According To Hoyt

Cheer up. We’re winning the long war.

And now you’re staring at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I might have. I was fighting typesetting till late last night. But I don’t think so.

It occurred to me sometime ago that we were in a long, sustained war since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just that war has morphed and gone underground, by other means.

Look, part of this was America’s showing in WWII. Not that it was bad, but that it was very, very good and it showed the ideologies who would conquer the world that they couldn’t do it shoulder-to-shoulder, in serried ranks. I mean they kept threatening us with it, but in fact that time had already passed. (Sometime I need to do a post about how most of threats we’re terrified of are actually things that are no longer possible, or at least highly unlikely.)

So, the ideologies that would conquer the world: it was before Marxism existed, of course, that people became obsessed with idea of a rule “of the people” involving “if only everyone” and also that there was a permanent underclass who needed to rule so they wouldn’t be oppressed.

In fact Marx, the least original thinker in the world, culled his ideas from the kind of red-throated insanity of the French revolution. To be fair to him, all of the civilized word was going through this, processing the shock of the immense violation that the French Revolution represented.

There had been peasant revolts… always pretty much. Look, despite the soft-water-color monarchy fools (mostly tbf European fools, though some people on this side of the Atlantic are … gullible (?Yeah, gullible is a good term)) try to sell you, monarchy and any system with hierarchy dictated by birth which you can neither choose nor change monarchy pretty much sucks and will end up having peasant revolts. (Yes, yes, constitutional monarchy is better. And also depending on the quality of the king, yadda yadda, except that you can’t guarantee the quality of the king, nor vote him out if he’s well…. Biden like. And constitutional monarchy is a way to still have kings for the feel while not having kings for anything practical. BUT in this case, I’m talking about historical, pre-French-revolution monarchy and its problems.)

However the French revolution was shocking like the covidiocy was shocking. It was a ‘this is not even possible’ moment.

And it was possible, suddenly, because of one innovation (this one simple trick!) — the printing press. And the propaganda it enabled.

While media was nowhere near as concentrated as it would become in the late 20th century, the big printing presses and their broadsides were responsible for disseminating the idea of the revolution and spurring people on to revolt, and concentrated enough to have it be in the hands of a wild-eyed bourgeois elite which spurred each other on to insanity. Oh, also, things were pretty sucky to be fair. I mean what fed the fire of the revolution is that the lower classes really were pinched like crazy. And had endured centuries of being treated as subhuman. But still, without the propaganda and the dissemination of ideas, the French peasants revolt would have engulfed a few cities, maybe a province, then fizzled.

That it didn’t scared the living daylights out of everyone in power. Well, and anyone literate, even the people in America who initially supported it, when they realized how ridiculous it had gotten.

Which means that by the early nineteenth century the intellectual establishment was still processing the shock (these things process slowly) and Marx codified the insanity into what sounded like more exact intellectual format.

And then they tried it on. WWI was a sad disappointment for the “Workers of the world” uniting, since apparently they still preferred their national identities. Which then led to fascism, that embraced that and various weird retcons of international socialism, including the very latest attempt here, with DEI, with “race” replacing class (and race being quite inventive as it ended up including women and sexual orientation and… insane little buggers these Marxists.)

Anyway, WWII was even more of a disappointment, at least for the Marxists (red or black bah, let the devil come and choose between them) idea that they could take the world by the force of arms, because it turned out the US had better arms. And thought it was at the time under the grip of a Marxist though not an avowed one, the US refused to do the taking over and occupying thing, since ultimately as a national character we’re terrible imperialists: all we want to do is go home.

Since then, the enemies of the US have been fighting the US by other means.

The most effective, starting right after WWII (or arguably before) was internal corruption and subversion. McCarthy was too late (no, seriously, when you have an hour, go and listen.) and all our institutions have been corrupted by Marxism for way too long. No, longer than you think.

This was facilitated by having central control of the means of communication, education and entertainment. They could promote the ideas of communism while assuring you they were strong anti-communists.

Also, the number of times they threw the USSR a life line or ignored its obvious lying to pretend they were an equal enemy and super-dangerous leads me to believe they liked the state of balance between two powers. Either because they liked it for puddinghead reasons (without a challenge we’d go soft!) or to keep a certain amount of state control because we were “threatened.”

That was one form of the long war. The cold war, where the forces of Marxism could pick out small helpless countries one by one while at home we were told that people there had “chosen” this and that “the people” liked communism and that we were oppressors for not letting them have it.

Except the slow grind didn’t work. The truth is that Marxism is as shitty a framework for government as it was an intellectual framework for the economy. Imposing any form of Marxism — starts as communism, quickly devolves to fascism and then to a sort of feudalism — means that the society thus afflicted cannot survive. Not long term. Not economically, not mentally and definitely not morally.

Things started falling apart more and more obviously by four decades after WWII and then the USSR came thundering down not long after.

Well, all credit to Ronald Reagan, because without him the democrats would have kept propping up the rotten corpse of the USSR (let’s remember it had tried to collapse in the sixties already) like a kind of international Weekend at Bernies.

But as it started thundering down, the people here who’d become willing mind-slaves of the Marxists lost their minds, until they found two new means of attack: race and ecology. (Remember for the left race also includes your sex and who you sleep with. Because, you know, these G-d blinded idiots can’t understand CHOICE and that there are characteristics you choose and aren’t simply born with. Here, between you and me, are they clankers, or do they just think they are?)

This worked middling well until recently. Or appeared to work middling well. Let’s remember again, due to their control of the means of mass communication and indoctrination, until recently it was hard to distinguish how well it worked from how well it appeared to work. And they controlled appearances. All memorex, no reality, is a possibility for what was happening. In fact given the slow creep of means of cheating being introduced in the US since the 90s and that cheating mostly benefits the left — no? then why are they always the ones who make it possible to cheat and bitch if you try to clean up the votes? — it’s quite likely their recover scam after the USSR never worked that well.

Anyway, by the end of the 20th century it was becoming clear that despite their best efforts, they were barely holding onto the US by fraud, and that they were certainly not controlling hearts and minds. And frankly, by the late teens the rest of the world was also starting to get ideas and to rebel, though less penetrated by the internet and free association which here started breaking the spell of mass media control.

And that’s when they came up with the ultimate idea to attack the west: a human wave. Mass immigration. They figured this would for sure get their race/group communism to stick.

It wouldn’t have of course. It won’t even in Europe. But it will cause a hell of a disturbance for a few decades. And if they could do that here, maybe they could break up the US and destroy our dangerous ideas. (Really, they’ve wanted us to break up since the USSR did, because they don’t understand the differences between us and them — no seriously — and want revenge.)

Except that the collectivists drink their own ink and believe their own propaganda. They thought that say here they could swamp us with JUST people from South of the border. They might very well have thought they could swamp us with people from Mexico.

Of course they couldn’t. The population isn’t as great as they thought. And frankly, we’re very spread out. But by the end they were recruiting wholesale from anywhere in the world to throw them in here, which meant their weapon — people — lacked internal cohesion and were as likely to turn on each other as on us.

Also, of course, they don’t have control of communication. No matter how many movies they put out on the plight of the poor illegals, the people aren’t listening, and instead really would like to stop getting elbowed out of jobs by people who work for 1/4 the salary while also drawing every possible form of welfare. And they would like people to stop trying to camp on their lawn and sh*t on their sidewalk. Oh, and they’d like their children and pets to be safe.

So…. So, in the US Trump might just about have saved us from having a violent spasm that would leave a bunch of people very dead (not all them, or even most of them, just illegals) and the country in a mess (and still not give the left its triumph.)

Europe… has bigger problems. Partly because they stopped reproducing about a generation before we fell into that kind of trouble (though there are signs with the young ‘uns here and there that this might well change within ten years.) And also because most of them have been well and truly swamped by waves of immigration. And they still don’t know how to deal with any of it, because — for various cultural reasons — this type of blog, and a kind of grassroots communication is much harder to take hold there.

Frankly I’m amazed they’re managing as much of a rebellion as they are, and we wish the insurgent forces in Great Britain, still fighting to reclaim their homeland, well. I will tell them be of good cheer. If the Marxists weren’t terrified, they wouldn’t be so openly dropping the mask and showing us their hideous totalitarian faces. You are winning, but I’m afraid the victory will cost you dearly. (Salutes.)

Here? Here we are winning. We are winning magnificently. After sixty years of non-stop shrieking, indoctrination, positional-good-Marxist-display, and guilt and shame beat downs, we’re hunching our shoulders and ignoring the self-proclaimed “elites.”

Trump was elected, not because of his great achievements (sorry, Sir. We didn’t even KNOW you in 16. Now? Now we like you fine) but because of our being tired of having our legs pissed on by people who told us it was raining.

And we’ve carried on. Their magnificent coup, the most corrupt and frankly large scale bit of election fraud in the US ever, installed someone who was practically dead and while hurting us very badly never got hold of our hearts and minds, let alone made us believe they were legitimate. We went from zero to Let’s Go Brandon in minutes, it felt like.

Meanwhile everything they do turns to shit. They have become contaminated with Obama’s Mierda’s touch. They’ve lost all ability to create (I have this theory they never had it, just coasted on whatever they could steal from the few conservatives still in whatever field, but that’s harder to prove) and they can’t convince anyone. Not in the face of the dismal results of their philosophy.

Does this mean the future is guaranteed? The future is never guaranteed. And Liberty must be won day by day.

No, what it means is we have a chance. We have a chance of winning this. It might be too late for the rest of the world. (But maybe not. Salutes Great Britain’s people who are still fighting.)

But America? Well, boys and girls: it’s time to drop our shackles, ignore the Marxists and aim for the stars.

I can’t promise you we’ll make it. But I think we’re going to.

Be not afraid. Keep fighting.

The future is shining bright, and America will lead the world into it.

I don’t know who needs to hear this.

You’re not perfect. I’m definitely not perfect. And that’s okay.

All right, so I know exactly who needs to hear that. And that’s me, here behind the eyes. Because I’m really upset at myself for this last week and then this weekend…

Why you ask? Well, because nothing went according to plan. Mostly the “nothing” hinged on adventures in publishing. I somehow managed to delete the typeset version of No Man’s Land Vol. 1 just before I realized I had a typo.

Then I reconstituted the dedication and the Acknowledgements by copying it from my downloaded Amazon file because I had a total brain glitch and forgot I had the epub I uploaded and could use calibre to convert it. (blah.)

Then Amazon rejected both uploads. I’m hoping that’s the reason. It also rejected Witchfinder, but I think that was because it’s just too long. I’ll be implementing two volumes of it (It’s about 110k words shorter than NML) sometime this week, after I fix NML. So I’m hoping its complaints about metadata are because Amazon decided I was stealing… my own book.

Anyway, this type of thing makes me insane, and I keep reiterating till solved. So, I’ve been driving myself insane, and unable to write much of anything, which means not sleeping really well.

It wasn’t till today that Fuzzy pointed out to me that I could use my epub file to reconstitute the book. At any rate, I have to redo the cover, because we got a printed arc, and some things are just wrong.

And I’m very angry at myself. Only, there is a glimmer of a thought I shouldn’t be, because I’m not perfect, but more importantly, I can’t be expected to be perfect. It doesn’t matter how much I’d like to be.

And things around me aren’t perfect either. Because that is the nature of life, basically. I mean, if Amazon were perfect none of this would have happened.

After 62 almost 63 years, too, you’d think I was aware of my own idiosyncrasies like the tendency to get obsessed with peculiar bits of the process. But no. It comes as a surprise and annoyance every time.

BUT enough about me: the point is that this is all of us. None of us is perfect. None of us does things perfectly. And everything is equally messed up. And everyone is.

Perfect would be nice. But it’s not within reach, and hey, it would probably be boring after a while.

So.

Do the best you can. Yes, even right now, when things are more messed up than usual and we have a job and a half if we don’t want to leave everything broken for our kids.

Do the best you can. And don’t give up. When it all comes apart, make your guts into a new heart and go back in.

No one gives prizes for trying. But in this imperfect world an imperfect result is sometimes amazing enough.

So, go on, go try.

And I will too.

It’s a new week, and a new chance at doing the things that need to be done.

Get to it.

Book Promo

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

REALLY IMPORTANT: DON’T BUY THE PRINTED VERSION OF WITCHFINDER. WHILE SMALLER THAN NO MAN’S LAND, IT WEIGHS IN AT 455 PAGES. IT’S GOING TO HAVE TO BE BROKEN INTO TWO VOLUMES TO PRINT. THIS BOOK IS TOO LARGE FOR THE PRINT VERSION TO BE STABLE. I’LL DO A TWO VOLUME PRINT EDITION SOMETIME THIS WEEK.

SARAH A. HOYT: Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

A Duke’s Defiance Could Shatter Two Worlds
In an England where magic pulses through every cobblestone and the Regency never ended, one man’s conscience threatens to topple an empire.
Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, inherited a legacy of forbidden heroism. For generations, his family served as witchfinders, crossing between worlds to rescue those condemned to die for possessing magical gifts. But when the royal princess vanished twenty years ago, the king sealed the borders between realities forever.
Now Seraphim faces an impossible choice: obey the crown and let innocents burn, or defy his king and risk everything he holds dear.
With only his enigmatic half-elf valet Gabriel Penn at his side, Seraphim tears holes in the fabric of existence itself, leaping between alternate Earths where magic means death.
His mother and sister are lost in Fairyland. His enemies circle like vultures. The king’s patience wears thin.
But Seraphim’s stubborn compassion burns brighter than caution. In a world where doing right means risking everything, he’ll discover that the greatest magic might just be the courage to keep fighting when hope seems lost.
Some prices are worth paying. Some lines are worth crossing. Some hearts are worth breaking.
A spellbinding tale of sacrifice, family, and the dangerous allure of doing what’s right in a world determined to punish goodness.

FROM FRED PHILLIPS: Dreams of Gold and Fire

Courage meets myth to create a destiny forged in fire.

Aron dreams of knighthood and battling dragons, but life in his quiet village means herding sheep and facing his father’s disapproval. When his parents dismiss his ambitions as childish, Aron’s determination ignites into rebellion. He runs away to the capital city of Lanfield, chasing a chance to prove himself as a knight and protect his home from encroaching goblin raids.
The city tests him and finds him wanting with hostile streets, trouble with local bullies, and a brush with the law that leave him reeling. A kind knight, Devan, offers guidance and sword lessons, sparking hope that Aron’s dreams might come true, for a time. Fleeing new troubles, he stumbles into the mountains, where a chance encounter with a goblin and an unexpected ally lead him to a hidden valley—and a discovery that changes everything.
Aron finds wonder in the valley, forging a bond that teaches him courage and the value of trust. When danger threatens his village, he must decide how to protect those he loves, even if it means risking his newfound friendship.
This heartfelt tale of grit and discovery speaks to boys daring to dream big and to parents who see their sons wrestling with who they want to become. Aron’s journey reminds us that heroism grows from believing in yourself, even when the path feels impossible. Perfect for young readers and families navigating the pull between dreams and duty.

FROM LIANE ZANE: Helsing: Demon Slayer (The Dragon’s Paladins Book 1)

Book One of The Dragon’s Paladins

A warrior bound by duty. A woman marked by fate. A world on the edge of darkness.

When the sky burns and the earth trembles, old powers stir beneath the surface. In the wake of a devastating solar flare, ancient evil rises to take advantage of a broken world. But the Elioud, a hidden race of angel-blooded warriors, have not stood idle. In the mountains of northern Albania, a stronghold has formed under the drangùe and his consort—a sanctuary where harmony and heroism might hold back the coming dark.

Ryan Helsing, a decorated Army Ranger with a past forged in fire, is sworn to that cause. Battle-tested and emotionally scarred, he never questions his orders—until he’s sent to retrieve Dianne Markham, the younger sister of the drangùe’s wife. What should have been a simple escort mission turns deadly when daemons strike Dianne’s cruise ship just as it docks in Split, Croatia. Ryan barely gets her out alive.

Now they’re on the run across a crumbling Europe, hunted by forces both human and inhuman. Dianne never asked to be part of a war between supernatural powers. All she wanted was to survive the chaos and find something real in a world of shallow pleasures. But when Ryan storms into her life with steel eyes and a haunted soul, she’s drawn into a world where ancient bloodlines, harmonic technology, and dark angelic forces collide.

Marked by an unseen enemy and carrying secrets even she doesn’t understand, Dianne may be the key to everything. And Ryan will risk his life to protect her—even if it means confronting the echoes of his past, and the possibility that fate has more in store for them than either imagined.

Helsing: Demon Slayer launches a pulse-pounding romantasy of survival, sacrifice, and the fierce first strike in the battle to hold the light.

Sometimes, one man is all that stands in the way.

FROM BRIAN HEMING: The Lives of Velnin: The Dark Empire: A fast-paced epic fantasy adventure of swords, love, magic, and battles

1.7 million enemy soldiers. One reincarnating prince. Who will win?

Swords. Love. Magic. Epic Battles. Reincarnation.

A year and a day after the death of his first incarnation, Prince Veldin rekindles his romance with the beautiful Princess Aloree, his first incarnation’s beloved widow. But these happy times are cut short as he is sent to repel the invasion of the Dark Empire: 1.7 million men, four thousand ships, all led by the Dark Empress Soraina, a beautiful maiden to whom the prince feels a mysterious but intense connection.

Stopping the invasion from destroying all he holds dear may cost him everything. To protect his people and triumph against impossible odds, must he sacrifice not just his lives, but even his love and his very soul?

Combining the most amazing battles in history with swords, love, and magic, The Dark Empire is sure to please fans of swords & sorcery, adventure romance, and military fiction alike. A fast-paced epic fantasy of swords, love, magic, and battles.

FROM NICK NETHERY: Relics of the Fallen (The Wormwood Archive Book 1)

Dan Kelly, a battle-hardened Army bomb tech on the brink of retirement, can’t shake the ghosts of his fallen team from a long-ago war zone. When a shadowy government outfit called Wormwood recruits him, he’s thrust into a world of enigmatic weapons—artifacts of unearthly power, scattered across Earth like forgotten relics. Alien remnants? Echoes of a vanished human empire? Wormwood hunts for answers, but they’re not alone; darker forces crave these devices for chaos.
As Dan grapples with tech that warps reality and inflicts unseen wounds, he uncovers a chilling link to his past tragedy. From cartel tunnels beneath the border to high-stakes raids on illicit arms hubs, missions blur the line between duty and vengeance. A leak within threatens everything, forcing Dan to root out betrayal before a final assault where old enemies await.
In this gritty fusion of military precision and otherworldly mystery, redemption comes at a price—one explosive secret at a time.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Quilted Circle Mysteries: Eight Suburban Scandals: Eight Suburban Scandals (The Detective Stories)

In the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, five retired women meet weekly to quilt, swap gossip, and — unintentionally — solve crimes.

The Quilted Circle Mysteries: Eight Suburban Scandals is a charming and clever collection of cozy mysteries featuring Vera, Dottie, June, Lois, and Marie — a circle of longtime friends whose projects always seem to uncover more than they bargained for. Whether it’s a missing recipe card, a vanishing med-spa mogul, or a suspiciously swapped quilt at the county fair, these suburban sleuths bring wit, wisdom, and just the right amount of sass to every case.

Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie’s village tales and the quirky humor of Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate, this delightful collection blends sharp observation with small-town secrets, proving that retirement is just the beginning — especially when your friends bring snacks and surveillance drones.

Each mystery can be enjoyed on its own or as part of the full collection. Come for the gossip. Stay for the justice.

BY DWIGHT SWAIN, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Crusade Across The Void (Annotated): The Classic Space Opera Novella of Revolution

“Scum of the spaceways,” the interplanetary police had called them, so Wolf Stone and his motley crew left the solar system for another. There, they found a tyranny not too different from the one they left, and this time, they decided to fight.

And when they fought for justice, they were one blood with the crusaders!

• This iktaPOP Media edition has a new introduction giving historical and genre context to the story.

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: A Dragon in the Foie Gras (Timelines Universe Book 3)

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She’s just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra’ (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name “Sanddoom”), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug “kitchen” that’s been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant “mules”. That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the “kitchen” and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .

. . . but it’s not to be. A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it’s up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Wolf and the Ward

A wolf wanders the land. . . .

Charity had thought it dreadful, being sent like a package to a man who might refuse to take her on as a ward. But when a wolf comes to look her up and down in the woods, and the man she is sent to greets her, making her wonder if she remembers something that never happened, she finds that there are problems far worse than that in the duchy.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That

MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.

No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.

ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.

Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Moon Mirror

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

SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: THUNDERING.

Two days ago I I wrote about tribalism and said tribalism always loses to the Western association by affinity (no, this is not tribalism.) and allegiance to nation states. There was the usual skepticism in response because tribalism confers advantages if not punished, in an otherwise civilized society. Note the begs.

I didn’t have time to unpack it in that post which was already overlong and besides it was close to two am when I was writing it, so I shall unpack now.

The reason for that great demon of the left “Western Colonization” is… tribalism. No, not tribalism on the part of westerners. Tribalism on the part of the various barbaric civilizations subjugated by the west.

To explain: we’re usually given a picture of westerners descending on poor unarmed savages, sometimes sweet and peaceful ones (ah!) and just being evil and warlike and subjugating them that way.

To unpack both the myth of the noble savage and the myth of “there was no war before civilization” would take far longer than I have on this post, though I will allude to the second, because it’s still a favorite of (of course) leftist anthropologists. Also, painfully, horribly wrong.

The truth is that at the time the Europeans didn’t have a great advantage in weapons over the savages. Oh, they had muskets but seriously, those things had a tendency to misfire and weren’t particularly accurate. And in their homelands the tribal cultures had by far an advantage of numbers. If you read some of the early battles, you see how close it all was.

It wasn’t — technologically — civilized meaning poor innocent barbarian. No, it was humans at nearly the same technological method and the ones who won — consistently — did so due to the superiority of the software-in-head.

So, let’s get into this as fast as possible. The tribe in the sense of the tribalism I’m talking of is a natural consequence of us being Great Apes (yes, yes, I know. At best moderately good apes.) All great apes live in bands, though what the bands are like, how organized and who gets to get Jiggy with whom in the band varies greatly among the ape species.

The bands are an outgrowth of “family group” of course, and all bands are at least in theory and perception related. (Perception? Well, at least in chimps as in humans perception doesn’t always match what’s on the can, since at least some observers claimed chimps have an issue with female infidelity also known as “randy chimp chicks sneaking out to get jiggy with boys from the other band” in my totally scientific summary of the studies.)

For humans, the oldest, most isolated stuff we’ve found from the dawn of civilization does seem to bear (keep in mind there are very few remains actually found and even fewer that can be dna-tested) the idea of family groups sometimes very large family groups living together. And some of it is horrifying, though completely in keeping with “these things go on in ape bands” like the settlement where there was only one adult male, several adult females, several children. And some of the adult females were the daughters of the male, and some of the children were both his children and grandchildren in one.

Note my caveat about the paucity of finds. The fact is we don’t know if these were typical things or if we stumbled on the home of the Neolithic Jim Jones equivalent. (But we do know that sort of mating was considered sacred by several near east cultures, including the civilized (by living standards) Egyptians. So, you know, there is every possibility is is the enshrining as better and pure of an old and widespread practice as “the one true way to live, because our ancestors did so.” (And a good reason to at a minimum be skeptical of all such appeals.))

Sometime during the long road to civilization, probably during the hunter-gatherer period — least of all because if it had continued in tiny highly incestuous groups we’d each have more than three eyes and countless toes. Also possibly tentacles — the bands coalesced into tribes.

The way to do this usually was to claim or obtain kinship. Obtain? Well, when your band conquered the other band and killed their great inseminator and any boys likely to look like they’d like to inseminate someone, you then impregnated their women, creating real kinship. For another the boys kicked out of the band by the great inseminator obviously at some point formed a band of bachelors and swore brotherhood (or were all brothers, which is highly likely) and in the dark of night descended on another band, killed their great inseminator and divided his women between themselves. This also formed tribes of kinship. Which had a great advantage over the one-man-band (you knew I was going to make that joke!) because there were brothers to hunt with you. So more mammoths, more happily fed women and way more babies. The idea of the tribe/large kinship group/more loosely associated than the family was a survival enhancing innovation and would therefore grow.

Just so stories? Likely, and not the only route. OTOH we have lots of fossilized myths (in primitive wedding ceremonies, for one) of bands of young men kidnapping the bride(s). They are as recent as the legend of the founding of Rome.

Were there other ways to do it? Sure. The myths of the world give us hints of this other way. See all the tiresome infidelities of Zeus/Jupiter. You could claim that your god is the child of our god, and therefore you’re our cousins, and why don’t you join our hunt.

There is at least one theory of the spread of Indo European culture that leans heavily on “They told the BEST stories.” I leave it as a reader exercise why I adore this theory while being agnostic on its veracity or even plausibility.

At a more advanced level there was probably peaceful woman-exchanging. “We give you our daughters, you give us your daughters. We are now cousins.” Perhaps anticipating the blood kinship a little.

Now knowing our species, bloody in thought and deed, I would tend to assume barring the occasional miracle most of those exchanges took place after an endless war had made both bands so exhausted they were on the verge of extinction/disbanding or at least seriously hungry.

Which brings us to that war thing. It might be true (though it depends on the numbers and time period, since the neolithic covers an AWFUL long time) that primitives don’t war in ranks, with discipline, meeting the enemy on the battlefield. In fact, we know they mostly don’t both from legends as widespread as the Americas and Ireland.

It takes a relatively civilized state to field “soldiers” even if only temporarily and the places that first managed it for their places became very successful and fearsome. (Aztecs, anyone? Civilization is relative.)

But war? War was with us. What it was was what we’d call “raids”. We find the results of such massacres, mostly women and children killed in horrible ways. And we know them from the colonization of the Americas and Africa at a relative recent remove.

From reading the history of those, it seems clear that the reaction of a primitive tribal culture to another tribe intruding on their territory is to go all out and commit atrocities.

The atrocities are of such level that at one time it was wondered if Amerindians and various African tribes (notably the Zulus, themselves already a super-tribe and relatively civilized) were even human or had souls. This was not because as the sappy left thinks “they were darker and people were racist.” That’s bullshit. It was because they would descend on isolated family groups and small settlements, kill everything male, rape everything female (and take them away, though sometimes killing them if they resisted too hard), splatter blood and body parts all over in grotesque and horrible ways, sometimes mutilating the captives or killing the youngest and most helpless in the most horrific ways.

For the tribe this was perfectly licit. In every tribe it is understood “we’re humans, the others aren’t.” And they killed animals all the time, sometimes for fun. (Chimps do too.)

So, you know? That’s what they did. And they’d continue doing it until the other band was subjugated (their males all killed) or ran away.

Sometimes this went the other way. If your band of braves was intruding on a tribe’s territory and you wanted them to be subjugated or run away, you committed atrocities. LOTS.

The atrocity had to be very atrocious because the more bizarre outlandish and out there the attack was, the more likely the other tribe would withdraw rather than fight back.

How atrocious did things get? Well…. a modern day example would be the events in Israel on 10/7 when Palestinians, a willfully re-barbarized people partly due to living from grift from civilized people, which is a very tribal strategy of survival, unleashed their neolithic savage. This btw is the reason they thought they were doing great and glorious deeds and that it would lead to immediate victory. Because once you run howling back into the ancient beast in your brain, you fall back into its ways.

And the reaction of the world over the next week (yes, we’ve lost that since then, and more on it later because it’s the crux of our problem and why the solution is not “do a tribalism.”) was what the reaction of the civilized usually is.

And the reason tribal cultures always lose. Always. Not even a little.

It’s like this, at some point in the long march of civilization, codified by Rome, solidified by Judeo Christianity whose philosophical underpinnings say all children of Adam are humans, the idea of tribe faded. No, it didn’t go away. It’s a very old part of the human brain and the beast keeps rearing its head and being exploited by those who want power. But it receded.

Eventually normal, well brought up people in England, could — say — look at the picture of a Dutch, French or Spanish child and see… a child, not a prey animal. (Again see not always, but most of the time.)

The problem, then, that the barbarians did what they always did and killed an isolated group, and didn’t realize the news spread across the world (okay, the printing press helped) and they were suddenly called into question as humans, and people decided to stop them by all means necessary. And they had the advantage of fielding organized and well trained armies. (Though the Zulus and the Aztecs had that too, honestly.)

The routing of the tribal cultures was so complete that they were pretty much eliminated in their original form. Oh, yes, I do know the tribes technically exist. One of my friends is a tribal member. But they wear clothes, they use computers, they communicate partly (at least) in Western languages and they live Westernized lives.

The software in the head, though, is often still the old tribal beast. As is the software in the heads of a lot of the rebarbarized west.

For the west the tribalism crept back in with Marxism. And it’s hilarious because you can see its waves. It started with that angry ink-blot’s, Marx’s belief that “classes” were tribes. This was not only laughable, but World War I showed that nation-states (which succeeded and absorbed the concept of kingship. Again, not enough room to unpack here) trumped “classes.” And no, the “Class” thing was not going to unite workers across the world. So Marxism was reconnected to please the old beast more. Instead of classes, the groups Marxists (be they the international or national variety) decided to pit against each other were “races” (and also sexes.) Oh, they also tried professional associations and all, but not being a physical thing it didn’t hold as much.

The other one went straight into a kernel in the very old brain. The more cosmopolite and mixed populations (we all ARE. Compared to the neolithic.) didn’t recognize “family features” as accurately as the old savages, but they understood skin color, language, and “they done us wrong.”

To some extent this also failed spectacularly, to another it succeeded beyond all expectations.

Look, it didn’t succeed at creating solidarity within races. Partly because most races involved AREN’T and have nothing to do with genetics. As someone pointed out in comments here two days ago, there is more genetic variety in 100 square miles of Africa than anywhere else in the world. And, look you, the rest of the world is far from uniform when compared to a single family.

What it did succeed was in creating organized exploits using the mask of race to destroy the culture.

Mask of race? Sarah, what are you talking about?

Look, people, it’s not even the made-up races like “Latin” (Yes, they are. Yesterday I had the opportunity to read some comments loudly declaiming that Portuguese could be Latin, while Spaniards, Spaniards absolutely were. This can only be claimed by people who have never visited the Iberian peninsula or know its history, where often whether a village was Portuguese or Spanish was a matter of dispute, and where Portugal is such a narrow band between the sea and Spain it’s laughable to imagine those genes didn’t spread. (In fact since one of dad’s branches comes from that region, 23 and me assures me I have more Spanish blood than Portuguese. (Heresy.)) In the end this requires believing “race” hangs on the spelling of words. No matter how much idiots pronounce my middle name Marquez, it’s in fact Marques. (kssss not Kez) Which according to these idiots means I’m not Latin, but the cousins who spell it with z are. It makes a mockery of the concept of race. Which IS TBF right and just.) It’s also “black”. Oh, let’s not go into the fact that black, like white covers such a wide multitude as to be meaningless. It’s the fact — you won’t be upset right? — that most American blacks are whiter than most of my cousins — both in features and skin color — who would be shocked to hear themselves called anything but white. (Or if you prefer, find me at a con sometimes and get me to explain that any culture in which Megan Markle is considered “black” has its head so far up its ass about race that its opinions are invalid. Though, hey, my peeps, we DID consider the rest of the world of our insanity. Ain’t that glorious?)

HOWEVER they’ve managed to convince large groups of people that they are a race, and also that everyone discriminates against them because of race and also “capitalism” is responsible for this.

I’m not sure they managed to convince anyone they’re all the same race. Look, I have black friends both born here and not, and what they’ll say about each other and about other blacks… well!

But they have very successfully through the art education news media dissemination complex, as long as they controlled it, managed to convince the dominant culture that these were races/tribes and must be catered to.

To the point that nation states and cultural groups (Indians and Chinese are not races. They are however motivated cultures and nation states) are using this as an exploit and using nepotism and the West’s own stupidity to replace vast working parts of the society.

It has also worked to get sympathy to rebarbarized neolithic savages like the so called Palestinians, the dregs of the Arab world fed on hatred and a sense of grievance while subsisting on grift.

Both of these are a clear problem. But they are a problem because of Marxist propaganda and ersatz tribalism. I.e. the attempt to revive tribalism so they can rule over the warring tribes.

The fact that tribalism, even this kind of made up super-tribalism (uniting several tribes) is not compatible with a technological civilization (Hiring for any reason but competence will ALWAYS degrade competence till over time it is completely gone. And competence is needed in a complex civilization with sophisticated systems and tools.) doesn’t bother the Marxists. Not at all. Because they have a bizarre idea that once “capitalism” (Human trading ability. Literally one of our oldest abilities) collapses, paradise will emerge.

It should bother us. At least those of us who like eating, having a roof over our heads, not being massacred over some weird tribal disputed.

No. The solution is not more tribalism.

We are dying of tribalism.

Some utter idiot came in here to say that I was a “liberal” and wanted egalitarianism and said everyone is alike.

The levels of dumb in that comment would take one of those deep sea probes to plumb.

Not only am I not egalitarian but I don’t believe that people with the same rough skin color or the same rough features, or the same general geographic origin are interchangeable.

I’m not a tribalist. I’m not a barbarian.

And I’m only a liberal like the founding fathers were liberal. I believe in the individual rights of every human.

I believe while we should all be equal before the law — punished for the same crimes, afforded the same opportunity to TRY — we are not equal, nor will our results be equal. Not only will they not be equal among these made up broad racial groups, they won’t be equal within groups. Hell, they won’t be equal within families. (Though that has a higher chance, however, ferocious reader, think on your siblings and cousins, if you have any. Are you all the same? Even if the other is your identical twin!)

And I believe that civilization requires the best for each position. (Granted, yes, mine could be fulfilled by a monkey who can strike the keyboard semi-accurately. But think how many monkey hours it would take to recreate my posts. I have at least a slight edge there.)

The tribalism we’ve allowed — note allowed. As with toxic feminism, it was allowed by those who should not have given it leeway, no matter how much they were told they were guilty, no matter how scared they were of the barbarians — to flourish has given us COLLEGE graduates who can’t read fluently. It’s given us Engineers who don’t know math. It’s given us a vast population that can neither cypher nor think, and who takes its history from simplified or invented movies.

This can’t go on.

Trump has — give him credit — done more to cut back at this nonsense than any other president. (What you thought they hated him for being orange?) He’s done it by forbidding DEI (DIE) and by making it possible for governmental dependencies to hire by testing for competence. (Which means the rest of society will follow, in our wretched state of being dependent on the leviathan. This too shall pass.) This has both defanged the Universities that preach the new tribalism and destroyed the pay off of claiming tribes.

Yes, it will take time — Lord, give us a decade! Two! — but it means the poison is now coursing through the tribalist mindset, and it will die.

So the demand for a new tribalism with inverted colors is bullshit. Or, if you prefer, the last hope of those who have profited from tribalism: the demagogues, the statists, the tyrants.

I do believe we should fight back with all we have against tribablism, by testing everyone for competence and ensuring the competent get the job.

By the way this includes testing for nationalities and culture. Forget the neolithic nonsense of “We are tribe because we all have the same father.” Every nation state in the present day is the daughter of whores who roamed the dockside. Sure, it might only be the blonder (or darker) sailors that got in, but you probably have some sprinkles of the other, though you might not show it. (Even the tests can be odd.) The world has been too much linked by travel for almost a thousand years, and humans are randy as all get out.

Oh, the nations of Europe might need similarity in looks. They rest on that myth and it will take more than that to overcome it. At least looking somewhat like the people around you is a good idea.

But the US? if you think there is any unity of “race” in the US you’re out of your mind. Arguably there never was, simply because apparently any number of other European countries came over to colonize if not at the same time as the English, shortly after.

Now? Well, my mom when she visited said we gave her a headache because she couldn’t tell WHAT we were. And no, she wasn’t talking black and white. I know exactly what she was talking about because growing up in Europe and seeing tourists, I used to be able to tell the French from the English, the Germans from both and from the Dutch (and I can tell you, though it’s not the majority of his genetics, my husband looks wholly Irish. I can tell you because I remember that from when I first met him.) I can no longer do that. We are too mixed, and it’s weird to see several nationalities in the same family group even if there are no different “races”.

So going back to tribalism is stupid and just sets it up for further nonsense and division.

And besides, remember the really important thing: HIRING FOR ANY REASON BUT COMPETENCE DEGRADES COMPETENCE.

America is the leading innovator, the leading culture of the world by the simple method of letting individuals compete as individuals.

To the extent we’ve been losing our edge it’s because we’ve been genuflecting to the Marxist mask of race.

It’s time to throw Marxism in the ash heap of history.

No, I don’t think “all races” are the same. I think the divide is far finer than you think, though, and sometimes the results will surprise you.

Of course I don’t think IQ is a valid way to choose anything — immigrants, scientists, writers — either. Yes, before this is over I’ll probably have limped up to explain once again, but for now suffice it to say that while it measures competency for some positions we need, the idea we ONLY need high IQ people is …. so early and stupid science fiction it makes my head hurt. Also the product of people who haven’t lived surrounded by geniuses. Trust me on this there are tasks — and not only menial ones — for which high IQ is a detriment. And those tasks often include “anything beyond a very narrow band where specialization and passion coexist for those with nose-bleed-level IQ.

What I have to say this: who should be an American? Those who are prepared to be Americans. We are such a (thanks mom) “miscigenated people” that practically any skin color or combination of features can pass — though some are outre enough to raise eyebrows — BUT we can still tell our own.

The most essential thing for any immigrants — besides coming in legally, which is needed because Americans get to choose, damn it! — is the golden rule: Fit in or Fuck off. And yes, that includes teaching your kids to be fluent in English and that America is the best country on Earth. Because if you teach them to pine for the old homeland, they should go back there.

For anyone else, anyone who doesn’t want to fit in, conform to our Constitution, our laws, wave the flag and be proud to bursting of being American? The door is that way. We don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here.

And for positions? For positions, we should hire and fire in the most American of all ways: by competence, tested if needed.

So, Sarah, how would you like it if that means that some professions end up being all the same color or rough origin-group?

I don’t care, so long as it’s not assumed no one else gets a look in. AND SO LONG AS OTHER PEOPLE GET TO APPLY AND BE TESTED FOR IT. Some day I’ll tell you why I think chemists and microscope jockeys will end up being mostly of German ancestry, at least in part. (It harks back to a specific experience. And it’s funny.) And I don’t care. So long as the brilliant chemist whose ancestors all come from Papua New Guinea (as long as he speaks fluent English and tries to fit in with the habits of his colleagues, at least in public) gets consideration and a look in. And so long as any manager trying to hire only his cousins is defenestrated, at least metaphorically. (Some cousin-hiring happens in every human society. Can’t stop all of it. Can make sure it’s not all of it, though.)

No, I don’t expect “racial” (mostly made up) groups to be equally represented in exact proportion. Hell, I don’t expect real genetic groups to be exactly equally represented. There are affinities and some seem to be genetic and pass on even in people that have very little of the genetics, on paper.

I do expect people to be hired for competence.

We are the best nation in the world. We are the best culture bestriding civilization.

We need to throw off the Marxist virus, refuse counterfeits and accept only the best of the best. Whatever that is for the position in question.

In hiring, in advancement, in education, competence should matter. Nothing else, except ethics.

That’s it.

The person who completed the title with “Are natural allies” can stay after school to help scrub the old gum from under the desks, thank you so much.

This is in lieu of “this is not a post” mostly because I meant to write a post early this morning and instead ended up chatting with friends. Sigh.

Writers these days, no discipline, no pride of hustle, no–

Okay, the problem is I couldn’t write it yesterday because yesterday I spent the day walking into walls.

It started at 7 am with our pest control people who were scheduled to come “in the morning” deciding it was vital to ring our doorbell to tell us they were here. Look, they were scheduled to come. We’d have seen them on the cameras later. DO NOT RING THE DOORBELL BEFORE 9 AM, what’s actually wrong with you?

This normally wouldn’t be that big a deal, but two nights before I got hit with the “tribalism” post at midnight and was writing till 1 am. And then the night after that I was “dry” on posts till one am and wrote till 2 am. Which means when I was wakened I’d slept a grand total of 5 hours. Plus I had a plumber appointment for the morning, which mestatized into an all day thing, so naps were out of the question.

Oh, and I was typesetting and dealing with Amazon, which…. is like dealing with a dental appointment without anesthetic, even if nothing goes wrong, just… dot all the ts and cross all the is. (Yes, I mean that. it’s what I normally do,a nd then I have to go back and fix it.) Oh, yeah, and the isbn place and…. argh.

Oh, and on Tuesday I DID have a dental appointment.

Anyway, the point is, I was really tired, and by the middle of the day was walking into walls. By night time I was starting to do “I can’t quite control my mouth, so I’m trying to speak and just making weird sounds.” So I just went to bed at ten. Without writing a post.

And this morning I’m apparently just lazy. And should be doing a chapter of Witch’s Daughter for the serialization in the substacks and figuring out the shopify store thing so I can sell my own ebooks (and others, if I can connect it to pod and fulfillment by printer.). So I’ll go and do that rather than write a blog post.

Ahem. No, seriously, I truly am fighting a tentacle monster. But it’s a tentacle monster of the mind.

And before I do any real work I have to go fight the litter boxes, the worst monster of all.

So, I’ll see you tomorrow. Think fondly of me as I battle the “Cat poo armagedon” (I should have done the boxes yesterday. I’m trying to avoid “poo in my shoe” at this point.)

The government doesn’t grant you your fundamental rights. You have those by virtue of being human.

Good governments protect them. Bad governments violate them. The fact that they can, and do violate them doesn’t mean they never existed. In fact, arguably, the fact they violate them means they exist.

Which is why I was completely befuddled when I was told that no, of course these aren’t natural rights, since if they were we wouldn’t need a bill of rights to protect them.

I think I merely pointed out that the fact the founders, it turns out rightly, didn’t trust future governments doesn’t mean the rights don’t exist before and beyond governments. It simply means bad governments can violate them. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the morality of doing so.

These are negative rights. They are rights you have in the absence of anyone violating them. (Remember Obama hated that, as he hates anything that doesn’t give him power over us.)

Rights like the right to bear arms don’t mean you have the right to have someone give you weapons. (No matter how much we throw ourselves on the floor and scream.) In the same way the right to free speech doesn’t mean we have the right to make people listen to our speech, compel people to agree with our speech or even insist people don’t contradict us.

In fact is the right to free speech I wish to talk about. By the time I was eighteen and doing 12th grade in the US, I knew the second amendment was under fire.

But I never thought I’d live to see the day when the left openly — not covertly — attacked the first amendment and talked about abolishing it.

Honestly, I think that’s a measure of how we’re winning.

The unalienable rights are well and good, but while the left had the effective lock on mass communication, they really weren’t scared of speech that disagreed with them. Even the times they were “forced” to tolerate it, like during presidential debates, they made sure anything that went against their beliefs was curtailed, mocked, made to seem bad. They could do this by seeding the questions with the left ahead of time, and afterwards by making anything the right candidate said seem stupid.

I still remember — possibly the last time they had that power — how they turned Romney’s anodyne comment about women in binders into — SOMEHOW — a chauvinist and anti-feminist attack. It was inexplicable. But it was everywhere at once and very loud and people went along because they weren’t sure what it all meant, but there must be something in it.

Now they don’t have that power. And they’ve been badly trained by years of having effective monopoly on communication. Then there’s the fact their best ideas were from the USSR and have been proven to bring nothing but horror and poverty.

And meanwhile while for inscrutable reasons (except a resistance to letting us go or perhaps being afraid the Human race will have better chances of survival if we leave the Earth) they were keeping us off space, geeks geeked the computer revolution. Which led to places like this blog and Twitter, and various other means by which someone not-approved can talk.

You can tell how threatened they are by it when you realize they are already stomping on “normal people speaking out on the internet” in the rest of the anglo sphere. (Because abuses elsewhere wouldn’t shock us as much.) And trust me on this, even in the rest of the anglosphere, they have nothing even remotely close to our vigorous political blogging and reporting sphere.

Anyway, in this crowd I do not need to tell you the importance of free speech, or that the right worth protecting is the right to unpopular speech or speech unapproved of from the top.

No. What I want to tell you, instead, is that at a time when it often feels we have an uphill battle.

But this is an actual sign we’re winning. Even if it’s an annoying one. And one where the other side is all stompy. And really bad things on that front are happening in Europe.

but the truth is the left could afford to pretend to be pro free speech and keep pushing the free speech boundaries mostly in ways that destroyed the culture and helped them get what they wanted until they lost the speech monopoly. And speech they didn’t like started to be heard.

Now they’ve had to drop the mask on that as on so many other things.

And now we can see them for the enemies of our unalienable rights they are.

Which means they have no chance of winning the fight. No. You can’t stop a million voices even with force.

Once more I’d like to remind you that typewriters took down the USSR.

They will make noise. They will threaten.

But you need to learn — I’ve learned — the more noise they make, the more they’re losing.

And they are losing.

Keep talking. Don’t stop.

Tribalism is the bane of mankind.

If there really were no great civilizations before ours, the fault would be squarely laid at the feet of tribalism.

To the extent the West has managed to take humanity further — further away from want, further away from famine, further away from the misery of barbarism — it is because through a combination of historical, philosophical and religious circumstances, the west (some places to a higher extent than others) came to view humans as all (more or less) part of the same tribe. All “human.”

Because you see, in tribalism you don’t. Those people who are related to you, or look like you, or tie their flegfardt as you do are people. Everyone else, them over there, who wear their spoons sideways? They’re not human. They’re terrifying animals who look like humans but who are as likely to kill you and eat you as look at you.

In the deep past of mankind — AND STILL IN MUCH OF THE WORLD — your humanity is conditional on how close you resemble the tribe in question and sometimes on whether you were raised there.

In the US we joke that there are places like small town New England or places in the Appalachia where if you haven’t lived there three generations you’re foreigners. Many places in Europe are or were like that till recently, (at least the one I came from was submerged in “foreigners” sometimes literally, so it’s no longer like that) but that’s not what I am talking about. It is perhaps the narrow edge of it.

However in true tribalism, you really don’t consider the rest of humanity “human.” The corollary, by the way, is that you don’t consider yourself quite human. You’re a being of the group. Your identity, the fact that you’re human at all is wrapped up in this sometimes very small group of people. You only make sense in connection with them.

Even the place I came from was/is a bit like that. It’s the West, of course, and of course other people are human, but there is an overwhelming tendency to think of yourself only in relation to the family, the tribe and their needs.

But how does that hold civilization back, Sarah? Shouldn’t we think of others, of the family, of the people we love first?

Um….

One thing is interest in others, loving your neighbor. Another is to view yourself as owing an obligation to people you’re related to for the rest of your life.

As an arrangement I suppose it’s superior to a man alone in the Savannah with a knife. Which is why most human societies drifted to it. That and because it’s the natural state of Great Apes, which is what we are.

However– However–

Tribalism, codified and set in stone becomes binding. You can’t innovate, you can’t have private property, you can’t improve yourself because you belong to the tribe/the family/the group.

We’ve all heard of tribal societies where a member can’t open a store, because all others will demand things for free from the store.

Where I come from which is well past that stage, you’re still expected to do “favors” for your family (which makes all Latin societies inherently corrupt. Yes, the culture is the same.) And you’re expected “not to give yourself airs” and not to act like you’re better than “your people.” And this is in Europe.

To the extent America became the engine of innovation and improvement of human life it is because, for various reasons, we got over tribalism.

Fully? no. Fully might be impossible so long as humans are humans. We are not angels, but apes who dream of angels.

However in America the ideal is to live with others as though every other were as human as you are, regardless of looks, attitude, etc. In America, the ideal is you deal fairly with everyone, and you have laws that apply to everyone equally.

Now, this doesn’t always apply, and it’s always at its worst when we get a large influx of immigrants, all at once. There were Irish and Italian immigrant ghettos, and of course you favored your kind if you could. “Of course” because you’re human. And there was a large unassimilated lump of people that were closer to each other than the rest, and under stress. of course they clung and acted tribal.

Still do with the latest imports. Perhaps worse with the latest imports, because America is under attack internally too, as well as externally.

The wave of people brought in to submerge the culture in ever increasing numbers was an attack. Of course it was. A highly innovative form of asymmetric warfare. but so was the insidious corruption of our laws and institutions which were supposed to assimilate and integrate the newcomers.

Instead of people being encouraged to learn English, they were catered to in their original language. Something that kept them tribal and clinging to those who understood them, and also dependent on the government catering to them.

People were encouraged to cling to their customs, from the innocuous — clothing, food, music — to the noxious — considering the long-ago-left-behind-countries better than the US — to the damaging, like honor killings or child marriage. Everyone else was told to oppose any one of these things, or to wish your neighbors didn’t play salsa music in the yard day and night (an actual example from a recentish article) was “racist” because “silence” was white. Somehow.

So were things like being punctual, frugal and clean. The bourgeois virtues that lifted the poor of the west out of poverty were now discouraged in new immigrants. People who demanded them from new immigrants were called racists. And the immigrants themselves were made to feel guilty if they tried to fit in.

A few years ago, someone nominally on our side also an immigrant said it made perfect sense that I’d completely acculturated (except for the d*mn accent) because “Women always adopt their husband’s tribal customs.” He’s not exactly wrong, at that, because of course evolutionarilly that is what was selected for, since women were often either traded or war spoils. It favored survival.

Except that if that were the case, my husband would have adopted half of my original culture, or more, because that’s what everyone from neighbors to colleagues to schools pushed us to do. I was told I came from a beautiful old culture — with absolutely no interest in why then I’d choose to come here. There is a curious blindness among the elite left, where they think prosperity is a function of location, not of what you do there — and my husband — whose ancestors have been here since the first European arrivals (save for the ones who met them on the shore) –got shamed for not learning Portuguese. A language, mind you, that had absolutely no use in our daily life.

As late as our youngest being in Middle School, schools assumed that “of course” we spoke Portuguese exclusively at home.

Those are the pressures against assimilating. Not, of course, that my family much cared, because we are Odd, which means while we’re aware of the way we’re being pushed, being pushed just annoys us. If anything it makes us less likely to go that way. So I acculturated, even when it felt like dying. My husband — to the extent being a mathematician, that he’s even aware of social pressures and dictates — became more intensely American. Our family went all out for the High Holy Holidays (for those not read in, that’s the Fourth of July, though we also do a thing for Valley Forge that involves biting off the heads of gingerbread Hessian soldiers on Christmas.) The 4th of July was the kids’ favorite holiday because we had the biggest party we could muster. Every year. And the kids were raised on the founding documents and American history and the ethos of America and why we were different and better than the rest of the world.

Which probably makes them rather odd ducks, since the rest of the kids in school are hearing why America is worse. And also why white people suck. (And the definition of white is more “behaves in a middle class way” so that Asian immigrants are considered white two generations in.) And are responsible for the evil in the world.

I think the left said between that and encouraging arrant tribalism in all the newcomers they’d get us back into a tribal society.

Tribal societies are easy to control. You keep the groups stoked one against the other. And then you rule on top of the mud heap.

It didn’t work that way. Oh, sure, there are people still stuck in that mind set, notably a lot of Democrat congressmen and women. But the man and woman on the street? Not so much. Latins didn’t vote for illegal immigration, even if the idea is fostered that most of those coming in illegally are Latin. (No longer largely the case.)

And then there’s the fact the left has never understood people who look alike to THEM can have very deep divisions. And that there’s no way in hell all people who tan are going to unite against “the white” because frankly they view the other people who tan as more of a problem.

That’s the fractious side. But there’s the other side.

Humans in proximity with other humans meld, meet and reproduce. Regardless of how much those near them try to stop them. That’s humans. We’re randy apes.

It is not rare or even noteworthy for me to find myself some public place and see a family that’s clearly an amalgam of several different points-of-origin. Oh, sure, sometimes those points of origin are all in Africa or all in Europe (though that’s rare, frankly) but even then they are the type of family that could only occur in America. More usually there are people of European, Asian, African and indefinable origins interacting as family, with kids passed around from lap to lap. Even in highly ethnic and relative recent immigrant places, like our favorite Mexican restaurant, I’ve seen a Latin family with quite obviously an Asian daughter in law and grandchild.

People meld. People mingle. By and large and more and more with the ease of travel, people are a genetic kludge. BUT and this is very important, people are American.

Yes, even now, despite all the pressures to the contrary, these people interact as Americans.

During the never-ending June driving around, I found myself at a hotel breakfast with a bunch of teen basketball players. Their unifying characteristic is that all of them made me feel like a midget. And yes, a lot of them were very very dark. But a lot were tall blonds, and looked either Germanic or Irish or yes. (Yes, growing up in Europe I can indeed tell you those features are all different.) They interacted as friends. Or in some cases frienemies, but despite all the push to view themselves as widgets who are a race/a skin color/a set of features FIRST the divisions were nowhere that clear cut.

And I literally couldn’t imagine that scene anywhere else.

Now, before you guys think I’ve lost my mind. I still think that illegal immigration is bad and bad for us. When I say these people were used as a weapon, I don’t mean they were brought in for our good. Perhaps they allowed some companies to pay lower amounts to their work force, but at the same time we were paying vast (vaster than I think we’ll ever know) amounts in social net payments to enable that.

And we were paying other prices, since other countries flooded us with the worst of their worst. Crime, lawlessness, all in turn leading to greater tribalism.

And of course, since Jimmy Carter and some crazy court decision saying tests with different outcomes are discriminatory, people have been forbidden from administering tests to job applicants. This fostered credentialism; the explosion of the diploma factory universities (and at this point even the ivies are diploma factories) AND nepotism. (If you can’t trust anyone, hire your friend/cousin/neighbor.)

Given that and systems that rewarded a work force that was anything but white male, it all became a spoils system that discriminated against whites and hardest against white males.

So now you have a lot of very intelligent people who, having been pounded their entire lives with the idea they mustn’t be racist and must be open to every skin color and culture have decided the solution to society’s ills is…. tribalism.

For the love of suffering succotash people! I know some of you have a brain. I’ve seen you use it. But in this? In this you’re “thinking” — I use the term loosely — with your toenails, or perhaps your spleen.

Tribalism is impossible to eliminate and to an extent, yes, we suffer from tribalism. And people, particularly displaced recent immigrants will take advantage.

But–

You can’t complain about people favoring their tribesmen from “places where they shit on the streets” and then want to have MORE TRIBALISM HERE.

Listen, let me spell it out for you: WHAT MAKES THE WEST BETTER IS NOT THE FACT THAT MOST OF YOU NEED SPF 3005 SUNBLOCK or some other f*cking alien type of thing to protect you from the sun. It’s not your blue eyes. It’s not your blond hair.

Hitler’s illusions notwithstanding, throughout the Middle Ages Germany was considered the most backward country in Europe, and part of the setup for the long war of the twentieth century was their just having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unified and wanting a warm water port in the worst way. (Literally.)

Skin color is not magic. There might be some genetic advantages to Neanderthal genetic inheritance, including a tendency to not be quite so tradition bound and more creative. Maybe. Evidence is unclear. Shake the magic eight ball of shards of pottery and bits of bone, and ask again.

Culture does matter. And the Western culture of “all human shaped things are human” and “We’ll give them the same chance under the law” did best for ALL HUMANS. The American version of “Equal under the law and give them a chance” did particularly well when combined with mobility both physical and social that allowed the exceptional to shine.

So why am I hearing rumblings about how we need a more collectivist mind set and we need to be tribal?

Mostly because people aren’t thinking. Partly because they are interacting with people who still live in the worst shit holes of the universe and either tell them how wonderful the place is, or pretend they aren’t living there and tell them how bad the US is.

Because of course, the practices of the places where you shit on the street will become MAGICALLY improved if you remove melanin. Yep. That’s super-plausible, isn’t it? No, I’m not calling you a racist. I’m calling you stupid.

If your skin color is so fucking superior and gifts you with automagic thinking powers, prove it. Do better at things by virtue of it. That means you don’t need a hand up or a handout, and you don’t need nepotism in your favor. Just a fair playing field. (And perhaps not even that, if you’re superior enough.)

And here’s the part I plain don’t get — just don’t get — Trump’s administration has made it possible to test people for government jobs again. And you know where government jobs go, the rest will follow.

This is not just a killing blow for the Academic stupidity, but, combined with stomping hard on DEI and the very concept of racial favoritism, and the closing of the borders and making work visas harder to obtain for a while, we stand a chance of clawing back to a society that’s primarily meritocratic.

Which we badly need because, listen to me, if you hire people for ANY REASON other than competence, competence will degrade and disappear. Yes, yes, you see the “affirmative action” hires, and you think competence is in the crapper in general because they can tan.

I have bad news for you. If you give preference to tall, pale blonds (in anything but modeling) you’ll be in the same place in three generations. The schools will not demand as much of them, because they must give them good grades; the people who hire will hire them even if they can barely read; and once on the job they will not do anything, because a) it’s not required. b) no one taught them how to.

If you just said “Well, fine, at least it will be my people” you have traded in your brain for a pancake. And the pancake is flat and lacking syrup.

If I didn’t have descendants, and if I didn’t come from an exceptionally long-lived line, I’d just smirk, sit back and buy marshmallows to roast on the fires of the dying civilization as we head back to tribalism for the long count.

Except that I do both. And that I don’t think the intellectuals who are now declaiming for “community” and “tribalism” are winning this one. Because again, people on the street don’t care for your triumphalist arguments.

They care for what works. And tribalism, in the long run, works for nothing but making people mad and resentful. And insular, very insular.

So why are all these people trying to push us in that direction and convincing us there’s no other hope, even as the things propping up this — pardon me — shitty regime are being pulled down by the administration? Even as people are becoming free to compete individually and on an even playing field again?

Why the big push the other way, the clamor of voices?

Isn’t it a coincidence we’re being told “We need affirmative action for OUR side” even as affirmative action is finally being relegated to the dust bin of history?

Oh, you’ll say but it’s “American Heritage” bloodline, because that is those who understand liberty and representative government.

Which is very cute. Husband comes as close to qualifying for that as you’re going to get (People who fully qualify for that, all eleven of them, have 30 toes per foot. And play the banjo really well.) He’s an exception to their political leanings. Most of them are blue-blooded communists. Because they prize “making the right high class noises” and “having the right high class thoughts” above all else, and thanks to Academia and the last century, most of those noises and thoughts have been Marxist.

Years ago, we had this glass fronted bookcase that our cat D’Artagnan (nickname Slinky McEvil) had learned to open and close. (Bear with me. yes, it is relevant.)

We don’t quite know how, but we kept finding Havey cat confined to the bottom shelf of this bookcase. Reconstructing the crime, we assumed that D’Artagnan had put Havey’s toy in there, leaving the door open, and when Havey got in, D’Artagnan slammed the door on him.

This happened at least twice a day, every day. We kept explaining to Havey “This cat doesn’t have your best interests at heart. This cat is not your friend.” And yet, it happened again and again, till older son (whose cat D’Artagnan was) moved out taking the bad element (now gone, and lamented) with him.

Havey-cat has some excuse, since he spent his kittenhood in a mini golf course where people hit him on the head with golf clubs for playing with the balls.

I don’t think most of you have that excuse. I mean, they don’t abandon kids at mini golf courses, and if they did the kid would die rather than live on bugs and feature water.

What’s more, you have all the history of humanity at your disposal. You can read (most of you.) Unlike Havey cat, you can learn from the mistakes of history and the rest of the world.

And yet it never occurs to you the people pushing tribalism, division, and an inversion of the already dysfunctional system in place are not your friends and don’t have your best interests at heart. It never occurs to you that changing the power sign means nothing because HIRING OR FIRING FOR ANY REASON BUT COMPETENCE LEADS TO LACK OF COMPETENCE.

It never occurs to you that a state of tribalism will need a strong state to mediate the spoils and keep the tribes from each other’s throat.

And that we’re dying form a too-strong state.

It never occurs to you that people throwing fits against individualism and individual striving and achievement don’t have America (or the West’s) best interests at heart.

Havey-cat has an excuse. What’s yours?

For the last few years, with the open border and people trampling in willy nilly, I had a running theme when I linked those news: Those poor saps are walking in on a family quarrel. When the excrement hits the rotating object it’s going to get seriously ugly.

I now think I was wrong on that. Oh, not on its getting ugly. I still worry about that and they — and the people they think are their defenders — aren’t making these people being caught in the middle less likely.

But I’m less — not completely “not worried” but less — worried about the excrement hitting the rotating object and precipitating us into a civil war.

Look, I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know how many votes the left is creating ex nihilo. I’ve known for a good long while that we were nothing like the half of the country that shows up in voting — this is obvious from how hard they work all the fraud mechanisms — sometime in the last three years I came to suspect their high watermark, including all the indoctrinated young and their insane shock troops and everyone else was about 25%. Of those the hard shock troops which are the criminally inclined and the insane who can’t be talked out of their leftist insanity are maybe half of that.

Look, in a nation of 300 mil (I never bought the 50 aggregated on out of nothing the last 20 years even as birthrates trolled the depths) it’s still a lot of people.

But it’s not enough for a civil war.

The fact that we took away some of their financing sources (not even all of them) and the shock troops became reduced to the usual half a dozen boomers with assistive oxygen and walkers bleating on the corner just reinforced my belief. I’m now convinced the young lady who told me ten years ago that most of antifa was there because it was a paycheck was saying nothing but the truth.

So the illegal masses coming in aren’t getting into the middle of a family quarrel. But they are still in danger. In fact they might be in more danger than not.

Look, there are certain things we’d been assured were lies that we now know we’re not.

And one of them was that it was a lie that people were coming here to steal American jobs.

We were told that immigrants came here to do jobs Americans wouldn’t do.

Turns out they were wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but wide open wrong.

Numbers don’t lie, and even with the anemic deportation we’ve had, salaries have gone up.

But it’s beyond that. The Telegraph last night had an article about “Generation jobless.” This is something I’ve been sounding the alarm on for a while, and all I get is “it’s all the fault of kids these days.”

Note that the Telegraph is in Britain, but the article could have been written about this country too. I’m not the only one who has observed a tendency for young people (And dear Lord I’ve been screaming at it for 10 years. They’re mostly now over thirty) to either be stuck in a never-ending educational loop or give up and hide in the basement doing nothing. Sometimes literally.

Now the problem used to be mostly young men, because well, the overculture was rigged to create at least “false success” for women, (make work jobs. Pretty looking jobs. “Our Laney is a representative of the under-represented, at anti-racism inc.” and don’t tell anyone she makes nothing) because of all the feminism rawr noises. And also because women are as a rule more social and less likely to hit the “I’m just gonna give up and hide.” But lately I understand young women are hitting the same, with a side line of being highly medicated and on endless therapy sessions.

Thing is when there is a “generation jobless” I don’t care how bad kids these days are (and whose fault is it, if you didn’t check they were at a minimum taught to read and write? Because even I managed that) there is more at work here. A lot more.

The lot more became obvious under Biden when for a year or so almost anyone who got a job was not born in the country. (And I bet it’s the same in England.)

Why? Oh, several trends. One of them was DEI, sure, but another was that people who are here and not citizens are easier to make into indentured servants and/or/pay less. There is also credentialism. If what you require to hire someone is a certificate, other countries are far more okay with faking certificates than Americans ever were. We’re autistic about stuff like that. They’re not.

But ultimately? It’s cheaper. And they’re easier to bully. It looked good for the bottom line; it looked good for diversity.

And so, companies have in fact giving away American jobs away to immigrants. And no, the trades are not a refuge from this, because lately they’ve been importing people for the trades too. (Those are mostly illegal.)

Yes, this means you’re going to see a lot enshittification, because most of the illegals (and not) are faking credentials, learning on the job, and have lower standards for “doing it well” because those are cultural. (Look, I come from a culture where doing it sort of okay is the apex to be aspired to, provided it’s done quickly. Yes, I was saved by being on the spectrum. I have a tendency to waste a lot of time on perfectionism. but there’s a middle ground, and most of the imports won’t even try.)

BUT they are cheaper. And so they are the ones being hired, and salaries are driven down, and then the only ones wanting to do it are those who are also benefiting from programs to help illegals and “refugees” and who can afford to do less in the visible market because they’re receiving subsidies and also working under the table.

The idiots liberals think this means they’re keeping America functioning, but that’s not remotely what’s happening.

What’s happening is simultaneously a driving down of quality and a pushing down of price, until at some point the quality can’t be driven down more by offshoring, but the price falls, and then we outsource to slave labor in China and other totalitarian regimes.

Look, this can’t go on. We can’t continue subsidizing driving our own children out of the job market. And yes, the problem starts with minimum wage, because that’s what sets up the inability to hire people legally. But it doesn’t end there. There are a million factors driving this.

And it’s all pushed by DEI, inability to test people for jobs and having to rely on credentials, and of course open borders.

Trump is doing exactly what he should be doing, in stopping DEI and making it possible to test people for jobs. Because that’s the death or credentials. Oh, and of course, closing the borders.

The young might not be well educated — most are not — and might have learned helplessness. But they’re still of our stock. If their parents succeeded, they’ll find their way once we stop hitting them on the head.

But in the meantime, the people demonstrating on the streets with foreign flags, and the usual idiot obligatory boomers talking about “compassion” are making the possible outcome exponentially worse.

We have figured out the people coming here are in fact taking ours or our kids’ jobs*. From here on out, it’s going to follow a crazy train of resentment against “the intruders.” It’s starting with Indians, because they’re a visible minority. It’s not going to stop there.

The best thing to do? Stop H1B visas. Stop nepotistic/racial hiring. Stop flapping lips about the inherent superiority of your race/subrace. Stop flying foreign flags. Stop insisting we cater to YOUR language, which is not English. Shut up and do your best to Fit in. Or Fuck Off.

Because at the end of this, this bullshit slide affects me. More importantly, it affects my kids.

And yes, note I put an asterisk up there. *Arguably I did steal an American job, but not one recognized as such in the eighties. And in my defense, if he’d not married me, my husband would be unlikely to marry and stay married. We’re one of those couples. So I stole the Wife to the Mathematician and Mother to his very Odd Offspring from some American-born woman, who’d probably run screaming from that job.

I didn’t steal the job as a writer from anyone.** Look, it’s not a location specific job. Arguably, I’d do much better if I were living in Portugal. And I’ve told people to stop worrying about AI and start worrying about people in Eastern European countries who speak English well enough to produce write for hire popcorn books for American companies who will pay them for the piece work, then pay someone who is not ESL to fix it. This is happening right now. Because $500 per novel and a novel per month is a princely living in many places in the world. I’m not that cheap, but what I make per year even just from writing would put me on a par with my brother and SIL who live very well indeed for Portugal.

So, why not do it? For the same reason I throw things at people (American and Portuguese) who ask me why I don’t retire in Portugal. It’s sort of like asking you why you don’t wear a suit that squeezes you and makes you itch all day.

I choose to live here, because I’m American. This is where I feel at home. Where my friends live, and the people I want to be friends with. The people that get me. This is where my children, who have never been anything but American live.

Which is why I’m hoping the crazy doesn’t get out of control enough that the broken identification mechanism casts me out.

Because I have nowhere to go. No other place is home.

[** Writing is a field screwed up by cheap labor, yes, but the cheap labor at least until recently was not foreign. Writing was screwed up by the demand that women have a profession as well as anything else. This drove an influx of stay-at-home-wives (most not moms) into the field. They were willing to work for less, because mostly they worked for the prestige. Most of them were exquisitely educated and well off, anyway. This drove the advances down to the point they are lower than they were in the 40s. It also, as it always does, affected quality as the books started reflecting ONLY the concerns of an extremely narrow population band, and one what wasn’t concerned with making a living.
Economics is a right bitch. You can’t solve it by screaming about race or whatever. It’s all about supply and demand. A supply of cheaper labor in excess of demand drives price down. That’s it. That it also drives quality down has more to do with the nature of an artistic field and the impressions it feeds on.]

Book Promo

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

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Following Trouble : A Tale of Underhill (Pixie for Hire)

Lom has a new mission, to track down illicit magical use. Something is going on in the gritty underworld of Cincinnati, where the nightclubs are still hosting gambling and the organized crime runs more smoothly than the bureaucracy. He’s about to find out if he’s going to get lucky… or get dead.

FROM DALE COZORT: There Will Always Be An England II: Planet Ripper

A gripping blend of alternate history, science fiction, and military adventure set in a world where time travel, alien invasion, and World War II-era conflicts collide.

1944 Britain spent twelve grueling years in the Stone Age, leaving its World War II Allies to fight on alone and forcing brutal decisions: dispatching stranded US troops to ancient North America, while wartime factories crumbled to rust. When the nation snaps back to 1944—mere weeks after it left—it’s a superpower, boasting jets, nuclear reactors, advanced computers, and television, light-years ahead of the world.

But this Britain is a fragile giant, its defenses geared for Neanderthal raids, not modern warfare. As Nazi Germany eyes the vulnerable country, eager to exploit the chaos, an even greater peril looms: a huge, derelict artificial moon orbits Earth, self-repairing with each orbit. Whoever seizes it could dominate the planet—or doom it.

In this pulse-pounding alternate history, survival hangs on getting rusting equipment back in the fight while turning Britain’s advanced technology to war.

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS: Alien Family Traditions (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 58)

In a galaxy torn by war, where battles shatter civilizations, the heart of family endures. From adoptions that bridge species to foster homes offering refuge to aliens and humans alike, love becomes the ultimate rebellion against conflict. Discover uplifting tales of unlikely kin—blood, chosen, or found—building havens of hope amidst chaos. In this heartwarming collection, explore the lives of those who choose compassion over strife, the consequences that reshape worlds, and the reasons why family, in all its forms, is the brightest light in the darkest times. A feel-good celebration of unity and resilience that will leave you inspired.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: Stories of Asteroid Mining: Hardships in the Belt

Stories of Asteroid Mining: Hardships in the Belt
by John Bailey

In the ruthless frontier of the asteroid belt, fortunes are carved from stone—and lives are shattered in silence.

Stories of Asteroid Mining tells three gripping tales from the boom era of space’s final gold rush. Elias Varn, the wiry mechanic-turned-prospector, claws his way to success and returns home to marry his sweetheart. Torin Kade, a hopeful coder from Europa, finds only betrayal and loss in the void. And Cassian Holt, the cunning tycoon, builds a mining empire from the wreckage of failed dreams.

From the dust-choked hulls of Vesta’s saloons to the icy stars above Ceres, these stories chronicle the harsh realities of life in the Belt. In a world where oxygen costs more than whiskey, and claim-jumpers hunt in stealth ships, only the sharp, the stubborn, or the soulless survive.

For fans of hard sci-fi, space Westerns, and frontier capitalism, this gritty anthology exposes the sacrifices made to mine the sky—and what’s left when the stars no longer shine for you.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: On Account of a Dame (Timelines Universe Book 9

Welcome to the New Jazz Age!

It’s the Roaring Twenties all over again — well — the 2120’s, that is. Where New York City has reverted to its Jazz Age roots of two centuries before. What’s missing? Prohibition, and gun control. What’s not missing? Tough guys, and the dames who (sometimes) love them. Gin joints. Speakeasies. Dance halls. The Social Register is still a thing, and the Beautiful People litter the society pages of the local hypernews sites.

Enter a typical gumshoe private detective — a member of that high society himself, yet a man who left society long ago for other pursuits. And his latest client, a rich young woman of leisure, who needs her new husband followed.

Throw in the recently-crowned queen of one of Chinatown’s tongs, a beautiful investment wizard from upstate, and a hundred million dollars in assets, and suddenly it’s all

On Account of a Dame

BY PETER RABE, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Dig My Grave Deep (Annotated): The classic pulp noir

Danny Port wanted out. Being the right hand man to the boss of a political machine in a second rate city was no longer interesting, let alone exciting. But Boss Stoker wanted him to stay. And Stoker’s main competition, head of the local Reform Party Bellamy, wants him to switch teams. And nobody, but nobody, is willing to let him leave. Worst of all, every one of them knows about Shelly, and some of them even know what she means to Port.

• This iktaPOP Media edition has a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.

FROM TIMOTHY WITCHAZEL: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

From author and poet Timothy V. Witchazel comes the story of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho in alliterative verse. Tracing the story of the Israelites from the parting of the Red Sea to the fall of the walls of Jericho, the story is retold in the style of Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and other Anglo-Saxon poems.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Having a Pint (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 2)

Even the dead have to make a living…

Meg Turner, vampire accountant and investments advisor, has plenty of living clients, but not many among her fellow undead. That’s about to change: she’s been invited to a regional business fair for her kind. She’ll get to meet and greet more bloodsuckers than she really wanted to (hopefully without having to suck up to any of them). than just the two Vampire cops she helped track down and stake her late, unlamented sire—and hopefully make some friends and answer some questions.

Unfortunately, she’s got a Line Progenitor who’s begun invading her dreams, and a serial killer stalking her future clients to distract her from growing her business. Throw in a sick roommate not long before the conference starts, a mafia messenger boy left on her front porch, and only one car to juggle all of her responsibilities toward her roommate and unexpected guest. And then on top of that, she has the business fair over an hour away that features vampire karaoke, nosy, pushy elder bloodsuckers, and one particular elder who’s friends with her unwelcome dream guest. Seriously, it’s enough to drive her to drink something other than coffee or blood.

Just why did she think this whole conference thing sounded like a good idea, again?

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn

A short story of banishment and magical intrigues.

Cecily had been a lady-in-waiting. Exiled to Clearwater — for her health — after she angered Queen Blanche, she has nothing to do but wait.

Until an ambassador is sent there, for his health, and Cecily finds that the court intrigues reach farther than she had known they could.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Time Enough to Spy

A spy has at long last come in from the cold — but all is not as it seems. The longer his debriefing continues, the more uneasy he becomes. In particular, how can he reconcile his presence here with the impossibility of both rescue and escape from a polity with the power to remodel the bodies of their subjects at will?

What secret hides behind those cool professional faces of the agents who briefed him so long ago? Has he been induced to betray all he was sent to protect?

A short story of the Madrian Empire.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Frantic