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They say not to judge a book by its cover. Well, you certainly shouldn’t let your judgment of the cover be your final judgment. Your assessment of a book should be based on a whole host of factors. Still, a cover is the first thing you see, and it makes a difference as to whether  you read the book or not.

I picked up this book because I saw the cover on Twitter, and it looked interesting. Simultaneously pulpy and punky isn’t a combination you often see.

As it turns out, it has only a tangential connection to the book itself, and I’m still not sure exactly who the characters depicted are supposed to be. There is a woman who wears gear not unlike that seen here, but she is described repeatedly as being dark-skinned. Also, this scene looks sort of urban or industrial, and most of the fighting takes place in open terrain.

The book is about a rebel insurgency trying to overthrow the monarchical government of the planet Sparta. In response, the Spartan kings hire a mercenary unit, Falkenberg’s legion, to assist them in putting down the rebellion.

I admit that the details of “who” and “where” and “why” were all rather unclear to me during the first quarter of the story or so. But this is not the first book in this series. Depending who you ask, it’s either the 2nd, 3rd, or 5th book in a series. But someone on Twitter claimed it could be read as a standalone, and if you can’t trust strangers on Twitter, well, who can you trust?

And in the end, they were kind of right, because after a while enough details became apparent that I could sort of follow who the characters were. Skida Thibodeau is the woman leading the rebellion, Prince Lysander is the acting ruler of Sparta, and Falkenberg is a mercenary leader. There were a bunch of other characters too, including a former prostitute turned mercenary and a corrupt Spartan senator. It wasn’t all clear, but the main players were vivid enough that I was interested in what they were doing. And I appreciated the multiple shout-outs to T.E. Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

The cyberpunk cover notwithstanding, this book is military sci-fi through and through. It’s actually more military than sci-fi, with legions (ha!) of analogies by the characters drawn from the history of Earth warfare. The final battle sequence feels like accounts of present-day warfare, in that it’s basically all frantic radio chatter among commanders of various units.

More than anything sci-fi, this book reminded me of a Tom Clancy novel. Actually, it’s better than most of the Clancy books that I’ve read, in that the characters felt real, as opposed to cardboard cut-outs. But the basic Clancian elements are there: the clean-cut elite anti-terror unit vs. the terrorists and their slimy politician supporters form the fundamental conflict of the story.

And of course, the plot is a thinly-veiled fictionalization that allows the author(s) to expound on real-world political issues. Pournelle, at least, seems to have had approximately the same political alignment as the aforementioned Clancy, and his Cold Warrior mentality comes through here, as the entire plot has strong echoes of many a U.S./Soviet proxy war.

All told, it was pretty good. Probably even better if you read it in sequence. But then again, there’s something to be said for just being dropped in media res. After all, the oldest work of military fiction still in existence starts out that way!

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Book cover for 'The Jump' by Mark Paxson featuring a silhouette of a construction crane against a sunset backdrop with the tagline: 'Nothing is as it seems, everything is as it should be.'

Every now and again, you get an opportunity as a reviewer to tell the world about a book before the world has had a chance to form an opinion on it. It’s rarer than you might think. When you review a classic book, most people have already at least heard of it. When it’s a book by a famous author, preconceived ideas based on that author’s other works are bound to color how it is perceived.

But this is a new book, by an indie author who I am honored to call a friend and who has yet to become widely known to the world at large. And more’s the pity for the world, because once you read Mark Paxson, you don’t stop reading him. You eagerly anticipate his next work.

Let’s say you are among the select group of people of taste and discernment who already do read Paxson. I am in this group. I’ve read his collections of short stories, and his literary novella, and his legal drama. I’ve read his coming-of-age novel and his psychological thriller.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Or, more accurately, the lack of a pattern here? Mark Paxson doesn’t write the same book twice. He experiments. He takes risks. He dares. He wins.

Which brings us, finally, to The Jump. What kind of a book is it?

Well, it’s about a dystopian United States where the President has declared martial law and sent squads of thugs, known as “the President’s Men”, to terrorize the population.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That this is a commentary on current events. Maybe you don’t like commentary on current events in your fiction. But I promise you, it’s not what you think. Stick with it. Don’t assume that it’s some lazy attempt at relevance-by-real-world-reference like we get from so much of the commoditized entertainment industrial complex these days. It’s not that at all.

Which is not to say it is not relevant! Oh, it’s plenty relevant, to be sure. We’ll get to that, fear not.

By the way, I won’t explain what the title means. It’s not a spoiler, because it’s explained in chapter one, but the way Paxson describes it is unforgettable. I should know, because I read the opening of this story nearly a decade ago, and it stuck with me all these years.

The Jump tells the story of a man named Richard Bell, on a quest to avenge his wife’s death, which he feels he can only do by punishing the man responsible: the President.

Following after him are his children, who soon realize their father is out for revenge. Separately, father and children journey across the shattered remnant of the USA, witnessing haunting visions of Americana fallen into decrepitude, and patrolled ceaselessly by the President’s Men.

Along the way, they meet an odd collection of characters, such as Tobin J Oxblood, another man haunted by the loss of the country he once knew. And then there’s Tum Tum Run, my personal favorite character. I won’t say anything about him other than he’s like if Tom Bombadil found his way into a Tom Clancy novel. If that doesn’t make you want to read this, nothing will.

Needless to say, it’s a long, strange trip. As the cross-country journey leads inexorably towards Washington D.C., the central theme, taken from the President’s book of maxims, is hammered home again and again:

Nothing is as it seems. Everything is as it should be.

To quote another American President: “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” It is repeated in the book like a leitmotif, as well it should be. It’s really the key to the whole story.

I won’t say more about the plot here. Just know that it begins as a dark story of despair and revenge, and ends up in a place you would never expect given where it started. It’s a brilliant, mind-bending, plot-twisting odyssey through dystopia, told at every step with the emotional, almost poetic writing we expect from a Paxson novel. 

But now we come to the really important question: what was the author trying to symbolize in this book?

Okay, okay; this started as an in-joke for the Writers Supporting Writers group and our viewers. None of us are huge fans of analyzing the symbolism in fiction, and when I said I would discuss that in my review of this book, it was really a lighthearted comment.

And yet… the question nagged at me. There can be no doubt, after all, that every author is influenced by his or her time and place, the milieu in which they live. The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic that transcends its setting, but would Dumas have written quite the same book if the conflict of Bonapartism vs. Royalism had not been on his mind? So it is with all of us.

And moreover, each reader interprets any given book in a different way, based on his or her own particular experiences and beliefs. If I did not play video games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Fallout: New Vegas, if I had not recently read books like The Image by Daniel J. Boorstin and The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, I would not have come up with the interpretation I am about to lay before you. But I did and I have, so I will.

The first thing to know, per Boorstin, is that, dating back to the 19th-century, America (along with the rest of the world) has been transformed by what he called “the graphic revolution”. Thanks to printed matter, photography, film, television and finally the internet, people receive news in the form of transmitted images, so much so that thinking of the image of a thing is more common than thinking of the thing itself. 

The second thing to know is that the human mind is primarily built on its facility for imitation. The smallest unit of a thing to be imitated is a called a meme, an analogue to the gene in the biological world. Thanks to Boorstin’s Graphic Revolution, these memes can now be transmitted instantly around the world, leading to people imitating “viral” (the word is more apt than many realize) fashions, fads, ways of speaking, etc.

This is the world of the internet, the super-connected noösphere of de Chardin; the world you are in right now as you read these words, and the one I am in while I am writing them. We are able to bridge the temporal displacement between my writing them and your reading them effortlessly, thanks to DARPA’s miraculous invention.

And note that that this is not quite the same thing as the real world. You know, IRL. Meatspace. There is a certain overlap, but the world of physical reality is still separate from the interwebs.

How does all of this relate to The Jump? Well, here it is, ladies and gents: Berthold’s Unified Theory of What The Jump is Symbolizing. Are you ready?

What happens in The Jump is what would happen if the world of the internet could be transmuted into physical reality.

That’s why so much weirdness abounds. The President in The Jump is effectively the influencer-in-chief, requiring the population to mimic whatever fad his algorithm chooses to promote. (Remember, an algorithm need not necessarily be electronic or computer-based, but is an ancient mathematical concept. The word is an Anglicization of a Latinization of the name of a 9th-century Persian mathematician.)

Similarly, especially towards the end, the story is increasingly full of metafictional references to other things. I’ll give you a hint: there’s a nod to The Princess Bride at one point. These fourth-wall-breaking Easter Eggs are more than just in-jokes; they are symptomatic of a ubiquitous feature of internet culture, i.e. pop culture references. Only here, they are shown in the physical reality of the world itself, rather than in the form of reaction GIFs.

In some sense, the act of “the jump” for which the story is titled is the concept of “rage-quitting” as manifested in real life. Which of course has a very different effect than when it is purely a metaphor for logging off. And yet, as biosphere and noösphere continue to converge… well, it does give one pause, that’s all.

Anyway, that’s my take on it. Of course you might ask, did Mark mean to do any of this? Well, I haven’t asked him, but probably not. But what do we mean when we say we mean something? Do I mean to write every word in one of these rambling reviews of mine before I sit down and type it out? Not really. At the end of the day, I’m just a monkey with an unusually high capacity for imitation and a really powerful typewriter. So I just start hammering them keys and see where it takes me.

The important thing, though, is that you really need to read The Jump. You might think my interpretation is complete BS, and that’s fine. One of the signs of a great work of literature is critics preparing bogus interpretations of it. The work is strong enough it can withstand any cockamamie reading anybody wants to give it. 

But people do have to read it! This step cannot be skipped. Set aside whatever political biases you may have, be you Republican or Democratic, Whig or Tory, Bonapartist or Royalist, and approach the book with an open mind. I can almost guarantee that by the end it will not be what you expected at the beginning. And above all, it will make you think.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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One of the things we writers like to talk about are the so-called “rules of writing”, if such things even exist. Mostly, we come down on the side that there are no rules. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met a book quite as dedicated to rule-breaking as this one.

It’s not just the “usual” writing rules that get violated in Awful, Ohio. The basic rules of spelling and grammar come in for a sound thrashing as well. On the first page, the author uses “was” when it should be “were.”

And then there’s the matter of the words themselves. What are words, after all? Nothing but symbols, signifying sounds, that we, as a society, mutually agree to mean things. There’s nothing inherent in them that says the symbols composing the term “elephant” must correspond to the thing they describe. If language had evolved differently, “elephant” might have meant what we mean when we say “teacup” instead. It’s arbitrary. And yet, language works because speakers of a given language are trained to follow these conventions. Words are ultimately just agreements between writers and readers.

Except not in Awful, Ohio. Frequently, the author uses some word that just cannot mean what it is conventionally understood to mean in the context.

Not to say that there aren’t clues. For example, the word “ration”, which can be either a noun referring to some limited quantity of something distributed according to a schedule, or a verb meaning the act of distributing same, is here used to mean “rationality.” Clearly, the words have some etymological connection, but this is in no way a standard usage.

I’ve often criticized Lovecraft for his overuse of adjectives and repetitive, long sentences. But in HPL’s prose, the overused adjectives typically meant the thing they were generally understood to mean. Now imagine if they didn’t. Imagine if sometimes, in one of his fits of purple verbiage, the horror-master of Providence had just started throwing out malapropisms and you had to guess what he actually meant. That happens frequently here.

In short, the author has chosen to break the most basic rule in all of communication, the fundamental agreement as to what things mean. Clearly, he is far more committed to the idea of rule-breaking than even I am, and I think of myself as a real iconoclast.

That’s an introduction to the prose style. I say “introduction” because I suspect linguists could write whole papers, perhaps hold whole conferences, analyzing the writing in this novel. But we haven’t the time for that now, we have to get along to the plot, which is the story of a man named Troy Slushy. Troy has grown bored with his factory job in the town of Awful, and just wants to get away from it all and spend time with his wife, Lacy.

Troy’s plan for how to escape the tyranny of the industrial labor force is an unusual one: to destroy the sun. His reasoning is, since the sun wakes people up to go to work, eliminating it means they wouldn’t have to. This is of course the same sort of confused logic underlying cargo cults, but we can ignore that for now. Things are going to get much weirder before we are through.

While plotting to destroy the sun, Troy still has to go to clock in at his place of employment, Mad Ted’s Uckin Hot Auce factory. Now, you might say, shouldn’t that be “hot sauce”? Well, it might. Throughout the text, the product the factory makes is called “hot sauce.” But the factory name is always written without the “S”. Why is this? We don’t know.

The aforesaid “Mad Ted” is a dictatorial figure who oversees the workers on his hot sauce assembly line from a mirrored pod hanging over the factory floor. Mad Ted is reclusive and mysterious, and what little information is available about him comes from the dubious source of an investigative reporter named Wilsie McHickoryboob.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the names in this book are absolutely bonkers. Later on, we meet Doink McTriggers and Sammy Ammo. The latter was once a kindly transient named Samuel Amiable, but changed his name when he was transformed into a ruthless criminal.

I think you’re starting to get an idea of how insane this book is. But really, I’ve only scratched the surface of it. Our author sometimes gleefully ignores the rules of basic causality, which makes for a very unpredictable plot.

Now, here’s the part that may surprise you.

I really enjoyed this book. The way the story works out is quite funny, and in the end, surprisingly satisfying. One thing that doesn’t become clear until fairly late in the game is that the plot does have a certain logic to it; albeit a very strange logic.

I heard about this book from a friend who did not finish it. I read it and enjoyed it, so recommended it to another friend who likes wacky humor. He also did not finish it.

So, 66.67% of those polled couldn’t stand it. But that’s a small sample size. I’m sure if we cast a wider net, we could get those numbers up to more like 90%-95%, at least.

I’m under no illusions about this. Most people who attempt to read this are going to give up because it’s so bizarre in so many ways. The writing is truly hard to decipher in points. Sometimes a book is hard to read because the author uses too many large, obscure words. Sometimes a book is hard to read because of basic mistakes in grammar and spelling. It’s rare to find a book that is hard to read because of both. Usually sesquipedalian types have a good handle on the fundamentals.

But I could get past this. And the reason is simply that I respect a willingness to experiment and try different things. Anytime you do that, you’re risking disastrous, embarrassing failure. But you’ve got to do it if you want any hope of ever hitting it big. Everybody remembers the moon landing. Almost nobody remembers all the test rockets that blew up on the launchpad. But you can’t get the one without the other.

If you like extremely strange, wildly experimental fiction, and can look past a whole slew of typos, grammatical errors, and just flat-out incomprehensible things, Awful, Ohio is a surprisingly fun story.

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Book cover of 'Engines of Liberty: Rebel Heart' featuring a young man in a leather jacket holding a mechanical device, with an eagle in the background and a dramatic sunset.

What if I told you there was a YA adventure book about a boy fighting evil wizards? You’d probably say, “meh, sounds like a Harry Potter clone.”

I see why you’d think that. But what if I told you it’s set in America? Or rather, an alternate retro-futuristic America, in which the revolution was defeated, and the rebel colonists remain under the thumb of the cruel mages, who keep the non-magical people in a state of constant poverty by restricting their technology.

This is the world in which Calvin Adler, the protagonist, has grown up, and against which he rages impotently, lashing out at the mages who oppress his family. This act of rebellion earns them all a harsh punishment, and also earns Calvin a place in the underground resistance forming to fight the magic-wielding oppressors. A group of “technomancers”, who have vowed to succeed where George Washington failed.

The story is fast-paced and fun. It has all the usual beats of a coming-of-age YA novel: evil villains, school where hero takes some hits and learns to get back up, arrogant bullies, budding romance, and all the other elements we expect are here. Also, some interesting retrofuturistic technology, especially the guns. That’s right, unlike the Potterverse, wands aren’t the only weapons folks have at their disposal!

Is it the most original, innovative, or inventive story I ever read? No, it’s not. But I had fun reading it, and I think that’s all that really matters. If you’re in the mood for a fun fantasy adventure for quick reading, then this is a good choice. 

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Theodore Roosevelt was a man of many talents. He was, as Ben Stiller summarizes in that great masterpiece of 21st-century cinema, Night at the Museum 2: “26th President of the United States, Roughrider, Founder of the National Parks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.”

Among that “whole bunch of other stuff”, he was a writer, and one of his works is this biography of Oliver Cromwell: “Lord Protector of England, Puritan, born in 1599 and died in 1658, September.”🎶  (Once you hear the Monty Python song about him, you can never un-hear it.)

I love reading one famous historical figure writing about another. The gold standard for this is, of course, Napoleon’s commentaries on the wars of Julius Caesar, but this one is right up there. T.R.’s writing is efficient, to the point, and very opinionated. He’s making no attempt at neutrality, but arguing strenuously that Oliver Cromwell was awesome, and that the Stuart monarchy he temporarily deposed were, basically, a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.

But Teddy had a problem, in that Cromwell’s reign was, by basically any measure, just a tyrannous as was that of Charles I, if not more so. To his credit, he doesn’t deny this. He admits that Cromwell did some nasty stuff. He even puts together a tiered ranking of “guys who took over their countries after a revolution.” Top tier: George Washington. Next tier: Cromwell. Bottom tier: Napoleon. (Too bad he didn’t write this after 1917.)

He makes a lot of excuses for Cromwell, basically all of which amount to, “he meant well.” Yeah, yeah, Ted; that’s what they all say.

Nevertheless, the biographical sketch is quite interesting, and it’s kind of nice to read a politician who is unafraid to take an unequivocal stance on a relatively controversial topic. Not to mention that the idea of a politician taking the trouble to learn something about a distant period of history is rather amazing by modern standards.

Is it the best book ever written on Cromwell? Probably not. Is it objective? Definitely not. But is it the best book we’re ever likely to get about Cromwell written by an American politician? For at least the foreseeable future, yes.

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I am not generally in favor of content warnings. It’s not that I have any problem with them per se; it’s just that if you start doing them, you have to list everything that could possibly upset anyone. Which could really be anything. My mother knows a woman who is afraid of kittens. Kittens!

But this book should come with a warning. It is incredibly depressing. So depressing that, as I was reading it, the thought occurred to me that it could actually be in some sense dangerous. I am not prone to depression or melancholy, and yet even I was filled with a profound sense of gloom after reading this. I would say if you do read it, you should be sure you have someone you can talk to about it, because otherwise it might get just too damn bleak. For myself, I re-read a Zachary Shatzer book after finishing it, as a sort of satyr play.

What, you ask, is Stoner about? Not a drug enthusiast or the famous firearm designer, as you might have thought, but a man named William Stoner born on a small Missouri farm, back when the West was young… oh, wait, no; that’s Frank and Jesse James. Stoner is born on a small Missouri farm in 1891. Farm life is bleak and hard and miserable, and so, in 1910, Stoner’s father suggests he take classes at the University of Missouri, an institution set up to educate rural youths such as himself and mold them into productive citizens. (Their motto is salus populi suprema lex esto: “the health of the people shall be the supreme law.”)

Stoner enrolls at Mizzou, but finds the agricultural science classes boring. English literature catches his fancy, and he seeks a graduate degree in it, much to his parents’ disappointment. From there, he goes on to a career teaching at the same university. He meets a woman named Edith, whom he marries for no particular reason, and their marriage quickly proves to be an unhappy one. Despite this, they have a daughter, whom they name Grace. Stoner bonds with Grace when she is young and Edith is frequently absent, but then Edith begins manipulating her to keep her away from her father.

Meanwhile, Stoner’s professional life is the dreary, repetitive drudgery of teaching the same classes over and over, intermixed with the petty factional squabbles common to academia. Anyone who has ever been connected with a university for an extended period will recognize familiar types: the scheming faculty members with their intradepartmental political jockeying, and the malingering, dishonest students who put more effort into gaming the system than into studying their assignments.

All of it makes Stoner miserable, but only in a very detached sort of way. Frequently, we are told he views his problems as if he is watching them happening to somebody else. Some might call this stoicism or perseverance. But to me, it called to mind a line from a Monty Python skit: “He doesn’t know when he’s beaten, this boy! He doesn’t know when he’s winning either. He has no sort of sensory apparatus!”

Stoner is just a non-entity. A vaguely sad non-entity, but when it seems as if he himself can’t be bothered to care that his life sucks, well, why should I?

Stoner was more or less ignored when it was published in 1965, and only recently rediscovered in the age of the internet. This book has over 18,000 reviews on Amazon, most of them positive. It’s also tagged with something called “Best of #BookTok”, which means it’s popular on social media. Which amazes me, because it seems like exactly the sort of book that wouldn’t interest the TikTok crowd, what with its slow pace, historical setting, and lack of sparkling vampires. In a way, I view it as a good sign that a book like this can still find an audience today.

But not that good of a sign, because it’s still an unbelievably grim slog. A lot of reviews say that, basically, that’s the point. Stoner’s entire life is drab and uninteresting, like so many people’s lives, and yet the author was able to weave a narrative out of a completely dull non-story.

I have my own theory as to why the book is more popular now than it was upon its original publication. I suspect Stoner is most interesting to people who are familiar with the inner-workings of academia. In the 1960s, this was a smaller share of the population. But as access to college has increased, and especially as more students have sought post-graduate degrees, the percentage of people who can relate to Stoner has grown as well.

Which is a rather ominous message, given that the theme of the book seems to be that academic life is gloomy and wretched. Then again, it doesn’t suggest that Stoner’s agrarian parents were living the Life of Reilly, either. Basically, there are no happy endings here. All that was missing was a Barry Lyndon-esque epilogue in case we hadn’t gotten the point already: “It was in the reign of Franklin Roosevelt that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled…”

So, the big question: should you read the damn thing? Well… it’s hard to say. It’s well-written, and given the aggressively tedious subject matter, I have to give the author credit for making it fairly readable. I kept going after all, with morbid curiosity, wanting to know what awful thing Stoner would have to deal with next, and what his new excuse would be for not making his own life better.

Probably any young person just going off to college should read this. Then they can decide for themselves if they want to risk ending up like Stoner. But I don’t think many college-age kids read this blog. So for my typical readers: if you love well-written and crushingly depressing literary fiction, sure, give it a shot. Otherwise, steer clear.

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Cover of the book 'Wit and Assurance' by Zachary Shatzer, featuring the subtitle 'Reviewing the Jests of 18th Century Humorist Joe Miller.' The design has a dark background with white text.

Whenever I’m on the lookout for books to read, and a new title by Zachary Shatzer comes to my notice, I pause, stroke my mustache, and say in the voice of an English bobby, “‘ere now, wot’s all this then?”

In this case, “all this” is an annotated review of an 18th century joke book allegedly by an actor named Joe Miller, although actually it seems to have been compiled by a man named John Mottley, writing under the pseudonym of Elijah Jenkins. Are you confused yet? Just wait.

18th century humor is not always like modern humor. Sometimes, of course, it is. There are patterns in the human experience which are universal, and some of the jests do indeed strike chords of hilarity which echo down all the ages.

But other times, it’s hard, to be quite blunt, to know what the hell Miller (or Mottley or Jenkins or whoever) is talking about. Sometimes, Mr. Shatzer’s commentary is able to shed light on the matter. Other times, he is as baffled as the rest of us.

Fortunately, Shatzer is one of the funniest writers currently going, and so his commentary on each of the 247 jests is enjoyable in its own right, even when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible. Maybe especially when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible.

And every now and again, one of the jests is actually relatable and funny, and suddenly, the gulf between us and the 18th century is bridged, and we understand the people of the past were people, not merely names in history books, and that they laughed at absurdities just as we do. There’s nothing like shared laughter for helping to relate to someone else.

If nothing else, this book is a good window into Shatzer’s process. When his future biographers are trying to describe what made this great 21st-century humorist tick, they will no doubt turn to this volume for insight into Shatzer’s philosophy of comedy. To paraphrase a film review I once read, “Joe Miller’s wit is almost enough, because Zachary Shatzer’s wit is more than enough.”

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I had never heard of Nelson DeMille until recently, but apparently he was quite popular in his time. His time, alas, is over, but his books live on, including this short story, which is about a bookstore owner crushed to death by a fallen bookcase. An accident? The protagonist of the story, detective John Corey, is not so sure, and sets about unraveling the tangled web of events surrounding the bookstore owner’s demise, complete with a running sarcastic commentary on the cast of characters who seem to be involved, from the youthful shop clerk to the bookstore owner’s wife.

It’s an amusing story, though fairly predictable, which, when you consider the length and limited number of characters, might be inevitable. There’s only so much of a mystery you can have when the possibilities are so limited. Still, that’s not a bad thing. It would be worse if he had dragged it out to full novel length by throwing in extraneous material. Nobody wants that.

At the same time… it’s also not ground-breaking. Not that it needs to be. It’s just that, I can think of plenty of indie authors who have written things that are just as good or better. Yet, DeMille could get traditionally published and they could not. It’s not DeMille’s fault. Nil nisi bonum, after all. It’s just one of those frustrating mysteries in the world of publishing. These are the kinds of mysteries that just can’t be resolved with snappy, sarcastic one-liners. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Forgive me if this all seems a bit negative. Perhaps it’s my own failing, as I ponder the future of writing and feel a sense of looming disaster. But all in all, it’s a decent story if you want a quick diversion and some funny lines.

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AI is inescapable. At least as a topic of discussion. Which, if you believe in the idea of AI super-intelligence as a memetic mind virus from the future, means it has already won. But I digress. The subject of today’s review is a short story by my friend and fellow author, Richard Pastore, which you can read for free in its entirety on his blog.

Of course, one of the difficulties of reviewing short stories is that it’s too easy to accidentally give away the whole thing by describing it. I find it’s best to instead give a general “flavor” of it rather than to describe specific plot points. For this one, that’s a pretty easy task: it’s like a modern-day Twilight Zone episode on the theme of AI. As I said to Richard in the comments, I heard the closing paragraph in the voice of Rod Serling.

The story balances Swiftian satirical humor and science-fiction quite well, and serves as a good cautionary tale for where society seems to be going. Of course, there have been no shortage of cautionary tales over the years, some of them by Mr. Serling himself. So far, they haven’t worked. It’s a classic Torment Nexus situation. Or a “Berlin Cabaret” situation, for the old-timers.

And yet, all the same, fiction is one of the ways we process the world we live in. If the world becomes dystopian, can we really help it if our fiction does as well? Which way does the causality run?

All these are interesting questions to ponder, and that’s exactly what this sort of experimental sci-fi story is designed to do. Set the gears turning, as they say. So, what are you waiting for? Go read it. No, don’t have AI summarize it for you; just read it.

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A spectre is haunting Europe. Actually, it’s probably a lot of spectres. Turns out, a ton of people have died there over the years, especially in wars. Here in the United States, we think of our Civil War as a horribly bloody struggle that rent the national fabric in ways that have yet to be mended. In Europe, it would hardly register as a blip on the radar. They had one of those every few decades

So when you hear the word “Prussia,” it’s natural you think of warfare. In our caricatured version of history, Prussians are basically coded as proto-Nazis.

As this book makes clear, that’s not entirely a fair view of the famous German state. Sure, they had a strong military tradition. But they also had a strong tradition of learning, enlightenment, and civic organization. Frederick the Great would probably get called “Frederick the Woke” today for as much as he talked about values like equality and justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Clark starts at the beginning, when “Prussia” was just a bunch of warring groups. In a process Clark analogizes to the English Civil War and Thomas Hobbes, the violence of the Thirty Years War made a philosopher named Samuel von Pufendorf realize the need for a strong sovereign to maintain peace.

Thus was born the conception of The State. And, in stereotypical German fashion, the Prussian project became an obsessive need to build this new civic instrument into the most powerful and efficient version of itself that anybody could imagine.

The famous quip, often attributed to Voltaire, that “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state,” is, like so many Voltaire quotes, very funny but also misleading; the Prussians believed in having a good army simply because without one, the edicts of the state would be meaningless.

However, to some extent, the very mythology of le epic Prussian Army is just that; mythology. I think at least some of this is attributable to none other than good old Napoleon Bonaparte, who, having defeated the Prussians decisively, thought it would burnish his image to tell everyone how incredibly tough they were.

Not that they weren’t good, because they were. And indeed, in reaction to their defeat at Boney’s hands, the Prussians turned the Prussianism up to 11. They would be the Prussianest Prussians who ever Prussed. This is why the Germany vs. France series became so lopsided after 1813; you could argue that the entire Prussian philosophy was “always have a plan to beat France.”

This worked great in the Franco-Prussian War. It worked less great in World War I, when the plan to immediately invade France in response to a crisis sort of blew up in their faces. And the world’s face.

None of which is to suggest that the Prussian administrative class was unduly warlike or bloodthirsty. Indeed, part of their problem was their bureaucratic emphasis on rules, regulations and strict parliamentary procedures. A mode of operation which persisted into the Weimar Republic period, and which in turn could be exploited by non-Prussians entirely uninterested in rule-following.

Clark doesn’t appear to subscribe the “Great Man Theory,” but nevertheless, throughout the book there do emerge interesting pictures of some of the more vivid characters of Prussian history. The only thing that makes it a bit hard to follow is that almost all their rulers are named Wilhelm, Frederick, or Frederick-Wilhelm.

And then there’s Otto von Bismarck, the comically mis-nicknamed “Iron Chancellor”. “The Rubber Chancellor” would be more apt, because of his ability to bend as needed. Bismarck was the pragmatist to end all pragmatists. Whenever he would pretend to stand on principle, it was only as a ruse to get some practical goal advanced. Naturally, he is considered one of the greatest political figures of his era. (I watched the show Fall of Eagles concurrently with reading this book; and Curt Jürgens’ performance as Bismarck is one of the highlights.)

I picked up this book on a friend’s recommendation, mostly because I was interested in expanding my knowledge of the other players in the Napoleonic Wars. It delivers on that front. Clark’s treatment of the Battle of Leipzig alone is worth the read. And in addition to that, I got a meticulous analysis of 400 years’ worth of history, told in a very readable narrative.

But what’s the upshot, you may ask? What ultimately is to be learned from the rise and fall of the Prussian state? What, in short, is the moral of the story?

Naturally, always-online Gen Y-er that I am, my mind goes to a line from The Simpsons:

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.