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 JAKUB WISZ AND TERESA GRABS: Incitatus

A tense, character-driven sci-fi thriller full of action, corporate intrigue, and creeping-dread horror.
A young woman defies her father in search of treasure among the stars…
Shao has two choices: live and die the boring corporate life her father demands she live OR go on an adventure searching for space pirate treasure.

Shao hates her boring, corporate-driven spaceship pilot job. Living up to her father’s vision for her hasn’t been easy, but she’s been a dutiful daughter. Until she discovers a data chip leading to a pirate treasure. Suddenly faced with a new path, she convinces her crew to ditch their corporate responsibilities to go on a treasure hunt instead.
Shao has no idea she’s made a huge mistake and that her crew-including her girlfriend, Mai Wren-will wind up paying for.
With forces beyond her knowledge at play, Shao stands to lose everything she holds dear. Her decisions will be her downfall and she’ll have to make tough calls that’ll forever alter her future and the lives of her crew. Some of them might not survive, but that was a choice Shao made, and she must live with the consequences… no matter what they may be.
Set in a hard sci-fi world of Aphelion, Incitatus takes place in the near future, after humanity colonized the entire Solar System, and technology blurred the lines between humans and machines.
The book is full of action, conflicting interests, intrigue, and fear of the unknown, both in the outside world and inside the human mind. From transhumanist themes to matters of love, individuality, and personal freedom, Incitatus is an engaging, exciting thriller for adult audience.

FROM CLAYTON BARNETT: Obligations of Rank

Empress Faustina has always ruthlessly used those around her. With her three sons now young men, it is their turn.

To the imperium’s west, the Texans are increasingly unhappy with the empress, especially following her use of a fusion weapon against the city of St. Louis. A broken demi-human, Edward, is sent to patch up what affairs he can.

North, fleeing the ice and snow of a coming ice age, the Canadians and their army are on the Ohio River, threatening territory the imperium considers its own. Young human Robert, undercover as a simply legionary, joins a task force to find out what is going on.

But the prize is the terraforming of Mars, led by the Russian Empire. Crown Prince Laszlo, a friend of the Russian court, takes an experimental ship to determine what they and their Machine allies are doing on the once-red planet.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Long in the Land

He’s a man on the run. But on this harsh alien world, freedom doesn’t mean he’s safe.
Peter Dawe can’t face his mother’s relentless grief. With her anguish deepening his guilt and the colony’s governor out for revenge, he’s desperate to escape a deadly situation ready to explode. So he jumps at the chance to journey north away from danger, chasing the rare sight of a long-lost aircraft.
Buoyed by the glimpse of a machine he’s never seen before, Peter discovers the pilot desperately needs aid for his newborn son. But with sinister agents searching for them both, the remote planet may not be big enough to preserve the young fugitive from his enemy’s vengeance.
Can Peter find them refuge before they all fall to their doom?
Long in the Land is the thrilling second book in the Martha’s Sons science fiction series. If you like captivating world-building, edge-of-your-seat tension, and memorable characters, then you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s high-stakes tale.Buy Long in the Land to make a stark choice today!

And now we come to a very special book promo.

It has come to my attention some of you haven’t read the syllabus and haven’t done the required reading. This cannot be! I send no compliment to your mothers. You deserve no such–

What?

Oh, yeah, if you have time (or a cold. I usually re-watch it when I have a cold. I sit on the sofa with a carton of sugar free rocky road and watch all six hours) you definitely should watch the A & E Pride and Prejudice. I try to sneak a line from it into every book, the least likely the better. You too can participate in the text scavenge hunt.

Now, on the serious side, some of you have been silly enough to ask me for an auto-biography. This is not likely to happen, because I’m not that interesting. Mostly I grew up in books. However, it occurs to me I haven’t shared with you some of my favorite (indeed, some formative) books, so I thought you guys should get a list. Be careful, though, there might be more in the future.

I put a line or two on why I like the books. The authors some of whom are dead are held harmless from associating with such Nekulturny as myself and my fans and friends. Well, except the first one. He brought this on himself. He has no one else to blame.

So, the first book:

This is a special case. He sent me the book for promo a month or two ago, and said something about how stupid of him it was to write silent movie mysteries. For those not aware, I love mysteries set in the early 20th century, so I told him I’d probably read it, though not maybe in a timely manner.

Well, it ain’t be timely, but yesterday I bought it and read it, and then the first book (which seems to have been published by someone else?)

And you see, it’s AMAZING. And I want him to write more. As I know personally, having a pack of derran– er…. a nice group of fans begging for more can get you to write a lot of books. So I thought I’d do my best to get Christopher a whole mob of bay– er… group of intensely interested fans, so that he’ll write more mysteries for me to read.

Look, it makes perfect sense in my head!

From Christopher DiGrazia: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: A Theda Bara Mystery

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

Hollywood, 1917. Silent movie queen Theda Bara is filming her epic, Cleopatra – “the one they’ll remember me for.” But when a studio extra turns up dead in a PR stunt gone wrong, Bara finds herself the center of intrigue, from a friend from the past who isn’t at all what she seems, to an Egyptian cult that wants her dead. With stars like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Erich von Stroheim along for the ride, Bara and her loyal friend, makeup artist Toby Swanson, have to find out who is telling the truth, who is lying and whether it spells the end of Cleopatra. . .or of Hollywood itself.

THE BOOKS I LIKE BECAUSE I LIKE THEM and which influenced me though some of their authors were very politically silly.

FROM CLIFFORD SIMAK: The Werewolf Principle

His body hosting a pair of strange alien presences, an amnesiac space traveler returns home to an unrecognizable Earth

Many centuries in the future, a two-hundred-year-old man is discovered hibernating in a space capsule orbiting a distant star. Transported back to his home planet, Andrew Blake awakens to an Earth he does not recognize—a world of flying cars and sentient floating houses—with no memory whatsoever of his history or purpose. But he has not returned alone. The last survivor of a radical experiment abandoned more than a century earlier, Blake was genetically altered to be able to adapt to extreme alien environments, and now he can sense other presences inhabiting his mind and body. One is a biological computer of astonishing power; the other is a powerful creature akin to a large wolf. And Blake is definitely not the one in control. With his sanity hanging in the balance, Blake’s only option is to set out in frantic pursuit of his past, the truth, his destiny—and quite possibly the fate of humankind.
 
A bravura demonstration of unparalleled imagination, intelligence, and heart, The Werewolf Principle addresses weighty issues of genetic manipulation that are as relevant today as when the novel first appeared in print. One of the all-time best and brightest in speculative fiction, Grand Master Clifford D. Simak offers a moving, stunning, witty, and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.

Note: more strange political beliefs are thrown out in this book than you can shake a very large stick at. But it gives you a good snapshot of “normal” in the mid century. And you know, the characters and the book itself is the best capture of “Odd” I’ve ever seen.

FROM REX STOUT: Fer-de-Lance

As any herpetologist will tell you, the fer-de-lance is among the most dreaded snakes known to man.  When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin knows he’s getting dreadully close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an immigrant and a college president.  As for Wolfe, he’s playing snake charmer in a case with more twists than an anaconda — whistling a seductive tune he hopes will catch a killer who’s still got poison in his heart.

NOTE: I’m a fan of Rex Stout, despite suspecting our political outlooks are worlds apart. Mostly he kept his out of the books, though it got thicker the longer the series went. Anyway, I first fell into his books when I was I think 6 and hanging out in the front room, where dad kept his mysteries.
For reasons known only to the publishers’ psychiatrists, the only collection of mysteries in Portugal at the time was Vampire. For those who don’t know it, I’m a ninny when it comes to horror, and was even more so then. I was afraid to touch the book, because there was a vampire bat on the spine. But I was bored. NO. I WAS BORED. Like, soul killing boredom. So I took that book down and it sent me on a life-long mystery reading habit. Ah, well.

From Agatha Christie: The Moving Finger.

The indomitable sleuth Miss Marple is led to a small town with shameful secrets in Agatha Christie’s classic detective story, The Moving Finger. 

Lymstock is a town with more than its share of scandalous secrets—a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir.

But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs. Symmington, commits suicide. Her final note says “I can’t go on,” but Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Soon nobody is sure of anyone—as secrets stop being shameful and start becoming deadly.

NOTE: This book, right here, made me aware I was not alone. I was one of a type. I was a “smart girl who was likely to become a complete idiot” (No not an exact quote) until I took myself in hand. So I did. It’s also a very good mystery.

From Giovanni Guareschi: The Little World of Don Camillo

Reading ‘The Little World of Don Camillo’ is to travel to the Valley of the River Po, Italy’s widest and most fertile plain, with its unique atmosphere, culture and natural history. And to do so in the incomparable company of a cast of fictional characters who testify to the exquisite humour and humanity of their creator.

In the Little World, eternal forces grapple with the absurd drama of everyday life, and hilarious and unearthly things can happen.

If you keep this in mind you will have no difficulty in getting to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. Nor will you be surprised when a third person watches the goings-on from a big cross in the village church and not infrequently intercedes . . .

In story after story, the hot-headed Catholic priest, Don Camillo, and the equally pugnacious Communist mayor, Peppone, confront one another, sometimes in a serious and violent manner.

The clever bit is the way Guareschi engineers a resolution to the conflict and transforms the situation to the great benefit of the local community, so that the two men put their political convictions aside and, however begrudgingly, develop respect for one another.

To enable this, the author creates a third main character, his finest creation and the most surprising. Il Cristo presides over proceedings from above the altar of the town church and counsels Don Camillo, exposing and undermining the stubborn priest’s personal politics and prejudices and, with fascinating insights and gentle humour, suggests paths of action which, with the benefit of hindsight, we come to see make things right.

Guareschi claimed that the voice from above the altar was simply the voice of his own conscience, but in the stories it is a living reality which enables solutions so simple that they are beyond the reach of political minds clouded with ideology and the need to win.

Guareschi’s message is that what works at the level of the Little World can be made to work universally, the world over.

More than fifty years on, these enchanting, wise and strangely moving stories of life in the Lower Plain continue to enthral millions of readers of all ages around the world. They have been feted not only in books but in films, in series on TV, on radio and most recently on YouTube. In this newly translated volume, many are available in English for the very first time.

Note: I first read Don Camillo as I first read just about everything. It was on dad’s shelf, and I was bored. It was summer, and I want to say I was seven or eight. These are SHORT stories. A few hundred words. And yet… When I grow up, I’d like to be able to capture humanity that well. Of course, I’m almost 60, so it’s probably hopeless. But you shouldn’t deny yourself. Things are hinkie, and reading things that remind us humanity is not all dross is much needed.

There will probably be some more later, including some very strange comics.

PRIMERS FOR SUBVERSION!

These books are in a way, a way of looking at what is happening, and precisely what can be done, and what can’t. There are others. These are the ones in my head right now.

From Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Widely acknowledged as one of Robert A. Heinlein’s greatest works, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress rose from the golden age of science fiction to become an undisputed classic—and a touchstone for the philosophy of personal responsibility and political freedom. A revolution on a lunar penal colony—aided by a self-aware supercomputer—provides the framework for a story of a diverse group of men and women grappling with the ever-changing definitions of humanity, technology, and free will—themes that resonate just as strongly today as they did when the novel was first published.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress gives readers an extraordinary, thought-provoking glimpse into the mind of Robert A. Heinlein, who, even now, “shows us where the future is” (Tom Clancy).

NOTE: As you know I’m “the woman who loves Heinlein” so I’d tell you to read all of his work, even the one where he kills the cat. (Yes, I’m still smarting. Why?)
But my favorite is probably The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It was the primary influence on A Few Good Men, for instance. (Not linking, because I haven’t reissued, but no, not the movie. My book.)

FROM LLOYD BIGGLE JR: The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets

The IPR Bureau (whose motto is “Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny”) works to bring newly discovered planets up to the point where they have a planetary democratic government and then induct them into the galactic federation. Unfortunately, the planet Furnil offers problems. The continent of Kurr has a well-entrenched monarchy, and the citizens seem little inclined to change. In fact, they immerse themselves in art rather than politics…and have been doing so for more than 400 years! So what’s a poor IPR agent to do…? Classic science fiction!

Note: This is one of my favorite books. Interestingly it gave me a way to visualize what happened with traditional publishing. The idea that they published all worthy books could only continue so long as they could banish the authors who displeased them for whatever reason and make sure they were never seen again. Now, of course that’s broken, and we’re out, playing our trumpets….
I think it’s much like that on the political side. They only win if they can make us invisible. Be as visible as you can afford to be. They can’t silence all the trumpets.

From Giovanni Guareschi: Comrade Don Camillo

‘Those who read The Little World of Don Camillo will need no more than the news of this new volume to send them quickly to their bookshops so lovely, so humorous, and so wise.’ Harpers & Queen

In the Little World of Don Camillo, an Italian village in the Emilia-Romagna, the beauty of life lies in the connectedness of things. But, as at national level, relations between its people – normally pleasant, hospitable, generous, and with a high sense of humour – have become polarised by politics.

Since the end of the war, Stalin has been working to absorb Eastern Europe into the Soviet orbit, with every expectation of Italy being annexed to the Soviet Socialist Republic. Russia and America are like two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at the risk of his own life. There is the constant fear that one side will press the nuclear button and the whole world be reduced to wasteland.

Meanwhile, in Don Camillo’s Little World, where there were indeed more communists per capita than anywhere in Italy, the global struggle is reflected in hilarious relief in the conflict between its hot-headed Catholic priest and Peppone, its Communist mayor.

But now, in this 4th book in Guareschi’s series, it is 1959; Khrushchev has come to power. There is talk of détente, and Peppone has decided to take a group of Italian communists on a trip to Mother Russia. Determined not to miss a God-sent opportunity to throw a spanner in the works, Don Camillo skilfully inveigles himself into the group, and to Peppone’s dismay he becomes life and soul of the Party.

In a riot of shrewd manipulation, Don Camillo picks off his totalitarian comrades one-by-one, trapping them into demonstrating the repressive nature of the politically correct virtual world they occupy. But then ‘fate’ intervenes, and to everyone’s surprise the group discover a common denominator more radical than any political ideology…

As ever, Guareschi’s fictional characters testify to the exquisite humour and humanity of their creator, while the message of his satire, which applies to all times and all places, remains that what works in the microcosm of the Little World can be made to work universally, the world over.

NOTE: Before Allinski there was Comrade Don Camillo. Some of the tactics are startlingly similar like “Make them live up to their stated rules.”
But Guareschi was a decent human being, so most of his tactics are both more principled and aimed at redemption rather than destruction. Also, it’s funny, of course.

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: Rural

One if you had done me a lovely guest post, on the run, about why searching for “nuclear secrets” in Trump’s house made as much sense as panning for gold in your shower. And I’ll post it below.

But hours after he sent it to me the story had changed. It was obvious they’d gone to everything in Trump’s house on a fishing expedition, and they were talking crazy cakes charges.

None of this makes any sense. It would flop as comedy, because it’s too frigging stupid.

… So, I used to have a bad habit of reading about dictators and the revolutions that overturned them. Okay, I still do, but not as obsessively.

This was my go-back-to-reading from about 14 to 40, when the world stopped making sense.

And what I can tell you is that none of the worst regimes made any sense. Unless you assume everyone in China had lost their minds, Mao should have been laughed off public life long before he killed hundreds of thousands, or perhaps a million or so.

So, what gives? At some point our mind goes “It can’t be that ridiculous” and we start treating completely insane claims as though they made ANY sense. Or at least normal people do.

It’s time not to let it. It’s time to get out there and mock, mock, mock. We have our work cut out for us. BUT it must be done. Because when things get that ridiculous, mass death is just around the corner.

Evil is stupid. Invincibly stupid. So stupid that humans, normal humans, have trouble PROCESSING it. But the stupid must be shown and mocked.

If we are to save civilization.

Laugh them off the stage. It’s now or never.

The FBI At Mar-a-Largo by Bob Stultus

While I’m definitely not a PhD, nor a rocket scientist, nor someone with first hand knowledge, I can think, which is apparently more than any journalists can do.

Immediate Reactions to Hearing that the FBI was looking for ‘Nuclear Secrets’

a) I can’t think of any reason that Trump would have any interest in nuclear weapons documents.

b) okay, his uncle was a prof, and studied irradiating stuff, but still.

c) if someone was interested in giving the documents to someone, why on earth keep them around?

d) Los Alamos primer has been declassified for years.  Do these people even understand the difference between the Los Alamos primer, versus stuff it would be helpful to keep secure?

e) I was wondering what evidence they hoped to plant.

f) There are not a lot of reasons to think that the classification system is really working all that well.  At least from the outside.  Considering all the apparent security compromises.

g) It seems very likely that someone could have deliberately misinterpreted Q-anon into ‘nuclear secrets’.  The Q in Q-anon was a deliberate reference to, guess what, a classification level relating to nuclear secrets.  Documents on Q-Anon are actually things that would be of possible interest to Trump.

Again, classified nuclear documents can only contain so many things.

One possibility is detailed physics information, that could be used by skilled physicists or nuclear engineers to design a nuclear explosive.  This is pretty useless if you do not have the scientists or engineers, or do not want to make or refine a design for a nuclear explosive.

Another possibility, would be design details, or a design.  Again, this is something where you would need specialized scientists or engineers to even use, and building a design requires materials and technicians.  Basically, is anyone equipped to use a design, who does not already have access to designs?

The people making bombs are mostly either people with crappy enough manufacturing that maybe more designs would really be useless for them (China, Russia, etc), or probably have designs good enough for anything they might actually want to do (our NATO ‘allies’, Japan, etc.).

Again, this stuff is not really recreational reading.  You can dumb complex technical stuff down so that it isn’t gobbledegook for a general audience, but then it is usually too simple to build anything complicated with.  Stuff that you can design from is going to require graduate degrees to read, basically.   Or, you are talking about an extensive set of measured drawings prepared for a great number of different sorts of technician.  And, blueprints are inflexible, you need to be able to adjust the design if you happen to be unable to replicate components.

Basically, it seems like it would be pretty strange for Trump to have anything like this.  It would also be pretty strange to send 15 FBI agents from HQ to recover those documents.

One, that maybe isn’t enough people to securely remove everything if we are talking a bunch of blue prints.

Two, how would FBI agents know actual nuclear secrets from Q-Anon from a print of Rhodes. ‘the making of the atom bomb’?

FBI actually has been trying to hire engineers, etc.

But, the most frequent FBI hire is a lawyer.

To recognize special nuclear secrets, the FBI agents would need to be briefed in them, or trained in them.

Which is a potential security compromise.

You would actually want a narrow circle of investigators trained in those secrets, if you want to share them at all broadly.  Like might be employed by, say, a specialized security service?  That isn’t the FBI?

Caveats, Late at night, in response to a comment about blue prints requirements for a house:

Now, I could be wildly miss-estimating the complexity of the information.

Single story houses can be pretty complicated.

Maybe someone figured out a really simple set of secrets about nuclear devices.

If so, I should not be provided that information because the FBI caused a mess due to never hearing of subtlety or discretion.

Knowing that something can be done is sometimes the most  important thing.

But, yeah, I strongly suspect that the most truth in the statement would be if they were misrepresenting an investigation into Q-anon.

Caveats this morning

Clarifying:

1. Trump is a salesman who has worked in real estate for decades of his life.  The type of person who would be interested in nuclear physics documents for the sake of recreational reading would have made different life choices, and exhibit different strengths.

2. His uncle, John Trump, was an MIT professor.  His early work was in radar, which is an entirely different sort of radiation, electromagnetic waves, aka radio waves and microwaves.  Radar has significant military applications.  John Trump’s later work was in civilian/medical applications.  Water treatment, medical imaging, and other forms of medicine.  I’m not familiar enough with his later work to say exactly which kinds of radiation, nor describe the applications. 

3.  Obama basically deliberately caused the compromise of a bunch of personal information of everyone in the Federal government, the GAO breech.  Between Clinton, and Obama, there may be no secrets left to hand out to hostile foreign powers. 

3i Okay, it is still not good to give more help to foreign powers, but foreign powers generally have trouble implementing the capabilities that we still preserve a monopoly on, even with help from us. 

3ii.  Yes, new capabilities were developed under Trump.  When you look at open sources about what they were trying to develop, or to open sources about what the academic world is learning how to do, fancy new secrets with nuclear explosives are not the ones that jump out at you.  Russia, Iran, and PRC were lying about their delivery capabilities, people would have been interested in interception.  It has also been a while since we have tested any warhead designs.

 3iii General level of government incompetence leaves me far from confident that classification of technical information would make any sense what so ever if I had any access to it.  Okay, sure there is probably a bunch of stuff buried in there that should stay buried. There is almost certainly a lot of stuff that would be about impossible to understand without the sort of career that would get you access in the first place.  The open source textbooks that you can buy get into ‘takes years of study to understand’ territory real fast.  The basic principle that I should not have any access that I do not actually need is probably sound. 

4. The reason Q anon is called Q anon is the claim of having the Department of Energy’s Q clearance.  The Department of Energy has a clearance system of its own, Q and L. 

Supplemental Details

Checking wikipedia, the Department of Energy has the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, which does all of that for the DoE.  Now, it is possible that the DoD has an office that covers the counterintelligence for some specific work done on nuclear secrets under a DoD umbrella.  That office is likewise one that may be really jealous of just handing information to the FBI, and letting the FBI act on said information without involvement outside of the FBI.  And, wiki mentions a Turchie who resigned in 2008, complaining about changes being made to the DoE OIC that Turchie felt compromised counter intelligence.  (In 2006, Bush decided to combine the DoE intelligence and counter-intelligence operations.)

I sure did catch it when I dissed Family Ties as leftist propaganda. Which it was, of course. Perhaps more so than most of us realize.

And yet, not only did a lot of you in the comments note that it gave you the first glimpse of being conservative, but I got emails. Ooooh, boy. I got all the emails.

Apparently Alex P. Keaton was a great part of the reason why my generation didn’t fall in line with the self-critique sessions and the lefty “protests”, cut our hair (or got a nice perm, depending on sex.) dressed in suits and went to work.

I spent some time trying to figure this one out. Because Alex P. Keaton was a cardboard cut out of a conservative, enamored of that Statist, Nixon.

And then I realized what it was. The problem is that the left hadn’t perfected the fine art of cardboard conservatives, where they made their opposition into sort of rampaging Nazis with no contact with reality.

Back then, they were still spitting out things that they’d heard conservatives say, even though mixed up with things conservatives had never said. So while Alex P. Keaton talked about what a great guy Nixon was, etc, he also ….

Well, there were a lot of things that came through in the character. Like, you know, he wanted to succeed, do well, be rich. It is probably lost on younger kids, but this was anathema. Wearing a suit, let alone a suit and tie was anathema. It was totally uncool, old, “straight” (back when that referred to the opposite of being a hippie.)

In fact, Alex P. Keaton, cardboard and all might have been responsible for making it hip to be square.

Not counting the things that slipped through that the left thought were horrifying like “women might be happier staying at home and raising kids.” These were of course supposed to be for laughs because the narrative was women would take over the work world and push men to the side by being SO MUCH better. (When that failed, we started hearing about institutional patriarchy. Such nonsense.) But the fact is that while after the kids are grown in the practically second-life-time modern medicine grants us, women might very well start caring about careers as much as men, but we do have different biological drives, and– well, they throw a spanner into the works of the “ersatz corporate man.”

Anyway, those comments apparently were true, and found fertile ground in a lot of minds.

This got me to thinking. The narrative was so thick, so absolute. You people who grew up with the internet might not understand how absolute it was. Everything echoed each other: from a casual spread in a fashion magazine, to the latest work of ‘art’ at a gallery. From a causal line in a news report, to the latest book that “will be on everyone who’s anyone’s bedside this fall.”

And the lines that came through them were the left’s. They might have been a little more veiled than they are now, but the crazy was all there, even back then. From “people cannot control their sexual urges at any time and kids are sexual creatures” to “women should be just like men, only the worst of men” to “the poor need more government.” And anyone and everyone opposing the coming of big government everything was, bizarrely, a fascist, and hated women and minorities.

There was no logic, but there was a barrage of sound and fury, and everything worked in concert with the big lie.

Which considering their system didn’t work at all, and the only thing big government is good at is collecting taxes and oppressing its own citizens was not amazing. They needed that barrage to make it seem like their “truths” were unassailable.

But their truths were patently not truths. They weren’t authentic. They found no resonance with people. People went along with them, because they were afraid to stand out, but meanwhile, each of them individually thought they were freaks of nature.

I had a little more resistance because events I’d seen close up and personal were otherwise in history books. But for most people the weight of the lies was almost impossible to throw off.

And yet the least bit of “support” from the official channels, even when it was meant to discourage dissent could tear a big swathe off consent and show the picture beneath.

And the picture was true, so of course it had a big impact. Because of course young men want to dress well and be successful. In what world does it make any kind of sense that they WOULDN’T?

You see what I mean? The narrative, because it’s counter-reality needs to be absolute and relentless.

Truth only needs to break in now and then to completely destroy it.

Like, you know, America was over and done with in the late seventies. It was all downhill now. We were over, and deserved to be over, and the USSR was going to win, because it was not only more efficient but more “just”.

And then Reagan came. And the narrative crumbled. Because it was all lies, and each person individually knew they were lies, and only the relentless weight of the narrative, endlessly repeated could make people think everyone else thought the lie.

Same with Trump. HUGE hole in the narrative. And heaven knows neither of the men were prefect. But they had reality at their side.

Now the lies are crumbling, because while relentless they can’t be ubiquitous anymore. And they can only survive when truth never appears.

When truth appears, no matter in how little an amount, the lies melt like spun sugar in water.

Do not collaborate with the lies. Use exactly whatever degree of subtlety you need to pierce them. As we see above, anything, from pretending to be mocking the truth to pretending to not quite “get’ it while telling the truth will destroy the lies. Fast or slow.

(For homework, I assign you reading Comrade Don Camillo. If you need ideas.)

Go and melt away the lies that never worked. We have a future to build. And the future must rest on truth.

This is the part of According To Hoyt in which you get reading assignments. I want you — yes, even you in the back who don’t read science fiction to find and read two books.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Puppet Masters and Clifford Simak’s They Walked Like Men.

No, you don’t actually need to read them to get this post, but you might want to read them, if you haven’t, after you read this post.

I was kind of surprised about 20 years ago when even Heinlein aficionados started running down Puppet Masters. It was just a “Hackneyed space invasion” and it was just “to capitalize off the red scare” and it was “just.”

What it was just, as I had long ago figured out was a perfect analogy of a society whose top levels and communication means had been taken over by enemies.

Was it “hackneyed space invasion” or “capitalizing off the red scare.” I don’t know. Dear Lord, people, you could give me letters from Heinlein saying it was so and I’d still not know. Writers, particularly writers working for traditional publishing often presented the books they were working on as “this or that” because it’s what the publisher wanted to hear. (For a prime example of this, find some of my interviews on why I wrote the Shakespeare trilogy, or my favorite reading, at that time. Look, I wrote it because it sold on a one-page pitch. Did I always love Shakespeare and Shakespearean biography? Sure. My library records going back to my exchange student year, let alone my purchases prove that. But did I always want to write literary fantasy. AHAHAHAHAH. I like space opera and mystery. That’s what I always wanted to write, though some crazy fantasies also come through. Literary? Not so much.)

The thing is, the way Heinlein’s mind worked, you could give him a hackneyed and stupid prompt and he ran with it making it as plausible as possible. (We have proof of that in Sixth Column) which meant that along the way he created a pretty good thought experiment for “if this were really happening, what would it look like?”

Which is what he did with Puppet Masters. (We’ll get to They Walked Like Men towards the end.)

And the world we lived in, with mass media controlling what we saw and did and what “everybody knew” was as close to the world of the Puppet Masters under the “masquerade” as anything could come that wasn’t actual brain parasites from space. And anyone — this persists in the areas taken over by the left both virtual and physical — telling the truth came/comes across as a complete loony.

Except the Masquerade is breaking.

There is a terrifying scene in Puppet Masters, where the parasites are exposed, and the entire office that is working perfectly normally and looking completely humdrum breaks. The scene shatters, and these very ordinary secretaries and stenographers go for the characters with bare nails and teeth.

There are other places where the masquerade shatters in the book, until finally when the brain parasites realize humanity knows of them, the masquerade breaks completely and the aliens start living the way they really want to, and it’s horrific.

Right now we’re somewhere in between. With COVIDiocy and the stolen election, there are parts of society that are just going “Fine, we stole it, you’ll never have a say again” (This is particularly in your face in blue cities and states that vote by mail fraud) and letting it all hangout. (Same in Canada, with little Castreau.) They’re dancing in the streets, metaphorically, screaming “you’ll eat the bugs and DIE and DIE DIE DIE.” And it’s such a horrific display that the person in the street is providing cover for it by refusing to believe this can EVEN be happening.

And the other parts, the parts like the federal government and the incredibly corrupt agencies, are those secretaries. They’ve realized that we can see them, we know what they are, and they’ve lost all pretense of sanity. They’re just attacking, hands and claws, and biting teeth, raiding private homes, stealing cell phones, and being completely crazy, because they realized they’re EXPOSED and they can’t be exposed and survive.

The point, and the analogy though, is that they were there a long time before. They’ve been there at least 20 years, and in many places, let’s be fair, over 50. They kept up a pretense of legitimacy and process and law. Until we saw them. And then all hell broke lose.

Where do we go from here?

I don’t know. We don’t have a magical martian disease to get rid of them, so I don’t know how many of them are salvageable. Those of us who believe can pray for them. It might do no good, but it will do no harm.

And the thing is, we don’t need the martian disease, because these are humans, just humans. They’re corrupt and crazy, and we’ve thrown off other corrupt and crazy aristocracies before. Which they know. And why they’re going crazy and wounded-animal, in their attempt to survive.

The other side of this is They Walked Like Men. Clifford Simak was, I have it on Jerry Pournelle’s authority, a conventional liberal of his time, which is to say far left than us.

But in this book, he captured perfectly what happens when a force that doesn’t understand symbology and confuses the symbol for the thing uses the symbols to take over society.

The fundamentals, underneath, are fine. It’s just the symbolic structure that’s borked.

Now, in this case the symbolic structure of power, unlike the mere money of the novel (and seirously, if no one else thinks of BlackRock I’ll be sad. Also, what kind of idiots named their company after the meteor of Islam, again?) is also the various institutions that symbolically run the economy and the society.

Symbolically?

Well, yes. You don’t actually need a doctor to have the seal of the AMA to have a good doctor. You don’t need a lawyer to have the stamp of approval of the board to have a good lawyer, and when you get down from there, there are people walking around who know more about any given subject than those holding the credentials from an accredited university. (I swear we’re a country of weaponized autists. I probably know more about Shakespeare than people who teach Shakespearean biography. And may plumber ten years ago was the world’s foremost expert on Civil War weapons, if you could get him talking. And any number of the rest of us, in the middle of our humdrum lives get a question about our passion, and the eyes light up, and we start talking, and the problem is for the casual bystander to avoid getting graduate level education on whatever it is, from ladies underwear in the 14th century to the specific composition of Martian sands.)

The accreditation, the power, the structure is symbolic. And that’s what the left has seized, thereby claiming you can’t be a whatever without drinking deep of their poison. Which they then use to claim “all smart people are with us.”

But that is breaking too. I read an article recently saying we’re doing a disservice to conservative kids by telling them to stay out of colleges.

But are we? Are we really?

It’s not that we fear they’ll be contaminated. If you raised them right, they won’t. They might get angry. But that’s about it.

It’s that colleges each year become more of a scam to make you waste time while paying Beardo the Weirdo a comfortable retirement stipend and building really massive buildings around campuses.

Yeah, indoctrination too, but they’re in it for the money.

I’ve seen this kind of sclerosis, of institutions eaten from inside and forgetting what they’re meant to do. Yes, traditional publishing toddles on. But notice that’s because German companies (and Europe hasn’t jumped on the ebook revolution, just like they didn’t jump on political blogging, which only proves we are, yes, different.) But it is not what it was. It no longer holds the stamp of approval of the culture. And it sells less and less every year. Meanwhile, it is entirely possible to become a mega-bestseller and influential as a pure indie. It’s not guaranteed, but it never was. But it is possible.

When institutions are seen to be eaten out; when the throne is revealed to be thin sheet gold over rotted wood, it doesn’t last.

I don’t know when the flip will come, but it feels like it’s really close, when the “official credentials” will mean nothing, and employers will be scouring high and low for those who know and can do.

Because we’re in the middle of the masquerade falling apart.

And that’s both terrifying and disgusting, but it’s also, objectively, the end of what the masquerade preserved: The steady erosion of all structures, under cover of normalcy.

Thing is, once you see the enemy, you know where it is and what it is. And you see, in full display, its grotesque vileness.

And it doesn’t stand a chance.

I’m a fan of history. As in, it’s been one of my favorite reading genres since I was ten or so and found mom’s old history schoolbooks.

I like that people in the past aren’t forgotten, and also to see how things happened, and how they were done, way back in the past.

I still buy so many history books that for a while there — back in the dark ages, when you had to order from History Book Club for the stuff your bookstore wouldn’t even carry — I could have made my paycheck over to the History Book Club.

I think I was in my thirties before I realized the books weren’t history. They were “agreed upon interpretation of history.”

The agreed upon was important for me at the time, because I was mostly writing historical stuff, and the agreed upon version is the safe one, if you don’t want to keep forever defending it.

There are limits, of course. I wouldn’t change Sword and Blood to follow the latest movies on the musketeers (at the time.) No, Porthos was never a pirate. No, Athos won’t reconcile with Mylady. No she’s not just misunderstood. And no, for the love of fargin Bob, I will not use the names of the “real musketeers.” (So, the idea is that there was a book that Dumas based his stories on and those are the “the real musketeers.” Meh. The source material is NOT the story. In that source, all the musketeers were cousins and all Gascons. So, you know, no. Also in the book, the only one ever named is Aramis. (Would you believe Rene?))

However if everyone insists Anne Boleyn was an evil seductress, you might as well go with it, or not write about her. The push back will be next level.

And I did tell you — didn’t I? — about the editor who refused my Red Baron time travel story, because he was a villain and shot Snoopy? Sometimes, you can’t win the battle. What everybody knows (at least in Traditional publishing) is too strong. So the book was shelved.

But it took me much longer to realize how much the history that everybody knows and what really happened differ. And it took me till 2020 to want to hit heads over it.

You know that meme that went around on with the founding fathers and “Me and my buddies would already be stacking bodies?” That’s the image of the founding fathers in movies, and heavily influenced by the seventies “they were revolutionaries” thing.

They were actually farmers, cobblers, businessmen, lawyers, accountants, husbands, fathers, sons and brothers.

What does that mean? Well, that the only ones who were raving about “stacking bodies” were people like Tom Payne, who later went to join the French revolution on the side of the revolutionaries. There was something broken in that man, no matter that he was on the side of good for a little while.

The rest of them? A lot, until the last minute, until they signed the declaration of independence, thought a reconciliation with England was possible, and waffled on the daily over whether such a thing as separation was needed.

This while already actively fighting Englishmen and knowing d*mn well they were all on kill lists.

And if you go back and actually read the horrors the Englishmen perpetrated… Take the political prisoners in DC now and the stolen election and multiply by a hundred.

But the founding fathers still hoped everything could be smoothed over and made whole.

Think of any revolt against an overpowering tyrant, and you are thinking of the movie version, or the slightly longer and still way sped up book version. Yes, even the goatgaggers on history pretty it up, simplify it and make it seem much more rational and coherent.

Real revolts take time, and the most resolute of revolutionaries, unless infused with the cult-like fervor of Marxism (which tends to attract psychopaths, anyway) back off, hesitate, hem and haw.

Most of you, if the Founding Fathers (PARTICULARLY FRANKLIN) were blogging today would call them weak sisters, appeasers, and people who just wanted things to go back to “normal.”

And yet the revolution happened and here we are.

And I’m fairly sure the abuses and insanity will not go on.

Thing is, I can’t point you to direct history, because history books and what we know as history are not what happened. (And that’s part of what’s leading you astray.)

Look, reality is not a story. It isn’t even made of stories. It is the raw material from which you can extract stories that you can then tell people.

Because reality is messy. Take if you will, if I should become of interest to history (Heaven forfend) how would yesterday be characterized? Well…. I wrote a blog. I sure did, and historically speaking, nothing else. Of course, I met with a friend, read his stuff. Talked to younger son and worked on his move stuff. Talked to a repairman, got dryer fixed and parts ordered for the dishwasher. Washed way too many dishes by hand. Watered the garden.

Are those things I did? Yes. And a lot of them are things that matter — for instance, the dishwasher. Having it fixed saves me having to waste three hours a day on dishes — but they’re not part of the story. Heck, if the story is “fiction writing” I did NOTHING yesterday.

Now multiply that by the population of a country, even when the population was six million or so.

History is messy, convoluted and complicated. The “history” we extract from it is simplified, didactic and often …. like translation, so changed so you can “get” it that it’s actually flat wrong, while retaining a shadow of a shade of what really happened.

So, what really happened in the revolutionary war?

They endured far more than we’ve even started to endure, until it reached critical mass. A lot of their striking back was wrong. A lot of the founding fathers seemed to be on both sides at once. A lot of them were on one side, then changed. A lot of the people on the other side, who ran away or learned to be quiet weren’t evil villains. They didn’t support the horrors the English inflicted on the colonies. They’d just not processed them, or thought there must be an explanation, or perhaps knew of the bad things the revolutionaries had done. Or were afraid of being targeted for their religion, in some of the friskier colonies.

So, when you come here and you say “We haven’t rebelled. We’ll never rebel.” you’re talking from the movie in your head, where everyone is fully aware and on the same page you are and everyone understands the constitutional implications of every little thing, and everyone — as one — rises up and–

Can you hear the music swelling? It’s never happened that way.

And now you’re going to come back and say it’s all like what happened in Cuba, or Venuzuela, or heaven forbid, China or — our resident troll, yesterday apropos nothing — some tribal war in Africa.

That’s cute. That’s lovely. You know what’s left out of that?

Culture. You’re falling into the same trap as the globalists who think every culture is the same, and so, we’re all at heart compliant Chinese peasants. (Even they aren’t that compliant, it’s just that the control on information is next level and entire areas in revolt get written out of history there.

Cultures aren’t widgets and humans aren’t widgets. And Americans are chaos incarnate, compared to most countries, which is what frustrates the statists when they try their cr*p here.

We haven’t revolted, but we’re already rebelling. What do you think “let’s go Brandon” or the instant support for the Kenosha kid were all about? Why do you think they’re so scared they’re doing all the stupid things? By the way, their real poll numbers, the ones they see, not the ones they push, must be next level. And their megaphone is broken. People mostly make fun of the news, except for shuttins and the dullest of our compatriots.

Will we revolt? I don’t know. Will it be violent? I don’t know.

I know that through my anger, I’m still praying we can turn this without violence.

But I do know that what they’re doing — unlike the raid on Mar-a-largo, which isn’t – is hitting people IMMEDIATELY and comprehensively.

You can argue on constitutional rights; you can’t argue on “I’m having trouble meeting expenses, and Christmas might not happen for my kids.”

Note that the first signs of widespread revolt we’ve seen have come with what the schools are doing to kids. Because it’s immediate and it hits hard.

A cold winter with food being hard to get and expensive will hit most people.

What can’t go on, won’t.

If it tips into revolution, it will be sudden, unpredictable, and horrible. Even if we agree with the goals, a lot of us will sit here going “I’m not sure THAT incident was right” and the whole thing will proceed, through failure and win and mixed feelings, till it concludes.

Nothing is cut and dry or picture perfect, although future historians will try to make it so.

Right now, they’re deploying the things they control to try to get us to do something we regret. I think they’re being stupid, because frankly, at this point, if it starts, I don’t think they can put it down. It’s like those “controlled burns” that go out of control.

But sooner or later, controlled burn or not, if a forest has a lot of dead branches and the weather is hot, the fire will happen. Can I predict where it will start? Or when? No. And driving through the forest in those conditions is nerve-wracking, let alone live there. And we might hope the fire doesn’t happen at all, but know what it would take to keep it tamped down is more or less eternal snows. And that’s not acceptable.

Heed the real lessons of history: Each country is different, and until mass-media controlled us somewhat, the US was like a bunch of cats in a sac. From day to day observation, we more or less still are. We’re not a people well suited to being controlled. Like fooling people, it can be achieved for a time, in a place. But not forever and all over.

The forest is very high on tinder, indeed. It’s up to the knees of the casual walker. And they’re running through with flame throwers.

You can hope someone would grab them, use the flame throwers on them, and starts clearing. I do.

But most people aren’t even aware of how bad it is, or how bad it will get. And metaphorically speaking, we won’t get out of this without losing a lot of the trees, some of them small and green and hopeful.

It is what it is. Real life is like that. You can prepare, you can make sure you and yours are somewhat safe.

And you can pray the fire isn’t as bad as you expect.

But you can’t do a thing to either stop it or hurry it up.

Real life is messy and confusing.

All is not lost. We haven’t even started to fight, and in historical time we’re not close to enough time to start to fight.

This too shall pass, and us with it.

While we’re here, let’s make the most of every day. And make it count towards the future, freedom and a restored republic.

The rest will take care of itself.

For those who have seen me answer comments, and poke a few of the groups I’m on and are wondering why I haven’t written a post: I’ve been sitting here, quite literally wordless.

I was fairly salty on instapundit last night, on the subject of the idiotic raid on Trump’s place, but you know, that is easy. This is much harder, because I have to give a more reasoned opinion. And all I can say is, SERIOUSLY? Am I really living in a novel? Because Sad Puppies really was foreshadowing for our greater National troubles, only you know, it can’t work int he macro world as it did there, so–

Though I suppose it can, in fact, and give us a society that would give wet dreams to much younger, much more Libertarian (If there’s a way to put a more capital L on that, do it mentally) me. But I’ve grown up, and as predictable, move left, which means I became MERELY a minarchist, and I’m not sure that the kind of peaceful anarchy I envisioned is any more possible than communism. Not that I think we end up with colanders on our faces (but I’ll buy another one, just in case, since right now all I have is Pineapple colander and blue enamel colander, not the right style.) because that’s not how anything works. But the problem is I apparently don’t really know how things can work in the end.

Anyway, if that paragraph above gave you headaches, you and I are headache buddies now. If you understood it, find a reputable psychiatrist asap.

I’ll start the festivities with how a buddy characterized the Junta this morning, a characterization I heartily endorse: The Biden Construct, and his stupid-as-a-box-of-rocks, yet arrogant-as-a-house-cat advisors.

Part of the problem, as I said before, is that they are now running plots that are only flying below the radar — to the extent they are — because they are so crazy real people feel insane even thinking about them. Another thing to add is that they’re stupid. They’re stupid as all get out. And that’s even harder for some of us to fathom.

“Arrogant as a house cat” and stupid for the exact same reason. Our big puff of fluff declawed (yes, there was a reason. Might have to do it to Valeria now for another reason: medical) Havelock cat keeps back talking the coyotes outside, and telling us he could go out and beat them all. They’re just illiterate cats who don’t talk right.

Havey wouldn’t last ten seconds outside. He looks like a big, fluffy bunny and has the sort of squeaky voice bunnies have. If the coyotes didn’t nom him, the hawks would.

These Bidentia are the same kind of hothouse flowers (I almost typed whitehouse flowers) as Havey, pampered from birth, no one ever told them no. In his defense, at least Havey is one of the most adorable little kittens I’ve ever seen. These people ain’t adorable. They just internalized early that rewards came from parroting what was handed to them, and twisting it ever crazier. And they never realized that’s not, in any world or place the definition of “smart.”

You see, from THAT point of view, raiding Trump’s house (“compound” my ass) is a win win for them.

Either they find secret stuff they can use to do their big Stalinist show trial and finally imprison him — yes, they really believe this, because he’s a “bad man” so of course he must have recorded himself twirling his mustache and talking about his love affair with Putin — OR they piss us off so much that we erupt into civil war and then they can put us down easily, because frankly there’s only a couple thousand of us, and we’re all racist rednecks and over 70. So it will be trivially easy, right?

No. I’m not joking about either of their assumptions. I found out during SP that they have a bizarre idea of who we are and what we can bring. In fact, their view of the world requires we be that, or it splinters. And that, because they base their identity on their view of the world, means they splinter. It’s kind of like dying.

And part of the issue is how they define us. And how they justify what they want to do to us. As in Sad Puppies (And we’ll Psakircle around to that) they can only imagine we oppose them, not because we have substantive reasons to disagree with them or because their ideas are crazy, don’t work and are totally out of contact with reality but because we’re all old white males who feel our supremacy (which hasn’t been true for fifty years, if it ever was) in science fiction threatened, and so we are lashing out. For this to work, we must all be rich and famous and OLD white males. Even when we obviously and literally aren’t, which started the whole joke about the white Mormon male with a great rack (since a few of us obviously aren’t. And some of us aren’t any of those.) But for their ideology to work we MUST be that, and so that’s what it is in their heads. (Remember they also believe if they think something hard enough it will be true.)

So, in this case, they define anyone who objects to their completely pants-on-head program (and they really don’t get it is that, so they keep melting down and telling us how good it will be for us, and then melting down again and blaming Republicans) MUST be an old privileged white male, who is a white-supremacist. And the fact the FBI can only find one or two of those for their groups, and that the ones they find are all insane, must mean we’re rare and basically powerless.

That this can co-habit their heads with the idea that we are holding back their entire dream-program tells you the level of insanity we’re dealing with. (Unfortunately not rare for the left. Let’s hold a moment of silence for the kulaks and all the other “wreckers” and “hoarders” blamed for their dreams NEVER working in reality.)

So when I say they’re hoping to get “us” to revolt, this is not exactly true. What they are trying to do is provoke the imaginary couple of thousand people to revolt, so they can make an example out of them, and thereby explain to the vaster crowd to whom they’ve lied that these people are evil, and the democrat/Marxists are our only salvation. And once they explain, everyone will just get with the program of eating bugs and owning nothing and being happy.

And there is an off chance they’ll find documents of collusion between Trump and Russia. Perhaps in their heads MUCH MORE than an off chance.

Okay, I’m going to have to explain that one.

The first thing you need to understand is that evil people assume everyone else is evil. Crooks assume everyone else is a crook, and pathological narcissists think everyone is a pathological narcissist. You have to understand that to realize why they act the way they do.

The fraud is so massive (ah, inclusive, isn’t it?) on the left that they thought they had the elections sewn up forever and ever amen. But Trump won. That means HE HAS TO HAVE CHEATED, and there must be proof somewhere. The same way there must be proof somewhere that he intended an insurrection on Jan 6, because they d*mn well would have, if someone had frauded an election away from them openly and that clumsily. So, they’re sure they’ll find proof.

You see, part of their conceit is that they have to cheat, because people are either too apathetic or too bamboozled by those 2000 white supremacists to vote for them. That is the other bit. They’re absolutely convinced that only Trump could have/would ever defeat them, because collusion and evil sneakiness, not the American people having had JUST ABOUT ENOUGH of their shenanigans.

Which is what this is all about. They’re sure this raid was win win.

Which tells you what we’re up against. Stupidity so vaunting and overarching, combined with confidence so absolute that the angels themselves cry in vain at trying to pierce it.

In other words, they’re morons who think they’re geniuses.

Now, while I don’t agree with BGE that civil war is the worst thing — trust me on this, there are worse things. Though I understand where he’s coming from — it would still be a very bad thing, and there is an off chance — VERY off — we can still avoid it, maybe. And trust me, having gone through it and back again, yes, norms can be restored without it. It’s kind of like a convulsion of collective disgust that cleans things up. While I’m not sure Nuremberg-style trials really do. Because I’ve been in Germany and heard people talk in pubs. It might just make the resentment and sense of being hard done by go underground and fester for generations.

However–

There is Sad Puppies. We started it with shiny chrome-plated idealism, wanting to restore the point at which the Hugo meant “you should read this.” instead of “ew, really?” And yes, for some of us the breaking point was when the stupidity known as “if you were a dinosaur my love” got nominated for all the awards, despite displaying the contact-with-reality and craft that would have got me a b in middle school.

We were fought up against tooth and nail, with full disproportionate demonization and media attacks, understandable only if you get that they need their awards to get academic jobs.

They then “fortified” the Hugos to make sure nothing they didn’t approve of could ever be nominated, let alone win. And they bragged about it. And somehow they thought this didn’t matter, or made them more important, I’m not sure which.

Except that it does. Once people see the masks off, they don’t believe you again. So the public at large including casual-fans disconnected from the awards. And while they were probably still good for academic jobs, the awards have now gone to Diyu (yeah, I know, but trust me, it’s Diyu) and are never coming back, so they’ve lost that too. And I know because I still lurk in a bunch of lists where they’ve forgotten I exist, that they’re having trouble selling at all, and the new advances are often just $2k per book. (Which is why they need the academic jobs.) While the rest of us are doing okay. I mean, I need to get back to serious work (before Pat-the-editor kills me) but the just 40k word sf mystery I cobbled together and put out before moving swallowed my life had made me 14k by end of year. So we can just ignore them and thrive, while their livelihood sinks and their awards go to China.

But while I’m sure they think they can send the entire country to China, and it might very well be what they’d like to do, they can’t. And they can’t have China take over either.

So what they’re actually doing is create a country in which none of us believes in the propaganda or the elections or the institutions or the processes. And they have absolutely no clue how bad that can get for them. (For us too, sure. But them–)

And as someone who went through Sad Puppies and the insanity that followed — the resemblances are uncanny. We ignore them, and they would surely have the FBI raid us if they could — I can tell you that should Trump or anyone else not of the left get back in there will be a cleaning. Most of us are scarred and limping, but we’ve also lost all illusions about playing the game or the other side being honorable.

And I bet it’s the same on the macro scale. What they are creating for themselves is implacable enemies.

Yes, maybe it will all tip into actual violence sooner than later. But it’s worse for them if it doesn’t. People who no longer trust that the people making the rules have any right to can get downright nasty. Aristo aristo a la lanterne nasty. And the longer it goes on the worse the “nasty” will be.

Can we get them to understand that? I very much doubt it. Morons who mistake themselves for geniuses remember.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punishèd:

And it won’t be at all what the left thinks it is.

*UNRELATED UPDATE: Teamhoyt apparently thought that I meant to reserve the contributions in check and cash to thank later, after one more trip to mailbox. Teamhoyt can be morons. I blame Havey. But at this point I guess there will be a second thanking later.

I doubt this list is complete. I suspect TeamHoyt misplaced (or possibly ate, for values of TeamHoyt, since Havelock-cat insisted on helping) the mailbox donations. (Some of them we won’t even get till this weekend. As I said, an envelope a day, still. THANK YOU.) If you don’t see your name here, and would like to, ping me below and I’ll amend (I trust you.)

If you see your name here and would like not to, send me a note immediately at the email of heat. It shouldn’t be a big issue, TBH since any name even vaguely unusual was anonymized to just initials. However, I understand paranoia, and if you want it removed and TeamHoyt slipped up, let me know.

Hun membership certificates and carp-ed certificates will follow in PDF form. We’re going to try to send all the physical/book rewards before the end of August, and I’m actively working on the collection, but not full time because my editor will kill me if I don’t get BOR to him.

And lest you think I’m all about the bats, until the age of 10 my family nickname was Raposa, due to my eating habits (carnivorous) and my tendency to be slinky and vanishing. So, this is a good representation of me being very happy about the fundraiser. It occurred to me that it’s actually close to 45k. So, given everything, very happy. Younger son says I shouldn’t feel embarrassed, I should feel grateful and use it wisely, to grow the writing business AND not kill myself with work. (When did the boys get so wise, anyway?)

I’m going to try to make it fun, by bringing on silly images, because I don’t know what else to do, with a long list:

Now, shouting the As — and one number and another alphabet — (by first initial):

11B-Mailclerk, A Nice Name in Hebrew From a Donor in Israel, A. M., Aaron D., Aaron M., Abigail H., Aidan G., Aimee Morgan, A. E., Alan D., Alan F., Alice D., A., Allan K., Allene C., Alvin T., Amanda S., Amanda Z., Amy B., AnAuthorinCharge, Andrew A., Andrew F., Andrew H., Andrew H., Andrew M., Andrew M., A. N., Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous, (repeat a few times) Anthony B., Anthony T., Arnold D., Arthur B., A. R.,

That Good Boy above is Giving some love to the Bs:

Barbara T., Barry G., Benjamin Y., Bertram B., Bill M., Bill R., Billy A., Bobbie S., Bonnie H., Bonnie Ramthun, Brad E., Brandon D., Brenda D., Brian E., Brian G., Bridget M., Bridget M., Bryan C., Bryan S., Bryan W., Byron C

Do you C it?

C.R.W., Caitlin W, Cardshark, Carl P., C. M., Carol O., Carol R., Catherine D., Chad I., Charles S., Charles W., Chelsea W., Cheryl & William, Christine K., Christie M., Christopher C., Christopher M., C. B., C. H., C. W., C. N., C.W., C. E., C. R., Colin W., Confutus, Courtney B., C. P., Cybersmythe, Cynthia A.

Here is a derp fish saying: What would I do without Ds?

D.A. B., Daniel A., Daniel C., Daniel M., Daniel R., Daniela M., Danny A., Danny W., D. D., D. B., David Bishop, David D., David F., David F., David H., David J., David J., David K., David L., David L., David M., David M., David N., David P., David R., David W., Dawn: Crew of the Howl, Dawn, Dean K., Dean S., Denise H., Denise W., Dennis A., Dennis H., Diane H., Digital Night, DJS L., D. S., Don P., Donald B., Donald C., Donald P., Doug N., Douglas W., Douglas W., D. M

This little guy says the Es are always excellent:

Earl B., Edward M., Eleanor C., Elizabeth B., Elizabeth H., Ellyn L., Eric S., Eric S., Erica B., Erik A., Erik S., F.

And you know the Fs just FLY:

Fast Richard, Fernando F., F., Francis F., Frank H., Frank T., Fred S., Frederick M

Okay, he’s trying to dance for the Gs. He’s a little… mechanistic:

Gail F., Gale G., Gary S., G. N., Geoffrey B., Geoffrey W., George F., Gerald D., Gerald P., G. A., G. S., Giles H., Grant L., Greg K., Gregor H., Gregory R., Gregory S

Everyone knows I’m partial to the H’s but I’m also putting the Is here, because they’re little:

Hal H., Harold S., Harry B., Harry S., H. M., Henry C., Herb N., Howard H., H. C, I. S., I. M., I. K., I. a K., I. B., I. M.,

Saying hello to the Js!

J A., Jack M., Jackie M., Jack W, J., James A., James B., James C., James C., James C., James F., James F., James G., James G., James K., James N., James N., James O., James P., James S., James W., James W., James Y., Janice D., Janice M., Janis C., Jeff G., Jeffery H.P., Jeffrey C., Jeffrey G., Jeffrey P., Jeffrey S., Jennifer A., Jennifer R., Jeremy C., Jeremy P., Jerold S., Jerry B., Jerry L., Jerry S., Jill Oszibarack, Jim T., JOE m., John B., JOHN B., John C., JOHN D., John F., John G., John H., John H., john k., john k., JOHN M., John M., John M., John P., John P., John R., John S., John W., John-Joseph W., Jonathan B., Jonathan C., Jonathan G., Jordan N., Joseph C., Joseph C., Joseph O., Joseph R., Joseph S., Joshua A., Julaire A., Julia P., Julia W., Julian H., Julie S.

Who else should introduce the Ks?

Karen B., Karen G., Karen M., Karen P., Karen P., Kat S., Kathryn Y., Kathryn Y., Kathy B., Kathy L., Keith F., Keith L., Kendall V., Kenneth F, Kenneth H., Kenneth K., Kenneth O., Kenneth S., Kevin K., Kevin R., Kirsten B., Kirsten C., K. L., Kristine H., Kurt W

But I’m trying to keep it balanced here, so these guys will throw a party for the Ls

Larry B., Laura M., Lauren R., Laurie M., Laurie M., Lawrence R., lawrence t., Leonard D., Leonard W., Lewis C., Linda S., Lloyd L., Lord Funnybone, Lori E., Lori K., Lucy H., Luis L., L. C., Lynn C.

Well, who else would introduce the Ms?

M. Metzger, Margaret Ball, Marie R. & Samizdata Friends, Mario A., Mark H., Mark H., Mark L., Mark R., Mark R., Mark W., Martin R., Martin S., Martin S., Mary B., Mary C., Mary C., Mary H., Mary H., Mary J., Mary M., maryh10000, Matthew M., Max J., Michael A., Michael B., Michael B., Michael D., Michael D., Michael F., Michael G., Michael H., Michael K., Michael K., Michael K., Michael L., Michael L., Michael M., Michael M., Michael N., Michael P., Michael S., Michel D., Michele P., Michelle R., Mike Houst, Mike K., M. G.

He was offended he didn’t get the Ms so he’s introducing the Ns,

Nancy M., Nathan Brindle, N. S., N. C., New England Yankee, Nicholas K., Nick B., Nick C.,

And Os, I’m sorry, but no pretty oreoles. Orvan would like to represent!

O. F., Oliver S., Orvan Ox

I was going to aggregate the Ps, but the pegasus wanted in and you can argue with a pegasus, but they always win.

Pamela O., Pamela U., Patrick, Patrick L., Patrick W., Paul B., Paul C., Paul Foreman, Paul H., Paul K., Paula W., Perry The Cynic, Peter B., Peter C., Peter S., Peter S., Philip E., Philip P., Phillip C.,

And he claims he’s entitled to the Rs:

Rachael B., Rachael M., Rachel M., Rachel T., Ralph C., Randall H., Rebecca J., Rebecca M., Rev J., Ricahrd Bledsoe, Richard F. Weyand, Richard Skinner, Richard B., Richard C., Richard D., Richard E., Richard G., Richard G., Richard H., Richard J., Richard K., Richard N., Richard S., Richard V., Rick K., Rick W., Robert A., Robert B., Robert C., Robert D., Robert F., Robert F., Robert P., Robert W., Robert Y., Rod M., Roger M., Roger Ritter, Roland H., Ronald L., Ronald W., Ronald W., Rory D., Ross H.,

Shout out to the S!

Sam F., Sara D., Sarah G., Scott K., Sean K., Shane T., Sharon P., Sharon R., Sharon S., Shawna S., Sherri M., Sherry H., Sintra E’Drien, Spirit of Sanford, Stefano L., Stephanie K., Stephen C., Stephen C., Stephen F., Stephen L., Stephen M., Stephen M., Stephen N., Stephen U., Steve B., Steve H., Steve J., Steven B., Steven G., Steven K., Steve and Emily Nelson, Steven O., Steven W., Susan H., Susan Mollman, Susan W., Susan W., TheOtherSean

He’s upset I didn’t let him into the S, so he’s here to shout Let’s hear it for the Ts

T. H., T. S., T. T., Ted R., Terrence M., Terri R., Terry L., Thomas C., Thomas J., Thomas M., Thomas R., Thomas R., Thomas S., Thomas S., Thomas T., Thomas T., Thomas W., Thomas W., Tiffanie G., Tim, Tim B., Tim C., Timothy B., Timothy D., Timothy H., Timothy T., Todd N., Todd Q., Todd S., Tone L, Tom B., Tom S., Tony A., T. A., Tregnosee314, T. S., T. R., Tyler B., Tyler P., Torne D.

And a wallaby is excited for the Ws and the Zs.

, Walter S., Wayne W., Wendy K., West S., Willard F., William B., William B., William P., William R., William R., William S., William S., Zach R., Zachary C,  Z. F.,

To all of you, to the endless “anonimy/anonymoose/anonimity/anoonas and A. Nonimous” and to the 500 people who very carefully contributed under 10 (a lot of them 9.99) so they wouldn’t be included in the shout out (Yes, next time I’ll raise that threshold), I am immensely grateful and love you all to bits.

Certificates under way shortly, and I’ll tell you from which email before I send. (Or more likely put them somewhere you can download, so that the email doesn’t think I’m spamming.) And the other rewards too, shortly.

LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH.

Years ago, when the Shakespeare series was the only thing I had published, and it seemed like I’d be shunted into historical fantasy forever, I was offered a book (through the History Bookclub, that’s how long ago that was) that claimed to be the diary of a Tudor (or Elizabethan, I don’t remember) woman. (The book is still packed. There is a great push to unpack, yes, but it will take time.)

It was the greatest take-in. This woman had had a fascinating life. In the crazy conspiracy and totalitarian pushes of the era, two of her husbands and some number of her progeny had been executed for treason. She, herself, had been under suspicion.

What was her diary? Well, imagine I become famous enough that in 200 years a graduate student looking to do a thesis on some obscure 21st century person. He gets all excited, because you know, immigrant, ESL, writer, blogger. And he finds, somehow, miraculously preserved, my husband’s scrupulous diaries. How much of my own life will be recorded there, eh?

Well, he’ll get all our dentist and eye appointments (I often forget mine, so Dan notes mine too) and all our major house reno (like roof repair, on the other house after hail) and appliance purchases, so we know where to go for the warranty. And that’s pretty much it.

This woman wasn’t quite that bad. I mean, she did note her poultry purchases, the eggs they’d laid, etc etc. (Yes, she was a noblewoman. Look, it’s not like the movies) but most of the entrances, like 99% of them consisted of the same words:

Prayed. Wrought. Prayed.

Wrought means “Worked.”

This woman, amid one of the most tumultuous periods of the renaissance, in an area where people were getting killed for their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, where lands were being expropriated, where treason was so rife on the ground you couldn’t cross the street without becoming a co-conspirator in something, spent most of her days sewing, cleaning, supervising servants, preserving food, looking after domestic animals (or keeping an eye on servants who did.)

Her husbands and her might have been involved in outright plotted regicide. BUT most of her days, she got up in the morning, washed hands and face (probably) put on clothes, prayed, and prayed again. And went to bed.

Was she happy? No one is unremittingly, permanently not happy. I bet in the middle of the turmoil and horror of losing husbands and children, she had days of joy.

And she made things and salvaged things, and fed her family, and some of her kids survived, and given how long ago it was, if you have any European blood, you’re probably descended from the world’s most boring diarist.

So, what is this in the name of?

Well, I wasn’t going to write about this. I was going to write about how none of you really understand the younger generation (40 and younger) unless you’ve raised them and paid close attention. About how they’re so frigging paranoid that they make my instincts, trained under socialism/communism/and for six months Maoism seem downright relaxed and laid back. So when people say all the kids are socialist or whatever, they’re listening to what the kids want them to think, not reality. (Their paranoia is giving TeamHoyt quiet fits, and they’re all going to be bald by the end of this. A reminder: if you contributed under two or three different pseudonyms, but expect it to be aggregated for rewards, you’re going to have to clue us in. Some I know or can guess, and spent considerable time this morning trying to unsnarl some of it, but–)

Except something grabbed by the scruff to write this, and when this happens some of you out there need it.

Londoners went on, and worked and kept the economy going enough not to starve while being bombed, during WWII. In bombed out Lebanon people worked and studied and married. Except during the worst periods of communist repression — and even then only in certain areas — life went on. It might be a stupid life, which you spent in food lines, but life went on.

Humans are a resourceful ape, but most of all, we are apes that survive. You’re descended from 100% people who survived to reproduce and whose kids survived to reproduce. And if you think they all did that through easy and fun times, you’re being foolish beyond permission. While all of human history might not have consisted of “brutish, nasty and short” it probably did compared to how amazingly rich and blessed our lives have been even those of the poorest of us in America.

And before you go and beat yourself up that we allowed this wealth and peace to be wasted, don’t. The process started well before us, with the people who believed in social engineering and that humans could be changed to the “new men” and women and “perfect” by their definition of perfect.

They were in the end only the old eugenicists, whose pasttime of trying to breed perfect humans and eliminate the others had been interrupted by the bad taste a certain German madman left on the idea.

So instead they decided to try soft psychological engineering, and armed with a bunch of pseudo-scientific bullshit, they set forth to do it.

That’s where the problem was, with the engineering of economy and society to create something new upon the Earth, all because these *ssholes hated their neighbors and thought themselves superior and enlightened.

The violent wrenches thrown into civilization from the early twentieth century onward had to come acrashing, sooner or later. That it took this long is a mark of how hard working, how inventive we are. (Yeah, mostly — though not exclusively — Americans, because the future comes from America.) Despite leadership that was outright crazy for most of 100 years, most Americans Wrought and Prayed and went on.

The thing is: I don’t think it will crash to the point that we live even vaguely as bad as our renaissance, or even our 19th century ancestors. It might get as bad as the horrible wastelands of the mid twentieth century.

I think we can survive it. It will feel horrible. And the sense of this being done by crazy people, who have a distorted view of reality they are using to break everything is not happy making. BUT it’s survivable.

We’ll pray (those of us who do) and work, and sleep, and even have times of happiness amid the insane chaos.

Remember the history of the 20th century is not a good guide for anything, because it was being continuously influenced by the crazy work of the Marxists, who are now more or less powerless in real terms (though still causing crazy in macro terms.) and powerless in cultural terms. (It’s what’s driving them to try to destroy us.)

Mostly people go on.

But will we lose the Republic? I don’t think so. Maybe, perhaps, for a short time, but no more than it was lost under FDR or Woodrow Wilson (and probably less. Because now we’re aware of what they did, and it’s a “funny once.”)

Will it come back? Almost for sure. Ideas are very hard to kill, and America is, as well as a stubborn, self-selected people, an idea.

When will it come back?

I don’t know. One of the deformations of our current time is that we expect history to work in movie-time. It doesn’t.

Throughout the 20th century and much of the 21st we’ve been in a cold civil war with the Marxists, not just here, but all over the world.

Can we resolve the cold war without violence. I don’t know. Heck, I was never sure with the cold war with the USSR that it could resolve without fire and blood. And I’m not sure, now, it should have.

But it will resolve. One way or another, it will resolve.

And meanwhile, life goes on. And we are the people who keeps life going.

We must work a little everyday, as much as we can to the restoration of the republic, whether that’s by learning or passing the knowledge on. By thinking and reading or by teaching.

But the other work we do also counts towards that.

I was looking at a picture of “work” on Pixabay, and the first five pages were all about group work or someone sitting in front of the computer. We have been truly spoiled.

And okay, I have a bias to considering mind-work as less vital, which makes me feel like a useless leech. Hey, I know it’s not true, it’s one of those things you learn in early childhood.

But a lot of what goes on in companies is make work. If that’s your lot, do it as well as you can, and use the income to build. And if you have hobbies that make and build, do those too.

Get up, go about your life, and build, make and learn.

The republic will survive, one way or another, but our lot is such that we must live through the interesting times, and build and build towards the result we want, even if our contribution is a mere crumb.

This morning I got up and washed a lot of dishes by hand, having finally given up on the dishwasher until it can be replaced. (More time than money issue right now) Then I started writing this, but got interrupted by a friend who needed to talk. Now I’m finishing this, going to grab something to eat, finish a bit of unpacking. Put DST up for pre-order. Contract for two audio books. And work on BOR. TeamHoyt has delivered the list (“Your biggest fan is Anonymoose. He contributed like 100 times.) I’ll thank tonight, which means certificates in a couple of days (Different list, somewhat.)

Got up. Wrought. Yes, prayed too. Will go to bed exhausted, get up, pray and work. My work is mostly stories. If it weren’t for my work at insty, I’d stop reading politics, except a day on the weekend, as Heinlein did during WWII. But I can’t do that, so that happens in there too. So I can spread the word on things I think should be seen. But I also cook, clean, unpack, and make things. I’m planning to take up art again, and there’s these stuffed animals I want to make. (WHAT makes you think it’s bats? Okay, sure, some of them are bats. But there are dragons, too.)

The tumult goes by, and it might or might not grab one of us at some point. Have a plan. Have a plan for lack of food. (I like the cans that last 30 years. The kids can inherit them!) Have a plan for “need to unass in a hurry.” Have a plan for “this might be hard to repair in the future, let me get that instead.” And have a plan for when the Infernal Revenue Stasi comes for you too. But that’s a worse case scenario, and you might be okay, anyway.

Survival is composed of little plans, little fights, little survivals and little moments of triumph.

And just like the wheels came off little by little — even when everything seemed okay — during the 20th century, we can put the wheels on, little by little, with our work everyday. It’s not glamorous. G-d knows it’s not fun. And He knows too it’s not easy, when the world is catching fire all around us.

But we do what good we can. Sleep, wake, pray, work. No matter what chaos goes on, that’s how wars are ultimately won. And that’s how humans remain humans.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

And don’t let the crazy paralyze you.

Go work.

FIRST A BRIEF BUT NEEDED UPDATE FROM MANAGEMENT:

Well, I did tell you this fundraiser would be the “pardon our dust” year. What I never expected was for the difficulties to arise from that simplest of things: a shout out on my blog.

It’s not just that I’m nearly paralyzed with fear of outing someone who ends up fired because they sent me $10 — though that’s part of it. I remember being deep in the closet. I opened Instapundit one morning, and saw my name and my heart froze. Glenn and I were in various semi-secret groups together, and I thought he was quoting me, and the most lucrative contract I’d ever had (3 books at 17.5k each) would be cancelled.) Then I realized he was referencing my fiction. — it’s that the “shoutout” part wasn’t absolutely clear, and I didn’t have a designated email for “email me if you don’t want this.” Team Hoyt thought they had a list, but they’d forgotten to look through the bookpimping, the blog comments AND the letters with checks. So, that’s happening now. Next year there will be a “rewards” email, which we’re starting to send off the certificates this week, anyway.

Weirdly, the mass death and/or brief mention is not as hard. A lot of you are going to end up being AIs, ships or colonies in the Rhodes-verse. (Because some names aren’t suited to people names, without an excuse. Though some of you might be noms-de-communication and call signs. A couple of you might end up as cats in the uplifted cat world. Deal.) ALL the other stuff is proceeding apace if slowly — would you believe checks are still arriving at the mail box, at the rate of one a day or so? I guess expecting Huns to follow “time directions” was always a forlorn hope. It’s like herding cats. THANK YOU. Muh PEOPLEZ– though compiling and sending rewards to long term subscribers will take longer, particularly since I want to send you guys something special. (And probably insane, but… you met me, right? I want to make it worth your while.)

Anyway, it’s proceeding apace. Might be done this evening, though probably not because I was VERY bad yesterday, and instead of working decided to unpack my art/hobby room. Which, once it’s setup will be part of my taking a day off a week and doing non-word stuff. So Team Hoyt was left hanging in the dark with no direction.

ALSO D*MN your eyes, can’t you guys send me a note saying ‘use this or that name’ without a thank you note that makes me cry. My mom told me “iron women don’t have the luxury of crying’ and here you guys are going to make me rust or something! (Thank you. Even though I’m crying ugly, having been gathering all the notes, to make sure TeamHoyt gets the name list clean, and all of them made me cry again. I’m grateful for the donations but most of all I’m grateful for you guys.)

Other updates:

Yes, I should FINALLY send BOR to my editor this week. He might kill me, because it’s supposed to be out the 25th and we’re very late.

I’ve sent in the Barbarella script. And I’ve FINALLY sent in the short story for Lawdog’s Knights of Malta anthology. You see, normally I toss short stories out like I breathe, and doing a short story in a couple of hours is a thing. This one cost me 3 weeks, because it came out in disjointed paragraphs that made no sense. I assumed each of them was the beginning of the story, but actually the assemblage of five paragraphs that first came through were the last of the story. And none of it made sense. Which made me stop and to “The heck, actually?”
Until I finally — because a friend promised to read it before I sent it to lawdog, and tell me if it was written in Martian — sat down and typed it out in 3 hours (the last moving paragraphs/scenes around) and realized yeah, it’s a story. Probably THE weirdest I’ve ever written, but a story. So there’s that.

Darkship Thieves is ALMOST ready to go up, just working on things around the formating edges, in my copious spare time. (Now I’m going to put it on a week pre-order so I can tinker with the hard cover version, but I expect it might take longer to go live, since sometimes Amazon gets inky about re-pub rights, particularly for paper editions.)

ALSO I’m contracting for audio versions of both Other Rhodes and Deep Pink. (Yes, sequels will get written. I do know move and recovery and all have dragged on forever, seemingly, at least from this side of the screen. I have an idea it seems even slower from the other side, but believe it or not the ice is breaking, the floes loosening their grip and there is definite and consistent forward movement. Even if some days — like yesterday — I do play hooky.)

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 DOROTHY GRANT: Between Two Graves: Book 4 of Combined Operations

He swore he wouldn’t be back while his parents lived…

Now, almost thirty years later, AJ is going home.

Ordered to attend his mother’s funeral in the rugged northern border of the Empire, AJ is baring old wounds to his new wife, and burying familial feuds.

But the past won’t die that easily, and grave secrets will threaten all the survivors and the women they love. Because the Feds are after AJ’s unwanted inheritance…

And they’re willing to risk a war to get their hands on it.

FROM CLAYTON BARNETT: Goddess’ Crusade (American Imperium Trilogy Book 3)

With five legions at her disposal and her own enhanced, demi-human nervous system, Faustina Hartmann has nearly conquered all of what had been the Deep South. Work on the rail lines continues as well as the bridge over the Mississippi, to move badly needed uranium ore from Texas to Knoxville. There remain two holdouts: the former US Army base of Fort Benning and the city of Atlanta. Choosing to strike the military base first, Faustina is horrified to find it is controlled not only by another demi-human who can draw upon the power of a quantum supercomputer but that she is outnumbered in infantry and has no tanks to their brigade of armor. Pulling four of her five legions together, Faustina uses both her knowledge of history and her modified mind to devise a plan. Realizing she cannot do this alone, she reaches out to the Thinking Machines, knowing they will demand a severe price for their help. And, even if she wins, Atlanta lies to the north, where a house-to-house fight would break the back of her army. Marshaling her friends and allies, Faustina marches out, daring to put it all to the touch, to win or lose it all, in this concluding volume of the American Imperium trilogy.

FROM PAUL CLAYTON: Strange Worlds

HE’S DOING A FREE PROMO I THINK TOMORROW? (If I got it wrong, let me know. I’m wrestling octopi while doing this.)

In the future, the love of a young man’s life is dying. He would do almost anything to keep her alive…except that! In Dog Man, it turns out that Oscar the tomcat was just misunderstood — with deadly consequences… A love sick young man attempts to tap the power of an ancient religion to secure the affections of a girl on their class trip to Christland… The dead come briefly back to life every year when the astral dimensions align in Day, or Two, of The Dead. A cynical young ‘player’, adrift in the modern, amoral age meets God on a mountain top and his life is changed forever — but not in the way he’d ever imagined. Traditional sci-fi/fantasy and satire from the author of Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam. Clayton channels the spirits of Huxley, Orwell and Philip K. Dick in these and ten other intelligent, provocative and highly entertaining stories. WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING “Thank you for writing this. This is the sort of book I was hoping would begin to spring from the Indie world. No way would NYC Corporate Publishing ever allow something with this world view through.” “… I expected Strange Worlds to be about dystopias, supernatural monsters, zombies, and futuristic technologies, but now after reading this collection, I realize that the stories are about us.” “Clayton leads the modern reader through dark and dangerous territory, but the gems they will find there are worth the risk. Very few Indies would have had the courage to put their names to something like this.” “… while you are being taken away to a place and time which is… strange and… disturbing… the humanity of (most of) his characters will make you feel right at home; of course, you’ll want to leave a light on.”

BY WILIAM MORRISON WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Gears of Time (Annotated): The Pulp Science Fiction Bio Adventure

He was caught between those who moved too swiftly and those who moved too slowly, but time stood still when he met Medlana.

She was old enough to be his grandmother’s grandmother — but he loved her!

    This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving genre and historical context to the novel.

FROM FRANK J. FLEMING, THE AUDIOBOOK FOR: Superego: Betrayal

Terrorists. A ruthless criminal syndicate. A warmongering dictatorship. And those are just Rico’s allies.

With the civilized universe conquered, it’s up to the uncivilized to fight back. Rico prefers working alone, but this time, he’s leading an army against his two greatest enemies, who both have one thing in common: Rico’s own DNA.

Fighting a personal battle on a galactic scale, Rico enlists thieves, murderers, and malcontents (plus one space princess) to help him save the universe from tyranny.

And considering Rico’s new associates, it’s not a question of whether he’ll be betrayed, but when, and by whom.

FROM TOM VEAL: Clicks & Colluders

Hillary Clinton has won the 2016 Presidential election. That was no surprise to anyone. What was surprising was the margin: an Electoral College majority of just two votes. The key to the victory was, in the opinion of many, the late revelation of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

Madi Hewlett, fledgling reporter for an Internet service specializing in political news and gossip, is the lucky recipient of the inside story of how the Trump scandal was uncovered. Her source is impeccable, a Russian dissident with contacts deep within the Putin regime. Her story disclosing the details is a sensation, launching her journalistic career.

Or so she thinks. The events that she sets in motion veer in unexpected directions, threatening to end the Clinton Presidency before it begins and making her and her friends and her friends’ friends targets of the FBI.

Featuring an array of characters from the worlds of spycraft, social media, politics and private foundations, Clicks & Colluders tells a story that might almost have come true.

FROM DAVID COLLINS: Darkness and Claws: Starship Medusa book 2 (Space Ship Medusa)

In the first book, On Mars, Jason stumbled across the escape pod to a 3,500 year old derelict spacecraft.

The AI for the ship then informed Jason that due to him having some traces of alien DNA, he was now the Captain of a massive alien Starship. That ‘should’ have been good news. But bad news was was that Jasons DNA had a second trait, one that shouldn’t be there… The last time that someone had one of the forbidden DNA aspects, that was what caused the last war that left the ship a derelict.

Now, in the second book, with the ship finally with a a full crew, and outfitted with the most creative weapons that Earth had managed to come up with. They take off to their first interstellar destination, a Mauron shipyard, that turns out to be run more like a penal colony.

While their ship is in the repair bay, they get attacked by a state of the art Felinog battle ship. The Felinog were not counting on the unusual Earth weapons that had been added, and some very creative tactics.

Who are the Darkness? Who are the Claws? Where does Jason and his ship fit into their conflict?

What new secrets hides beneath the fake ship, on a world that shouldn’t be where it is?

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202208 Message in a Bottle

This is another collection of the last month worth of pamphlets I’ve published. Edited, polished, surrounded by news headlines I didn’t have any specific comment about but wanted to include. If we’re still around in another month or so, I’ll put the last few booklets together as a standard book as I’ve been publishing for years. If you’re one of my massive legions of fans, you know the drill. If you’re new, you can give me lots of money and find out. That’s a win-win, right?

But I’m still covering current events and analyzing whatever I can, I’ll continue doing that for as long as possible. I know I keep saying that we don’t have much time left but the world keeps getting worse and I only need to be right about this once time.

Either way, I’m still putting this out to anybody who can make good use of it. At this point, that’s about all we can do for each other. I hope you believe the same way, because there are far too many people who don’t, who ignore reality at all costs, who are destroying everything it took centuries to build just to prove they can.

We need inspiration, we need hope, we need a sign that there’s something more than what those creatures are foisting upon the world. Here’s my attempt.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202207 Fulcrum

Polished and collected, this is what I’ve been putting out for the last month. Current events, observations, thought on the world falling apart, just hoping I could get this done before it finally happens. We need to turn this around now or it’ll get much worse.

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: STANDING

So…. this time line. This wretched, depressing, aching time line… Or perhaps just this time, where we must confront the death of our ancestors illusions.

I’m not going to apologize for the Cassandra moment, yesterday. Yes, I know, Cassandra didn’t get half the kicking around she deserved. And yet I guarantee to you the worst thing of all was to watch folly unroll twice: the one she’d seen inside her head and then the one before her eyes.

It is a curse to be able to look ahead, and see the most likely path, and then not be able to stop people if that path is absolutely suicidal and stupid.

Having seen the left build the narrative to hide the coming theft, (and the staggering scale of that theft) I don’t know what to do. Nothing, I suppose, just like I could do nothing when I saw how stupid the lockdowns were.

(And don’t get me started on those of you who seem to think being ruled by decree by unelected persons is really better than throwing it to your representatives, even when the decree is nonsensical and made up out of whole cloth.

Did I die and wake up in the 11th century, or something? Yes, I know your representatives are idiots. And you think the perfumed, princely judges aren’t? What? they’re Good Men, made to rule? Give me a break. Think. No, this isn’t about that vote, but hearing libertarians defend ex nihilo decrees of unelected officials turns my stomach and makes me think this really is the stupidest timeline.

Yes, solid interpretations of law might stand, but bullshit that is even flimsier than Roe will eventually be overturned. And then what? Are you going to threaten to kill judges? Is that the idea?

Leave alone my beliefs on this. Or your beliefs on this. They are nothing to the matter. Look at what you’d prefer: a real and clear law, written by representatives you can toss out; or the drunken word-spinning of a toking judge granting you things because it’s what he likes?
I have often argued against things I believe right, because the process matters. And these days, taking processes out of the hands of those we can’t punish is EVERYTHING.
But perhaps I’m alone in this. May the yoke be light on your neck.)

This morning, the black dog isn’t tamed. But he is quieter.

I’ve always said that communism would have to die here. The virus came here, even as it destroyed its structures in other countries and took the host with it. Here it hid in our universities, our arts, our intellectual life. And we’ve been strong enough and rich enough to live with it, as a sort of chronic condition.

However, the only way to kill it is to see it. To have it break free of containment and try to kill us as it killed others. Only then can we target it, kill it, remove the malware from the human system for a while.

So it has to die here. And it’s not going to die peacefully. Oh, perhaps there will be no war as such — who knows? — but hunger teaches very sharp lessons nonetheless.

Already, whatever the left thinks, our trust in our system is gone. They didn’t need that barbed wire this time, but as they tighten the screws and more of the system collapses they will need it. And it won’t avail them.

Already people are ignoring them, or doing things to rub their faces in their own stupidity — busing illegal aliens to DC and NYC is a chef’s kiss of wonderful, let them choke on the shit they spew on the rest of us — and ignoring their decrees in myriad way. All their vaunted rulings come apart in their hands like rotted cloth.

Perhaps we have to experience the full measure of misery plus some. It is certain the elections won’t be cleaned up without it, nor the true bankruptcy of Marxist thought exposed.

Cults usually have to die out by having their prophecies disproved over and over and over again.

Yes, millions will die for the fantasies of the lords of internationalism. But the stench of corpses will wake up those that remain.

It is not what I wanted, but it is what it is, and humans — as is said of Americans — only do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.

Perhaps it has to get worse before it gets better.

I was vouchsafed, long before all of this started, a certainty the republic would survive this. That it would return and endure. Now, I don’t require you to believe that. I don’t believe it half the time (I really hate woo woo stuff.) And I don’t know if this will be in time, or in the future. But it doesn’t matter, does it? The Republic will survive. That’s all I really need to know. Whether it coincides with my mortal and limited life is immaterial. I believe in verities that stand eternal, and it is their survival and manifestation in this world that matter.

Meanwhile…. well, as grandma said… we’ll eat the bread the devil kneaded.

But even devil’s bread will keep you alive. It just makes you angry and bitter and determined.

Listen to Steve’s suggestions on what to do now, to try to clean up the vote. And if that doesn’t work, stand by to fight another day. Because some things are worth fighting for.

The truth is, there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering and pain, because like the fictional puppet masters, these people are too stupid to keep slaves.

It’s acquired stupidity, dinned into their skulls early and often, but it is stupidity.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Put a leash on that black dog. Take him for a walk. I’m going to clean up the list of names to thank, and then start assembling the collection of USAian stories. I’m also going to finish setting up DSR to reissue and work on BOR.

Life goes on. Life went on in bombed out Beirut, and it goes on for us.

We are fortunate to be in a country where the deaths — even if it takes five or ten or fifteen years to get rid of the Puppet Masters — of famine and deprivation are likely to be minimal. We are a feisty people, with resources. We’ll manage.

And we’ll learn.

The burnt hand teaches best. This one will need to burn to the bone, I think. But we’ll learn.

May the Author in his mercy not make us taste the full cup of evil, even if we deserve it.

Now leash that dog. Take it for a walk. And be as bright and productive as you can be. Only that will cushion the fall. And perhaps avoid some deaths. And get us ready to build again.

Me, I’m going to sling words. It’s all I’m good for. And sometimes it’s enough.