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I’ve said before that the only way I think we beat the civilization-killing mess we’re in is technology.  For one, tech in the last twenty years is the sort of tech that empowers the individual, from news to entertainment — the fields I know.
A commenter asked about nanotech — a field I don’t know — and M. Simon promised to write something about it. He did.

My only issue with it, is that I don’t recall saying that a financial crash can stop it — I think the financial crash that will stop all the new tech is so massive it will stop civilization too.  I’m hoping we don’t have that.  I’m very much hoping we don’t have that.  Sometimes I think it’s what the enemies of the future want, though.  They understand medieval.  It’s the future that scares them.

One other minor quibble is asking how much of this will come to a stop when (?) Lockheed Martin gets whacked by the fiscal cliff (that one seems fairly sure.)

This is what M. Simon has to say:

One thing holding back the use of nanotubes is that they are relatively expensive to make. Not a significant problem for computer chips, but if you want wires five times more conductive than copper, you are going to need kilograms and megatons of the material. Researchers at Rice University believe they have an answer to that problem. A Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University (just North of Chicago) believes he has a better answer. He has started a company, Nanointegris, to explore the possibilities. Right now, they are focusing on carbon nanotube inks. They have also branched out into graphene. That has great potential for replacing the conductive indium tin oxide coating on touch screens. Indium is kind of rare, so this development has great possibilities. And they have actual products for sale.

Well Sarah (and commenter), I hope that has answered your question about the near future of nanotechnology. I think we are in a short pause between Kondratieff Waves. In my opinion, the time between waves is getting shorter, so we will not have too long to wait before the next wave takes off. My estimation is that we will see macro economic results in five to ten years. An eternity if the present economic cycle is causing you a lot of suffering but in historical terms a fraction of an eye blink.

Go read the whole thing.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

The Weight Of The Crown

They’d no more hit the ground, running, than Nell realized she couldn’t run on home.  Even if she wanted to.  She had no idea where “home” was, or for that matter which home she should go to: Earth, which she still thought of as home, or Avalon, where, supposedly, she’d first come from?

The place where they landed – running – seemed to be made of black shiny stuff, like really polished glass, and they were running along a corridor made of the stuff.  It was hard not to slip, even in running shoes, and she worried that the less well designed footware of Avalon wouldn’t be up to it at all.

The air that pumped into her lungs felt so cold it singed them.  It was like walking in a snowstorm back in Colorado, the air icy and dry, and feeling like it burned its way down your nasal passages and made your chest hurt.

Nell tried to think – hard to do while running and hurting.  She remembered again that most things in fairyland were illusory and could be changed by the mind.  She tried to think of running elsewhere – on a meadowland path towards an open portal to Earth, for instance – but nothing happened.  She tried again, throwing her magic at it, and still nothing happened.

If she couldn’t dent this “reality” imposing itself on her and her friends, then she must be in the type of trap like the net.  And that meant… that meant they needed extraordinary magic to get out of it.  She wasn’t even sure that their running was taking them anywhere, or whether they were just running in place on a slippery, never-ending black-glass trap.

“I’m tired,” a voice said behind her, and she recognized Caroline’s voice.

“You shouldn’t be,” the voice of the young man with her.  “You shouldn’t be.  We gave you the magic potion that–.”

“I’m tired,” she said again.  “And I’m thirsty.”

And now Michael’s voice came, sounding exactly like Seraphim’s only younger, at that age when male voices haven’t fully acquired the depth of adulthood, “Lady, Miss, I don’t think my sister can go much further.”

Nell stopped and turned.  Behind her, she heard her companions stop.  She turned around to face them.  There was Caroline, and a young man holding her hand, and she looked like she was going to faint, while he looked full of concern.

Michael, on the other hand, just looked pale, and was panting a little as if from the long run.

For a moment, something in the young man to whom Caroline clung called Nell’s attention.  He looked like someone…  The resemblance formed in her mind, fixed in disbelief, and, finally horror.  Antoine.  He looked like Antoine.  But he … He couldn’t be…. And yet why not?  Had not Antoine come from Avalon?  Or from some other world that had connection to Avalon.

“Madam,” the young man said, and his voice too echoed the memory of Antoine in her mind.  “Milady, you see, my people gave Miss Ainsling a potion that should have prevented her feeling hunger, thirst or tiredness.  If she’s feeling that, wherever we are, then something is leeching the magic and virtue of the potion she took.  And nothing should be able to.  I think, lady, that this is a trap.”

“Your people?” Nell said, more perturbed than she wanted to admit by the young man’s resemblance to Antoine, even as she scanned the walls of the tunnel.  She could now see it was not a tunnel but a box.  There was more black glass at either end.  Had it always been there, or had they appeared when the little group had stopped growing?  And if it had always been there, how had they been kept running in place?

“My…  My name…  The Lord—” Something that sounded like an elf name.  “Whom you know as Gabriel Penn called you princess… are you?”

“I am told I am the princess of Avalon,” Nell said, miserably.  She didn’t want to be.  More than ever, now, she didn’t want to be.  Back on Earth, as a young woman, fantasy adventures had seemed so romantic and exciting, but now all she wanted was to go back to Earth, go back to her job as a code monkey, and live a life of complete and ordinary lack of adventure.

His eyes widened.  “My people,” he said.  “Have long been in search of you and… and of the real king of fairyland.  We’ve worked long and hard to bring it about.  My brother—”  he stopped for a moment, his voice gone watery, and Nell thought he had stopped to get his emotion under control before dissolving in tears.  “My brother died in that quest.  The prophecy said he would.  I will too probably.  The prophecy said if my father wanted to rescue both worlds he could do so, but it would cost him all his descendants.  No more would those of his blood run in the woodland glades of fairyland.”  The young man set his chin, all jutting angles, beneath a face still endowed with childhood softness and dark eyes swimming in tears.  “He still did it.  He still did what was right.”

And now the hair at the back of Nell’s head was trying to rise, and there was a feeling of dread, but she had to know, “Your brother’s name was… Antoine?”

The young man blinked at her.  “No, but he used that name when he went among men and didn’t want to be known for what he was.  His name was Anargyros.”

“But… he used Antoine?”  There was a distinct buzz in Nell’s ears.  Were the walls moving closer?  “When he went among… men?  What…”

“My sister, lady, do you have water?  Your highness?” Michael asked.

She got her backpack down and without thinking passed a bottle of water and crackers to Caroline, then one to Michael.  She continued staring at the Greek looking young man.  “Who are you?  What are you?  What was your brother?”

“My name is Akakios,” he said.  “And I’m a prince of centaurs, only heir to my father, now my brother is gone.”

She looked down at his very human, bare feet, on the floor, “Centaurs?”

“We can change shapes.”  He sounded tired.  “All centaurs are male.  All our mothers are human.  We don’t become centaurs till we’re five or six.  And we can change back, though it takes some effort.  Lady, the walls are closing in on us.”

“Yes, I think so too,” Nell thought, as in her mind the idea that Antoine had come to find her on Earth in service of some fairyland prophecy, that he’d, in fact, sacrificed his life to bring her back to Avalon put a whole other perspective on their involvement.  He might have lied to her, and he might have had things in mind he wouldn’t share, but he’d done what he’d done in service of an ideal and not because he wanted to seduce her.  And he might have even loved her for all she knew.

“It’s a magical box,” Michael said.  “We must get out of it.”

“Yes,” Akakios said.

“It will take your power, you know,” Michael said.  “Because it can’t be fully controlled, since your father didn’t swear fealty.”

“And hers,” Akakios said.  He looked at Nell.  “Yours, your highness.  You must use the power of your ancestors.  Your connection of Avalon.  You must be the one who forms the connection.  The… the true king told you to run along home.”

She didn’t have time to instruct them to do anything.  Their hands linked, and on one side Caroline’s cold hand, on the other Michael’s sweaty one to hold of hers.

In the middle, Nell fell all their powers given to her – trustingly given.  Michael’s power, and Caroline’s brilliant and dazzling power, and Akakios’ all odd shapes and yet reminiscent of Antoine’s.

“Now, lady, now.”

And Nell who’d been brought up to think that kings and queens and princesses were quaint things of the past, now tried to reach for what should be in her blood.  For kings and queens and princess’s long dead.

She felt as though a great weight rest on her.  People thought that power over people was… power.  That you could tell people what to do and they would.  True, a lot of politicians thought so too, but those weren’t the good politicians.

Public power wasn’t glamour and glitz, ball gowns and being worshipped.  Real kings, she felt, and yeah, princesses too, served.  They shouldered the burden because someone had to, and they used it to make sure the unthinkable didn’t happen to those who trusted in them.

She felt the imaginary crown like a band around her head, but she knew what she had to do.  Gathering all their magic, she thought about the palace in Avalon.  It was by rights her home.  They couldn’t keep it out.

The glass box shattered with a sound like a note of music so high it hurt the ears.  They were falling, hands still linked, from somewhere near the ceiling of a large room.  A large room with a tree growing in the middle of it, two dragons, and a confusion of people.

The splinters of the cage, falling ahead of them, managed to hit the floor where they stuck, vibrating, without actually hitting anyone.

And Nell fell in the middle of them, and just beside Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.

Right now and for the next five days, the Short story Sacrifice will be free on Amazon.

(There will also be goodies on Sunday, because it’s my birthday and I give away if I want to.)

Also Baen has my short story Angel In Flight (with Jarl aged about 19) free on its home page (page down.)  It is a Christmas story and profoundly transgressive, though it has an historical basis, in the sense that Christians have done this in the past and still do in certain areas of the world.

I’ve been thinking about this blog a lot.  I never wanted it to be a political blog. This is my personal blog, where I post whatever is crossing my mind at the moment.

I started it at my then agent’s instigation (has it really been that long ago?  And how the world has changed) because of course my books were getting close to zero distribution and I could fix this with a “platform.”  (This is one of the illusions the publishing world chases.  It works, kind of.  If say, like VDH what you write are non fiction historical books and your blog talks about parallels between ancient history and today, it works wonderfully.  It can also work if what you write is always set in a particular time period and you write about that time period exhaustively.  There is probably a low-probability world in which the Shakespeare series did well and I continued to write in that time period and my personal blog has gone completely after my personal obsession with all things Tudor… and that might help the books.  This of course presupposes I didn’t kill myself through having to write “literary” stuff, which I can do but depresses me unutterably if it’s the ONLY thing I do.)

Anyway, so my agent wanted me to have a platform, which in my mind was this little wooden soapbox onto which I could climb and start shouting at the crowds of indifferent passersby.  The other thing she pushed on me was Facebook which mostly serves to raise my blood pressure, unless I confine myself to cute cat pictures and aphorisms.  OTOH it provides a way for people who don’t have my email to contact me and that has been a boon.  But I’m at a loss for how it builds the er… platform.

The blog was actually not THIS blog, but the live journal one, and this was back when I was stealthing it: trying to pretend to be a rather standard liberal (and being shocked by how far to the left the other authors were, even from standard liberal) with the idea once I got big I could decloak.

What that meant was that I couldn’t post about anything I cared about.  Besides being an intensely political animal in the sense that I don’t trust the critters in power more than an inch out of my sight, and therefore follow politics obsessively, I’m, of course, an amateur historian, an observer of culture, and an American.  Since I couldn’t decloak all of these were verboten topics.

Heck, I couldn’t even post about what was going on with the kids, because this included my interface with the public schools, the daily deprogramming sessions “No, the US isn’t an aggressive bully.  Here what you need to look up”, the truly bizarre stuff that was built in to assignments like the assumption that race equals culture (and that one broke through and caused a month-long blog war).  I couldn’t even blog about my housewifely quirks (I don’t have many of them.  I don’t have time for many of them) like the really cool steam iron and the occasional attacks of crochet.  The times I tried I got slammed for being insufficiently liberated or something.

So the blog got updated once a month if that, and frankly I think only three people read it.

But the agent kept pushing about the platform, and finally I started this blog and made it a point of blogging everyday.

It is impossible to blog every day without dipping my toes into politics, or at least culture.  I tried to not have partisan politics here – and it’s amazing how many people who think they’re far left of center agree with my root statements, provided I don’t mention politics by name, which leads me to believe they think this is a soccer match and not a battle of ideas.

Still, I started getting some following, and the blog community that has grown here is very enjoyable.

But last week I had to decloak politically.  I had to do it because I think part of the reason we’re losing is that we’re keeping quiet and allowing the other side to define us.  (BTW I find it interesting one of the blogs that linked back to that post said it was of course superfluous for me to decloak since I won the Prometheus.  Apparently, they’re unaware that the Prometheus judges the book, not the writer, and has been won by any number of leftists.  Again, perhaps the base assumption is that all libertarians are left?  Or right?  I fail to get it.)

I am for the record a small l libertarian, who would like government out of people’s economic and social life.  Saving people’s souls is the business of religions.  Saving people from utter disaster is the job of charity.  When government gets confused with either of those it ends in tears.  Churches become branches of the government, and the government forces compulsive and bizarre charity (did you know there are provisions in Ocare impinging on “your lifestyle” including how you eat?  No?  Perhaps you should.  Considering the pyramid those idiots forced on us as one size fits all, I’d say we’re headed for choppy waters.)

Anyway, having decloaked politically, I found there was a series of politically pertinent posts I could/should make, because the times are perilous.  Having done it, too, I don’t intend to keep as strict a hold on my tongue from now on.  To be absolutely honest, we’re living in a target rich environment and speaking out about the things that drive me most insane might just keep me from having an embolism.

But my life is not politics.  My life is fiction writing with a good bit of reading, while trying to keep my husband’s life as smooth as possible, herding four cats and trying to get two young men a decent start in life in this very hard time for it.

A lot of what I customarily blog about here is writing – how to create universes, what bothers me about universes others create and trends in writing, etc.  I think from now on I’ll keep the highly technical how-to stuff for Mad Genius Club (and tell you when I post that there.)  Frankly, I think most of my regulars have endured those with a quirked eyebrow.

But I blog about other stuff too, as it relates to writing: the way writing shapes culture, and the way it’s been shaping culture without most people even being aware for the last thirty years; the way writing is changing, with indie displacing traditionals – the we’re escaping between their fingers like sand thing – and the way the elites seem ever more out of touch with the everyday person out here on the streets.

Thinking about that made me realize where this blog belongs and where it should head.  As I said in the post about how they can slow down the defeat, but unless they completely dismantle civilization hey can’t win (and I think this is part of their infatuation with the most obscurantist of religions, the fact that this religion has stopped progress very effectively in any place they took over.)

What is happening at the top level of everything from education to culture to politics to entertainment is a stunning, almost jaw-dropping disconnect to what is actually going on in these fields, at every other level and among common people.

It’s as if the future is being born but the people who fought hard to acquire power over the present time are trying to cross their legs and prevent it coming out.

It doesn’t work, and it makes things way more painful.  And there is room there for someone who has a tendency to seriously overthink things to highlight where that fight is taking place, and the horrible things that can result from trying, in vain, to hold on to a top-down manner of planning things when all our tech is now distributed and getting more so.

So, this won’t become a techy blog, or a political blog, but it will reflect – often on the way politics is out of touch with the tech and vice versa.  I am by nature someone who thinks across fields, and if there is something I can offer it is the distributed perspective of a non-specialist.

Of course, this will require I read even more of that stuff and make notes where I saw things, but that can be done.  It will take a little more time, which means I (sigh) might as well institute a subscription mode.  I’m noddling it and hopefully will come up with something next week supposing the flu lets up.  (It’s better today, thank you, though not completely gone.)

Mind you, there will still be – PARTICULARLY on weekends – occasional eruptions of cute cat pictures (well, I do have four cats) and odd, sometimes sideways thoughts about history and the primary causes of this or that.  It can’t be helped.  If I’ve been doing any hand work that doesn’t allow me to read – like gardening or carpentry or even ironing – the weirdest ideas come up in my mind…  There will also be the occasional rant.  Some stereotypes exist because they’re true.  When I get angry, the Latin Chick comes to the fore, or as my husband puts it, in the somewhat bewildered tone of a man descended mostly from New England patricians “You do get excitable, sweetie.”  So, rants will happen.  And there will be another episodic novel, though it might move to Saturdays, once Witchfinder is done.  It is – oddly – I think SF technically, but … well… It’s Starship Troopers meets Operation Chaos.  It’s still untitled, and it’s going to require I actually research a lot.  (Eep) Mostly about special forces.

If you’re okay with that, stick around.  My mind works at odd angles, but I try not to be boring.

And there is a lot of room to chronicle the birth of the future and everything that can go wrong along the way.

The Titanic is sinking and before the rescue boat in the shape of a future we can only barely glimpse arrives there’s going to be a long time where we’ll have to do the best we can and perhaps hunker down on the floating grand piano with a bottle of whiskey.

This blog will try to be the floating grand piano.  Here’s a blanket.  Shortly someone will pass the whiskey around.  It’s going to be a long night.  But I am determined we shall survive.

And since you don’t want to cross the Excitable Latin Chick, (trust me, even I don’t want to cross her, and she lives in my mind) you’ll do your best…

 

Last night I dreamed of a zombie story.  No, I’m not going to write it.  I don’t even read zombie stories.  In my entire writing career, I’ve written two zombie stories, one of them a Portuguese legend and another a really, really odd zombies in spaaaaaace story.

However, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out I have the flu.  My husband had it last week, and we’re a family that shares.  I understand for this year’s flu I actually have a mild case, but I’ve reached the stage where I know I’m not dead but wish I were.  My throat hurts, my head is stuffed with cotton wool and there’s something seriously wrong going on with my bronchial passages.

But enough about me and more about the dream.  You see, when I run even a mild fever, I have very weird dreams.  Normally they involve zombies.  Normally’re big-canvas apocalypse type dreams, including the one in which everyone became a zombie and I shot them all with daddy’s gun.  (Not one word, Charles.)

I guess this time my subconscious decided that apocalypse was coming too close to home.  So, instead I was this noir detective (I don’t know about you, guys, but I’m rarely myself in my dreams.  Yes, I’m sure that a psychiatrist would have a field day) trying to find a very unsavory guy who was suspected of bank robberies.  You know, the sort of critter who has a dozen crimes to his count, but you can’t make a single one stick.

I eventually traced him to the small house where he was born, and was received by a very nice older lady.  The house was spic and span and it was obvious this lady, in her eighties or so, cleaned and polished and gardened constantly.  And then…

Well, she was this guy’s mother.  She was his first crime.  He had murdered her.  She had got up right out of the grave and come back to clean and fix the house and had been there for fifty years, cleaning and fixing.  When he came there to seek refuge, she knifed him in his sleep.  She opened the door to show “me” his corpse on the bed and she said, in a bewildered voice, “He don’t get up.  He lie flat.”

Now, this comes around to where we are:

We are a week past the election.  They won by less than one percent.  I’m sick and tired of people (few in these comments) saying it’s all gone.  You see, it’s easy.  And they just want to lie flat.

This is actually what happens  anyway.  To an extent, after a while, we all lose some anger.  We lie flat.  Oh, not yet.  I don’t know about you, but I’m still boiling at what the media did, sweeping Benghazi under the rug and STILL ignoring the people suffering in the aftermath of Sandy, so they could elect an oikophobic president who, like them, believes that the US is the center of all evil in the world.  And I’m still scared about what this team that has no contact with reality at any point will do to our finances and our defense.

You can’t live forever in alt.  Of course you can’t.  And at any rate, you are the sons of Martha (Please eschew theological discussion) the ones who do things.  You have jobs, you’re raising kids, you have responsibilities.  Unlike OWS, you can’t just camp out in parks and poo on police cars.  (Not that any of you would, I’m sure.)

Several ways have been suggested to somewhat punish the left – who have no compunction in using these normally, even not (just) to punish us – and yesterday in the comments, predictably, it was pointed out they won’t do much.

It depends.  I think it will.  Look, I know somewhat more about how perilously close even bestseller authors are to the bone.  As for movies, I don’t know, they already sell mostly abroad – but there is the spirit of the thing, and we can make the thing a resounding bomb here, like Lions for Lambs or whatever the heck that was.

But more importantly, living in a certain way and doing certain things, will keep it in your mind, as you go back to everyday life, that not everything is normal.  Unlike Dave, I don’t think this gang is smart enough (or actually in touch with reality enough) to boil the frog slowly.  I think they’re going for broke.  There’s nasty stuff coming, and this will help you be prepared and not relaxed in your non-watching position.

The first part of it is, I’m sure, at this point, a necessity for most of us.  If you’re sure you’ll still have a job in the next year, you’re the exception.  If your savings haven’t been depleted for the last four years, you’re the exception.  If you’re not worried about how you’ll make it through the next four years, how you’ll keep a roof over your head, how you’ll keep the house heated as energy skyrockets, you’re the exception.

So there is the scheme the whisper-campaign calls mini-galt.  Most of us – most of me – can’t stop working.  Most of us, even if we had a little more padding five years ago, are now living paycheck  to paycheck.  Going galt is a dream we can’t indulge in when it comes to stopping work and starving the beast of taxes.

BUT we can starve the beast in another way.  Look, it’s only because we’re Americans that this is even a consideration.  A lot of people would say we’re nuts, spending money we shouldn’t on entertainment.

But I grew up with Heinlein who advised that when broke you should budget luxuries first.  Over two periods of being utterly broke as an adult, I found this was true.  If we didn’t do it, life got to feeling like an utter slog, and then we’d do stuff like buy a paperback and pay it back by eating pancakes for dinner for a week.

Besides, if you are a little less broke than that – and heck you’re so busy, I know – you probably go out to eat once or twice a month just because you can’t possibly be everywhere at once.  For me, this takes the form of stopping by Carl’s Junior for the special or something along those lines.

Well, in mini-galt you don’t do that.  To avoid the sudden need to pick up something, you cook double for some meals and freeze it, or you learn to love omelets.  (I’m doing both.)  And as for the “big fun” you just don’t do it.  In full disclosure, my family is going to have one glorious last fling to celebrate my 50^th and younger boy’s 18^th – but after that we’re not even driving to Denver unless there’s some reason like meeting a friend.  Gas is expensive.  Eating out is expensive.  Museums are expensive.  We’re sitting tight.

But Sarah, you said, didn’t you say that you needed to budget some fun or life becomes an endless slog?

Well, two things – first yeah, sure, but wait and see, the left will give us enough reason to buy-cott some entertainment.  For instance, they’re frothing at the mouth at Applebys for having said if Obama won it would have to lay off people.   Papa John’s pizza is having a similar problem.

Also, rediscover your friends.  If they live close enough by, go to each other’s house to eat.  It can be done.  And hey, you’re going to need each other when things go pear shaped.

And over it all, feel the warmth of the certainty that you’re starving the beast.  Yes, you’re also starving some businesses, but that can’t be helped, and anyway, they – like you – can’t hold on very long this way.  A crisis is preferable to the slow-boil.  Of course you’ll feel better if the businesses you normally patronize are leftist (ours are, because we live in a city.)

Doing this will save you money which you’ll need AND will help you not lie flat, even when your mind turns back to everyday business.

The other part of the mini galt, also come to me three times now in the whisper campaign, is the one people say “won’t do any good.”

Don’t bet on it.  It might very well even change the editorial trends (though I doubt it.)

Media and entertainment betrayed the nation big time this election.  What’s more they’ve crawled through the institutions for three generations to do it.  Yep, they even  turned down better people, because they wanted to promote like thinkers.  (No?  Then how come it’s wall to wall to the left of Lenin. Yes, I’ve heard the argument that the left are just NATURALLY better artists and more creative.  If you believe that, I have some swampland in FL you can have cheap. )

It’s time to take the same tactic to the extent we can.  Yes, yes, the right is not like the left.  It amused me yesterday to hear you guys extol Guy Gavriel Kay because I can’t read him.  Yes, he’s an excellent writer.  HOWEVER  I grew up under Marxism and I’m overly sensitive to their spin on history and their distortions.  Books go against the wall.  His did – I don’t even remember which.  Someone had given it to me for my birthday… sixteen years ago?

But we’re more tolerant.  Heck, even I am.  I love some author’s mysteries, despite their obvious politics.  Part of this is because we HAD to get used to reading the left and ignoring the nonsense.  They weren’t letting anything else through.

Now let that sink in for a minute: they weren’t letting anything else through.  So we bought what they wanted us to.

Think about it.  Doesn’t it make you mad?  Maybe it only makes those of us who were trying to break in at the same time mad.

However, it’s time to get mad.  Don’t lie flat.

Your budget is limited, anyway, right?  So, for those lefties’ books, movies, games?  Wait and buy them used.  You can still enjoy it, but you won’t be subsidizing them.

Will they feel it?  I think so.  As I said, I know a lot more about how tight things are there than you do.  Will it break them?  Well… it might make them a little poorer, a little more in contact with reality.  If some of them are stealthing (I guarantee about half of them are) they might even give up the masquerade even if they have to go indie.

Yes, I know you feel dirty doing that.  I do.  “They’re entitled to their opinion.”  — Of course they are.  But the publishing establishment has made sure their opinion is the only one you hear, and these people most of them are in a bubble and think they’re enlightening the benighted.

If they’re right and our money is negligible to their wealth, then they won’t feel it, but at least you’ll know you’re not contributing to the propagation of a unified front of lies.  And if they feel it, perhaps they’ll wake up.  Call it an alarm clock service.

Needless to say, you should also be preparing.  Maybe there won’t be a big crash, but I think we’re going to hit hard.  Or rather, we’re going to have multiple, localized crashes and  it will be both not as bad and way worse than you expect (I’ll blog on this tomorrow, when I’m less feverish.)  For now?

Don’t lie flat.

(I’m doing a different post over at Mad Genius Club.  One on comfort reads.  It will be up in half an hour or so.)

There is a huge inflection running through “conservative” thought.  Even if you define “conservative” as small government and therefore get rid of the distinctions between social conservatives and libertarians, law and order and minarchists, strong-defense and isolationists.

In fact, all these distinctions are meaningless in the face of the one big distinction.

What big distinction?  Well… How do you feel about the following William F. Buckley quote about National Review?

“It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

If you’re nodding your head, chances are you’re older than I, probably by ten years.  If you’re wrinkling your brow and going “say what?” chances are you’re younger than I by at least ten years.

These things are not written in stone.  Generations are permeable.  For instance the current president is my age, just about, but he is technically of my older son’s generation, the echo-boom – the child of boomers who imbibed the ideology of the sixties in their mother’s milk and regurgitate it unexamined.  My parents OTOH were born during WWII and were the youngest of their family and therefore technically belonged to the prior generation.

However, in general, conservatives of any stripe who came of age before the seventies have the built in assumption that history is against their beliefs and they’re doomed to eventually lose.   They react to this in many different ways.  A lot of what you call RINOs are in fact conservatives of this stripe.  They think that they’re doomed to lose anyway – or rather, don’t think, just feel it, since it’s at the back of all their political beliefs – and therefore doing a little trade on the way to make things easier seems wise.  There are other types, like VDH who mourn the failing of the light and believe it is their duty to chronicle our journey into the dark, to warn some future rekindling of civilization (even though it’s understood he thinks they too are pre-doomed.)  Then there are the ones, like the Vikings of old who stand and make them fight for every inch they take, even though knowing that in the end evil and darkness win.

All of these from the “go down easy” to the admirable warriors have more in common with each other than with me.  You see, they don’t believe we can win.

Me?  I’m neither naïve nor stupid.  Yes, I’ve read the same historical texts they have.  Yes, I know the danger is grave.  Yes, I’m fully aware that forces of darkness are closing in on all sides.  They’ve been closing in on all sides forever, and the dawn of the industrial age made it worse.

BUT how could I not believe we can win?  In my lifetime, I’ve seen communist countries fall.  Even if they reconstituted again in some form, we found out one thing: no communist dictatorship can continue unchanged or unsoftened for over seventy years.  How CAN they be the future if they can’t even feed their own people longer than that.   Even strong men in benighted Latin countries do better than the dictatorship of the proletariat to which the future was supposed to belong.

How can I not believe we can win, when I’ve seen the growth of the new media, challenging the sclerotic orthodoxy of the mass-production age?

How can I not believe we can win when almost all new tech is geared towards giving individuals greater freedom and greater tech?

How can I not believe we can win when it is the “progressives” who are fighting the future so hard they’re willing to take us back to the thirties and permanent stagnation to stop history?

Look – I know where the older conservatives got this idea.  Each generation was going to be larger than the last, creating a sort of tyranny of indoctrinated youth and a sort of permanent dependence on the welfare state.  On the international front, larger and larger states would face each other across nuclear arsenals.  The almost mass-producing of people would create soulless societies where everyone was taught to think/act/dress alike.

Like Marx they made the mistake of looking at a point in history and thinking this goes on forever.  It’s a human thing.  (Unlike Marx, at least they didn’t rub their hands with glee and view it as a way to enshrine envy and vengeance as virtues.)

But their assumptions were wrong: their population assumptions, their assumptions on the longevity of industrial totalitarian states, and yes, their assumptions on technology.

What’s more the assumptions on tech and on economics were wrong in a spectacular way.

So, those of us who came of age after the seventies, those of us who took to the net like a fish to water, those of us who live in the stream of information, who are happy warriors in the battle for the future, can’t avoid but think there is not only a good chance we win – but our victory is almost assured.  Almost.  They have one weapon that destroys us, though it destroys them too.

Let’s start with some basics – can’t cover them all.  Again, the rule of science fiction applies – from which you can extrapolate the rest.  Let’s take the fact that you can now live in Podunk Kansas, or Santa Maria, Brazil and work in New York City.  If you’re thinking that’s just convenient, you didn’t think things through.

The industrial nation-state depends on territorial control for its power.  Their power to tax you, force you, coerce you, censor you hinges on your living in their territory.  What is the good of giving incentives to one industry and taxing the other to oblivion if it just means that it changes “offices” on paper, while not moving a single piece of paper.

We’re not quite there yet, but as better automated manufacture (and 3-d printers) come on line, the productive class becomes a will-o’-the-wisp thing that they can’t pin down and tax to buy the favor and votes of the moocher class.

Their troubles are only starting.

Yes, I know right now, the main stream media still shaped the narrative.  Or did they?  Note that Obama’s vote records fell way more from 08 than those of the Republican.  Yeah, the hatred campaign worked… for now.

But over the next four years, how many more people acquire tablets and computers?  How many more turn off the news?

Look, guys, the left was infiltrated by communists in the thirties and since then they’ve been preparing their beautifully detailed snare.  It was easy in a way.  Keep out of media, education and entertainment anyone who doesn’t think as they do.  Anyone who isn’t one of the “good guys.”

It worked.  It worked wonderfully.  They knew it would.  It worked everywhere else, too.  The entire Western World speaks with a unified media voice somewhere to the left of Lenin.  They don’t care if the people tune them out, something still sticks.

Those of us who came of age before blogs, came of age to feeling like we were insane.  EVERYTHING and everyone from newspapers, to our teachers to our favorite novelists/film makers told us a centralized economy was better and to think otherwise was heresy.

Okay, so the fall of the USSR made us think all of those authorities were full of it.  But it was still hard.  Now?  Now you can find a million people who think like you with very little effort – more importantly, you can find views that accord with your ‘lying eyes’.

They are holding on to the old way of doing things.  They conquered it the hard way over three generations.  They don’t want to let go.

What would you do if you threw a long march through the institutions, and in the end you found the institutions irrelevant?

Look at the talk show hosts.  That’s flop sweat on their brow.  Look at the merger of Random Penguin, because, in the face of all evidence, bigger must be better, they must stop these pesky indie people, they must OVERCOME.  They were told come the revolution they won, and yet now their victory is running between their fingers like sand.

They don’t know what to do.  All they can scream about is “taxing the rich” and taking us back to the good ol’ class war days of the 1930s.  They’re hoping by collapsing the economy they stop the clock of progress and cut off our route of escape.

Can it work?

Sure it can.  For a time.  If they collapse the economy completely, if they take us back to pre-history, it might work for a few hundred years.  BUT if they continue the course they’re in and only semi-collapse it?

Uh uh.  No way guys.  Yeah they “win” for a few decades.  But even China can’t stop the internet, and China has a FAR more conformist culture than anywhere in the west, even Portugal.  If they collapse the economy, we have to find new ways of surviving.  Things we can make/trade/sell the leviathan can’t trace.  Ways to be like the companies and move around to where they can’t force us.  In other words, if they continue in this course, they’ll only accelerate the progress of the technologies that will defeat them.

Doesn’t mean it’s not important to fight them.  When I say a few decades it could be as many as seven decades of untold misery.  The human life is brief.  Seventy years wipes me out and pretty much everyone I care about in this world.  I’m fighting for the near future.  I’m fighting to avoid pain for my children and grandchildren.  I’m fighting to keep the lights blazing bright.

BUT make no mistake – in the end, one way or another, we win.  Things can get ugly.  We might lose a few cities.  Things can get a lot more painful than they should.

But in the end it is the progressives standing athwart history yelling “stop.”  And that thing bearing down on them?  It’s an express train.  It stops for no one.

(Oh, and I didn’t say, but it’s understood — I’d be relieved if you can credibly tell me none of these, and no combination of them are likely.  Of course, telling me “this won’t happen because socialism totally works and is teh-awesome” is not credible.)

America has never experienced a collapse – economic, order or sovereignty collapse.

The closest the US came to a collapse of the economy was the thirties, and compared to the rest of the world, as Grapes of Wrathy as it got here, it wasn’t that bad.  The closest one came to a collapse of order was the race riots, and even those one expects were more exaggerated by the media than anything else, and for many (even European) cities would be known as “Saturday Night.”

When I hear people talk about being hungry in a year or two, it doesn’t sound “right.”

On the other hand, we’ve never watched the collapse of a country as large as the US, a country that in many ways has made the other countries collapses in the last fifty years slow mo and practically painless.

There are three things to consider in collapse, no matter how the collapse is brought about, keeping in mind that economic is the one we’re headed to at speed.

Economic – an economic collapse can range from people losing all their retirement, all their wealth, and having to accept a diminished lifestyle (we’ve been in this for four years or so) to real collapse, which I understand Portugal experienced in the thirties (I only have my grandmother’s stories for this, but she claimed some families survived by boiling weeds from the side of the street for soup, when nothing else was available.  I don’t know if people actually died of hunger, or if it would have been recorded.  I know my mom grew up barefoot and gleaning both from fields after the harvest, and coal from the railroad side for cooking – heating is not an important consideration in most of Portugal.)

Order – I don’t think any of you have any idea how law abiding Americans are even compared to Europeans.  I know having grown up in a southern European country, I experienced the other extreme, but even the Northern European countries are less law abiding In The Absence Of Enforcement.  The most astonishing thing about the US when I came here as an exchange student was not how much wealthier than Portugal it was – though my jaw dropped when my host mother bought a small TV on a whim – but how people could put Christmas décor outside and NO ONE STOLE it.  And how houses had no real protective fences around them and no one destroyed the gardens.

Part of this is cultural.  The US is extreme and past Germany for this, but it is a northern-European cultural thing.  BUT part of this is that Americans have bought into their own laws… up till now.  If that changes (and it’s almost impossible it won’t if regulations keep getting piled) it will destroy the culture.  Things could get very Ugly.

Territorial Integrity – 9/11 was, other than Pearl Harbor to an extent, and attacks on our embassies, the first violation of territorial integrity.  Going along on this scale can be … bad.  Really bad.  And can exacerbate all the rest.

So, here is a scale of “fears” from the “best” to the worst case scenarios for the next four years.  I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, and I doubt ANY of these will work in exactly this way.  The thing we SF writers don’t tell you is that predicting the future is hard because – like other complex systems – there are too many variables going on to say “this will go this way for sure.”  We get away with it, when writing, by scaffolding vast portions of the world and letting you imagine whatever.

Again, I doubt any of this comes true this way.  Likely we’ll have a combination of all three, and all of it muffled under another scenario I won’t bother putting in, which is “Everything goes to h*ll but no one knows it, which looks kind of like now but worse.  AKA “p*ssing down your neck and telling you it’s raining.”  In which we don’t even KNOW everything that’s gone wrong, and things are masked by other things.)

So, here goes.

First step:

The New Normal

In many ways this is what has happened in Portugal since it pulled back from the madness of 78 and the still crazy times of 79.

It’s not exactly collapse.  Or rather, it’s collapse in such slow mo you don’t see it.  You just rearrange your mental furniture to where you expect next year to be worse than this.

As energy restrictions kick in – and please, those of you who are going to argue, google the video of the president saying under his plan “energy costs will necessarily skyrocket” and that he will bankrupt coal plants. – because the privileged children running the administration think energy is used only to run cars and planes for the sort of pleasure jaunts they undertake, they’re baffled by the side effect of EVERYTHING becoming more expensive.  Greed is blamed.  The excuse is growing prosperity and competition from the rest of the world, too.  “Everyone is becoming richer, because we’re a little poorer” will be the thought.

It’s stupid economics, but a lot a people will buy it.  This will be wrapped in declinism and in how the US has had its turn, but now…

It will be used to bring a lot of UN law and regulations over here.

Meanwhile new taxes will decimate the middle class, till we ALL can’t survive without some form of assistance.

We get attacked, but primarily abroad, and it feeds into the declinism, and into our pulling in.

As for order in our territory, it will be viewed as oppressive.  After all, people are hurting, it’s no wonder that there’s more crime.

This scenario is the most likely.  It’s also bad enough.  Look, under this scenario, people get to believe that they need the government and that there’s no salvation without “help” – it’s the “you didn’t build that” scenario.

It doesn’t look so bad from here, but twenty years down the road, the same people are still being voted in because at least they care, and the downfall is not their fault, it’s currents of history, and we’ve had our turn, now it’s someone else’s, etc.  It will all be sold in the name of fairness, and with the media spinning, those who feel bad about their living conditions will feel guilty of protesting.  After all, would you want the Indians or Chinese to be poorer so you can live high off the Hog, you greedy capitalist pig?

The fact that it’s nonsense, doesn’t mean it won’t be believed.

Twenty years from now, it means what I’ve seen in Portugal at my last visit.  MOST young people are unemployed, still living at home.  Making drugs legal at this point means most of them are also addicted to something.  The only people doing well work for the government at some level.  There are massive public building projects but the private homes are falling apart.  And even in the good neighborhoods you have to have strong fences, alarms, etc, and no one is safe.  Instinctively, people know the law doesn’t make sense, and therefore there’s a lot more crime.  Also, of course, young people have nothing better to do.

This scenario we lose our liberty on the installment plan, each pathology caused by statism papered over with declinism and “it’s their turn.”  I think this is the scenario we’re being eased towards, and whether they manage to do it or not, I don’t know.  They’ve managed this in most of Western Europe.

(BTW in most of Western Europe, the new aristocracy is descended from the old.  All the sons and daughters of “good families” became communists.  This is because if you look at the end scenario of this – maybe thirty years from now – you see these people as the hereditary bureaucratic rulers of a sort of post-industrial feudalism, managing the herds of semi-literate peasants with media and just enough food and clothing to keep – some of them – alive, but not enough to allow them to get ideas and revolt.  We could call this “they think 1984 is an instruction manual”  Brave New World too.)

There is one big difference, here, though.   Europe has managed this soft declinism because we remained the world’s police, the world’s consumer and the world’s parachute, providing aid in massive amounts all over the world.

We don’t have an America to do that for us.  (Though we’re trying by buying our own treasuries.)

So we come to scenario two, which is I think somewhat likely:

Sudden Death

This is quite possible, but if it happens it will be SO sudden I don’t know how to give you signs to watch for.

Things ratchet up until normal American families know what hunger is.  Say nineteen thirties level.  This is combined (and this is quite likely) with random interruptions of electricity, besides its being unholy expensive.

It’s the “let the bastards starve in the dark” scenario.  People can’t afford to drive to work, even if there were work to drive to.

And suddenly the government checks stop.

I think to get there, you need to have our inflation so high that government checks count for very little anyway.

Under this scenario, what I call the “glossy bastards” of the media lose their power.  When you’re rationing your electricity because you can only afford so much, you’re not going to spend the day in front of your TV.

In this case we break in pieces.  Literally.  There are food crisis, and how your local area goes depends on who is in your area.  The government has no way of maintaining order except using force, and that won’t go over well many places.

Is this likely?  I don’t know.  I’d have told you no, but the small arms thing with the UN which the administration initiated the day after the election leads me to believe THEY find it likely.

Under these circumstances, anything can follow and my fear is that if order is restored (a big if) what will follow is probably what most lefties fear.  A “law and order social conservative” regime.  Aka, kind of the anthetisis of my ideas.  The economy will be regulated, but so will social life.

I can pass under this sort of regime.  I can actually write wholesome, clean books – as some of you know – and I am technically a married housewife.  I just think we’ll lose something vital about America and are likely to stagnate.

OTOH even with economic authoritarianism, let me tell you at least in this scenario, most of us would eat regularly and there would be order on the streets.  Think Starship Troopers.

That sort of reassembly is unlikely, though, and would only come about if the American Army goes rogue and decides to establish law and order in defiance of the  bureaucratic class.  I find this unlikely almost in the extreme.

More likely would be a breakup of the US, with some portions thriving as medium size countries and others becoming Detroit.

Unfortunately though, even though adventurism abroad was started by the “progressives” we now have enough of an history of it that other countries view us as “the foe to defeat” even when we have nothing to do with their particular problem.  We’re viewed as the king that must be struck down before the rest of the world can be conquered.  Which brings us to scenario three:

Fire From Heaven

Either under scenario one or two, at some point we’re perceived as weak.

Look, like most of you I don’t like adventurism abroad.  However, if you think that we can disarm and then no one will attack us, you’re living in dream world and I suggest you do this: go into a bad neighborhood, wearing expensive clothes and carrying an Ipad, with a sign on you that says “I’m not armed and I’m a pacifist.”  When you recover, get back to me about how well that worked.

And don’t tell me, “But Sarah, under these scenarios we won’t be that wealthy” – that’s nice, dear.  We’re still 40 years behind Europe on this path, and even though we’re overachievers and can get to ruin faster, we won’t be PAST them for ten years, unless scenario 2 ensues FAST.  Also America is no longer itself but its legend.  “Everyone knows” Americans are wealthy.  Also as America collapses, the rest of the world will get unimaginably worse – trust me.  My dad says “when America sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia” and I can tell you that’s true – and will inevitably blame us.  They’ll blame us for not protecting them from themselves, and they’ll blame us for “stealing” from them in some nebulous way they can’t define.

And the Arab world (most likely) will sense fear.  It doesn’t matter if you say “it’s not fear.  We’re dealing with our own stuff and ignoring them.”  They’ll sense fear.

Under this scenario we lose one or two cities to a nuke.  At a guess LA and NYC.  And then all hell breaks lose and I can’t tell you what happens next.  I don’t think we’re so far gone we just sit and take it, no matter what our leaders think.  BUT after that, literally, the world is mad.

Japan, South Korea and Israel will probably be casualties of the conflagration, but so will Europe.  (I wonder if Russia still has printed street signs in Russian directing troops all the way to Lisbon.)

When this is done, those of us who survive will face a world none of us wants to imagine.

I consider this the least likely scenario, but perhaps I shouldn’t.  I now realize that my depression since Benghazi comes from seeing the beginnings of this.

The people in power will never see it coming.  They’ve been steeped in Marxism, where the only reason people would attack the US is because they’re afraid of us.  (Shakes head.)  I learned this cr*p too, but I refuse to believe it over my lying eyes.

************************************************

And there you have it.  The steps of our fears.  The most likely is still scenario one.  We don’t have anyone to cushion us, but we’ve been wealthy so long there’s an astonishing amount of ruin in this nation, and it might be enough to cushion us down.

Note in all three of them I see a severe threat to who we are.

I was talking to Stephen Green the other day and he pointed out that the French (the English too, but less so) have been a monarchy, a republic, an empire, and now are a republic again but they are still French.  And that’s fine for them.  The French are a nation of land and blood.

But, as he pointed out, we’re only a nation of belief, proclaimed in the declaration of Independence, enshrined in the constitution.

It was those two documents that made us what we are, and not as our poor youth has been told, greed or theft.

If we lose that, who are we?  Where has America gone?  And can we get it back?

I don’t know.  I’d rather not lose it.  And that starts with figuring out what we can do to prevent ALL of these scenarios.  Detroit-America which is where scenario 1 ends might be better than “nuclear radioactive America” but it is nowhere we want to live.

So… What do we do, and where do we start.  Roll up your sleeves.  Let’s talk.

If I say “I’m not a particularly political person” in front of my husband and kids, they’ll probably laugh so hard that they’ll break something.  And yet it’s true.

I’m not a particularly political person, though I am aware of and anxious about politics, because seeing a country slide into ever more leftist and dysfunctional regimes while the media covers up the results and attributes them to “bad luck” is one of those things one only cares to do once per life time.  So I have an obsession with the news (and these days blogs) and sometimes I can only work in front of the TV, if things are particularly iffy (the three months after 9/11.)

I’m not a particularly political person because I don’t think there is a one-size fits all political solution for every land.  I believe, by and large the United States constitution is the best way ever come up with to organize government and the people, but I’m not saying improvements couldn’t be suggested that would enhance individual liberty and keep government in check.  I’m rather enamored of Heinlein’s idea of having a chamber JUST to repeal laws and prune the hydra-like growth of over regulation.

I’m also not going to say that in a different world, with different technology/setup a better system couldn’t be created.

Unlike the collectivists, I don’t have this dream that human nature will suddenly change.  So the only things I truly believe in is that individuals know what is better for them better than the government, and that individuals should be allowed to spend their wealth in the way they see fit, which is likely to accrue greater benefit to society than having the government take it and spend it in the way the government sees fit.  Studies about the buying of gifts, and studies of how one spends one’s own as opposed to “found” money (like lottery wins) would seem to confirm this in spades.

So in almost all circumstances, I pick the ticket/candidate who will have a possibility of being closer to the founding principles, fully cognizant half the time the choice is between bad and worse, and also fully cognizant of the fact that there are circumstances in which greater individual autonomy has to be sacrificed to third party control, such as during war (but not the “moral equivalent of war” which gets tricky.)

Because I’m not devoted to a universal solution to the human condition, and because furthermore, the idea of being recruited to preside over the implementation of any regime gives me the cold grue (Terry Pratchett about nailed it when he said “it would be like cleaning other people’s rooms for them”.  Apparently I’m not normal, or perhaps I’m normal to half the breed but not the other half, because there seems to be a lot of people who would do anything for power.  I’ve often wondered what kind of broken is in them that they feel the need to control others as if that were the only way they’d be safe.  Marx, btw, who “reads” Asperger’s, completely failed to take that impulse into account.) I feel zero compulsion to write characters that follow this or that ideology, spout this or that solution to mankind’s problems, and/or write about the paradise to come under enlightened rulers.

But Sarah, you’ll say – Darkships!  And, possibly more when you read it A Few Good Men!

Well, science fiction, by its nature, pulls into the writers’ understanding of both people’s motives and historical facts.  And that means that it will read “political” to many people, though really I’m just world building and playing with my characters’ circumstances.

As Heinlein once said – I think, though this is a wild paraphrase – I’d be very disappointed if any of my readers just reads the book and agrees with everything in it.  The goal is always to make you think.

Which is not to say I don’t think individual will is more moral than control by the state, or that the right to own property individually doesn’t, ultimately, redound to greater wealth than all the collectivist dreams – but that’s because I’ve read both history and economics, and I’ve lived through a good chunk of it, in a small country whose revolution was about as well understood by the American media as the current “Arab Spring.”  (Sometimes there just isn’t a side to cheer for, something progressives fail to get because they think history is sentient and has favorites.)

Anyway – while you might find politics (MY politics) – in my science fiction, you’d have a really hard time figuring out who I was voting for in almost any election based on that.  Because that’s not the point of the books.

And my other books are virtually apolitical.  Except, of course, for my understanding of human nature.  I realized, for instance, that Tom and Kyrie do fit the model of industrious small businessmen, and do not reach for government handouts which in the era of “you didn’t build that” might strike inquisitors determined to ferret heresy as contentious.  However, since my mother built and ran a business while I was growing up, it is just what I saw happening.

So I’ve always stayed away from speaking of politics in this blog – reserving anything I felt a need to say for PJM or Classical Values.

Part of this was mere prudence.  Until recently if Baen dropped me, I’d be in a position of never working again (and now I’m not sure if I’ll be able to live exclusively from indie, but that’s something else.  Sometimes you do what you must do.)  The other part is that I like people.  I like most of my colleagues, respect a good number of them, and only laugh at their politics because crying would make my mascara run.

Most of my colleagues are good people, see, and good people believe what they were told in school, and what they’re told by the “real” media, and…  And didn’t have eye-opening experiences like reading Time magazine completely misreport an event they’d been present at to present a “triumphant democracy” slant on something that was a communist takeover.

I can’t fault them for that.  I’d give my right arm and all its typing fingers not to have gone through/seen what I did before 18.  The desire to believe the mainstream narrative is correct is so great, and the fear I’m crazy for not believing it even though I was there so strong that even now, thirty years later, I’m likely to cry with relief when I come across an American who KNOWS — because he was there, or because he worked in some position that made him have to know – my recollection and not the collective myth is true.

So I understand my colleagues, and still like them despite the fact much of what they favor would destroy the country and my life and the life of those I love.  They don’t know that, see – and at heart they’re good people.  So, I don’t want to pick fights.

When they post stunningly ignorant, smug little posters with gloating type slogans that they think “prove” everything, I just unsubscribe from their updates.  And I go on.

Oh, there is another reason.  I don’t care what my favorite writers believe, so long as the story grips me.  Pratchett’s ideas on fiat currency make me want to dent a wall with my forehead.  It doesn’t mean he isn’t a god among writers or that I don’t love the other parts of the book.

The exception is when I’m reading some book where the author brings the action to a screeching halt and goes into current politics (for when the book was written) by name.  I’m likely to feel that way about both sides, mind.  I don’t want to be reading a mystery and suddenly fall headlong into a rant about Clinton, any more than I want to fall headlong into a hate screed about Reagan.  What makes it worse, though, is that often these go on the “preferred narrative of the left” such as that Reagan was going to bankrupt us AND get us in a war.  I’m reading this thirty years later and my ability to believe anything this author tells me, including but not limited to that the sky is blue in her world just went out the window.  Which, you see, is a problem.

However I’m aware that a lot of readers – usually hard, loony left – vet on beliefs of the AUTHOR and not the book, and that the hard loony left, with their incessant screeching have a way of cowing the soft left and even a lot of the center into place and convincing them NEVER to read someone because they’re “sexist/racist/homophobic.”  I’ve watched them do this to Heinlein, possibly one of the least racist/sexist/homophobic writers of his generation and it wasn’t worth my dime to have them do that to me.  I figured they were never going to love me, but they also wouldn’t find enough energy to hate me, provided I didn’t talk about politics openly outside books.

And that’s where we’ve been for the last few years, though I started talking more about my beliefs in the last year, with the possibility of indie.

Except…

Except when people like me stay quiet, when for our self-interest and because the loony left are vindictive harpies (particularly the men) as fond of free speech as your average brown shirt, we allow the other side to define us.  As we saw in that stunningly clueless comment yesterday, they’ll decide it’s all race, or that we want to control their ladyparts, because that’s the screams from the other side, who would much rather you don’t look at their record, or, OMG Benghazi.

We don’t say “I’m voting for so and so, not because he’s ideal but because our debt is so massive that otherwise we’re going to have a collapsed economy (I probably SHOULD write about living in a collapsed economy.  Most of what you guys envision is far direr than what it is – OTOH the fragmentation happens in interesting ways and with a country this  much bigger, it could be MORE lethal in spots.) and a health care system that won’t work at all, which kind of affects me/mine and can’t be allowed.”

That means they get to decide we hate gay people, or black people, or that we’re all textual Christian fundamentalists or that…

Among the regular readers of this blog, I know several agnostic, a few atheists, at least one Buddhist (hi sweetie!), an adherent to an offbeat Muslim sect (or perhaps it’s not considered Muslim.  The Muslims hate it, at any rate), at least a handful of pagans of various descriptions, and yes, a contingent of Jews and Christians, some of whom even belong to defined sects within their religion (but not all.)  Yeah, I also have at least one very devout Christian fundamentalist (hi sweetie!)

I have no idea what shades y’all are, but when I was growing up and spent a lot of time outside, and when afro perms were in fashion, shop keepers in Portugal – much more so than here – called me “the young lady of color.”  My older son looks like a younger Marco Rubio.  My younger son, OTOH could blend into any IDF unit unremarked, save perhaps for being a bit darker than any of them.  (Right now he’s growing a beard and a ridiculous moustache, and could also blend into any foreign legion posts as a French assassin – ah, mon dieu.)  I’m going to assume the rest of you are just as varied.  If you aren’t it doesn’t matter either.  Who the heck cares what something that’s literally skin deep does when we’re all related several ways.  (We’ve reasons to believe that at various times the human population was reduced to a few thousand, if not a few hundred.  So you and you and you and you are all my cousins, whatever color you are.)

Because I’m not a joiner, and because I know devotees of small government and individual rights come in all sizes, genders and shapes, it never occurred to me that fear of us would be enough to stampede people to vote for the most stunningly incompetent administration this country has ever known, one that, furthermore, displays open contempt for the people they are supposed to lead and which, in the end, believes the lie that if only America is made small the rest of the world will get better.  (I wish the people who believe this lie got the panicked phone calls I got from people all over the world who know better.)

Because I wanted people to not be able to demonize me and my books, I didn’t talk about how much these ideas are wrong – historically – and how demonizing “old white males” is exactly the same as demonizing anyone else.  I didn’t – not on this blog – point out that the people who think state power is always a good and the instrument of all improvement and who, themselves, crave power over others, have found it effective to paint anyone who opposes them into this dreaded, stereotypical “Other.”  Or how this was a total misrepresentation of our ragtag and diverse band of freedom-lovers.  I didn’t denounce it as the only, last thing they had.

Would my having done all that stuff do any good?  I don’t know.  It is possible the indoctrination has been so successful their ears and eyes shut down and, like the creature yesterday, they actually assume I’m an old white male (!)  Would I get more by simply embedding my beliefs in my books?  I don’t know.  I’ve found these people also not only do not read the “banned” books, but they don’t read outside the “approved” list that they’ve been told are so “good.”  So I don’t think I can reach most of them anyway.  I might have been able to reach the mushy left or the middle.  Maybe.  If there were time.

I don’t think there is time.  Because they believed the “othering” of conservatives (and calling us conservatives is hilarious, since most of us are so far out of power it’s not even funny, and want to change society as it is now completely – and before the ladyparts kick in – towards greater freedom of individual action) they voted for the hardest financial landing a country ever had.  This would be true even if the administration weren’t doubling down on stupid with things like carbon taxes (an unproven solution to a nebulous problem, but guaranteed to destroy whatever industry remains in the continental US, at this time.) On top of that, while I’ve lived through a slo-mo financial collapse before, it was in a country that was getting so much money from the IMF we could all have landed on it from the top of mount Everest and survived.  There is no cushion for the US.  We ARE the cushion.

But people voted for this because they didn’t want to align themselves with racist/sexist/homophobes, like all my gay conservative friends, like the black family who was working phones for Romney alongside the rest of us, like the Philippine lady at the Romney rally crying hysterically and saying that the other guy couldn’t win, because he’s going to destroy us all.  Like ALL the women who gave their all to prevent this, because they don’t want their children and grandchildren to live in indentured servitude to the government.  (No?  What do you call it when someone is forced to perform actions/provide services because the government tells them to, and won’t let them leave?  Do you even know that under this administration, if you have unpaid student loans you can’t leave the country?  No, not even if that’s your only chance to find a job and pay the loans.  What would you call that? You’ve become a serf, attached to the land. You didn’t know?  Why not?)

And so, whatever it costs my career, it’s time to come out.  I think it’s time for all of you to come out too, wherever you are, though honestly, I wouldn’t presume to judge your circumstances better than you.  Like my gay friends who never judge someone who chooses to continue closeted, I don’t presume to know what’s best for you.

However, everyone sending me “kind” missives on how they’re going to never read me again, because they always suspected I’m racist/sexist/homophobic but now that I’ve said it I’m despicable, and I’ve hurt them, can stop.  What you’re experiencing is neither hurt nor my despicableness.  It’s the cognitive dissonance of KNOWING I’m neither racist/sexist/homophobic nor – amazingly – a Marxist.  You can’t reconcile those two, and so you want me to make it go away and shut up.  That’s understandable, but no.  As a country we have (economically) come to the end of cake and as a person I have come to the end of patience with those who would enslave others and ruin the last, best thing on Earth to make themselves feel good.

If that means I lose readers, so be it.  And you can’t cow me into shutting up by telling me I’m losing readers – guys, we’ve gone well beyond that point.  When a mad woman is running around soaking the bridges with gasoline before setting them on fire, she’s just going to laugh at you when you tell her she’ll now have to swim across.  She knows.  She thinks it’s more important to keep the armies of ruin, starvation and statism from marching  in and despoiling her home.

And this is me laughing at you.  And your pious little missives (only one of you, btw, is a recognized reader/fan) only make me angrier, and you won’t like me when I’m angry.  Chiding me on not understanding the current trend won’t save you either – I’ve seen this before.  THESE EXACT POLICIES.  (Okay, so they haven’t sent our Port Wine to Russia.  That’s because we don’t have Port Wine – no, California doesn’t qualify – and Russia probably wouldn’t want it) and I know for a fact where they lead.  Except here we seem to be trying them harder and faster and whatever your college professor told you, it wasn’t a matter of implementation and it won’t be different this time.

Does this mean this blog will now be forever and all the time politics?  Partisan politics yet?

Most of the time it won’t be partisan politics at all.  Usually I don’t even vote for any party, but against the other side.  But sometimes I might feel the need to remind people who think they’re “on the side of history” that history has ONLY one side and what she whispers is always “die.”  Most people of historical significance are dead.  That’s it.  History is not sentient and did not anoint your side, and those who believe in that have fallen for a dead economist’s understanding of history as a machine and of economics as a set of gears.  Marx is dead.  His ideas will never be sufficiently so.

However, I’m not a politician.  I’m a writer.  I’m also an historian, a reader and a mother.  More often my blogs will revolve around those, particularly the writing because it’s an all-consuming passion, but sometimes about some fun discovery and occasionally about a good book or something the kids have done.

If you’re okay with that, stick around.  If you’re not – that’s fine.  But you don’t get to go all concerney and tell me to fall in line.

I know where you’re coming from.  If you weren’t trying to impose your wrongheaded delusions on me, I’d even sympathize.  But if you think you explain me away by projecting on me all those things they told you “conservatives” are, you have no idea who I am or where I’m coming from.

If you’re a thinking human being, you’ll stick around and try to figure it out.  Or you can run away, with your hands over your ears, back to your safe corner, away from the cognitive dissonance.

Your choice and frankly right now I don’t care which you choose.  What I care about is figuring a way to keep me and mine safe through that big crash to come – mine being defined as those who will listen.

You see, individual rights was NEVER about not caring for the weaker.  It is the weaker who are going to be hit bad in this.  They’re probably going to go hungry, cold, and ill.  BUT worse than that and even if they escape that, their children are not going to be able to start life in any way that leads to independence and prosperity.

I care about finding a way to avoid one or two lost generations.  I care about avoiding the world of Friday where the only safe place is in an enclave.  I care about my fellow man.  Far more than any pretty theories.

And if no one buys my books anymore because of this, fine.  There’s underpasses and free wifi at the library.

So when I need to speak out, I shall do so.  You don’t like it?  There’s your hands over your ears and your comfy corner.  You should be okay there.

Until the precipice.

And my friend Larry Correia is experiencing similar concern.  Isn’t it precious?

Setting bridges on fire, now a family affair.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

First, let me explain that right now my reading is full of French Revolution, for the second book of The Earth Revolution: Through Fire. Second that I have a cousin who was raised in France.  His parents came back briefly to see if they could establish themselves in Portugal when I was nine and he was three.  (It was a forlorn hope, and they went back and only came back to Portugal when he was in his twenties.  Fortunately for them he married a Portuguese woman and so they have the family nearby.)

Anyway, for that year, while his parents went back and forth to France to do legal stuff, he lived with us almost full time.  Among his accomplishments at three was the ability to sing the full La Marseillese.  The song impressed me immensely with its opening “Allons Enfants de la Patrie.”

The verse translated as “Arise” (or less grandiloquently) “Come on” “Children of the Fatherland.”

Of course, in English it has a very off-putting sound and for Americans it makes no sense at all.  This land is not our fatherland.  It might have molded our people, starting with showing the Pilgrims that if you don’t work you’ll die, but it’s not been the place where our DNA culled, filtered and mixed for thousands of years.

Anyway, this all came to me while reading Roger L. Simon’s rather dispirited article after the election, where he more or less says it’s all done, we’re no longer a center-right country.

As much as I like Roger, I’ll beg to disagree.  Even if that were true, we wouldn’t be a center-right country by less than one percentage point.  And if after more than fifty years of school indoctrination, media control, entertainment filtering, the left has only that advantage, it means at the very least that we’re a people with a hard head and that most of us find the way out of the plantation sooner or later.  This is confirmed by the fact that what gave the victory to Obama was the legions of (unemployed) under thirty years old.  These are people who, like him, are ignorant of business and the facts of life (I don’t mean sex.  That they know as much as previous generations, though they think they invented it.)  To him his rhetoric, the cooked unemployment numbers, the whole nonsense of needing more time because it was so bad makes sense.  They haven’t broken out of indoctrination yet.  And a lot of them want to be part of what they perceive as the “cool kids” (which at that age inevitably is the ones that curse more, have tattoos and have no visible means of sustenance.)  Most of them will grow up.  But the age group will be replaced by yet more indoctrinated youth.

Which means Roger is right about the causes: we must take back education, entertainment/arts, and the news.

I’m not sure he’s right about the solution.  His idea is that we need to go back, infiltrate, start our own long march through the institutions.

I have two problems with that.  The first is that it’s been tried.  Roger, as a recent convert, might not be aware of this, but the right didn’t give up on these fields.  Some of us even tried to infiltrate them by doing what we called “stealthing”  (which can be defined as “walk like one of them until you’re secure.”)

I still have acquaintances and friends (some of whom would surprise you) doing just that.

There are two problems with this approach – one is that the left, being a mystery religion, has so many signs, counter signs and symbols that it’s very hard to imitate the whole unless you believe it OR want to bring about their result.  The second is that they demand constant tests of loyalty.  It’s rather like infiltrating a criminal organization.

I might flatter myself that I had as good a chance as any, with my background, but I couldn’t do it.  Art is to a great extent a thing of the subconscious and things broke through without my meaning.  I also wouldn’t undertake the tests of loyalty, such as writing a book on how America had ruined my life.

The right let themselves be infiltrated because at some level the right had bought the left was the future.  It wasn’t that the people coming in weren’t obvious, it was that their bosses shrugged and sighed and said “Apres nous le deluge.”  Which left us in this fine mess. But the left thinks we’re evil.  They fight our infiltration with all strength.

The other objection to the scheme is that all of those fields are falling apart.  I think Hollywood lives, these days, mostly on foreign sales.  Part of it is that entertainment and the news are creating product no one wants.  (Which means I’m convinced that most people are still center right – where it counts.  Their wallets.  A lot of them just don’t consider themselves political and still buy what “everybody says” – never mind, the tribulation that’s coming will fix that.)

The other thing that’s hitting these fields is a wave of technological innovation that demands they adapt and innovate, something they’re UNABLE to do.

All of us in writing have watched with almost awe as again and again the publishing establishment balks the challenge and tries to force things back somehow to “business as usual.”

And this is because they can’t do otherwise.  It’s not in their makeup.

This is not cheap pop psychology.  It’s merely the result of how people become hard left, or anything to the right of Lenin.  Hard to center left don’t have to do anything.  They’re the good boys and girls.  They receive “wisdom” in the schools and they know by parroting it they’ll go far.  They never doubt, never stray, never go out on a limb.

I’m not saying they’re dumb.  Some of them are brilliant.  Some of them are even true artists and their product gives their spoutings the lie because their subconscious knows better than they do.

I mean, they are more creatures of the group.  Social approval is important.  They never strayed.

So their ability to innovate is limited to “improving on how things are done.”  When faced with the type of catastrophic change hitting  those three fields right now, they are flabbergasted and most of their reaction amounts to hands over ears and screaming lalalalalala.

Then there’s us.  If I had a dime for each conservative who starts with “I used to be liberal, but—“  Now the left trolls try to mimic this with “I am a lifelong republican” and that’s bs, and we all know it, because that’s not how things work.  But we all start more or less liberal, at least those of us under 60.

Heck, I was always anti-communist, but I didn’t understand why guns shouldn’t be regulated or why we shouldn’t have universal health care, or why–   Heinlein cured me, though it was a slow cure.

For most of us, coming to our present beliefs involved one or more Damascus Road moments.  (For those of other traditions, that was when St. Paul on his way to persecute Christians met with the resurrected Christ and changed completely – and no, I’m not as pious as I sound.  I was raised in a country where Catholicism is a course from elementary through High School, though full disclosure, my dad got me dispensation in High School because the priest who taught it couldn’t put up with my arguments anymore. He was a liberation theologist and I’m not a good person.)

A Damascus Road experience of the political kind involves suddenly trying to integrate an event or a circumstance that just won’t fit your mental map, being unable to, and then starting to examine all your received wisdom until you realize it’s all – or most of it a lie.  (I’ve had three, and yes, 9/11 was one of them.)

It involves walking around for about a year, wondering if you’ve gone completely insane, because “everybody knows” and yet…  And yet you can no longer believe it.  This gives you an impression of brokenness and loss of faith.

Those of us who survive it and stay the course are independent cusses.  People who are independent cusses socially tend to be creative too.  Or at least we are so far out of the box that we can’t find it.

This makes it easier for us to adapt when catastrophic change sets in.  And because the status quo establishment hates us, we HAVE in self defense to take to the new tech.

We’ve been doing so.  In droves.

However, Roger L. Simon is right and it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because the inmates just got four more years to run the asylum.  And with tech and society changing as fast as they are, these people have set the course to the 1930s, this time with more bizarre multiculti which also endangers us from abroad.

Guys, this ship is going to go aground and go aground HARD.  My friend Charles says that he doesn’t know what happens when a democracy implodes, but we do know: Empire.  Yeah, it’s possible that by being a different type of democracy we won’t get it, but I think it’s more likely we’ll just get a different type of Empire.  (Which, BTW, Soviet Russia WAS.)

We don’t have time to wait for them to die off and us to replace them.  IF we can keep the republic, we must accelerate this buggy.

Hence the title, which is actually from a Kipling poem, The Sons of Martha.  Again, if you don’t want to click through, it’s based on the New Testament story of Martha and Mary sisters of Lazarus, who are entertaining Jesus and his disciples.  Martha is bringing out the food and doing all the work while Mary sits and listens.  It’s in there to illustrate the difference between active and contemplative devotion, but that’s not important right now.  The important part is that Kipling picked up the tale and wrote a poem to extoll those who do real things in society: engineering, creating…

I think most of those who call themselves Sons of Martha in modern times are Engineers or scientists.  BUT it extends further.  They’re everyone who creates – everyone who works hard, breaks the mold, brings forth innovation.

We’re the sons and daughters of Martha.  And we must take up our heritage.

There’s not much point infiltrating the dying model.  It’s difficult, if not impossible.  It stains the soul, till you don’t know who you are.  And in the end there isn’t enough time for that.

But just playing with the new model isn’t enough.  We must consciously and vigorously push the new model forward in all ways possible.

I’ll propose some points, upon which you may enlarge at will and pass on to your several groups, which will enlarge them and in turn bring them back to us.

1 – Entertainment:

TV/movies: there is STARTING to be stuff on youtube that can compete with the commercial stuff.  This is not my arena, I don’t know what to do, other than wish I were twenty years younger and had time to learn animation.  The tech for that to be a solo thing is almost there but not quite.  However, this is not my area.  Those of you who are in the field, look to it, and come up with ways to go indie.

Books: Yes, I know tons of us do that, but a lot of us do it almost passively because it’s there.  Well, it’s time to put teeth in it. Accelerate, innovate, improve.  Let your beliefs through without preaching.  Write more.  Write better.  LEARN covers.  Help each other.  Make the traditional stuff look like the gray goo it is. Go.

Games: Those of you who know enough to supervise a team, create a pitch, put it on Kickstarter, see if you get enough to hire a team to make the games for you.  Again – GO, you have work to do.

2- News:

We have pundits aplenty.  Here and there a bit of news breaks through.  BUT believe it or not journalism is a craft, even if not practiced any longer.  There are ways to gather, test and filter news.  I was trained for it so long ago that it’s useless now.  At any rate, I think I’m more of the integrator/pundit.  Though I wouldn’t mind knowing how to do it.  If any of you know, teach the others.  Let’s start a blog or more of news-gatherers and (local) reporters.

We NEED that.  And if you have a face made for TV (well, let me lose another fifty pounds.  Am losing again, on new hormonal regime.  I MIGHT be presentable, unless all my skin sags and stuff… :-P ) do your news in video format.  Make it professional.  GO.

3- Education.  I confess here, I expected to have more time and for tech to develop more.  It’s there, it’s coming, I expected my grandkids to be learning at home/online/self directed.

We won’t have that time.  Some of the entertainment and news have to cover for education.  I’m thinking a YA detective series set during the American revolution might help…  YA romances might help too.  (I don’t think YA erotica helps anything, but maybe I’m a prude.  But there’s sweet-romance, i.e. without sex, and let’s admit it, 11 yo girls dream of their wedding and the great love.  There’s a market there.)

However, for parents like me who can be home with the kids but lacked the time to properly homeschool, we need … Online homeschooling leagues?  Online schools?  Online resources that can help de-indoctrinate kids who went to public school.

We need this, and we need it to be good.  My expertise in the field is now so rusty as to be useless.  At best I can glimpse what it SHOULD be.  But there are many of you with training and expertise.  It is your duty, for the sake of our republic, to figure this out, get together, form groups, explore forms, work like h*ll and create serious competition to the state’s indoctrination machines.  Now GO!  You have work to do.

If we succeed this might be the weirdest revolution of mankind, but it WILL be a revolution.

Arise, Sons and Daughters of Martha.  Our only chance to keep our republic is to claim our individuality and work around the stifling government that would herd us back to the nineteen thirties.

Go.  Innovation is in your blood.  Creation is your heritage.  Claim it proudly.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and bring us the future.

*Guys, I want to apologize for this chapter.  Not for being late, but for the chapter.  It was devilishly hard to write, and I had no intention of inflicting it on you, only it wouldn’t let me off, and you know…  I think it’s vital.  But … gag… it’s not the sort of thing I like to write.*

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

Something Sickly, Something Sweet

 

Gabriel didn’t know how he’d got back to fairyland.  He couldn’t remember exactly how old he was, and he didn’t know what he’d been doing, just before he found himself here.

But there was no doubt he was in fairyland.  He recognized the mist around him, the weaving writhing kind of fogs that happened only when magic was involved.

It felt cold and clammy on his skin, permeating the sleeves of the too-small, too-tight suit which should have been replaced years ago, when he was … six?  Seven?  But which continued to be his only suit, even though his body had grown so much.  His wrists showed, bony, exposed, and his hands, small, thin, covered in the scrapes and sores a sweeper boy accumulated keeping the crossing clean for the fine lords and ladies who didn’t want to taint the hem of their clothing with horse droppings.

But he didn’t know where his broom had gone, nor the last time he’d swept.  He felt tired, as if he’d spent the whole day sweeping, but then why hadn’t he gone home?

His bare feet plodded along the pavement he couldn’t quite see through the mist, and his steps slowed down.  Somewhere, up ahead was… He couldn’t remember, only that he was supposed to go there, that he meant to go there, but he didn’t know why.

He shivered in the mist and wondered if his mother had locked the door because she was with one of those friends who paid money, and if he’d somehow wandered out so tired that he’d stepped, unwary, into fairyland.  But no, surely not.  He’d been thrown out of fairyland with his mother.  He remembered it.  And he had never wanted to come back.

A shiver ran up his spine at the memory of his last days of fairyland, of what he’d had to do, how he’d had to find the will to resist, just to be thrown out.

Perhaps his uncle wanted him back?  To serve as a source of magic and a–  He cut the thought off, and continued walking.

If only he weren’t so hungry.  Starving, really, which shouldn’t surprise him, since it had been his condition for most of his time in the earth of mortals, at least since Mr. Penn had left mama.  But it surprised him, or rather, it felt unaccustomed to his body, as though he’d been well fed and well taken care of for a long time, and this discomfort felt like an outrage. It made tears prickle at the back of his eyes, and it made him feel scared and fragile in turns.

The smell of cake came from somewhere to the left, away from the path he’d been following.  He didn’t remember why he’d been feeling that path, and though he was in fairyland and knew therefore directions could change without warning, and that the image the smell of cake invoked, of a bakery window piled high with treats was not true.  All he could think was that the bakery near his mother’s house, sometimes threw out cake that had gone so stale that it could be used for no other purpose.  He’d often found it in the rubbish bins behind the shop.

His steps changed almost without his meaning to.  The first disturbing change was that he felt as though the tendrils of fog had now become personal, intimate.  They seemed to insinuate into his clothes, attempt to crawl into his skin.  The touch disturbed him, repulsed him.  It felt too close, too… tight… too much of not letting him alone.  It awakened memories he could not quite focus on.

As he walked on, still in fog, the smell of cake got stronger, and but the light grew too.  Quite suddenly, he was standing in a plaza amid shops.  It was London, he thought, but not the London he lived in, with its decaying hovels, its narrow streets.  Once or twice, he’d walked beyond his neighborhood and glimpsed something of this: clean facades, prim maids going about their business in starched, frilled aprons, and the windowshops filled with dolls and toys, with cakes and hams and all manner of good things.

The shop windows were there and laden, but there was no one in sight.  The street was quiet, probably because it was nighttime.  But in the center of the little plaza, a table was set, with a sparkling white table cloth.  On the table sat cakes and pies, and candy in big piles.  The light pouring on it from the gas lamps above sparkled on sugar decorations and put a mellow gold color on the sweet buns.

Like Seraphim’s birthday table, Gabriel thought.  That first time.  But when he tried to pursue the memory, it retreated before him and he couldn’t remember at all who Seraphim was.

Instead he approached the table, slowly, with the certainty that this much food, freely displayed, had to be some sort of catch.  Even wild beasts knew that much.

He half expected it to disappear, but it didn’t, and with his eyes fixed on a certain, particularly colorful piece of candy, he imagined it melting in his mouth, sickly sweet.

But when he was almost within reach of it, the fog hardened like a prison, and held him.  “No,” the fog said, whispering in his ear in a sweet, cloying tone.  “No, little boy, there is a price.”

Gabriel caught his breath on shock, on recoil of that voice, on memories he couldn’t reach, and yet made him feel uncomfortable.  “Please, sir,” he said.  “I’m just hungry.”

And as he said them it seemed to him he’d said these words before, and that what followed – He stepped back, recoiling from the sweets, but the fog was there again, not letting him run.

If the table weren’t there, with its tempting sweets.  If his stomach didn’t hurt with hunger.  If—

He felt will power leave him and went limp, in the grasp of the fog.

Through his mind, unbidden, came a voice, a glimpse of an adult, in a classroom, standing by a chart that represented the worlds that touched Avalon and saying, “The power of fairyland is in childhood.  It reaches into this, feeds on it, in the manner of a leech or parasite.  This makes fairyland a parasite leech upon the worlds.”

Gabriel had a moment of wanting to protest that it wasn’t true, that the power direction was all wrong, and then he couldn’t remember what it was all about.  What a strange dream.  He’d never been in a classroom like that.  Classrooms like that were not for the likes of Gabriel Penn.

“Will you pay?” the fog hissed.

Gabriel looked at the table, at the candy.  His stomach roared its hunger. How bad could it be?  He had an idea that it could be very bad, but also that he’d survived it in the past.  He closed his eyes.  A voice came from somewhere in his memory saying, “An’ you can do whatever you want with him, governor.  No one will care.  He’s elfborn and got only a crazy fairymother.  You can even kill him if it pleases you.”

From somewhere too, came a memory that they’d almost had, but then Father had burst in and—

But the memory vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the certainty it could be survived.  But hunger might not be.  When had he eaten last?  How long could he keep walking with no sustenance?

He closed his eyes.  He said, “I will pay.”

And then the fog was on him, in him, touching every single pore of his being, while strange, alien thoughts poured into his mind.

Gabriel Penn found himself falling to his knees, while darkness and cloying sweetness consumed his mind.