The Art of Illiterates

After Labor Day in Grand Rapids, MI the "next big thing" is ArtPrize. I've commented on it before. This usually gets me thinking about art qua art. (And saying hifalutin words like "qua.") My wife remarked at breakfast this morning that one of the profs (who teaches movie-making) repeated this quote: "Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

I believe the point he was trying to make was that film naturally puts few demands on the viewer.

Keep in mind that illiterates are not necessarily stupid. There have been some very clever people who never get around to learning to read or write.

Film, by presenting brute imagery and sound to the consumer, is consumed without necessarily engaging the higher cognitive functions.

I suppose this means the screenwriter must strive to represent the mythic or iconic in her screenplay, because that is how it will be best consumed.

Conversely, the author of Russian novels realizes her readers have strong arms and great upper-body strength to lug around those long, heavy tomes. The author of Victorian novels realizes her readers have long attention spans. And the contemporary author expects her readers read at at least a sixth-grade level.

The gallery viewer of walls-sized canvases brings different expectations to the art than the comic book reader who sees virtually the same thing.

When you produce art, there's more than just "the medium is the message." Each medium brings a different audience.

The different audience brings different eyes and ears to the work depending upon their expectations. We all should work to understand our audience and work with their expectations as opposed to against them.

There is a time for the mathematics lecture that you can find in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And there's a time for breathless action scenes as you can find in Larry Correia's Monster Hunters International. Your job is to sense who is buying your books and produce the time they are expecting.

Apology: i fear you might draw the wrong conclusion from my choice of pictures from Roy Lichtenstein and Tony Abruzzo. Though I question the intelligence and common sense of those who spend big bucks to fill modern art galleries, I do NOT want to demean any comic book readers and intended no slight toward Mr. Abruzzo by juxtaposing his art with a derivative copy.

Gun Magic

There is a lot of infantile thinking about guns. It is nothing new. If you do not understand guns, they are sort of like magic. You point them at something you want destroyed and pull the trigger. And something bad happens to whatever you're aiming at. Hollywood perpetuates this sort of magic thinking by having guns somehow kill all the terrorists when Jamie Lee Curtis drops a machine pistol in True Lies or all those old westerns where the two gunfighters face off at the edge of town. One shoots, the other falls immediately dead.

Louis L'Amour complained about this in the '70s. He knew his stuff because he was exacting in his historical research. Sorry Toshiro Mifune, but the Seven Samurai isn't a perfect translation into the Magnificent Seven. Americans do not do unarmed peasants.

Black Bart couldn't terrorize a town full of Civil War veterans who were trained in warfare. Maybe he was the fastest gun in the west but he could still die from a shotgun blast in his back. Or if the town is mad enough, he might face six shotguns with the warning that you might kill one of us but you won't kill all of us and you'll be just as dead.

L'Amour claimed the face off at the edge of town was exceedingly rare. And when it did take place, a big guy full of adrenaline won't go down with only one shot. Because he had been a boxer as a young man, his fistfights are often better than his gunfights.

A gunfight isn't a duel between magical weapons where one shoots and the other dies. It's a fight where damage causing attacks are exchanged until one or both sides can no longer hit the other.

People who know something about guns understand this. Most of what you read in books or see in movies does not reflect this understanding. The gunfight brings the climax of the story with a bang and you immediately segue into the denouement and start selling the sequel.

Mindful of this I was reading a thumbsucker about the N most important Science Fiction novels. I was impressed by the inclusion of stories that inspired nothing but eye-rolls when I tried to read them, and I was impressed by the omissions.

(Likewise, I was reading a collection of the best SF stories of last year and after reading one that I knew was excellent, I was impressed by the next two that made me think, "what made that special?" I suppose I would have to be a Social Justice Warrior to understand.)

I figure an SF novel is not important if it reiterates The Message that the SJWs are pushing, but it is important if it changes the direction of the genre. Someone in the '40s and '50s got everyone to writing novels with a rocket ship on the cover. Someone in the '60s got everyone to writing novels with a mushroom cloud with grateful dead in the foreground on the cover. I'll call those important SF stories.

Tom Clancy's Hunt For Red October was important because it got a lot of stories about the Reagan military build-up. The whole field of military SF took off at this time.

But let's backtrack to those 1950s B-quality SF movies. Not the high brow ones like Forbidden Planet, but the cheap ones with giant ants, spiders, etc. You know, like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. The ones made on the other side of the pond were a little more posh, like The Day of the Triffids, but they all followed the same pattern:

Radiation or something mutates ants into the size
of houses. Or a space comet drops spores on Earth and blinds people while the spores grow into giant people-eating plants. In such a movie the first reel is spent learning Something is Not Right. The second reel is spent convincing someone official to Take Action. The third reel is then divided in two halves: Our Guns Have No Effect on the monster, and finally Something Trivial devastates the monster.

(Something Trivial? Consider something as ubiquitous as water. If you're the alien in Signs, it'll kill you. Same for those carnivorous plants in Day of the Triffids. (Don't forget the wicked witch of the west.) In these movies it serves as Something Trivial to be pulled out at the Dark Moment to act as a deux ex machina and save the day.)

This happens because if guns are magic, then the writer can turn off their magic. 

All this made me grow bored and tired of the entire Horror genre. I wanted to just yell at the idiot who tries to escape the chainsaw wielding fiend by jogging backwards in the forest. The slasher movies were the most annoying. There were tantalizing glimpses of a better way. The scene in Nighthawks with Sly Stallone in drag, or the world's shortest slasher film.

But the old tired pattern is risible to anyone familiar with guns. If you shoot a vampire, the kinetic energy of the round has to go somewhere as it goes through the monster's body. And if the round doesn't interact with the matter of the vampire, then how can the monster interact with other matter, say the girl's neck to be bitten or her blood to be sucked?

This sets the stage for someone like Larry Correia to write Monster Hunter International novels. He's a firearms instructor and he's trained civilians and lawmen in how to use guns effectively. You can call him a gun nut, but you'd better smile when you say that.

He respects guns enough to have the round do SOMETHING to the monster, even if it is less than sufficient to kill the beastie. Consider the opening scene of the first Monster Hunter International novel. Our Hero encounters a werewolf. You know, werewolves cannot be killed except with wolfbane and silver bullets. But Our Hero empties his gun in the beastie and it keeps coming, and he uses his fists. It keeps coming, he pushes it out a fourth-floor window, then he drops a desk on top if it.

No wolfbane, and no silver bullets. The werewolf (a young one) cannot regenerate fast enough to survive the blunt force trauma of a desk falling on his head.

At some point, even monsters have to obey the laws of physics. And that awareness is what Larry Correia brought to the telling of monster stories. It changes the entire horror genre. Instead of being helpless, or utterly dependent upon a stupid gimmick, the forces of good can innovate and come up with better ways to fight evil. When "our guns have no effect on the monster" let's try bigger guns. (And if your heroes don't have bigger guns, they can make do like the Finnish did when they beat the Russians in WW2. Like this.)

Making guns less magical
is a very helpful thing for the horror genre. And I think that when more writers realize that guns are not magic, they'll use them more effectively in their storytelling. This makes Monster Hunters important SF/horror stories.

Nemesis

Larry Correia is the best action writer in the world. He understands guns and he understands fighting. If the dates worked and if I believed in reincarnation, I'd say he was Louis L'Amour come back.

But I don't believe in reincarnation. And that's my one gripe about Larry Correia's novel, Nemesis. I'll come back to this later.

In the preceding novels of the Monster Hunter International series, we've been introduced to the original Combat Accountant, Owen Z Pitt. Over the course of the next few novels, Pitt nukes a Lovecraftian entity (something I've always wanted to see), then introduce the Alpha werewolf (and his yooper chick girlfriend), and then he trashes Vegas baby.

I had a chance to reflect on my first review of Mr. Correia's work and I realize how far he's brought me. I used to absolutely despise the horror genre with no inclination toward anything but mocking it. There was always a lot of screaming and helpless people flailing about while someone really stupid takes forever figuring out that triffids or aliens are allergic to seawater--as opposed to well aimed hot lead at high velocity. Hurray for Larry Correia for showing us that maybe our weapons can have some effect on the monster.

The pattern of Mr. Correia's Monster Hunter books of late has been to tell an interesting foreground story and mix in a big of the backstory that answers questions about the more interesting characters. Alpha explained how Earl Harbinger became a werewolf and learned to cope with it. Nemesis is like Alpha in this way.

Nemesis turns the focus on Agent Franks of the Monster Control Bureau of the US Federal Government. In Larry Correia's universe, the story of Victor Frankenstein's creation is "based on a true story." And after bouncing around Europe for a century, Agent Franks runs into George Washington, doesn't kill him, and contracts with Benjamin Franklin to work for the US. This beats being a Hessian mercenary, but Franks has one stipulation in his contract...

Do NOT try to make any more frankenstein monsters. If you do, Franks agrees in his part of the contract to do everything in his power to destroy the project and the government who authorized it.

So, this leaves you one guess about what the inciting incident of Nemesis is. Yup, the government and the shadowy Special Task Force Unicorn (STFU) decide to create a bunch of weaponized frankenstein monsters. Not that the original is not already a formidable weapon...

Lots of action ensues.

Is there gunplay?

Yes. Lots of gunplay.

Are there fistfights, knife fights, sword fights, and heavy blunt object fights?

Yes. All of the above.

Is it a lot of exciting fun?

Definitely.

When the STFU, led by the evil albino named Stricken, realize they've bit off more than they can chew, they call in monster hunters from all over the world. Leading to some dandy firefights in unsavory parts of Washington DC and exurban Virginia.

Of note are the Vatican monster hunters who want to know if Franks is still abiding by the terms of "The Deal." What's most intriguing about the Vatican hunters is summed up in two words: combat exorcists. Yes, I want to hear more about these guys.

This brings us to that bit about Nemesis and reincarnation. I've tried to avoid spoilers to this point, but if you want to read the book before you read the following paragraphs, I'll wait.

Waiting...


Still waiting...

No, it's OK, I'll be here when you get done...









Spoilers ahead...

When asked what Agent Franks is, he always says, "Classified." But he ends up telling his bosses at the government this is classified. He gets away with it until he says that to the Archangel Michael, with whom he fought when he fell with Lucifer and one third of the angels in heaven.

Yes, that Archangel Michael.

Let's back up a bit. Have you ever wondered what a soul is? I know I have.

You see, according to Mr. Correia's cosmology, every human soul is an angel who's been granted permission to inhabit a human body. When any baby is born, some angel who's on a waiting list gets the green-light to take up residence. Somehow, only approved angels get the chance, and when they do get the chance, they forget everything that went before. This leaves the fallen angels imprisoned in Hell, but sometimes they find a way to escape Hell, whereupon they wander Earth influencing humans to do evil.

This is quite similar to the scheme C. S. Lewis put in his novel "That Hideous Strength." However, instead of reanimating a dead human brain to serve as a fallen angel's presence in this world, Mr. Correia posits that when you make an empty human shell, like a frankenstein monster, then any fallen angel can "possess" the body. This is consistent with the bible stories wherein the Savior casts out demons.

The notion is that a human body is a sort of receptacle that can house a soul. This is a dualistic schema wherein body and soul are completely different sorts of stuff. You can see this is where the reincarnation folks are coming from. A soul may be victimized and murdered in the first reel of a Bollywood movie, and be reincarnated in the 2nd reel to exact his revenge two decades later in the 3rd reel. This was going on in Babylon 5 when the Minbari noticed that some of their best souls were missing and had been getting reincarnated into Humans.

I think it is a Mormon notion that souls of men are all unfallen angels put here on Earth for a reason a Mormon might explain better than I could. This drives the backstory of Agent Franks, a fallen angel of some distinction who escapes Hell, comes to Earth, and inhabits a body of corpse parts enervated by alchemical means sometime in the 17th century.

This is a cool idea even if I don't believe in it. I think a soul is an emergent property of a sufficiently advanced neural network. But my idea doesn't matter as far as Mr. Correia's story is concerned, it's just a quibble. It doesn't hurt the story, it just serves as a distraction to the philosophically minded who will step outside the story for a bit to contemplate the transmigration of the soul. (I'm not suggesting Mormonism believe in reincarnation. It's different from that.)

The debate about where and how the soul comes about is a lot older than anyone reading this. If it is a matter of Mormon doctrine, no argument will suffice to change a Mormon's mind. Nor would I want to argue to this end.

I don't think it is possible, but if Nemesis could be written in such a way that the reader was not distracted by metaphysical considerations. In a story with the supernatural as the main source of conflict, I suppose metaphysical considerations are a necessary component.

How many stars? 5 well earned stars.

Pixie Noir

In the late 1970s, an animated movie named Wizards came out. I don't remember anything about the movie except a scene toward the end where one wizard confronts another wizard. And you might expect a big fight with magic being thrown back and forth. Instead, one wizard pulls out a revolver and puts daylight through his opponent. Gunplay in a magical fantasy story was a brand new thing and it had shock value. The scene was as surprising as later when Indiana Jones aborts a sword fight with a big scimitar wielding dude using his sidearm.

In the decades that have followed, this sort of blending of firearms and magic has become a little more common. Larry Correia does a great job of describing with loving detail the firearms used to dispatch evil in his Monster Hunter stories.

In Larry Correia's world you might not take down a werewolf with a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, but you'll slow him down enough to drop a desk on him. And Larry Correia doubled-down with his magical private eye in his Warbound stories wherein John Moses Browning supplies the firearms.

The mix of fantasy and noir goes well together and Cedar Sanderson adds a twist in her mystical bounty hunter, Lom. Whereas Larry Correia builds his stories around big dudes--a towering "combat accountant" and a magical "heavy"--Lom is a pixie.

As in shorter of stature and slight of build.

When I say a story is about a bounty hunter, one doesn't immediately think of a pixie. Which is cool.

But all the other things you would expect of a noir protagonist are present. He's got a past. He's been betrayed by those close to him and thus he doesn't trust anyone.

That includes the dame in trouble with great gams. He meets Bella in the opening scene of Pixie Noir. Like a good noir story, the dame is more than a pretty face and smoking hot body.

Trouble takes the form of various magical monsters who want her dead. Lom's inner demons and his unhappy past add to his internal conflict. They run a gauntlet of evil monsters as Lom tries to deliver Bella to his client. Along the way they use guns, lots of guns.

Lom and Bella undergo some changes on their road trip and the nature of the relationship becomes more complicated as well.

It's a fun read and I recommend it heartily. Five stars.

BUT FIRST a word from our Grammar Nazi. (What good noir story doesn't have Nazis?)

English Grammar does not use grammatical cases as much as other languages. When I learned English grammar in school, I cheated. My mom spoke grammatically correct sentences, and thus I never learned English Grammar, I just gave the answer that "sounded good." There were exceptions. Nobody says "whom" any more, so any usage with "whom" did not sound right. Thus it was only in the last few years that I learned that "who" is used in a subjective case, and "whom" is used in an objective case.

Moreover collections of names and pronouns like "Joe and I went to breakfast" combine names and pronouns with the case of the pronoun depending upon the usage of the collection. If the collection is used in a subjective way, you say "Joe and I" and if it is an objective use, you say, "Joe and me."

Thus we say, "Joe and I went to breakfast. The waitress brought toast to Joe and me." It is a common mistake to use the subjective pronoun in a collection when one ought to use the objective pronoun. Objects of a prepositional phrase are invariably subjective case. Ms. Sanderson needs to hire an editor to catch these things in her final draft.

For this reason, the Grammar Nazi insists that I deduct a half-star from Pixie Noir: four point five stars.

Inside Baseball

I was reading Larry Correia's blog when I saw him write this about a discussion with his editor, Toni Weisskopf:

I bounced several things off of Toni to see what she wanted me to focus my energy on next, (Having a ton of books under contract to be written is a really good problem to have) and she really wants to see this epic fantasy that I’ve been talking about for years.

This is a glimpse into the relationship between a successful author and editor. It struck me how businesslike the conversation was. Here's the deal, Mr. Correia and Ms. Weisskopf have a common goal: make gobs of money by selling books.

Mr. Correia has a good idea of how to put words on paper that make awesome stories. Ms. Weisskopf has a good idea of the sort of people she can reach and sell books to. Neither one of them have the whole picture, so they compare notes, brainstorm, and try to find out which stories will do better than others.

It's every bit as much a business conversation as one between a General Contractor and a Realtor about building a spec house. I know a few small businessmen and this glimpse of Mr. Correia makes a lot of sense when seen through this lens.

Contrast this with the depictions of authors in the mass media. You never see Richard Castle or Robin Masters talking to their editors like this. The popular conception is that the writer is some kind of free spirit whose creative outputs drop from his fingers in an arbitrary and capricious fashion as his muse takes him.

NO, the successful author is a successful businessman who builds things on spec, if s/he doesn't have a book deal, or to spec if s/he does. Most businessmen are normal people who relate to their vendors and customers who also happen to be normal people. And unless there's trouble, normal people conduct business with each other in a pleasant and cooperative fashion.

Once you've figured out how to devise a cunning plot, fill it with dazzling characters, and render your stories in breathless prose, think about how you can be a reliable business partner. This includes communicating clearly, meeting deadlines, and exceeding your partners' expectations.

I Used To Like X

I want you to fix in your mind your favorite artist. Make a list of all the things s/he did to make you like him/her. Let's suppose you like the way s/he puts words together. Or you like the way s/he provides insight into the human condition. Or you like that clever twist at the end of his/her short stories. Now, for the purposes of this essay we'll refer to this artist as X.

If I met you in a coffee shop and mentioned X, you'd wax rhapsodic about him/her and recite at least some of those things on that list that I asked you to make.

Now, suppose that you discover that wonderful creative person you had in mind was also a leader of the National Socialist Party. Or s/he was outed as a closeted KKK member.

I'm supposing that everyone reading this hates fascists and white supremacists. But if you don't, substitute something else that you hate. (It is an unfortunate trait of our society that we tend to identify mutually antagonistic classes of people and then we set at each others' throats.)

Armed with this additional factoid about X, let's return to the coffee shop and I ask you about X. Now what do you say? Perhaps you'll feel rather sheepish: regarding X's writing as a guilty pleasure, or perhaps denying any enjoyment of X's work.

Then imagine the next time you're in a bookstore and you see X's latest work on the shelf. Will you snap up a copy with the same fervor as before? And after you finish it, will you post a review that is as positive as before? Or maybe not, you don't want the taint of association with double-ungoodness.


If you are an artist, you won't want that taint, and you won't want to be identified with any demon groups. This is a matter of personal brand management. Though it is easy to eschew evil in its Nazi and White-Supremacist forms, it get tricky when you're a Republican looking at a Democrat artist, or vice versa. (That's why I'm a Whig. A pox on both your houses!)

A bit of controversy can be great fun as any fan of cismale gendernormative fascism or glittery hoohas can attest. If someone on one side says something ridiculous and someone on the other side responds with ridicule, pass me the popcorn. This explains why I like Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt.

It's easy to go too far as I've said about Ann Coulter. I'm not concern-trolling Mr. Correia or Mrs. Hoyt, because they have NOT gone too far. But I am not interested in tilting at every windmill. Unless you really enjoy slapping around idiots, there are some topics of conversation you might want to avoid. Some controversies are more interesting to me than they are to you, I want to shy away from those you'll find boring.

Let's return to your friend X. It is common in these busy times to go off half cocked. Internet mobs are like traditional mobs in that low-information people respond to half-truths or lies with great passion. Thus we may find that X really isn't really a Nazi, but s/he said something that could be construed as such. Or maybe X's art was wholly independent of his/her Nazism.

If you liked X because of his/her art, and you discover a taint of something evil in X, you should remember the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every person. You should be slow to judge until you've got all the facts. And checked them. And you should temper your judgment with understanding.

I fondly remember the Tarzan and John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My enjoyment thereof is alloyed somewhat by accusations of racism, but I cannot deny he could spin a great adventure yarn. Though I used to like Edgar Rice Burroughs, I should not dismiss his work.

That's Raaaacist!

I ran an early draft of a story past my friend who told me all my characters were white guys. Since a person's race, or sex is doesn't disqualify one from our shared humanity, I thought, "That's not right."

And then I had a second thought, "How do you know Skip Collins is a white guy? Or Art Donway?"

In a fit of pique I asked, "Should I have one of them start speaking in ebonics?"

If you are a racist and a sexist, it matters whether these characters are white or black, boy or girl. If you're a human, maybe you can relate to the characters' humanity without heavy-handed labels branded on them.

One of the reasons why I like Bollywood movies so much is that all the characters are light enough to be not-black and tan enough to be not-white.

Racism and sexism now mean something different from what I have always thought they meant. What I always thought these terms meant was treating someone badly because they identify with the out group. But once all the laws get passed prohibiting favorable treatment, the people in the racism and sexism industry need to raise the bar. It's not enough to treat everyone equally and relate to them on the basis of their common humanity and respect them on the basis of bearing the image of God.

We somehow have to please self-appointed bean counters: Who complain that there aren't enough blacks in Science Fiction, or enough women, or that there are too many cismale gendernormative fascists.

So, what's a writer to do? Write a scene where the character goes into the girls' bathroom, and laments her boy-parts? Or vice-versa?

Sure, that'll sell a lot of books.

This tendency toward bean counting has engendered push-back. And if a "cismale gendernormative fascist" isn't polite enough when he pushes back, there's someone out there to concern-troll him.

Writing should be able to effectively and richly convey who a character is with just words and no gimmicks. Giving a character an Afro hair-cut or a name like LaFonda is a gimmick.

No, wait, Napoleon Dynamite was a white guy with an Afro. But he could dance, and don't they say that black people have rhythm--Raaaaacist!

So, the bean counters want us to convey the racial and sexual identity of our characters when the easiest ways to do that with the written word include racial and sexual stereotypes. But they have to be the right racial stereotypes or you'll be crucified for being a racist/sexist.

This game is not worth the candle. It doesn't matter whether my characters are black or white, male or female, because their humanity is more important.

(No, I don't think black people have rhythm, Motown records notwithstanding.)

I'm tempted to write a story with characters named Alex and Sidney who are the opposite sex, race, etc. than what everyone expects.

Do What I Tell You

I think one way to know the maturity of writers is to look at their characters. Or hear them complain about them.

The poor writer never has any problems with his characters. He wants them to race in the Indy 500 Monday, then kick a heroin addiction on Tuesday, then cure cancer on Wednesday, then go on a killing spree on Thursday. His characters are like chess pieces he pushes around the board, except he makes bishops move off diagonals and knights go wherever he wants. There's no structure shaping the characters' actions.

A better writer has internalized the character's mind, habits of thought, temperament, and nature. Saint or criminal, tinker, tailor soldier, spy--the writer knows what the character can do and won't do. This writer has to advance the plot and she's got this lot of characters to do it with. And they're all going of in their own directions.

I guess they have to take the plot where they want to go and the writer just has to roll with it.

I think that is what happened to Larry Correia's novel Warbound.

I love the setup, Jake Sullivan is a bitter ex-con detective in a gritty noir setting. The guy loves solving puzzles. He should be doing detective stuff, but with magic. Like Harry Dresden, but a lot more Phil Marlowe.

But I think Larry Correia couldn't get Jake to cooperate. Instead, he gets caught up in all this geopolitical stuff. International conspiracies and fighting foreign powers leaves no time for divorce cases, stolen jewelry, and missing husbands. There wasn't any of that in Warbound.

And then Jake is supposed to be come kind of warrior scholar. Which is also cool, but that doesn't quite work either.

Then out of nowhere comes the oakie girl who has been an enigma in the first two novels. Nevertheless, at the beginning of Warbound she is a most powerful enigma. Then as her true nature is disclosed, we see other aspects of how the magic system in these novels works.

Larry Correia does a good job of answering story questions he's planted in the first and second Grimnoir novels, but you get the general impression that he generally wanted to zig, and his characters forced him to zag.

The only thing missing from the climax of Warbound was a direct quote from or allusion to Lord Acton's "power tends to corrupt."

Warbound gets 5 stars for several well staged fights and for taking the story where it should go instead of where Mr. Correia may have originally intended it to.

I have also reviewed Hard Magic, the first book of this series. As well as Spellbound, the second book of this series.

It Can't Happen Here

Despite initial appearances, this is a review of Spellbound, by Larry Correia... eventually...

When you hear the words "concentration camp" you generally think of Nazis. If I ask you to name a non-Nazi concentration camp, you might be stumped. And if I asked you who invented the concentration camp, you probably would not have said the British.

Though the British used concentration camps to oppress the Boer population of South Africa, other fascist countries were quick to learn from their example.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Federal government rounded up citizens of Asian, particularly Japanese, ethnicity and put them in concentration camps. We just called our camps something different.

So, don't say things that have already happened here can't happen here.

I finished grad school and applied for work as a Mathematician. The people hiring the most Mathematicians then was the NSA. The job required I pass a lie detector test. I tripped on one yes/no question: Are you a Fascist?

Keep in mind Hitler was dead a decade before I was born. What could the question mean? I was a Republican then. I was a lifelong anti-Communist. I intended to and did vote for Reagan.

I asked, "What's a Fascist?"

The lie detector operator was an old guy who probably fought WW2 and he said something about Nazis. "Oh, that? No way!" And I passed the test.

Years before that I saw on live network television William F Buckley threaten violence upon Gore Vidal who had slanderously called him a crypto-Fascist. Was Buckley a Fascist? What is a Fascist, crypto or otherwise? A couple years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote the book on fascism. And he made the case that several prominent US politicians held Fascist opinions. Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel "It Can't Happen Here."

Ominously, Larry Correia's characters in his novel Spellbound echo the words, "It can't happen here." He also puts the words "never let a crisis go to waste" in the mouth of the antagonist. He that has ears to hear should keep an eye between the lines of Spellbound.

In the 1930s America faced the real possibility of becoming a Fascist state. And in the parallel universe of Spellbound the possibility is even more imminent.

If you're a fan of Marvel's X-Men, you'll see parallels with Hard Magic and Spellbound. I've always thought Magneto to be less interested in being a bad guy and more interested in protecting mutants from Nazi-style enslavement and discrimination.

The normals versus magic-users schism is one of the axes upon which Spellbound turns. It is just a matter of time before the government passes a law requiring magic users to wear a Star of David badge--or something like that.

The white hats in Spellbound are all members of the Grimnoir Society, a secret bunch whose elders are all euro-weenies counseling caution and deceit. Though their deceit is vindicated--after a fashion--in Hard Magic, you'll find foreshadowing of more deceit in Spellbound.

Spellbound is the middle book in a trilogy. As such, you should expect to see a lot of bad things to happen to good people to set up the third book. Nevertheless, there are some interesting new characters introduced.

Fans of Robert A Heinlein should keep an eye out for an Easter Egg. When you write a parallel universe novel set in the golden age of Science Fiction, I think you are honor-bound to give one of the grand masters a walk-on role.

Likewise, if you're a fan of Buckminster Fuller, and his way of using language, you'll get a huge laugh out of Spellbound.

One character from the first book, Faye, takes on a prominent role in Spellbound. She can teleport and she knows how to fight. Turns out she's very good at killing. And she does so gleefully. At least one Amazon reviewer has called her a psychopath, drawing a moral equivalency to the bloodthirsty black hats. I disagree.

I think Larry Correia is playing a deeper game: The glee is intentional: it's partially addressed by Spellbound, and I will have to read Warbound to confirm this. Faye has taken a lot of lives, but they were all in battle, or they needed killing. And she does a good job of not-killing those who irritate her.

The villain in Spellbound is delightfully evil. He is soooooo evil, he even makes J. Edgar Hoover look good. And that's saying something. I loved Spellbound. It deserves all five stars.

I'm looking forward to the 3rd installment, Warbound. If you haven't read Hard Magic, you've missed a treat.

I have also reviewed Hard Magic, the first book of this series. As well as Warbound, the third book of this series.

Hot Gat, Hard Fists and Magic

Spite can be a marvelous thing. You never want to anger a writer. But when someone else does so, something marvelous may come of it.

I hear there was a Science Fiction Con whereon there sat a panel of authors of fantasy novels. This panel was relatively diverse, being represented by the typical sword and sorcery types, horror, and at least one urban-fantasy writer. An individual asked a question of the panel about magic. When the urban fantasy writer answered, the questioner said he wanted to hear from one of the real magic writers.

You never want to anger a writer.

Larry Correia was the guy on the panel who didn't write real magic. Angered, he did what the best writers do: he channeled his ire into writing. He wrote out of spite. And it is delightful.

I've written stories mocking the Xena-style sword and sorcery genre. And I am pleased that when challenged to write a magic story, he chose a 1930s noir setting.

A Chicago private dick named Jack Sullivan is a war hero fresh out of prison for smashing a Louisiana sheriff into a red paste. In old noir stories, a heavy was the sort of character played by a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr. In hard-boiled detective fiction you could usually count on heavy named Rocco to break bones at the direction of his gangster boss.

But "Heavy" means something different in "Hard Magic." It means a particular type of magic-user who can manipulate the force of gravity.

The magic-users in Larry Correia's world aren't fellas in pointy hats holding gnarled wood walking sticks (or even hockey sticks). They are all segregated into distinct categories depending upon the type of magic they do. Cracklers can manipulate electricity. Brutes are unstoppable fighters. Fades can walk through walls. Travelers can teleport.

On top of that there are magic spells and wards that are acquired by careful study into the source of magic itself. With one exception, everyone gets one magical power to develop as best s/he can. The exception is the villainous Chairman who understands magic best, and has developed a system of spells that he brands on his Iron Guardsmen.

If you are familiar with 1930s pop culture, you'll recognize a lot of names. Larry Correia likes the idea of giving parts to the people of that time, like J. Edgar Hoover, Melvin Purvis, John Moses Browning, General Blackjack Pershing.

Mix in airships and you've got a rollicking yarn.

The good guys get chased around by the bad guys while they're gathering their forces and trying to keep a doomsday weapon (invented by Nicola Tesla) out of the hands of the evil Chairman. Meanwhile, the evil designs of both the Chairman and the traitors among the Grimnoir society collide in a most satisfactory fashion.

I sure hope that Larry Correia gets along with his brothers, because I've seen a pattern in both Hard Magic and Monster Hunters. The hero is a big buy who has to negotiate familial conflict with some Other Big Guy with a bad eye.

Larry Correia write fight scenes as well as anybody I've seen this side of Louis L'amour. If you want to see how someone wades into a fight with two hard fists and a hot gat, I can't see any writer doing a better job of it than Correia.

Five stars. Easy.

I have also reviewed Spellbound, the second book of this series. As well as Warbound, the third book of this series.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

The Monster Hunter Series

As a tender lad I had nightmares fueled by a combination of 1960s Cold War hysteria and Evangelical apocalypse preaching. The end-of-the-world nightmares were particularly frightening because the ground would crumble beneath my feet. I feared falling into the abyss.

Until I learned that I could fly in dreams. And then ground crumbling beneath my feet became an annoyance. That's what I told my kids. Just learn to fly. But my daughter dreamed of monsters and I told her to dream up a gun to shoot it. There are not that many problems in my dreams that cannot be solved with a sufficiently large calibre gun.



I don't know whether Larry Correia learned to destroy the terror of nightmares this way, but he writes like it. I've read four of his novels, and reviewed them. And I decided I should create a single place where you can link them:

• Monster Hunters International
• Monster Hunter Vendetta
• Monster Hunter Alpha
• Monster Hunter Legion

I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I did.