Posts

by on

The great philosopher-humorist Zachary Shatzer recently told me I might read “too many books about gritty, unshaven antiheroes who say things like ‘Sometimes a man has to do what must be done.'” And he may well be right. I’m descended from Irish policemen, many of whom probably played by their own rules and refused to do things by the book. So I’m a sucker for stories about tough cops who can’t stand being hamstrung by red tape. My epithet might well be the line Gallus says to Sejanus in an episode of I, Claudius:

A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed!

Well, come to that, I think Sejanus got a bad rap.  He was just trying to get stuff done in the notoriously corrupt Roman Empire. But I digress.

This book is about just one such gritty cop: David Forbes Carter, a brilliant, daring and extremely anti-bureaucracy Interplanetary Police Force agent. Since the mysterious death of his sister, Carter has become an increasingly loose cannon, and so the IPF assigns profiler Veronique de Tournay to try and get a sense of his unstable psychology and determine if he is still fit to serve.

It’s the classic set-up: two cops forced to work together, neither of whom likes the other. It’s been done a thousand times. But, as George Lucas once said, “they’re clichés because they work!” He ought to know. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark are nothing but clichés, and they became some of the most beloved films in history.

So it is with Phoenix. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and that’s exactly what made it so much fun; like seeing an old friend again after a few years. It doesn’t hurt that Janeski and I seem to have more or less the same vision for what a future solar system-spanning civilization would look like. Space stations, corrupt mega-corporations, cultists, conspiracies, etc. I had a very easy time picturing this world.

And of course, those cultists and conspiracies and mega-corporations soon get in the way of Agent de Tournay’s efforts at profiling Agent Carter, and the pair is caught up in trying to solve a massive plot to destroy the entire interplanetary government. As often as not, they resort to Carter’s decidedly non-standard methods of operating, though with time, Agent de Tournay helps him understand that waving a gun in people’s faces isn’t always the best answer to a problem.

Like I said, if you’re expecting something groundbreaking, you won’t find it here. But if you’re expecting a fun adventure story in a great sci-fi setting, this is just the ticket. And it would make a great movie!

by on

Indie writers, take an hour of your time today to watch Saffron Asteria meet the Writers Supporting Writers group to discuss her work. Saffron is an incredible supporter of indie authors, and an all-around cool person. I encourage you to subscribe to her podcast BOOKED and watch her site Indiosyncrasy, which is currently undergoing a revamp, but which has been and will soon again be a wonderful place for indies.

by on

This post isn’t just about football, though at first glance it appears to be. Stick with me, non-gridiron fans, it will be worth your while…

10 years ago tomorrow, the New England Patriots played the Denver Broncos for the AFC Championship. It’s one of my favorite football games ever, partially because I predicted how it would play out almost exactly. Defense wins championships, and the Denver defense of 2015 was tough enough that they could shut down the mighty Patriots and Tom Brady, with Peyton Manning more or less playing the football equivalent of El Cid.

But it wasn’t just that I called the game correctly that makes it a favorite memory of mine. I remember that at the same time I was watching it, I was also following news of the Paris premiere of a movie called Jane Got a Gun. I can literally remember seeing a picture of Natalie Portman and Joel Edgerton at the photocall at the same moment as Brady was throwing a seam route to Gronkowski on the Patriots’ last valiant, but ultimately doomed drive.

I’d been looking forward to Jane Got a Gun for months, and indeed I got to see it for myself on its US release five days later. See here for my retrospective thoughts on that film. It’s a small, but important, part of this story.

Fast-forward ten years, and a lot has changed. Not much of it, I am sad to report, for the better. Tom Brady won three more Super Bowls. Does Natalie Portman even still make movies? And there were… um… other things, too. We don’t need to get into specifics. To quote Jane Got a Gun: “It’s hard to remember how things seemed when you know how they actually turned out.”

But, like the Vicar of Bray, “whatsoever king may reign”, the Patriots will still be in the AFC championship, sir! And they are facing none other than the Denver Broncos again. Instead of Brady vs. Manning, we get Drake Maye (who?) vs. Jarrett Stidham (again, who?) What was it Marx said? Something about, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”? Or, in the words of the anti-human philosopher Nick Land summarizing a scene in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The dwarf makes some kind of remark like, “even eternity is a circle,” or some kind of flip little remark… And Zarathustra says to the dwarf, “Oh, you know, don’t be an asshole. You know, like, it’s more interesting than that.”

It is, indeed, more interesting than that.

At first blush, you think: so the Broncos are starting some guy who hasn’t thrown a pass all year, the Patriots should easily beat them. But then you remember that even the Great and Powerful Belichick’s legendary defense lost to Nick Foles in a Super Bowl. And there is actually a possible advantage in starting a quarterback who hasn’t played all year: there is no film on him for the Patriots to study. Whatever little tics, tendencies, and tells Stidham has will have to be discovered as the game plays out.

I did say above that defense wins championships, and both the Broncos and the Patriots have outstanding defenses. It would be delightful for a traditionalist like me, in this modern era when all the rules are designed to give us 52-49 games, to see a conference championship decided by a score of 6-3. Or better yet, 5-0. Football is supposed to be a brutal, physical game where getting a field goal feels like a hard-won victory. Nowadays coaches pass up field goals like they are nothing. Is this related to the decline of modern society generally? I’m not saying that. I’m not not saying it either…

But, I’ve not yet finished explaining why that 2016 AFC Championship game is one of my favorites. Like the writers of Jane Got a Gun, I’ve deliberately structured this to keep the most important revelation for the end. You see, on that prediction post of mine from a decade ago, I made a friendly bet with a reader and fellow blogger named Barb Knowles. That led to an online friendship with Barb. And through Barb, I met Carrie Rubin. And Carrie pretty much single-handedly encouraged me to keep writing when I was about to give up.

It goes deeper than that. Through Carrie, I met Mark Paxson, and through him, Audrey Driscoll and Kevin Brennan. And through all of them, in various way, I’ve found Lorinda Taylor and Richard Pastore and Noah Goats and Peter Martuneac and Lydia Schoch and Chuck Litka and Roger Lewellyn. And through Noah, I’ve discovered Zachary Shatzer, and through Lydia, Adam Bertocci… and the list goes on and on. There’s a sidebar on this blog that has the full roster.

What if Barb hadn’t commented on that post? Or what if I had picked the Patriots, and she hadn’t felt the need to say anything as a result? Would I know any of these wonderful people? (Not to neglect the old guard, like Pat Prescott and Maggie, who have been with me since the Blogger days!)

So that’s why it’s one of my favorite football memories, even though on paper I should really dislike both teams. It led to some of the most enjoyable friendships I’ve made in my life, and I would be vastly poorer without them. It just goes to show you how a simple post about something as ephemeral as a football game can change your life in ways you never expected.

Anyway… I see Vegas favors the Patriots, just like they did last time. They’re probably right to. But as I just explained, I won big by picking the underdog ten years ago. And so… for auld lang syne:

Broncos: 22
Patriots: 20

by on

When the history of our era is written, what will they say about our literature?

I can’t help asking this sort of question. I read about Weimar literature and fin de siècle literature and Victorian literature and all other sorts of literature categorized by historical period. Each one has some pithy one-line summary associated with it: Weimar was “experimental”, fin de siècle was “decadent”, Victorian was “sentimental”, and on and on. These words can hardly be expected to do justice to vast numbers of books written by countless people over periods of years, and each one represents only a general consensus of literary critics and historians. But, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere.

So, again: what are they going to say about our era? You know they’ll say something; they have to. What they say is going to depend on which books they read.

Well, for those future historians writing about “Early 21st century literature”, the works of Adam Bertocci are not a bad place to start. I’ve reviewed many of them already, but since he is not incredibly famous and wealthy thanks to the massive success of his books, clearly I have not reviewed enough of them yet.

Confessions of an Off-Brand Princess starts with a Bertoccian staple: a young woman named Sydney who is working her way through grad school as an employee of her step-mother’s company, which provides rent-a-princess services for children’s birthday parties. Sydney has played versions of all the recognizable fairy tale princesses, albeit with enough plausible deniability so as not to be sued by a certain mega corporation that owns the rights to many of their likenesses.

Sydney likes her job well enough, and her step-sisters are anything but wicked. Still, even though she enjoys her work, she can’t help feeling a sense of malaise as well as loss: her memories of her mother’s early death haunt her, perhaps more than she cares to admit.

The book blends deeply-felt human emotions with the superficial and banal tropes of commercialized princess culture. This, I finally realized, is why I love Bertocci’s work so much. I’ve occasionally heard critics complain that he undercuts the raw human emotion of his stories with superficial jokes and pop culture references, but this misses the point: the life experience of anyone born in the 1980s or later has involved searching for genuine expressions of real humanity, now obscured in a techno-decadent jungle. Like Diogenes of Sinope, we are all searching through this mass of ephemera for something true.

What becomes apparent only rather late in the story, is that it is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. Fairy tales are a tradition which reflects the changing state of culture. Most of the famous ones emerged from the dark forest of German Romanticism only to be sanitized by aforementioned mega corporation into mere trite caricatures.

And yet, as Sydney learns over the course of the story, it all springs from the same well of human desire. And so, Bertocci crafts a retelling for the 21st-century, where concerns like social media and paying for college and not being taken to court by a company known for a cartoon mouse occupy our time and mental energy.

Beneath it all lies something more important, but it takes a while to emerge. But when it does, it’s like the beam of a headlight piercing the dark of night.

When they go to write the history of 21st-century literature, they will have to include Bertocci. Few authors currently going understand our era as well, and even fewer have the gift of translating it to the page as he does.

by on

On the one hand, you might be tempted to say, this book is just a zany comedy. It certainly has its share of zaniness. It’s about a woman who travels to a small river village, populated by colorful characters. A wizard named Zuzzingbar, a group of gossipy ladies, and a species of aquatic creature known as a “leaping chomper”, which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be, are just some of the odd denizens of the place.

And then there’s Coren, a man cursed to never be allowed to set foot on dry land. So, he spends his days rowing up the aforementioned river. He has to, because if he doesn’t, he’ll go over the waterfall at the end of it.

Is this setting fertile ground for hilarity? It is! And there is plenty of that. Humorous hijinks abound. You might as well know that, despite the name on the cover, this is a Zachary Shatzer book. I’ve reviewed every one of his published books, and if you don’t know by now that I enjoy his work, well, you just haven’t been paying attention.

And yet… you might stop and wonder, why did he publish this under another name? Isn’t it just another one of his wizard stories?

Well, yes and no. It is another one of his wizard stories. But it is also something else.

You see in the description where it says it’s a “philosophical comedy”? Don’t ignore that first word. The book poses a philosophical and moral dilemma for the reader to puzzle over. And argue about ad nauseam. (Well, maybe that’s just me.) But it really is an interesting question of ethics that lies at the center of this seemingly light little comedy.

What is the interesting question, you ask? I’m not telling. That would be to spoil it! The whole story has been constructed specifically to invite the reader to think about this moral quandary. For me to just vomit forth my own interpretation would be leading the witness.

And how refreshing it is, I might add, to read a story that invites us to think, rather than lecturing us on what to believe. There is more than one way the story can be viewed, and that’s what makes it magical. Well, that and the wizards.

Is this Shatzer’s best book? I’m not sure—I really am fond of The Beach Wizard. But it’s in the top three, certainly, and it probably is the one that lends itself most readily to discussion and analysis. And it does it with the lightest of touches, without ever seeming heavy-handed or preachy. It’s just a story about some people and how they play the cards life deals them.

by on
Cover art of 'The Marching Morons' by C. M. Kornbluth, depicting a futuristic city with towering skyscrapers, crowded streets, and large advertisements highlighting themes like overpopulation and anti-intellectualism.

In his penultimate album, the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has a lyric, “You got me wishing, wishing our little love would last / You got me thinking like those people of the past.” And isn’t that the point of reading old books? To step into the shoes of people from a bygone age to see what exactly was on their minds?

Well, that’s what I think, and that’s why Little Red Reviewer’s Vintage Science-Fiction Month is such a valuable tradition. It gives us an excuse to go back to those sci-fi books of yesteryear, and see what, if anything, they can say to us in 2026. Well, what can “The Marching Morons” from 1951 tell us about the world of today?

Cover of a vintage science fiction book featuring a rocket and a cartoonish alien, with the text 'Red alert for the Interstellar Patrol The Vintage Science Fiction Month not-a-challenge'.

The book is set in the future, and begins with a humble potter excavating the ruins of the University of Chicago, where he finds a man called “Honest John Barlow”, who back in the 1980s had been placed in a state of suspended animation. With modern technology, he is quickly revived, and enters into his new reality, which, from books and films he has seen, he assumes will be high-tech, enlightened, and advanced.

However, Barlow quickly finds that all is not as he anticipated. Much of the world’s population lives in congested mega-cities, driving in cars that claim to go incredibly fast, but are actually modified with rigged speedometers that claim to go ten times faster than they do. The populace is awash in crude, vapid entertainment and hyper-sexualized electronic advertising. Current events, meanwhile, seem to be nothing but apathetic news personalities recounting one massive technological disaster after another and politicians speaking in ungrammatical and semi-literate soundbites.

Barlow, again falling back on his own reading of science fiction, assumes that the masses have been enslaved by a cadre of elites, and that the government handlers he has been assigned are the secret police of the tyrannical government that has let this occur. He demands to speak to their leadership.

Surprisingly, this request is granted, and they explain to him the the has got the situation all wrong: it is the billions of morons who have enslaved the relatively small handful of competent people still remaining. The latter are the people who keep the world (barely) functioning, supporting the ever-expanding hordes of imbeciles.

If this sounds as familiar to you as it did to me, it’s probably because it is almost exactly the plot of the 2006 comedy film Idiocracy. But here is where the two stories diverge, because while Idiocracy was a rather lighthearted comedy, “The Marching Morons” takes a much darker turn.

Barlow’s nickname is ironic, you see. He didn’t build a career in real estate back in his own time by being exceptionally ethical. And when the leadership of Earth explain their predicament to him, he responds by offering them a typically ruthless deal: he will help them with their moron problem, if they will name him Supreme World Dictator and give him money, power, and prestige. Not knowing what else to do, they agree to his demands, and Barlow then sets about implementing a massive propaganda campaign to sell the morons on the idea of vacations to Venus, and creating a program to dismantle the cities and use the material to build rockets which will take them to the supposed Venusian paradise.

Barlow, who is a bit of a racist in addition to his proclivity for shady real estate dealings, is a student of mid 20th-century Germany, and borrows heavily from that period in his plans for dealing with his captive population. Needless to say, his rockets do not actually go to Venus.

It’s not a long story. It appeared in Galaxy Magazine, where it took up a mere 30 pages, complete with very 1950s illustrations. (You can view it here.) Indeed, for a science-fiction story, it contained relatively little world-building. And yet, I did not feel that this was a serious problem; for it was as if the setting seemed already established in my mind. 

It’s always interesting, as I said, to know what “those people of the past” were thinking about. It’s even more interesting, once you know that, to speculate on what they would think about us, if they could know about our time. What would C.M. Kornbluth make of 2026, if he could see it? Well, I have an idea, but I’ll not put words in his mouth. Read the story, and decide for yourself. 

by on

This started as a comment to Mark Paxson, but then it occurred to me there may be other people as weird as me who might enjoy it too.

First, cue up a walkthrough video of an old mall, abandoned factory, or even an empty cruise ship, like the below. (Turn the sound off.)

      Then, cue up a long Sovietwave music playlist. This is a good one:

      Watch the first video while listening to the second one. It’s best if you can put the video on a big screen TV.

      Now, sit back and bask in melancholic techno-decadent nirvana! 🙂

      by on

      As usual, I’m using the last Friday of the year to recap all the books I reviewed over the past 12 months.

      In January, I reviewed Adam Bertocci’s Travailing Through Time followed by the “choose-you-own-adventure”-esque Brutal Moon by Andrew Morris and Laura Dodd. For Vintage Sci-Fi Month, I reviewed The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K le Guin, and then it was time for a book I returned to over and over again throughout the year, Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image. I finished of the month with the Lovecraftian Eldritch Declarations by Osvaldo Felipe Amorarte.

      For February, I reviewed the literary romance with the cheesecake-y cover, In Love with Eleanor Rigby by Stacey Cochran, followed by the disappointing The Martian General’s Daughter. Then I finished the month with a new Geoffrey Cooper thriller, The Plagiarism Plot.

      March began with Audrey Driscoll’s gorgeous and melancholy Winter Journeys, followed by C. Litka’s Glencrow Summer. I followed this up with the collected tweets of Adam Bertocci, Please RT, followed by the long-awaited review of Lorinda Taylor’s The Termite Queen Volume One: The Speaking of the Dead.

      April started off with Seth Wickersham’s It’s Better to be Feared, a book about football, but I tried to make an interesting even for those immune to the charms of the gridiron. Then I followed that up with The Pup and the Pianist by Sea Kjeldsen, and the stylish noir short story The Night Train by Evelyn Archer. I then reviewed The Beach Wizard and the Easy Mind, the third book in Zachary Shatzer’s wonderful Beach Wizard series, and finished the month off with a how-to book for Walpurgis Night: Night of the Witches by Linda Raedisch.

      I began May with John C. Reilly’s survey of apocalyptic literature The Perennial Apocalypse, followed by Norman Spinrad’s speculative sci-fi satire, The Iron Dream. Switching gears a bit, I reviewed Sterling North’s wistful memoir of his pet raccoon Rascal. I ended the month with Beth Brower’s The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion.

      June started with my review of C. Litka’s The Darval-Mers Dossier and the delightful sci-fi caper The Wrong Stop by Rex Burke. Then it was time for a deep dive into the history of Prussia with Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom.

      In July I reviewed Richard Pastore’s short story Twilight of the Guardians and Nelson DeMille’s The Book Case. Then it was time for another Shatzer book with his annotated commentary Wit and Assurance: Reviewing the Jests of 18th Century Humorist Joe Miller.

      For August, I reviewed the unfathomably depressing but also extremely well-written Stoner by John Williams, followed by a biography of Oliver Cromwell by Theodore Roosevelt. Sticking with that rebellious motif, I reviewed the alternate future YA adventure Rebel Heart by Graham Bradley. And then, to close out the month, I reviewed the weirdest, wildest, most off-the-wall book in Jeff Neal’s Awful, Ohio.

      September began with a long-expected party for the release of Mark Paxson’s absurdist political thriller masterpiece, The Jump. Next up was the military sci-fi adventure Go Tell the Spartans by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling and then, for a change of pace, the Autumn cozy mystery Candy Apple Curse by Eva Belle. Then I tackled Adam Bertocci’s darkest tale, The Fairfield County Friday Night Gridiron Bonanza

      October, also known as Halloween month, is when I devote myself to reviewing books related to the great spooky holiday. I started with John A. Keel’s classic of paranormal literature The Mothman Prophecies. Then I reviewed another Geoffrey Cooper thriller, Betrayal of Trust, and Graham Bradley’s action-adventure spin on the classic story of the Headless Horseman with Sleepless Hollow. Then it was on to Adam Bertocci’s much-anticipated first novel The Sorcery of White Rats. Then I did a comparison of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mystery Hallowe’en Party with the vaguely-related parody adaptation film by Kenneth Branagh. And finally, for the big day itself, I reviewed Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree.

      November began with another Litka book, The Founders’ Tribunal, followed by a pair of reviews of related books: Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and the CCRU: Writings 1997 – 2003, which might as well have been called “For the Machine.”

      For December, I reviewed Yukio Mishima’s controversial Sun and Steel, then Bertocci’s latest short, McKenna gets Mercutio. I ended the year by reviving the Victorian tradition of the Christmas ghost story with The Green Room by Walter de la Mare.

      A very happy holiday season and a happy new year to you, dear reader. Let’s make 2026 another year of reviewing interesting books.

      by on

      I’m a big believer in tradition. Not for nothing have friends compared me to Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Especially on topics like Halloween and college football, I am something of a zealot on matters of tradition. And I have to be! A tradition is like a plant: it must be nurtured, tended, and cared for. Otherwise it dies.

      Today’s book is an example of a dead tradition. The introduction informs us that “reading a ghost story on Christmas Eve was once as much a part of traditional Christmas celebrations as turkey, eggnog, and Santa Claus.” In Victorian times, the “Christmas ghost story” was a cliché, but now the only trace of it that still exists in the popular consciousness is in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and its many adaptations. (In the words of Bart Simpson, “TV writers have been milking that goat for years.”)

      A cartoonist known as Seth aimed to revive this tradition, by republishing classic ghost stories, of which this is one, originally published in 1925. It’s about a young man who sees a ghostly woman in a bookstore, which was previously a residence. In a little-used annex, he finds a manuscript of poems she had written in life. Thinking perhaps it will put her spirit at rest, he decides to publish them himself.

      Now, you might say, that sounds like a simple enough story. And it is—but the Victorians had another tradition, you see, and that tradition is also preserved in this volume. That tradition is: incredibly overwrought prose.

      I’m no stranger to complex writing. I grew up on Gilbert, Hardy, and Lovecraft, you know. I’m not one of those people who thinks writing should be as concise as possible, as I’ve said more than once. But damn, this thing is something else. Everything is described in the minutest detail, and once you’ve got through reading it, you realize that you don’t know much more than when you started. It reminded me of Henry James, only more so.

      It’s not actually a bad story in itself. It has kind of a twist, and it’s a twist that I think will appeal to writers in particular. I’ll give you a hint: how would you feel if someone published your drafts without permission? But the problem is that I had to plow through so much ornate verbiage to get to it that by the end I’m like, “is that it?”

      That said, maybe it would work better read aloud to friends by firelight on a cold December evening, while drinking eggnog. Perhaps eggnog mixed with a goodly helping of rum. Then you and your friends could enjoy the story together, and engage in the delightful parlor game of debating why the room was green and what it symbolizes. And isn’t that the real point of reading?

      Well, no, of course it’s not. That would be silly. Still, like the ghost of Maiden’s Peak haunting the summer festival, I enjoy keeping alive all the old legends that people have forgotten over the years. And I must thank Lydia Schoch for bringing this book to my attention. It took four years, but I finally got around to reading it! 🙂

      by on

      They call him the Bard for a reason. Shakespeare took the English language and used it like he owned it, constantly inventing memorable turns of phrase. He was so good at it that by now it actually works against him. You’ll be watching a Shakespeare play and somebody says something and you roll your eyes and go “oh, that old cliché… oh, wait,” suddenly remembering that it wasn’t a cliché back then.

      We still have some creative users of the English language with us today, even as modern communication technology homogenizes speech patterns. Adam Bertocci is one of them, and his latest book shows off his skill at the playing of words.

      It’s a simple enough story, about a teenaged girl named McKenna who is cast as Mercutio in her high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Now, I have to confess my ignorance: I’d forgotten there even was such a character in R & J, if I ever knew it. It’s not my favorite Shakespeare—give me Macbeth or better yet, Coriolanus, any day.

      But anyway, McKenna is assigned the rôle, as people used to call it, and it’s a tough challenge for her, because Mercutio, in case you also forgot, is a male. So she has to get in touch with her masculine side, and she figures that the best way to do that is hang out with her brother’s friends, including the boy she has a crush on.

      What follows is a typically Bertoccian mix of wit and philosophy. Because of the age of the characters, it’s less about the angst of figuring out life as an adult, and more about the experience of growing up in the first place. As a result, it has more of a carefree, breezy quality to it, which is exactly as it should be.

      I could go on, but I’ve been rallying people to read Bertocci’s books for years now, and I have a mind to keep on doing it. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and read it already!