Salon Admits Jeffro Was Right

Jeffro's detractors have called him a crackpot conspiracy theorist for daring to point out the concerted effort by major publishing houses filthy with secular midwits and tedious intersectionalists to commandeer the ship of science-fiction and steer it away from the open waters of action, adventure and heroism and onto the deadly rocks of collectivist thought.  They don't want to see that attempts to weaponize science-fiction is straight up non-fiction and so have ignored all of his cogent observations and connections.

Well, Slate (ramping up for the Hugo Awards - these stories always hit the press in greater numbers in June in order to help establish street cred for their garbage reporting on the Hugos) let the cat out of the bag.  I'm not linking to that fake news site, but here's my proof:

A few choice quotes:

If you’re surprised to hear that that science fiction might actually have a meaningful real world impact, you haven’t been paying attention. Science fiction and science reality have often found themselves in a feedback loop.

Okay, that's not exactly news.  We all know this to be true.  The article takes a turn for the sinister when it reports on an organization seeking ways to bridge the gap between dreaming of SJW futures and implementing them:

The newly announced Science Fiction Advisory Council, composed of a stellar selection of 64 bestselling sci-fi writers and visionary filmmakers, has tasked itself with imagining realistic, possible, positive futures that we might actually want to live in—and figuring out we can get from here to there.

Does anyone think that this council will be inviting Dragon Award winning author Brian Niemeier or best selling science-fiction (and non-fiction) author Vox Day or even a Nick Cole?  Beuller?  Beuller?  Yeah, didn't think so.  No room for badthinkers when you've got towering luminaries like Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, checkbox hire Malindo Lo, and colossal douche Neil Gaiman.  Although, you have to give 'em credit for including a few tokens like Niven and Mike Resnick.

This is a council interested in directing the future along paths that are pre-approved by the Narrativists and they cannot welcome guys with clear vision and deep understanding of how humans actually operate rather than how they might operate if only they would surrender control over their lives to the SFAC.  So you won't see even moderate voices like Larry Correia, John C. Wright, Brad Torgerson, or Sarah Hoyt win that Golden Ticket.

Bear in mind that this council goes well beyond previous instances of science-fiction writers - actually engineers who write science-fiction - advising the US military on potential new technologies.  The SFAC lists numerous roadmaps designed to steer the future along a "preferred future state" including "Planet & Environment; Energy & Resources; Shelter & Infrastructure; Health & Wellbeing; Civil Society; Learning & Human Potential; and Space & New Frontiers" (emphasis mine).

Anyone want to bet that the civil society they envision will include criminal sentencing for rodeo clowns who wear the wrong mask, but plenty of room for staged political assassinations (when the assassins' target is on the wrong side of the political divide?   Anyone want to bet that a big part of the roadmap for civil society will be finding way to reduce or eliminate the influence of Christianity, free speech, or the preservation of European culture?

 With a council like they have assembled, that's a sucker's bet.

But take heart.  Their roadmaps will be clumsy, ineffectual things.  They will be predicated on the same false notions of humanity possessed by most of the members of the council.  As their view of humanity is so fanciful, their roadmap will be a rainbow bridge built on dreams and wishes and just as effective at carrying vehicle traffic.  This is largely a collection of authors whose works do not resonate with readers, whose works have driven mainstream readers away from books, and whose only recourse is the ever popular appeal to amenable authority.  Their roadmaps will all be less about maps and more about traffic laws and ensuring that they control the highway patrol to force humanity to drive the direction they want, regardless of what the people want and regardless of what will be healthy for humanity.

Unfortunately, although their plans are guaranteed to fail, there's no telling how much damage they might do to civilization in the meantime.  So do your part to help stave off their inevitable dystopian futures - don't read anything written after 1940, and if you must, don't read anything published east of the Hudson River.

Hey, here's something that meets the latter criteria
and it's a heck of a lot of fun, to boot!

They Know

Politics is downstream from culture.
 

One of the reasons that the publishers in New York are doing everything they can to isolate independent writers and publishers like Castalia House is that they know it plays a vital role in establishing what kind of future we will have.  We represent a threat not just to their pocketbooks, but a threat to their goal to completely secularize all life in America.  Science-fiction grounded in a Christian worldview - even if it isn't explicit in the way of C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy - serves as a counter to their efforts, and as one grounded in truth and beauty it represents a far more appealing vision of the future than anything the secular nihilists living in NYC can possibly offer.

In the run up to this year's Hugo Awards, the mainstream media is once again turning its attention to pushing back against rebellious newcomers like yours truly by fluffing up the credentials of the intersectionalists, secularists, and just plain Marxists.  NPR's Big Picture ran a typical overview piece that mistakenly reports science fiction's birth in the 1950s and repeats the lie of the false Trinity of the pervert Heinlein, the hack Asimov, and the pedophile Clarke.  No mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs or E.E. Doc Smith - at least in the first 30 minutes of the show.  I grew bored hearing the usual lies and distortion repeated and as such could not stomach the rest.

 

I did hear them mention and thereby tacitly endorse authors like boring Kim Stanley Robinson, a Marxist who wields global warming as a political club, and Margaret Atwood, author of the latest rage amongst the "haven't read a book since Harry Potter" crowd.  Her mediocre and contradictory book, "The Handmaid's Tale" is an explicitly feminist tale based in profoundly stupid understandings of how people work, but which has nevertheless proven to be a popular means of fearmongering by the elites.

 

Brace yourself for a wave of this sort of typical midwit writing by Fake Science Fiction fans writing stories about fake science fiction.  For far greater insights into the state of science-fiction today, watch the following video.  The narrator is talking about Marvel comic books, but his insights are accurate across all media.  He might as well be talking about the Hugo Awards.
 

If you can't stomach fake science fiction, why not give the real thing a shot.  I've got a post-apocalyptic tale featuring real people, real adventure, and real science fiction:

Hugo Novelette: Touring with the Alien

Tomas Diaz beat me to the punch on this review, and more power to him for that. My review was written without peeking at his.  As you'll see, he takes a far more cerebral approach to his review, and I highly recommend giving his blog a read. Where I deal with the brass tacks of this story's inherent contradictions, he delves into the actual philosophical conundrum that arises whenever a nihilist starts flapping their gums.

Onwards and up(?)wards!


Carolyn Ives Gilman takes a stab at Lovecraftian fiction with Touring with the Alien.  Like the alien-human-road-trip film that likely inspired this short story (see left), while the tradesmanship is fine, the pointlessness and meaninglessness of the tale result in nothing more than a few fleeting moments of enjoyment that as forgettable as the story itself.

Reading Touring with the Alien was a much more pleasant experience than my last foray into Hugo territory.  Unlike Alyssa Wong, Gilman sticks to tried and true prose and narrative structures that work.  Her descriptions of a cross country tour evoke the drifting way that time seems to expand as the miles fly by, the terrain outside the window changes, and the towns stay the same, and then contract for the memorable slices of Americana like a downtown café or a county fair.

Her descriptions of a mother's grief at the loss of a child are strong and poignant, with every aspect of the story from the gray weather to the wet grass to the broken terra-cotta angel left on her daughter's grave lending itself to instilling a feeling of sorrow in the reader.  This aspect of Avery, the point-of-view character, humanizes her with a fullness that you don't see all that often in today's 'female bad ass secret agent' characters.

It's tight and compelling writing.  Shame its wasted on such a pointless story.  Carolyn Ives Gilman continues the Hugo Award trend of failing to understand the difference between a trade and an art.  Gilman masterfully strings together sentences that pile up into a pointless heap of garbage the way a master carpenter might lend his talents to this monstrosity:

 

The phrase "point-of-view character" used to describe Avery sounds clunky, but it's as good as it gets.  For all that she is presented as a sympathetic victim of fate, she is no hero.  She consigns humanity to the dustbin of history, regretful only that she wasn't given the free choice to do so, but was tricked into it by the slave of the alien slavers come to conquer the earth:

 

 

Gilman knows which side of the Hugo bread is buttered, and right out of the gate, she checks that all important box without which no story can be considered for the silver rocket:

With that passage, as pointless as the rest of the story, we are two for two in the 2017 Novelette category for tacked-on virtue signaling.  Gilman stops the narrative before it has even begun in order to wave a red flag of GoodThink around the arena to distract the ever-present bulls of the thought police.  She knows full well that without this signal the rest of the story becomes as pointless as, well, as the rest of the story.  She knows that without the first sentence of that paragraph, this story would not have been a Hugo Contender.   Of course, given the SJW penchant for quoting out of context and utter lack of reading comprehension, every sentence of this paragraph after the first will be ignored by them, but the struggle is the glory.  Once again, the objection here is not the inclusion of a homosexual character, but the hamfistedness manner in which its done.  The character of Lionel is expressly written as Hispanic, an important check mark in the racial inclusivity box, but unlike Blake and Jeff, the fact of Lionel's race is presented seamlessly and organically.

There is a second passage that once again showcases Gilman's insular provinciality.  This is a woman so steeped in her own culture that she paints the Other with a brush that reveals more about herself than those whom she writes:

The complete and utter lack of self-awareness of these authors never ceases to amaze.  Desperate to signal her GoodThink and inclusivity, she writes off whole swathes of people with whom she has only the most passing familiarity.  Her egotistic vie of herself as an urbane and sophisticated auteur dispensing deeper truths stands on a foundation of utter ignorance and profoundly crude assumptions about rural Americans. 

And that sort of shallowness of thought doesn't limit itself to descriptions of 'flyover country', it that permeates Touring with the Alien.  Avery is presented as a smart and tough operator who outwits the CIA, but who then gets fooled by her boss and the inexperienced and naïve alien slave, Lionel.  Avery bounces from caring sister to hard case to grieving mother to indifferent genocidal maniac with head snapping speed.  The aliens are presented as all-wise, then know-nothing - eating raw cats makes you sick, bro - with the same sort of disregard for continuity or sense.

Then there's the complete disconnect between the story's main theme of "Nothing really matters," and the constant reminders that we are surrounded by big deals.  All of these disconnects slowly pile up the thoughtful reader's mind, making this story a complete and utter hash.

It's well written hash, and it's hash that the empty headed will enjoy, but in the end, Touring with the Alien is as pointless as the worldview it illustrates.

Cora Lyin'

Cora, Cora, Cora, why you gotta play like dat?

I was goggling about searching for Tomas Diaz's excellent analysis of the Hugo Novelette-ettes, which is excellent.  My own review of Touring with the Alien will be published tomorrow, so check back to compare.

It's a little old, but Cora Buhlert posted a nice long summary of the reactions to the Hugo Awards in which she dwells mainly on those who lament the provinciality and insularity and non-inclusiveness of the award.  It turns out my observation that the wooden anus lickers spent more time talking about authors nominated than the works nominated.  My point was that they didn't really have conversations about the works.  She proved me wrong by concluding:

Comments are still off and passive aggressive e-mails will be deleted unread. Grumble elsewhere.

Heh.  You got yourself a deal.  Welcome to elsewhere, toots.

Cora does make a few predictable objections about past conversations (without providing evidence) and a promise that conversations will be forthcoming once voters receive their packets (a fair point, but I remain skeptical that they will talk about the work rather than the author).  The real impetus for my post is a throw-away line tacked on to the end of hers:

*Does anybody else find the idea of a rabid puppy taking inspiration from Jonathan Livingston Seagull of all things as funny as I do?

Of course she thinks it's funny.  She doesn't know what you're talking about.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the story of a seagull whose unwillingness to conform to the demands of the crowd results in his expulsion from the flock.  It was adopted by the hippy-dippy movement in the 1970s as they struggled to escape the conformity provided by hard work, the Christian faith, and showers.  Cora still operates under that out-dated mindset, clinging to the notion that true rebels write works that conform to the demands of the university system, major publishing houses, Hollywood, every major media outlet, and most major businesses like Target, Google, and Starbucks.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the story of a seagull whose unwillingness to conform to the demands of the crowd results in his expulsion from the flock.  Her mirth makes it clear that she either has not read the work in question - which is largely agnostic on matters of politics, hewing closer to  a 'you be you even if it means going against the majority' message than to her assumed 'stick it to the man, and once you are the man, stick it to those who want to stick it to the man' message.  Proving once again...

These people don't read.

My comments are open.  I like talking about books.  My place is a place for conversations about books, even difficult ones.  It's neither echo chamber nor bully pulpit.  But then, as a member of the distinct minority pushed out by the powers that be, my pulpit is small, my reach short, and my faith in their weakness and lack of desire to discuss books secure.

You'll Surely Drown

You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay by Alyssa Wong has been nominated for a Hugo Award, and since the online conversation about the Hugo Awards is driven primarily by what authors look like, it might be nice to take a moment to do something very, very different - read the work in question and talk about the story itself.  Nutty, I know, but as a literary critic par excellent, it's just the sort of nuttiness that churns my butter.

The good news is that you can read the Hugo Nominated novelette* online for free right here.  The even better news is that you don't even have to read it!  If you're curious about, here's everything you need to know:

A witch-man goes off into the desert, marries her, and sires a were-desert named Ellis.  The local miners, fearful of such creatures do what comes natural and put that witch-man in the ground.  Their decision is proved wise when the desert buries the lot of them at the bottom of a silver mine in retaliation.  After a bit of literary faffing about, the story proper starts off with up with two tenderfoot businessmen and their Preacher-man guide meeting Ellis.  This story was nominated for a Hugo, so you can already guess that as businessmen, these are the villains of the piece, and that one of them harbors latent homosexual feelings for the other.  Gotta check those boxes, baby!

The two men, William and Samuel, might just be Ellis' uncles on his father's side - like so much in this story, it isn't entirely clear.  They deffo sing the same lullaby that Ellis' father used to sing to him.  At any rate, they work for a mining outfit, and if William can get to the mine, he can use his own witch-man powers to use an animated army of dead to do the mining.  That would save labor costs, save lives, and make him rich all at the same time.  What a bastard.  When Ellis realizes the full import of William's vile plan he attempts to kill the lot of them.  But Samuel skins his hog and gives Ellis a case of lead poisoning before Ellis can go full Tasmanian Devil on them.

What the two evil businessmen (but I repeat myself) don't realize is that the Preacher-man is Ellis' uncle on his mother's side, and like Ellis, can bring things back from the dead.  The Preacher-man does that voodoo that he do so well on Ellis, and Ellis takes the bones of all the people his mother killed back to town for a good old fashioned hootenanny complete with a lynching of the two men who killed Ellis in self-defense.  You know, one of those mean old men loves the same girl as Ellis, and offers to take her out of the whore-house and give her a life of ease back east?  The bastard surely deserved to die.

Ellis then turns the love of his life loose to go find a man to love who isn't Ellis...because when you love some one, you first kill anyone who loves her, then tell her to go find somebody else to love?  Then Ellis skips off to take his rightful place as the king of the dead lands.

Brace yourself for an extended metaphor here.  The Harlem Globetrotters have some astounding technical basketball skills.  They can do things with a basketball that make your head spin.  They dribble like monsters, dunk like beasts, and shoot the lights out.  It's incredible to watch.  Even as you marvel at their mastery of the game's tricks and fundamentals, you understand that what they are doing isn't really basketball.  In a straight up game with any NBA team, they'd get killed.  All of those tricks and all of that showmanship just doesn't translate to the actual game of basketball.

I think you know where I'm going with this:

Sweet Georgia Brown, It's Alyssa Wong!

Alyssa Wong is a writer who knows all the tricks, and can pull every single one of them off flawlessly.  The problem with You'll Surely Drown is that she uses them all to terrible effect.

The story is told in second person format.  A bold choice that makes perfect sense for instilling a sense of urgency and discomfort in the reader.  It can also be used to lend additional sympathy for the primary point-of-view character.  It's a great trick, but it just doesn't work in a story like this.  Putting the reader into the shoes of a wild child necromancer stretches things past the breaking point.  The additional cognitive dissonance created by translating the narrative from the second person serves as a constant distraction.  This story has layers of background that are gradually revealed throughout the course of the tale - background that would have been more naturally revealed through the use of more traditional framing devices.

This story is rife with payoff moments.  They happen over and over and over.  The reader goes through a constant cycle of wondering what the heck is going on one moment, only to be told that something else was going on the whole time the next.  Again and again and again.  Used sparingly, this style of story telling can hammer away at a reader and draw forth sudden reactions of delight.  Used repeatedly, they numb the reader, leaving each additional revelation no more special and no more magical than any other passage.

This series of writing exercises masquerading as a story is deliberately designed to be largely opaque.  Wong's writing is evocative, but dense, and her plotting and slow-drip information reveal demand constant attention on the part of the reader.  The resulting narrative reads more like a textbook than a proper story.  These can be a lot of fun to read - they are the basis of the entire mystery genre, after all!  But one of the biggest failings of Wong is that reading the story too closely destroys the narrative.  Everything the reader sees, he sees through Ellis's eyes, but Ellis' narration is one of the most unreliable ever sent to digital print.  He is utterly untrustworthy, and reading the story with the attention it demands exposes the reader to all of the cheap tricks and plot holes that ruin Wong's approach to the story.

Make no mistake about it, Wong has solid writing chops.  She knows how to use tempo, rhythm, word choice, and description to draw a reader in.  She knows how to layer detail and time those character beats to bring things to a riveting climax.  She has clearly spent years honing her craft.

It's a shame she squanders her skills on cheap tricks instead of genuine sportsmanship.

There's a great story here about an orphaned witch boy struggling to come to terms with himself and his power, and about how fear and retribution always rebound onto those who act out of a misplaced desire for vengeance over justice.  There's a story about impossible love and the conflict between civilization and nature.  There's a story about a girl forced to choose between the boy who loves her and the man who can care for her.  But Wong is too enamored of all her pretty little writing tricks and her misplaced faith in nature over man and cleverness over wisdom to write that story.  So instead we get the usual sort of ivory tower bouncing balls that make the fans of showmanship guffaw, rather than the workmanlike attention to story-telling and human nature that results in entertainment at its highest level. 

* Is anyone else amused that the name of the category whose nominations were swept by the fairer sex ends with the female diminutive suffix?  That kind of literary humor writes itself.

What Hugo Discussions Reveal

Take it away Eleanor!

Reading through coverage of this year's Hugo nominated works, both in mainstream media and in the on-line circles thrilled by the results of E. Pluribus Unum, it's striking how little conversation there is about...you know...the works themselves.

From Wired:

Another is that Best Novelette has lately emerged as a microcosm of the Hugos’ move toward gender and racial inclusion. Women have won the category four of the last five years, and all of this year’s nominees are women—except for Hiscock.

Nowhere in that article do they actually discuss the novelettes nominated by the women.  They mention that they are women, but don't really care to talk about the works themselves. 

Not surprising, given that these people don't read.

Consider Fuzion's coverage:

It’s because of interest from communities of fans (like the body that makes up the Hugo Awards voting committee) who make the effort to critically analyze the titles despite the fact that Marvel doesn’t do the best of jobs when it comes to promoting them effectively.

Yeah, except they don't critically analyzes the titles beyond a simple gender and race count.  That's not critical analysis, that's simple social justice scorekeeping.

These people don't read.

Let's check io9:

The Hugo Awards nominations were released this week, featuring some of the best and brightest works in science fiction and fantasy— most of which are relatively well known. Then, there’s one nominee for Best Novelette, a short story hardly anyone had even heard of... until now. It’s called Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock. 

All they want to talk about is Stix Hiscock.  They haven't read any of the other nominee's works, and have no intention of doing so.  Reading and talking about the best novelette stories is so passé.

These people don't read.

Check out the File770 thread where people talk about the nominees.  It's all pricing and tangential issues.  Nobody talks about the works themselves.  Scan the front page and look for any analysis of the works themselves at all.  There's no there there.  They've got Camestros Felaptron doing some analysis but he works in the sad, old Damon Knight style wherein he focuses on who people hang out with far more than what they actually write.

They don't want to talk about ideas.  They don't want to talk about ideas.  They only really want to talk about people.

Small minds.

Now, take a look at the front page of the Castalia House Blog.  On any given day, they've got six or seven reviews of works that talk primarily about what is in the work itself.  They read and analyze the things they've read, not who said what about whom, and oh my god did you see the dress John Scalzi wore on Tuesday it made him look so fat!  It's this dedication to reading and discussion of the works that first drew me to the Castalia House Blog, and it's the reason I'm proud to be a regular contributor.  It's a blog about ideas - a strange thing for a sci-fi blog in these strange days, to be sure.

But you know who talks about ideas?

Great minds.

Hugo Congrats Are In Order

C

ongratulations to the Hugo Award finalists.   A few short thoughts on a few categories:

Best Fan Writer: Jeffro Johnson
This Jeffro guy is getting to be a regular fixture there.  He's slowly becoming the Sally Fields of the Hugo Awards.  They should just give him one already, then maybe he'll finally go away.

 

Best Fancast: The Rageoholic
The level of talent necessary to create a video game blog that outshines the stiff competition in that field is one thing.  To couple that with an encyclopedic knowledge of heavy metal music (and an ability to make heavy metal music interesting for non-metalheads), and some of the best dang political analysis on this or any other internet, and you're looking at a talent that the Hugo Awards don't deserve.  In a just universe, this guy would have wa-hay more subscribers (and be just as hated as) that PewDiePie goofus.  On the other hand, he does have a raging case of the Moorcock Hives.  Elric is okay, but so are a lot of cheap Conan knock-off, people.

Best Fanzine: Castalia House blog
It's traditional to make the Hugo Awards about oneself - not about recognizing the best and brightest in the field - and who am I to buck tradition?  I'm a contributor there, so really, if you think about it, this isn't really Jeffro's second nomination this year, it's my first.  In all seriousness, the crew over there represents some of the smartest and most passionate fans of sci-fi around.  They are also some of the most upbeat and fun loving fans around, constantly pushing envelops and laughing their way into the bad graces of Team Curmudgeon.  They really are the best.

Best Semiprozine: Cirsova
P. Alexander continues to prove the nay-sayers retarded.  As if the continued growth of his little experiment hasn't been gratifying, now he's got a much larger stage upon which to strut his stuff.  He has already earned his stripes, and he deserves all the attention that this nomination should bring his way.

Best Novella: "This Census-Taker" by China Mieville
Bleurgh.  I've never been impressed by China Mieville.  He can put sentences together like a beast, but he's like the Jackson Pollock of writers - all that talent and he turns around and writes vapid trash that is ultimately as empty as his political philosophy.  Also, he owes his success in large measure to having the right politics.  If Perdido Street Station had presented a heroic and inspirational ending that cast doubt on the benefits of socialism, no way would he have earned all those early accolades.  He'd have been Circular Filed along with the rest of the undesirables.

Best Novel: The Obilisk Gate by NK Jemisin
No comment.  Not worth talking about.

You're Welcome, HUGO!

The Rabid Puppies are the best thing to happen to the Hugo Awards in decades.

Five years ago, nobody in the mainstream media was talking about the Hugos.  It was considered a niche of a niche market.  Maaaybe you'd see a couple of column inches discussing the results, but certainly no real acknowledgement or analysis.  You can count on one finger the number of Hugo Award winners given significant air time on NPR, for example.

Then the Rabids showed up, knocked the nomination process tail over teakettles and suddenly the Hugos became a viable way to virtue signal.  The People’s Radio made sure to present stories about the brave kingmaker clique standing up to those very bad, no good, horrible fans who liked writers that didn’t look right on camera.  Entertainment Weekly rushed a story out the door so fast they didn’t even have time to perform the simplest fact checking or even read the list of names of white guys like Chixin Liu before going to print. It was a bonanza of coverage for a modest little corner of fandom, and it only occurred because of the Puppy driven controversies. 

Had the Puppies never shown up spoiling to fight for their own beloved works, the winers would have been no different, but the mainstream press would have given Hugo a considerably dimmer spotlight.

Think I’m wrong?  Just wait.

Sooner or later the Rabids will lose interest in Hugo.  They’ve largely met the goals established at the outset.  They’ve exposed the corruption for everyone but the Fake News to see.  They’ve forced Worldcon to revise the nomination process to make it far more difficult for the insiders to dominate the ballot list.  Best of all, and a year earlier, they exposed the years of PizzaGate style activity of the despicable people at the heart of fantasy and sci-fi publishing.  In short, the Rabids managed to allow a little bit of sunlight into the process.

While that sunlight might burn the flesh of the Puppy-Kicking vampires, it also acts as a strong disinfectant.  Even if the Rabids were to walk away from the Hugo Awards forever more, they have done tremendous good for the Awards by raising its profile, for better or worse. 

Remember, though, that the Puppy Kickers are the classic examples of 'useful idiots'.  They welcomed the spotlight shone on them by the mainstream media – which holds those nerds in such contempt that they couldn’t bother to report on the Hugo Awards until they had been bitten by the Puppies.  Once the Puppies do fade away, the Hugos will have one year of grace in which the media will fall all over themselves congratulating the vampires for drawing the curtain back over the windows and preventing the Van Helsing’s* of the Rabid Puppies from exposing them to unwanted attention.  The next year, the only sound you’ll hear from the media will be crickets.  The next year, the Hugo Awards will once again be nothing but a minor blip of an event taking place in a backwater mutual masturbate-a-thon than no one in the mainstream media cares about.

So enjoy it while you can, Hugo Award insiders, because your relevance now depends entirely upon the Puppies.

You’re welcome.

*Thanks to the couple of guys who filled in for my brain on that one!

It's Not Just You

Pictured above: Not me and my brother.

This past week I sent an email out to my closest friends and family announcing my entry into the world of self-publishing.  This represents my 'coming out of the pulp closet' to people in meat-space.  This doesn't include the meat-sticks that sleep under the roof I pay for, naturally.  They have to put up with 'quiet time' while Dad hammers at the keyboard to the sweet guitar licks of Dick Dale.

Almost immediately, one of the legions of men who are my literal brothers shot back a message asking if I would be interested in reading some of his written work.  That prompted a long phone call during which he confirmed a few suspicions I've seen voiced around the Pulp-O-Sphere.

Before we get to those points, let's get a couple things straight.  It's important to remember that this is my brother we're talking about.  We've got the same genes.  We grew up in the same environment.  We spent countless hours separated by a DM screen.  During our formative years, we watched the same movies and read the same books.  So it isn't too surprising that we share tastes.  That said, we've been on our own in this wonderful world for two and a half decades, and in that time we've gone our separate ways.  The critical difference here is that this is a guy who hasn't spent the last couple of years tilting at the Hugo windmill, who doesn't spend a lot of time on social media, and who hasn't fallen in with a bad crowd of revolutionaries.  This guy represents the average fan of sf/f literature who just wants to read the damn things.  For that reason, he serves as an interesting point of reference.

What came out of our conversation was a telling glimpse into the mind of a casual fan of adventure fiction with an emphasis on the sf/f.  He noticed the decline in quality of the typical sf/f book published today.  He wanted something very different from what the big publishers had to offer.  He was desperate enough for stories that fit his notion of adventure and heroism that he sat down at the computer and wrote up a few stories of his own.  Including one about a guy fighting a dragon.  And all of this over just the last three to four years.

Which is the exact same time frame that I'm seeing in reports around the pulp-o-sphere.

People are tired of genre fiction that doesn't fill a need for inspirational heroism.  They are done waiting for the coastal cocktail party crowd to fill that need.  They are hungry for fiction that reminds them of the value of truth, honor, and beauty.  They can't quite put their finger on the problem, but most of them aren't so much interested in solving the problem as they are interested in handing over their money to those who can solve it for them.

The only hurdles they face today are a limited supply and an inability to find that limited supply.

Fortunately for them, we have top men working on those problems.

Top.  Men.

Cirsova, The Cover Art

Four covers by Jabari Weather

As warned previously, the covers of Cirsova magazine are worth a look. 

We're going to punt on the special edition cover featuring a pair of GamerGate heroes in a classic Frazetta pose.  That was a nice nod to the troops on the front lines of the Great Meme War of 2016, but it's worth it's own discussion.  Also, it doesn't really fit my thesis, so like any good climate scientist worth his grant money, I'm going to just ignore that pesky little data point.

What you're looking at to the right there are the first four covers of Cirsova Magazine.  Initially, I was little disappointed to learn that the same artist would be preparing the cover for the fourth installation of the magazine.  Then I saw the cover he did and realized I didn't know what I was talking about and maybe I should keep my damn fool mouth shut.

That never stopped me before and it's not going to stop me now. 

Purely from a branding perspective, this is a clever move.  Cirsova magazine has a distinct look to it.  The bold colors and the stark impressionistic style all serve to distance this magazine from its more staid competitors.  You've got conflict occurring in each one as well.  Only in the case of the magic thief sneaking through a wall do you have a cool character looking cool, and even he is in the process of doing something.

Now take a look at the more recent covers of the sort of magazines you're likely to find in the box chains:

At least they warned you what to expect inside.

Let's just take a moment to enjoy the fact that F&SF over on the left features a lonely person surrounded by multiple cats.  Give them credit, they know what their audience likes and they are going to give those spinster cat ladies what they want good and hard.

Those three covers are all dull and muted.  Only the woman fleeing through the woods features any action of any kind.  The middle one is nothing but three pensive faces looking pensively off into the distance.  This is the sorry state of the mainstream fantasy and science-fiction world today.  Cirsova is right to do everything different that it can.

Of course, this being November, maybe the October issues of each magazine are just naturally muted and dark.  October is the spooky month of Halloween after all, so let's look at a survey of Asimov's covers, to get a better overview of what to expect from them.  Here is the top row of results from a Googel Image Search for "Asimov's Magazine Previous Issues":

There are nine people shown. Five of them are sitting down.  Of the fours people standing, only one is actually moving, and that figure is tucked way off into the back.  One of the covers is nothing but a landscape. Thrilling tales of adventure more certainly do not await.  This is a sedate magazine filled with people doing the same things they do in our world, only against a backdrop of stars and castles.  There's no last minute changes to the hyper-drive coils.  There's no fight against a scaly natural disaster in lizard form that breathes fire.  There's just a whole lot of people sitting around talking about life and love and stuff, you know?

You can't even give them credit for using a variety of artists.  Cirsova, with one artist shows just as much variety as Asimov's does with (presumably) eight of them.  All eight covers of Asimov's could be done by the same artist.  They have the same technical quality and evoke the same listless acceptance of the same old stories set in the same old new worlds. 

I'd argue Cirsova has more variety given that its four issues feature three different figure perspectives.  Two feature full body characters painted from overhead, one a three quarter figure from below, and the most recent features a head and shoulder shot of a woman.  This is a great way of subtly reminding readers that Cirsova includes stories written from different perspectives.

The only thing I see that is consistent across the first four covers of Cirsova is that all four are fantasy.  They have yet to feature a sci-fi cover.  That seems like a glaring omission for a magazine that features plenty of adventure off-planet.

So mark me down as a suitably chastened fan of Jabari Weathers.  The Cirsova covers have continued to grow on me over time, and I'm eager to see what the fifth issue of Cirsova brings to my mailbox.

[Edit to add:  After writing this post, my thesis was independently confirmed by the Barbarian Book Club.]

Cirsova, Issue Three

It's long past time we talked about Cirsova.  The third issue dropped, and I backed at a high enough level to receive a hard copy.  I could talk about the high quality of the physical copy, but I won't. Because I'm not autistic.  That particular train may be fine, but it's only one means by which Cirsova is sounding the death bell for traditional publishing.

We'll do a more in-depth look at a few of the stories from this issue later, but for now, let's just look at the issue from a bird's eye view.  After all, this magazine is almost assured of a spot on the short list for a Hugo. 

As usual, this is some of the best bang for your buck that fans of short fantasy and science-fiction can find these days.  As a big fan of this style of reading, I've long been an advocate for increased production and sale by authors of their short form fiction on Amazon.  (I'm following that model myself with the steady release of novellas such as Wyrm's Bane.)  As things stand, the production rate of stand-alone short fiction is low, and no one has developed a central review and recommendation list that one could use to select "the good stuff" (hint, hint).

That leaves us at the tender mercies of a man like P. Alexander, the editor of Cirsova, and to date those mercies have been tender indeed.  In each of the previous issues of Cirsova, I have yet to be disappointed by a story.  As expected, they range in quality.  They haven't all blown my socks off, but I have yet to get half-way through a story and think, "Why am I wasting time on this garbage?"  Even the worst story in Crisova is worth reading through to the end.  That streak continues in the third issue.

This go 'round we get nine stories largely centered around the theme of pirates.  One glaring omission that jumps out is the third installment of the epic poetic retelling of the John Carter tale by James Hutchings.  That has been promised for the next issue, and it frees up space for stories from new authors, so it's a small loss.  The mix of stories tends toward the fantasy end of the spectrum, but there's enough science-fiction to satisfy.  The fantasy itself is a solid mix as well with a pair of stories set in historical fantasy worlds rather than the de rigeuer Tolkein pastiches that are all too common.  This issue even includes a modern world where fantasy slips past the normies on the regular, and while it wasn't one that appealed to my tastes, it was nice to see that setting included as well.

One thing you can say for Cirsova is that its mix of new and old, and of safe and daring, hits all the sweet spots for variety that you'd want.  Even if you don't like everything in this issue, it's a safe bet you'll like something.  And if you don't like something in this issue, maybe fantasy and science-fiction just aren't your thing.

As with the first two issues, the cover art here is provided by Jabari Weather.  My initial thought on seeing that he is the cover artist for the fourth issue was that they needed some fresh blood in the cover art department.  After thinking about it for ten seconds, and looking at the covers all lined up side-by-side, I realized how clever this choice really is.  But that's a post for another day...

Three Body Problem

Luke Daniels read Three Body Problem to me during my daily commute, and he is an excellent narrator.  I'd have taken physical notes on his performance if I wasn't busy driving, texting, and eating, all at the same time.  (I kid.)  As it was, I did take a lot of mental notes on ways to improve my own performances.

The title itself is one of the few Puppy-related works available for download from my local public library - I use Overdrive to pick and save titles - so it's only natural that it wound up in my queue.

This is a very strange book.  It's one of those books that nobody ever talks about, they just tell you it's great and that you should read it.  You won't understand why until you read it yourself, and then you'll be one of us.

There are a few things that I can say about it that won't ruin anything.  It starts with a young girl watching her father murdered by the Red Guards during Mao's Great Leap Forward.  My son listened to the first two chapters with me, and I was grateful for a chance to show him how socialism and communism really operate.  It took longer to get through the first few chapters because we paused the audio to review how China got to the point that mobs of college students could violently assault their college professors with no repercussions.  He got half-way through the observation that such a thing could never happen here before he remembered such things already happen here. 

That may have been the most chilling part of the book for him.  Even more so than the slow burn reveal of the main antagonist of the book.  He also was surprised that a science-fiction novel would spend so much time talking about the past, and it was only later - much later - that it became clear how the opening third of the book drives the action for the remainder of the book.

Cixin Liu has a gift for making likable characters that are irredeemably evil and good characters who are hard to like.  Sorting out which is which is half the mystery of the book.  A few of the mysteries are easy to solve right out of the gate, but even those are fun to watch unfold.

The last two chapters get really weird.  Like, end of 2001: A Space Odyssey: The Motion Picture weird.  The shift is gradual enough that you don't notice until things have already gone completely trippy, and soon enough the narrative circles back around to explain the import of the weirdness.

The book, the narrative, and the characters, are all so complicated, it's hard to know who to root for through most of it.  That kills a lot of the emotional punch that the book otherwise have had, and it's only Cixin's gift for characters and mystery that kept me plugging through to the cliff-hanger ending.

Although not the best book published in 2015, it certainly stands head and shoulders above some other Hugo Award winning novels I've read over the years.  It's well worth a read (or a listen), and the less you know about it going in, the better your experience will be.

McPublishing

The major publishing houses mass produce literature that starves the soul.  It provides no nutritional value - it just shoves ideas into you with no real concern for your well being.  When you're done, you feel like maybe you read something important, something that might have made you a better person.  Instead, all you did was consume a facsimile of real literature.  It pretends to be satisfying and filling and to have been developed by the finest minds in the industry, but what you consume barely meets the general criteria for literature.  It's all word games and parlor tricks, methods and exercised designed to elicit a mood or opinion backed by no healthy philosophy.

Daddy Warpig called it misery-porn, and that's a tight a summary as any I've seen.  It blindly accepts the lies of moral relativism and the belief that science negates religion, often at the same time.  It ignores real, fundamental truths about men and women and man's place in the universe in favor of a stunted view of mankind as both insignificant and the center of all things, again at the same time.  It ignores the reality of mankind as fallen from God's grace and his struggles to even understand his place in the universe.  It favors sex over romance and violence in service of their lies.  It's many things, clever, erudite, and even technically savvy, but it isn't very good for you.

Not even once, kids.

On the other hand, you've got a bunch of little independent producers - mom and pop shops - making fine fare that's fit for the whole family.  It's robust fare, a little daring, and it gives you something meaty, something that really sticks to your ribs.  Some of it might not be to your taste, and some of it might not taste all that great, but unlike restaurants, the small publishers and self-published writers charge less.  And you can stop after a chapter without wasting any more time on them.

Why would anyone eat mass produced garbage that costs more instead of taking a chance on cheaper fare that's probably a lot more filling and healthy?  Marketing is the only answer that comes to mind, and its the only explanation for the continued existence of the brain poison peddlers of the Big 5 Publishing houses.

This isn't a very nice blog post.  It's really not fair to McDonalds to compare them to trash mongers like the Big 5 publishing houses.  McDonald's produces low cost fare that makes for a fine sometimes food.  Maybe it's better to compare Big Publishing to Big Tobacco.  They both sell products that kill you - one your soul, the other your body.  They both rely on savvy marketing to convince that they are the coolest kids in the room.  They both suffer when consumers notice what they are really selling in their packages.

Yeah...Big Publishing is much more like Big Tobacco - stay away from it kids!  It might seem cool, but it's not healthy, and over time it makes you smell funny.

Hugo Delenda Est

One for the Pulp Revolutionaries

This was over in G+, and it deserves to be shared with the wider world.  Jeffro posted this amazing quote by the space pirate Captain Jaren, of the Shibboleth, which perfectly encapsulates the feeling of Nethereal:

"Our plan to liberate Tharis went down in flames, thanks to Malachi. All that’s left of the resistance is one ship and a skeleton crew. Vernon’s offered us a way to start again somewhere else. Let the Guild keep this godforsaken Stratum. We’ll make our own world. By our rules."

That's a great quote, if that doesn't charge you up, if that doesn't make you want to read the book, if that doesn't make you want to find an impossible battle to fight, then you have a very sick soul.  I don't even know what to tell you.  Have fun watching the Kardashians, maybe?

 It charged me up, and inspired me to respond:

"Our plan to liberate the Hugos went down in flames thanks to Scalzi. All that's left of the resistance is one blog and a skeleton crew. Vox's offered us a way to start again somewhere else. Let Tor keep this Godforsaken market. We'll make our own media. By our rules."

As Goes the Lovecraft, So Goes the Hugo

Last November, the World Fantasy Award stopped using Lovecraft's name and image for their top prize due to his disturbing tendency to engage in crimethink.

What I want to know is, when will the SFWA follow suit and change the name of their trophy to something more appropriate than just another old white guy?  Hugo Gernsback, the man for whom the award is named, spent his whole life as an old white guy, and never once apologized for it!

More salient, the Hugo award hasn't been about rewarding the Gernbeckian style of fantasy and science fiction in well over a decade.  There must be somebody far more suitable to the SFWA's style of genre fiction that they could name the award after.  Somebody who writes dull prose about identitarian politics or pro-socialist treatises dressed up in spaceships and silver spandex suits.  Somebody who more accurately reflects the Current Year.  Maybe even somebody who isn't so white-ish and man-ish.  I mean, not on purpose, just on principle, you see.

Yes, it's high time the SFWA selected a more diverse person to represent their fine award.  Not Leigh Brackett - she wrote space opera.  Not Andre Norton - she wrote books that appeared in Appendix N.  In fact, you can't really use any woman writing science fiction or fantasy during the 1950s and 1960s.  Their existence doesn't fit the narrative, so naming the award after one of them would go against SFWA's policy of erasing their memory, which plays a key role in proving that The Man always erases women from history.

So we need a diverse author who really nails the current SFWA mindset.  For that, there's really only two choices:

1. The Marion Award, after Marion Zimmer Bradley.  What could be more suitable than naming the trophy after a child molesting writer whose works are admired for their politics rather than being exemplars of science fiction and fantasy writing?
2. The Sammy Award, after Samuel R. Delaney.  Again, a known pedophile who spoke favorably about NAMBLA, and whose works of science fiction and fantasy are loved by the SFWA for their graphic depictions of child sex abuse.  He has the advantage of being a person of color, but unfortunately he is isn't quite dead yet.

The only reasonable solution is a compromise.  The SFWA should change the Hugo to the Marion until Delaney dies, and then change it to the Sammy.  That would really show the world where the SFWA's priorities lie.

Two Panels Diverged

While shouldering my way through a particularly grinding commute this week, I found myself with the time to listen to a pair of mp3’s that had been sitting on my phone.  The first was a recording of the 2016 Worldcon panel on “State of Short Fiction" that saw its moderator, Dave Truesdale, ejected from that convention in particular, from Worldcon in general, and from all of polite society.  The second was the much less well known Appendix N seminar held at GenCon 2016, which was sponsored by the crew over at Goodman Games. Listening to the two back to back provided a clear example of the stark contrast between the tiredness and tedium of the leaders of the dinosaur publishing outfits and the passion and creativity of the new school guys working out on the fringes of the genre.

Brief aside:  If your attack or defense of Truesdale includes the notion that he shouldn’t have recorded the panel, you’re an idiot, and I’ll reject the remainder of your analysis out of hand.  A panel discussion is a public event in which the participants have no expectation of privacy.  You are also signaling that the views expressed by ‘your side’ don’t stand up to the light of scrutiny, and if you don’t have enough faith in your views to allow that, then why would anyone else adopt them?

That said, this isn’t a post about the merits of Truesdale’s ouster.  Admittedly, that was my own initial impetus for listening to the WroldCon Panel; I originally listened to the first to try and get a handle on what sort of nonsense goes on at your typical Worldcon.  I’ve never been to Worldcon, being 100 pounds under the apparent weight limit for entry, and wanted to hear firsthand what went down, what so triggered the SJWs, and what the ‘industry insiders’ sound like when they discuss a matter such as the “state of short fiction”.  What I heard was a cantankerous old cur fighting to steer the conversation towards the political culture built by the major publishers of short fiction on one side, and four boring midwits who clearly aren’t nearly as intelligent as they sound in their heads. 

The question of Truesdale’s ouster quickly became secondary to the far more interesting question of how such boring people came to be tasked with writing, editing, and producing for a market that one would think was supposed to provide non-boring materials.  Sci-fi and fantasy should be the realm of rockets and rayguns and wizards throwing lightning bolts.  It should feature big creatures and big explosions and big science.  Even when it tells stories about ideas rather than dragons or rayguns, those ideas should be big ideas with world shaking consequences.

The only idea expressed by the WorldCon panelists was “diversity”.  They have it.  They have more of it.  Anyone who thinks they don’t have it is wrong.  And if they don’t have what you want that’s because what you want is bad and doesn’t fit within the narrow bands of acceptable diversity.  Every attempt to steer the conversation was an attempt to drive it towards a group wide back patting over everyone’s successes in promoting ‘the right people’ and keeping ‘the wrong people’ out. 

There was no discussion about big new ideas. No one mentioned of exciting new voices.  No one talked about interesting new developments in short fiction (hello, Cirsova!).  No one mentioned a story by name, even as an example.  No one mentioned exciting new characters or writers.  It was all vague and airy and completely tepid.  Even with Truesdale’s chain yanking, it may have been the most boring panel discussion that I’ve ever heard.  That’s really saying something coming from a man who once spent three years working as a hotel bartender, which meant standing in the back of countless panels listening to everything from insurance salesmen talking about actuarials to the state of the breakfast cereal industry to Democratic fund raising efforts – and not nationally relevant or salacious efforts, either, but the petty, local, small change efforts to squeeze nickels out of school teachers and easily conned elderly people.

What struck me most about the panel was utterly banal and pedestrian the whole thing was.  It sounded like a bunch of tired parents bickering about whether or not the next bake sale should be traditional or only include healthy organic choices.  You wouldn’t expect that from a panel featuring the leading lights of the most exciting genre of fiction in the world, but here we are.

Listening to the second panel, hosted Goodman Games, purveyor of fine role-playing adventures for various editions of Dungeons and Dragons, was one heck of a palette cleanser.  Here you listened to four guys excited about sci-fi and fantasy, discussion big ideas, concrete events and characters, and how the writers of yesterday continued to influence the writers of today.  The panel was wide ranging; it discussed literature spanning more than sixty years, and drifted off into related topics like artwork and publishing.  The panel was engaging; it featured laughter and disagreements.  The panel was informative; even an old hand at Appendix N literature could come away with some new fragment of information they hadn’t seen before.  (Personally, there were a few things about Frank Frazetta’s career arc that I hadn’t heard before.) The panel was everything you would expect from a group of people excited to work in an exciting genre like sci-fi and/or fantasy.

Listening to these two panels back to back was enlightening just because of the contrast it provided between the two camps.  It showed beyond any shadow of a doubt what the ultimate effects of Convergence are on a company, and industry, and a culture.  One the one hand you have grizzled and bland old dinosaurs desperate to hang onto positions of influence, and to use that influence for political purposes.  On the other hand you have energetic and excited idea-men who just love fantasy and sci-fi, and who just want to learn from the old masters and take their ideas in brave new directions.

That’s the choice before fans of sci-fi/fantasy today.  The well trod and potentially lucrative road of the dinosaurs, or the less travelled road of the fun loving idea men.

As for me, I'll be following Robert Frost down the road less travelled.

You're Welcome, Hugos

Each of the last two year's of Hugo Awards have seen more ink spilled across the dinosaur media than in any ten years previous, combined.  All of this attention was garnered not for the quality of the works presented at the Hugos, and not as a small part of the recent uptick in interest for geek culture by the wider culture at large.  All of this extra attention heaped on the Hugo Awards has had one central focus: lying about conservatives.

There's really no point in picking any one or a dozen of the color-by-numbers articles covering the Hugo Awards.  They write themselves, "People who meet the right demographic criteria won, the racist right wingers did everything could to block them, and failed.  Nerdom is safe for the Narrative for another year."  Pad that out with inaccurate histories, a few quotes from one and only one side of the issue, and remind the reader that anyone to the right of Che Guevara probably has white robes stashed under their bed, and you're done.  Time for some overpriced martinis at a cocktail party hosted by the right people in the right town.  It's the same playbook used for every other piece of what passes for journalism these days.

While the Hug Award Faithful are busy this week congratulating themselves on another successful year, there's just one little fly of truth in the ointment of self-congratulations...

That coverage doesn't help them, it helps the Puppies.

Like cockroaches*, they can really only do their dirty work in the dark.  The more people see the Hugo Award Faithful, the more they will see what they really are.  The more people see what they really are, the more they will start questioning the Hugo Narrative and be repulsed by it.  The more people start are repulsed by the Hugo Narrative, the more they will find alternatives like Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies.

The Puppies are fun loving decent people who love truth, justice (not the phony façade of social justice), and the American way of science fiction and fantasy - rollicking good stories with hard science, weird magic, and something to offer other than people meeting diversity checkboxes and plain women who are really beautiful whose biggest problem in life is deciding between the rich handsome supernatural half-man, and the down to earth sensitive and secretly rich supernatural half-man.

The Hugo Faithful win in dark rooms behind closed doors and cannot stand the sight of a mirror.  Their ouster of Dave Truesdale serves as yet another data point demonstrating that they cannot tolerate dissent of any kind.  The Puppies thrive on attention and adventure and conflict.

Your average reader, looking for a good fun read without a scolding, has only one choice.  Every one of those articles written by the dinosaur media might feel good and scratch a short term itch for the Hugo Award Faithful, but they serve the long term interests of the Puppies.  Keep 'em coming - you're doing the Puppy's work for them.

Hugo Dalenda Est

* I can guarantee some member of the Hugo Party will claim I called them cockroaches.  Note that I didn't say they are cockroaches, just that they are like cockroaches.

Hugo Awards 2016: Message Delivered

WorldCon, for the third year in a row, delivered a powerful message to a significant portion of the sci-fi/fantasy fandom.  In honor of their now openly admitted role of driving fans from the genre and consumers from the market, I propose a slight modification to the Hugo Award logo.  One that more accurately reflects WorldCon's opinion of the Hugo fans who vote as they are told:

 

Dreaming of Silver Rockets

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
   - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I fired another shot in the culture war.  I cast my ballot for the Hugos.  It is a small thing, a single bullet in a single battle in a far flung corner of the fight, but it is from the collective effect of many small things that great things arise.

My ballot in last year's fight helped to drive the forces of the Narrative to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground, and thus helped cause much consternation among the forces of the Narrative Almighty. 

Even as I celebrated the victory in that skirmish, deep down I felt shame.  To my everlasting regret, my ballot in last year's fight deviated in a few small ways from that ordained by the Supreme Dark Lord.  The failure of the forces of truth and light to rout the enemy and drive them from the field of battle rests on my shoulders.  This year, I will not make the same mistake.  My ballot perfectly reflects the will of the Supreme Dark Lord, in whose image I am but a pale reflection.  Together with the massed volley of the ballots cast by the brave men at my shoulders, I shall fear no defeat in the battle of Mid-America Con II.

To steel my resolve, and remind myself of the importance of a well regulated ballot, each morning I repeat the Sad Puppy's Voting Creed:

This is my ballot. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My ballot is my best friend. It is my life. I have mastered it as I mastered my life.

Without me, my ballot is useless. Without my ballot, I am useless. I must cast my ballot true. I must vote straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must vote against him before he shoots me.  I will...

My ballot and I know that what counts in war is not the votes we cast, the noise of our effect, nor the tears we create. We know that it is the result that counts. We will vote...

My ballot is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its order, its check boxes, and its electrons. I will keep my ballot clean and accurate, even as I am clean and accurate. We will become part of each other. We will...

Before the Supreme Dark Lord, I swear this creed. My ballot and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace!