-delayed end of this.

Put a pin in this, because we’ll revisit it.

First: We have been working late and a lot, and therefore coming downstairs late and with our minds turned to mush. So, we’ve been doing what we normally do, which is watch some kind of series on something or other. in this case we’ve been watching a series, per decade, on inventions that changed the world.

And both of us noticed that other than computers, the inventions they showed, after the seventies, were not inventions that changed the world, so much as things at the margins, and increasingly more and more things at the margins.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the computer revolution was massive, but I feel like it almost came as an after thought, while the regulators were looking elsewhere. The truth of course is that the regulators, the overarching state, developed computers as a way to control people. The way it escaped their control and became a tool against them is what took them by surprise.

But other than that, and compared to the vibrant and immense changes of the early 20th century, invention became a game of changes at the margins.

The answer to why is “Because we became increasingly tied up in a regulatory, credential enforcing, bureaucratic state.”

This state, in fact, engulfed the world after WWII, which is what the linked article talks about. To prevent the resurgence of war, we were told we needed to do away with nationalism and religion and — really ultimately — the family and all natural connections.

I know this sounds utterly and completely insane, but what they say in the article is exactly what I was taught in school. Perhaps not in so many words, but very clearly, we were told again and again that the cause of WWI was nationalism, religion and traditionalism. This was all completely wrong, by the way. The cause of WWI was the attempt at building international empires, the destruction of old limits on nations, empires and beliefs, and an attempt to create a “modern” world ex-nihilo.

However, the miss-atribution was so strong we were told German military FASHION caused WWI and that any resurgence of religion or nationalism would lead to endless war.

In truth, what led to endless war was the attempt to create the “open society.” By denying the strength of individual cultures, and their vital needs to humans — we are not physical creatures, our essence is not limited inside each of us, they are not fully human if not raised in a culture and society — by making that very individuality of culture and nationality, not to mention human individualism, an enemy and a sign of danger, the open society set itself up for a cycle of continual violence that ultimately made everything about being human illegal, forbidden and to be suppressed.

As a side effect, this destroyed all invention, all creation, made masculinity verboten (any society that wants passive subjects has to destroy masculinity and make women the keepers of that emasculation) and led to humanity losing all interest in continuing. Hence the coming population crash. The diminishing of inventions. The fact we haven’t been back to the moon.

Only — Western culture (the other cultures were never as strong or innovative as ours, let’s face it) — wasn’t quite dead. Despite its suicidal depression, its treatment as a conquered culture by a bunch of neurotic self-hating Marxists for almost a hundred years now, the culture of the West, of freedom, of individualism, of invention, of discovery, is not dead.

Like the king that sleeps in a cave and will awake when danger is great, it turns out we were just sleeping.

At some point it had to penetrate our uneasy soma sleep that the brave new world we were promised if only the west committed suicide was actually impossible. Other cultures persist, and their barbarism is not going to be miraculously redeemed by us disappearing. Our cultures persist too, as does the fact we’re individuals. We’re never going to be insects. Remove men and the women will become violent. Remove the West and barbarism will cover the planet. Remove G-d and humans will worship the silliest things. And a world government was always a stupid idea. Not just impossible, but stupid. The more distant the government, the less accountable, as we’ve found.

Our promised brave new world turned into endless re-runs of 1984, each one less disguised than the previous.

It was inevitable that the wakening would fully flower in America first. As a culture, we are based on the individual, on innovation, on the rejection of the old limitations of mankind. Only an act of treachery on the part of the “progressives” sealed by FDR secured us for the “open society” hegemony. They needed to secure us, because if we are free, we show the world what’s possible.

In a way if you prefer, the whole Open Society lie is the return of the old nobility. This is not as obvious in America, but it’s glaring in Europe, where the new bureaucrats, the heads of the all too powerful “international administrative state” are the descendants of the noblemen, the old “Good families.” In fact, in recent years they became very open about it, like the fact some British published a book trying to prove even in America it was the descendant of noblemen who somehow — naturally — they seem to think, will rise to the top everywhere. (I know about this book because my husband’s family was one of seven families they mentioned, in what I think they called an American Debrett’s (sp?) Which is hilarious as, just like they misunderstand the vastness of America they misunderstand the vastness of our genetic diversity. Sure, somewhere in the distant past husband’s family has the royal blood of two nations (Most of us do, really. That’s the other thing these asshats missed) but that blood has since crossed with much better genes: Amerindians and religious Germans, Irish Catholics and French Hugenots, and eventually a no-account Portuguese writer. I’d say we’ve quite redeemed any royal blood and genetically overwhelmed it.

Anyway, the whole reeking edifice of the “new world order” rested on the idea that our “betters” would rule. And Americans, save for those who were paid to believe it, (and even on them it rested uneasily) never fully believed they had betters.

So the new world order had to end in America. It had to end here. At a guess Trump 1.0 terrified them because they recognized in him the potential to end their world. Or rather, they recognized it in his supporters, because Trump 1.0 was still trying to play by the rules.

Hence the crazy play of the reaction to Covid, the attempt at playing for all the cookie chips. And the blatantly stolen 2020 election. And their behavior after, including the inauguration behind barbed wire in 2021. And the attempts on Trump, both legal and physical.

The funny thing of course is that though the revolution was coming, if they hadn’t fought so hard and overplayed their hand so early, they stood a good chance of surviving Trump. And true revolution, the end of the protracted 20th century, would take another 20 years or so. And when it happened, it would be more brutal and come into a much diminished world.

So, I guess we should be glad of the overreaction of the tyrants, that brought about their much needed overthrow.

It’s actually a fairly common thread in all stories of revolution. Those who feel they are about to be replaced overreact and bring about their own fall.

Eh. Now we’re in the middle of it.

Çȧ Irȧ!

If we’re very lucky, this time without tumbrils.

Not of bread alone lives man…. I seem to remember someone saying that. Yes, the follow up was about religion, but the point remains. “Not of bread alone lives man.”

It’s weirdly easier to ignore that in our super-affluent era. You’d think that people scrabbling to survive in a world that yielded subsistence a handful of grain and a quarter cup of oil at a time would be more focused on the material, the absolutely needed to keep alive. But no. People in those circumstances were aware of the need for religion, for dream,for a vision of the past and the future for them and their kind.

Possibly this was because the present frankly didn’t offer them much to anesthetize themselves with. Therefore they needed to know the slog they were going through today counted towards the welfare of the future. Either their own welfare in heaven, or their children and grandchildren better lives here on Earth.

And then we took care of the basic needs, and yes, science is magnificent at that. Or science was, at the level that it improved food production, and travel, and medicine. I don’t want this to be understood as my saying science isn’t important. Science is. It’s just that science isn’t the WHOLE THING.

Let me explain: I’m writing this at noon (during my (eh) lunch hour,) on Wednesday. Having protested the whole version of “the right gave up on the culture, and that’s why the left dominates everything”, I was attacked by a blast from the past from early cold war days (or pure stupidity. I report, you decide.) And then I chose violence. Real word violence. The words “take a flying leap” were used in reply type of violence.

The poster deserved it because he answered our — mild — dispute on whether the right gave up on the arts and culture or not by going all “America after the Sputnik”:

Note, unlike the artist, I am actually posting this with the guy’s xit with his name and user handle, because frankly he deserves to be famous for that piece of incandescent stupidity.

There are so many things wrong with that post it’s not even in the right universe. Let me put on the hazmat suit and dissect it.

“You’re both full of crap” obviously and clearly translates as: I don’t give a flying fig what you two are talking about, because I don’t like art, I’m not interested in art, and I want to prove all the bad stereotypes about the right by telling you not to do it.

My answer to this is ignore the idiot. He’s not representative. There are a few of them. In a population as large as ours, you’re going to find any number of people who simply don’t “hear the music.” Fine. Some of them are on the right. Some are on the left. They all have their uses. None of their uses should be setting policy for the rest of the country, because they simply have no clue. This is roughly akin to letting blind people set policy on colors. “This color thing you guys argue about is bullshit. I can’t see anything, and I never needed color. Let’s do away with this distraction. The only color allowed shall be grey.” Yeah.

“While you two shout at each other about THE ARTS, Chinese 8th graders are learning calculus.” Uh…. okay, then. This sounds like it should be an immensely important message, but in fact it’s just irrelevant bullshit. I mean, I can juxtapose too. “While you yell at us on twitter, space x is working on spaceships.” Or perhaps “While you stomp around screaming, people are watching Hollywood movies, because they have nothing else.” Or perhaps–

The point is an argument about whether the arts are or are not a thing that inheres on the left has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese 8th graders learning Calculus. In fact, Chinese eighth graders learning calculus has nothing to do with anything. Does the poster think if I and the other guy talking about art stopped talking about art Chinese eighth graders would stop learning calculus? American eighth graders would start learning calculus? (Hint, mine did, and I bet a lot of others do.) Science TM would win? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that this no-account writer and what appears to be a no-account artist arguing over whether the arts are ignored by the right had that kind of power. Apparently we can — and should — rewrite the world by choosing what we want to argue about. Someone tell me what I should argue with artists about to provide us with free energy and reverse aging! Enough farting around. We should “Argue to save the world”!

Stop rolling on the floor laughing. I’m sure the idiot was being VERY SERIOUS and posturing in the way he’s seen others posture. Which makes him very smart and important, people. You should ignore the fact it makes no sense.

The whole thing reminded me of a Portuguese anti-smoking campaign that had as its slogan “Read more, smoke less” despite the fact that most nicotine addicts can smoke quite well while reading. I keep wanting to scream back “Fiddle more, burn Rome less.”

This btw. doesn’t touch the fact that the claim that “Chinese eighth graders are learning calculus” is meaningless. Chinese eighth graders are very good at doing well in international competitions, partly because their whole culture is based on testing. But there is more to it than this. Chinese are totalitarians, which means they carefully choose the face they present to the world. So they will pick the best students. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that given the infection of DEI in our culture, the people we’ve sent to international testing are a variety of colors, and any number of them arrived in the country two weeks ago and are uncertain what they’re even being asked to do.

Point being: Stop paying attention to totalitarian propaganda. This is like telling me that the Chinese are building aircraft carriers. And ignoring the fact those are made of pot metal and tear like tissue paper.

At least the aircraft carriers thing makes sense, as in the military buildup of China can mean something in a potential war with the US. The calculus thing is tangential. Yes, we do need kids (and more importantly adults) who can do math in order to win wars or simply to maintain civilization.

But none of that a) has anything to do with how early you learn it, or how well you do in international competitions b) all the received knowledge in the world doesn’t make you a scientific powerhouse. c) even if you gave each kid in the US an excellent scientific education, with emphasis on the sciences and nothing else, it doesn’t mean America would thrive as a result. (We know that, because we did it. Put a pin in it for later.)

The thing about a) and b) is how many years this browbeating has been going on. Before I was born, we heard all about how the USSR did so much better in the sciences and that’s why America would lose the cold war. And yet, almost all scientific innovations come from the US with a not-insignificant trickle from Israel and a smaller trickle from Europe. The science-derived things that change the world and the way we live come from America. Part of it is that, as my friend Dave Freer once put it, America’s primary and secondary education suck but our tertiary is excellent. He was right (sort of) at the time, but now that our universities — INCLUDING STEM PROGRAMS (put a pin on this too) have been thoroughly corrupted, it is important to point out our DIY education, our ability to reinvent ourselves, and our relative ability to try and fail or succeed are still unequaled in the world.

Let me translate that: there are third acts in American lives. There are often fourth and fifth acts. … I know that our economy has been getting progressively restricted and entrepreneurship and invention limited, and in the last four years even more so, as people with saws ran around cutting off the legs of those who stood out. BUT we’re still possibly the only country in the world in which your life course isn’t set at 17 or so, for the rest of your life.

In America, if you didn’t learn Calculus in eighth grade, you can learn it at 30, in your free time, online, using one of the MIT free courses. And if you need it for that thing you want to invent and create, you very well will. Which means that it’s more directed. Sure, not everyone learns calculus, and then 99.9% go on to never use it, but those who need to learn calculus can learn it ala carte and cheaply when they need it.

Or put another way: my people, who are mostly the ones who are likely to create something (And to be rightly understood by “my people” I mean those who don’t fit in, who are just Odd, who spend their lives trying to understand, make, think, even as the rest of the world looks at them like they lost their minds. Call us Odds. Or pink monkeys. Or goats. My people) are always learning or trying to learn something, their entire lives, limited only by money and time and the number of hoops they’re made to jump through to acquire knowledge. In America, those are minimized. Right now my ability to (re?)learn ancient Greek is being hampered by health and lack of time, but I have an Oxford-packaged course on my desk as we speak. (And another course on game theory because I have a feeling it will help understand the cultural context we’re living through.)

To demand that we teach calculus to every eighth grader regardless of ability, interest, or whether they crossed the border yesterday is to subscribe to the totalitarian model of education and human society, in which everyone moves through stages of knowledge and training at the same ages, the “best” (and usually most highly conforming) ones are picked for the best training and posts, and your life is set at 17. This might have been the best way when your professional life was done by 60, your “climbing” professionally was done by 45, and the world was fairly static. This hasn’t been true in America since the 70s, at least. Probably before. And the only reason it’s “true” in the rest of the world is that they’re being artificially held back by their kraptastic systems of government.

A society with increasing numbers of healthy and productive eighty year olds would be stupid to set your course in life at 17. Count in your head how many people you know who are in their second, third or fourth careers and who have finally got where they’re meant to be.

Freedom is a choice, and it affects everything. Stop trying to regiment our education to compete with imaginary milestones. I agree our kids are being taught a bunch of idiocy and not learning how to read/write/do math. But the answer is not “more regimented top down education.” That’s how we got here. The answer is to free parents/others to teach people — not just children — as much as possible. OUTSIDE regimentation.

Now, remember that pin? After Sputnik, America panicked that they were losing the education game to the soviets. The answer was to emphasize STEM. We’d show the reds we were better by being more regimented and learning more sciences. Nothing but the sciences. Everything else was unimportant.

Which left an entire generation open to Soviet propaganda, selling them a rotten vision of their own land and their own system. And that is exactly how we got here.

Top down arguably doesn’t ever work very well in education, nor does one size fits all. Take languages: everyone who became an exchange student with me had learned English. Some of them, being rich and attending private schools, had learned it from kindergarten. On the plane over, we found out that I who had learned English for all of two years, as a guilty pleasure, was the only one who understood the stewardesses. I spent a sleepless night, translating for everyone. In the states, in turn, I found that those countries in which English was taught from kindergarten were slightly better. The Scandinavians could at least get along in the basics. But their attempts at conversation with the natives were actually less fluent than mine…

No, I’m not bragging. I’m pointing out I did well at it because I had an interest. You’re more likely to find people fluent in English in Europe now and it has nothing to do with school learning. It has to do with interest and this thing we call the internet, where they need to know English to communicate with the (eh) natives.

Interest drives learning. It’s always like that.

But beyond that, this training of everyone in STEM and only STEM because “STEM + Medical improves lives” leaves you open to cultural bullshit.

Because humans aren’t machines. Sure, there is “how men fight” (and women too) but there’s also “Why men fight.” In the two world wars, there were entertainers sent over seas and men painted cuties on the nose of their planes. On the hottest edges of tech innovation, right now, people are driven by visions. Musk (whom we imported, because America is not limited to ITS OWN 8th graders) is driving space travel and a whole lot of related science because he wants to go to Mars, not “because science.” He has a vision of humanity as a multi-planetary species, and that’s why he and those who are attracted by his vision work and create.

If you educate people excellently in science but don’t give them a “why” they’ll come up with “whys” and some of them will be imposed by the enemy, toxic and corrosive. The generation of the sixties, fed on STEM, had nothing to oppose Soviet puerile slogans and claims of superiority. The degradation of the culture can be laid squarely on the feet of that obsession combined with the left’s playing gatekeeper and keep away for everyone to the right of Lenin.

And it didn’t even work. Do you know anyone who did great things in STEM by being relentlessly pushed towards “STEM ONLY!”? I don’t. But I do know any number of people working in things from medicine to space who were brought there by the novels of Robert A. Heinlein.

Novels. Entertainment. And granted, a lot of his novels had state-of-the-art science. But by the time I came along, the science was outdated. The vision, the hope still drove me to love them and drove a lot of people to real science.

Meanwhile, the people pushed to STEM but not given a reason turn into bitter functionaries and hold on to “received science” as a religion. Not to evoke the unholy name of Fauci, but Fauci. And he is unfortunately the flowering of a trend. By the oughts the left was pushing into STEM with both feet. We got racially inclusive math and other insanity. Because if you don’t allow people to have a vision of what to work for, evil idiots will invent one and then subjugate those who have none.

Science is unglamorous and a lot of work. It’s also very important. But to work through the unglamorous, slogging parts people need something to drive them: the vision of a free future; the vision of humans living better and more happy/healthy lives; the vision of humanity as a multi-star species.

You can sell that vision via preaching and propaganda. Your buy-in will be small, and a lot of people will rebel. (Though in the totalitarian countries you won’t see much of the real rebellion. (Not that it doesn’t exist. You just won’t see it.) )The end result will be meh.

Or you can let those creatives who are not suited to STEM do their thing. (these things are hereditary, guys. Some of us in the commentariat pushed our kids HARD towards STEM and now in middle life 2/3 of them have escaped in the direction of arts and culture. Note I’m not saying that we’re not capable of science. I loved engineering. But for various reasons, we ended up working in the culture wars, arguably because that’s where we belonged. There are reasons for it. And those reasons will apply to a lot of our kids too.) .

Let people work and create and learn and live according to their inclinations. In the end, freedom and competition are the answer: nationally and internationally, in arts, in science, in everything.

Work at making training more easily available and opportunities more abundant. The rest will shake itself out and we’ll have the best science AND the best art.

Competition between the two was always a false dichotomy.

Put your helmet on. Go. Learn, create, invent. Explain, create, imagine. Art or science? Who cares? Everyone in the scrum. Everyone do what he/she is best at. May the best ones win. For the good of humanity. (And our destiny in the stars.)

I’m tired.

I mean, okay, part of the reason I’m tired is that my thyroid is still not quite right, and I’m trying to get the full house unpacked by the end of the month. And I’m trying to edit the YUGE book, and… and never sufficiently d*mned daylight savings time has thrown a spanner in my physical works just at this time.

But the other part of why I’m tired is more of a Weltschmerz, a weariness of the soul.

It got triggered yesterday by some poor sod on Twittex. I’m told he is an artist himself, and that I shouldn’t be mad at him. I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at the same old, same old he disseminated.

If he’s an artist, he’s been beaten down so far he now thinks it’s the law of the world for the left to clobber the right in artistic fields.

Look, I’m sick and tired of the story that goes something like this: The right is more hidebound/rationalist/uninterested in art. This is why the left took over and conquered all the non-STEM fields, and why they now control the culture. If the right wants to fight back, it needs to fight for the culture.

Everything in that paragraph is a life lie, except the last paragraph. And the last paragraph isn’t a lie, it’s just outdated. The right has fought back and is starting to make the left bleed freely.

I first had this argument with another of my kind — creative, on the right — in … 2009? I think. The other creative was Roger L. Simon, and he was peddling this same story. I think he believed it, in his case, because he’d not broken in as a right winger, but changed after. But still, it was inexcusable for the writer of “Blacklisting Myself” not to realize the right hadn’t walked away from culture-molding pursuits: from literature to art, from theater to news, from Hollywood to music the left was keeping out and giving hind teat not only to anyone to the right of Lenin, but to anyone they suspected MIGHT be to the right of Lenin. Or even to anyone who showed even an inkling of a glimmer of independent thought.

Which is why they are losing the culture war, the only way it can be lost once you have control of the means of distribution — well, not the only way. New technology to distribute the art and news and all the mass communication also helped — i.e. they have become an echo chamber, predictable, detached from reality — the best art touches, and amplifies reality, even in fantasy — and so inbred and involuted that it appeals to no one.

Look, I remember, if you can’t, that in 2012 the right was way behind the left on memes, and now everyone knows the left can’t meme.

The truth is that the right is more creative. Not, mind you, that we are special in our own, but because coming to the right while the left controlled the culture required a certain independence of mind to begin with. And of course, we’re not controlled top-down which allows us to be more creative still.

What we lack is money. Right now all the people who pay big money for artists and creatives, and productions, and movies, and all that are on the left. And I suspect once we track where all the government money is going, we’ll find that the crappy art, the strange plays about trans nonsense that supreme court judges (Kentaji Brown. no, really) can star in, etc. are all being paid for by our money.

On the other hand, being paid for by big NGOs and the government will impair your creativity.

So, we need to figure out a way to have the people finance it. We need to figure out a way to have people find out what we’re creating and pay for what they like. And we’re finding it, from indie to kickstarter.

It’s early days enough, but even our small endeavors are enough to to put the hurt on the arts-industrial-complex.

And I’m doing my part to promote and spread the word about indie writers. (To be fair all writers I like, not just indies, but a lot end up being indies.)

You do your part. And stop beating us down.

There is no psychological “explanation” for how the left came to dominate culture. it was all brutal game theory of hiring and promoting ONLY people who absolutely agreed with them, while the right hired and promoted anyone who was competent.

FYI by the time the lefty house of cards started to collapse they were starting to do the same to STEM. And it shows.

So stop beating us. We’re already winning the race, even though we’re running with a foot in a cement sack.

Perhaps give a little push when you can, instead?

Three months ago I came up with resuming a project I started here before the great lockdowns and all the insanity.

I was going to read myself back into my personal history with science fiction.

I see this is going to take my explaining a bit of my own background or how I came to run away with the science fiction and fantasy circus, which is not just a fairly strange pursuit for a woman who was born and raised in a small Portuguese village of no particular importance but outright insane.

You see, where I come from — sonny, (and for that matter, daughtery) — men were men, women were women, and reading was fairly weird. However if you were going to read — and my family was weird enough to — you read things like the newspaper, poetry and if you were of a certain bend of mind and aimed to improve yourself, popular theology, history, and other sciences, more or less in that order. At least that’s what you read if you were a man. If you were a woman you read improving books, edifying tales, and perhaps, hidden and by stealth, true confessions. (Oh, manuals of cooking and handcrafts, too, but that’s another category.) If you came from a family weird enough to read fiction — guilty as charged. Actually my family read everything, including collecting the inserts in medicine bottles. What can I way, the nut didn’t fall far from the tree — normally men read mystery, historic fiction, maybe military fiction, Westerns (for light reading, which they might or might not admit to.) Women read romantic fiction or edifying fiction, such as the lives of saints. (BTW romances in Portugal were more romantic than sexy, but the romantic was more of a 19th century definition. Or as I like to explain it, he died, she mourned him for decades till she died — joining a convent optional — and that was the HEA.)

Of course I read everything. Yes, including the romances that my older cousin read. But part of it is that I continually ran out of reading material. I had entire friendships based on the fact that some kids’ parents signed them up for book clubs and I could borrow the books. In fact, looking back, a lot of my young life was distorted by and devoted to story-seeking-behavior. What the stories were didn’t much matter,and whether they were good was secondary. Honestly? Story is story. Kind of like chocolate is chocolate. Even the worst chocolate (the chocolate of my childhood could be classed as a form of soap) is better, to a kid at least, than no chocolate at all. And frankly, when it comes to story I’m still a kid.

My father tried. I want to point this out right now. My father did his best to teach me good literary taste. He tried to get me to appreciate great books, and have mystery as my guilty pleasure on the side.

It could have worked, maybe. Even if mysteries would have been my primary reading, and the literary stuff just enough to be able to talk about it.

The problem is that my brother went into engineering. When I was eleven, he was an engineering student, and he made friends with a guy who had an actual library. (Something I’d only heard of in movies. In my family we kept books everywhere, including the potato cellar, the workshop and in every other room. Yes, that room too.

Anyway, I listened to the description of the library (yes, it had a ladder) as though he were talking about a fantastical realm, but the most amazing thing is that my brother had discovered science fiction.

For reasons that only the psychiatrist he never had could explain, he decided that he could borrow books — please note, actually bring books into the house I lived in, into the room next to mine — and I wouldn’t read them.

Of course I read them. The first one I remember reading was Out of Their Minds, by Clifford Simak. The first book i remember reading knowing it was science fiction, that is.

It is possible — unless it’s a false memory — that I had read Have Spacesuit Will Travel (Robert A. Heinlein) before, when I was 8. My brother says this was impossible because the first Portuguese edition was when I was 14. And this might be true. Or not. You see, Portugal had the same approach to copyright as many other third world countries. I suspect I stumbled onto it having bought it, in a plain unmarked cover, in some fair, or from some sidewalk bookseller. And that — officially — the edition didn’t exist. The reason I think this happened is that I didn’t have a concept of “science fiction” and didn’t realize the book was anything but contemporary fiction, in 1970. You see, I had seen the moon landing, and I had absolutely no reason to believe that America didn’t have people on the moon permanently. So– I think if I had read HSSWT at 14 I would have realized what it was.

Anyway, i do understand that Out of their minds isn’t precisely science fiction, except perhaps in the that sense where science meets philosophy and ontology. But it was science fiction enough for 11 year old me. At least once my brother had explained that science fiction was dreaming/writing of a future that obviously did not yet exist.

I fell into it with both feet and no parachute. By the time my brother realized I was reading everything he brought home, and told his friend to not lend him any racy stuff, it was already too late. both to stop the addiction and to keep it clean. By then I was taking classes in the city, and had found my way to bookstores that sold more of this particular form of crack.

Oh, heck, who am I kidding? I was back to my old tricks, including carefully cultivating entire relationships because these girls’ fathers or grandfather had stashes of science fiction books around the house. (Some of these men were even nice enough to give me entire boxes of these books as, they say, they’d “outgrown” them. Ah.)

Now what does that have to do with reading myself back through it? Well, you see, most of the books I read — though not all, but the one offs are harder to track and often were never legal — were from the Argonauta collection.

And it’s possible now to find a listing of all the books. See link above.

The problem, when I first tried to do this, is that some books were (as they were by the time I started reading them) unobtanium. But a few months ago, Charlie Martin suggested I might just read the ones I could find.

…. As such, I have read Adrift in the Stratosphere, and will inflict my views of it on you sometime next week. Mostly because I think it’s important to pass on a knowledge of what came before, what worked and what would make us laugh out loud.

Reading what the people of the past thought was the future is fascinating, and also a cautionary tale that what seems absolutely obvious to us is not necessarily so, and the future might prove us wrong.

But more importantly, I’m going to do this, so I might as well share.

I will do these “reviews” — revisits? — once a week on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

If you guys find books of the same time that are interesting, and want to suggest them, feel free.

Anyway, we’re off next week with Adrift in the Stratosphere, by A M. Low. If you want to play along.

You obviously don’t have to read it, and I’ll try to make the write-up fun anyway.

So, see you next week.

So, here we are, somehow part of a big tent.

Okay, correction, the big tent is still forming. We have the oddest people suddenly trying to be with us or on our side, or something. And it’s not so much like we’ve done something to attract everyone and their second cousin, it’s that the other side has been so enthusiastically pushing people away and excommunicating people and demanding that people conform to not just a narrow but ever changing set of specifications that change constantly. And if they don’t conform, they’re terrible, horrible, basically not-people.

So, people have been drifting out way.

Look, it’s not that our beliefs aren’t attractive, mind. They are. We promise people the ability to work to better themselves and the world. But it’s hard too. Being free is hard you have to admit to your own mistakes. you have to fight your own battles. You have to be the adult, and no one is coming to save you.

This means that a lot of people will be afraid of it, scared and horrified by the work needed. But right now they don’t have a choice, and they’re being catapulted, screaming onto our side. Because it’s still better than the psycho alternative that wants to control their every breath, and, if that doesn’t work, is quite willing to destroy them, their culture, and ultimately all humans.

So, they’ve raced here, and they’re on our side now. At least they think they are. They claim to be.

Except it’s not that easy. Is it ever? At heart they still have a lot of of bad habits. They still run to mamma want government to tell them what to do and how to fix everything.

And they have other unsavory habits. One of them being that they try to be what they always thought we were. And what they thought we were is crazy cakes.

So you’ll hear a lot of nonsense, and a lot of people claiming to be on the right and saying the most bizarrely appalling things.

Of course the difference is that there are a lot of soft skulls who just hear it everywhere and start thinking it must be right.

So a lot of the dumber ones are saying all sorts of appalling things, and really thinking they’re getting this “right wing” thing right.

Look, I remember when they told us about the “era of good feelings” And how there were no partisan feelings, no factions, etc.

But you know d*mn well that there were factions, because there were strong disagreements. And there are strong disagreements.

I think the crazier stuff will shake off. Because it usually does. Russia went completely insane once the opinion/discussion control was gone. And then it went extremely Russia. which is where they are right now. Hey, not all cultures are sane, and most countries sort of aren’t.

But we … as a nation are either incredibly sane or completely insane, coming out on the other side. So we have a way to maybe come out all right.

Maybe.

So, despite the fact that humans are social apes and we tend to imitate each other, and fall in with what we think the group is, I’m telling you to hold on to what you believe, what you think and know is right.

Don’t go falling in with the group because “this is a plausible theory.” And “this is what’s behind everything.” Or worse “this is the opposite of what the left told us they believed. (The left lied, anyway.)

Hold on to your beliefs. And if you’re shaky on those, I recommend our founding documents and the writings of the founding fathers.

If you’re still confused? We believe in individual liberty, individual responsibility and individual achievement. We believe in self-determination, freedom of association, and definitely freedom of commerce.

We believe we have the righ right to say whatever we want, particularly the people who are stupid and wrong, because that’s how it can be argued and how the most horrible things can be shown to be horrible.

Turns out when everyone is shoved under one big tent, it’s where the fights are.

There will be some epic fights. Enjoy them.

It’s the sound of freedom.

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. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

BY ROBERT J. HORTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Law Comes To Singing River (Annotated): The classic pulp western.

Lang Rush had to run. He’d killed a man in self-defense, fair and square, but then thought another man was drawing on him and shot him, too. But that man was Drayton, rich and connected, so it didn’t matter what Lang thought.

He ran, all the way to Singing River, population 15, without so much as a post office. And laid low. But there was a girl… and then there was trouble… and before everything was over and the gunsmoke drifted away, the Law would come!

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes an introduction giving the book historical context.

FROM KEVIN IKENBERRY: Bureau 42 (The Phoenix Initiative)

Peacemakers. The Galactic Union’s most capable enforcers and resolute negotiators, their name alone elicits fear and awe among the Union’s citizenry.

It doesn’t happen often, but when a Peacemaker can’t solve a case, it goes to the Peacemaker Archives, as all Peacemaker cold cases reside within “Bureau 42,” as it’s also known. Cases dealing with ghost ships, missing Peacemakers, mysterious killers, and even a few cases that aren’t even really cases can all be found in the files of Bureau 42.

Fourteen authors present thirteen all-new stories from the depths of Bureau 42. Take a look into the forgotten files of the Peacemaker Guild and find never-before-seen secrets, some of which herald the future of the Peacemaker Guild and even the Galactic Union itself.

These stories honor the threat, set the terms, and walk the knife edge between standing or falling. Step inside, Candidate, and see what our files hold…

FROM SCOTT MCCREA: Targets West: A Lucas Wheeler Thriller

Lucas Wheeler is having a bad day when he leaves his beloved Wyoming for the concrete canyons of New York. But he has no idea how rapidly things will turn for the worse. En route to London, where his ranch hands will be performing at the largest international rodeo in the world, Lucas is contacted by the State Department with an unusual request: to report back all observations and significant data on Sheikh Kashif Rashid Al Marltaum. Lucas will be traveling to Dubai to sell several hundred purebred Arabians to the Sheikh, who he learns is deeply involved in terror cells located throughout the U.S.

Before Lucas can even begin his assignment, he is kidnapped by student radicals, chased while handcuffed through Central Park by on-the-take New York cops and nearly shot in London’s poshest restaurant. It is only when Lucas is lured to Sheikh Kashif’s outlandish Summer Palace hidden in the Dubai desert that he learns of a daring and brazen terrorist plot that will have devastating consequences for the entire Western world.

With a shocking conclusion set in London’s crowded O2 arena, Lucas must overcome incredible odds before a multinational cabal of terrorists can hit…targets west.

Hopping through three continents, filled with memorable and very human characters, and energized by pulse-pounding suspense, Targets West is a thriller for people hungry for stories of American heroism and international intrigue.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Light Up the Night.

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

FROM DALE COZORT: Jace of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novella (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 1

A Snapshot Jungle Adventure?
Strange new people and animals keep appearing in an alternate history or alternate reality Africa otherwise isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. In that strange version of Africa, oddly familiar events keep happening.

*An out of place passenger liner is torpedoed by German submarines.
*A castaway boy is raised by man-like apes.
*Brutal slave-raiders sweep in to destroy peaceful communities.
*An 18 year old damsel finds herself in a lot of distress.
*Men talk with elephants.
*Men and ape-man fight to the death.

Sounds like that has all been done before a time or two, right?

Jace of the Jungle delivers an homage to the pulp era Jungle Adventure story with a New Pulp novella just as action-packed as the old pulp adventures. Fair warning, though: Jace starts out considerably darker than the old pulps and goes places the pulp era stories couldn’t.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil.

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: The Black Cube (Chronicles of the Fall Book 14)

Hieronymus was just going to take a ride with a friend and wasn’t expecting his friend’s sisters to be a kidnapped . . . and he certainly wasn’t expecting the opportunity to be a hero.

As information about the abilities of unchipped Portal Clones spread, their usefulness for cross-dimensional crimes of the ordinary sort should have been anticipated . . . although how to stop them is difficult, if not impossible. But as a spunky thirteen-year-old works to escape, Hieronymus has a plan . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Threads of Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Ten

“Return with coin or not at all!”

Dagnija Modrisdatter brought nothing but bad fortune to her family, or so they believed. When a merchant offered to hire her as spinster and weaver, her father sent her off.

Adrians Eckelbert searched for the master weaver who made ornate belts. He found her on a remote land-tongue, and brought her back to Rhonari.

Dagnija discovers a different world, one filled with possibilities she had never dared to even dream of. But she must learn to navigate the shoals of Rhonari, seat of the trade lords of the Northern Empire. Spinning comes easily to her hand. Speaking for herself and balancing trade law and family duty? Far harder.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Magic And Secrets

Tales of Wonder and Magic A woman, sent to a far off duchy, finds a mysterious wolf haunting the forest, and learns there are secrets no one even suspects. Playing with props for amateur theatricals has more consequences than any of those doing it dream. . . act with care. A king’s tyranny sends a woman searching desperately for a legend of lions, there being no other hope.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Moon Mirror

Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America’s priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been — until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn’t known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202502 2.0

Collection of current events and other thoughts from February 2025. The world has changed all of a sudden, this is the new update.

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: Evanescent.