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The first thing to clarify here is that the title is intentionally provocative, to the point of being misleading. I think a lot of people read it and assume the idea is that the whole thing was faked, and that Baudrillard was some kind of conspiracy theorist. But really he was something much crazier and more dangerous: a French philosopher.

And in this series of essays, he does not deny that something happened in the Persian Gulf in 1991. But he disputes that what it was was really a war. Or at least, contrary to Fallout, that “war has changed.” Would King Leonidas or even Ernst Jünger recognize modern warfare? Airstrikes and cyberattacks have taken the place of direct combat between infantry in many conflicts, and Baudrillard argues the first Gulf War was an example of war being fought for the purpose of spectacle. Whoever convinces the TV audience they are winning is winning, regardless of what the actual situation in reality may be.

This ties in to Baudrillard’s signature idea of “hyperreality”, a condition of the modern world in which what we call reality is actually largely fake, with symbols having taken the place of the things themselves. For the vast majority of people, their experience of the war was solely in the images presented to them via mass media.

If this sounds like Daniel J. Boorstin to you, then congratulations! You have been a careful and attentive reader. Boorstin was a forerunner of Baudrillard, and nothing about this replacement of the territory with the map would surprise him. Honestly, if you read The Image, you’ll find yourself chuckling sardonically as DJB’s prophecy of 30 years earlier is fulfilled.

These are interesting ideas, and they seem to have become only more relevant since Baudrillard wrote them. Unfortunately, the essays themselves are rather hard to read since they are (a) dense abstract philosophy and (b) translated from French. I think it’s a very good translation, but still, there is just some inevitable weirdness that creeps in as a result. That’s on top of all the other weirdness in play here.

The fundamental problem isn’t really this new type of war at all; rather, it’s a symptom of our global communications networks. Back in the old days, if the Greeks fought the Persians, most people not in Persia or Greece had no reason to know or care about it. But in the modern world, when there’s an armed conflict anywhere, especially between nuclear powers, everyone hears about it. And has an opinion on it.

As is often the way with books like this, the author does a magnificent job describing the problem, and a very poor job describing how to solve it. Baudrillard leaves us only with a note of warning for what these virtual wars imply for the future of the world:

“The more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced. the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

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Only Adam Bertocci could take one of the oldest and tritest riddles in the book (it dates to 1847, I discovered in writing this post) and transform it into a compelling work of literary fiction.  I mean, really, in this very short story he manages to weave together feelings of romance, fate, heartbreak, and dark comedy. I’ve read novels that didn’t have as much going on in them as this book does.

It’s the story of a chicken named Bertram, and the reasons that he decides to flee the farm life and go to… the other side. But, like many another literary crossing, this is more than just a literal crossing. It is a spiritual transformation.

This is somehow both very moving and deeply funny. I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s essay “Taste for Makers”:

The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings– or Shakespeare, for that matter.

That’s Bertocci to a “T”. He crafts something that is simultaneously a parody of the literary short form and a magnificent example of it. And he does it while staying true to the source material. The same cannot be said of many another modern adaptation.

And while I’ve never been as good at writing to prompts as, say, my friend Mark Paxson is… this made me wonder: what other hackneyed jokes or riddles could be repurposed as fodder for literary works? Knock, knock… who is there?

Well, I’ll leave that up to the rest of you. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for a quick and clever literary experiment, pick this up.

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New Dawn is a military sci-fi thriller. The premise is that a dystopian Earth sent the titular colony ship to Mars, crewed by dissident and free-thinking scientists and explorers, who rebelled against the authoritarian Earth governments. The ship disappeared, and it was assumed that all the crew had been lost.

Many years later, New Dawn reappears in the sky above Earth, with a mysterious crew and sending ominous messages demanding Earth submit to their demands or face an invasion.

The Earth nations quickly scramble to fight back against this foe, including rounding up a team of their best engineers and scientists to go aboard. They are some of Earth’s most brilliant minds—and, as it happens, some of them have crossed paths before, and not in pleasant ways. This leads to tension between people like the brilliant engineer and his bitter ex-lover, as well as the young graduate student who would very much like to become his current lover.

There’s plenty of emotional turmoil among Earth’s military personnel as well. We have the daring Italian pilot who flies for NATO and the young Russian who fights alongside him. These two were probably my favorite characters in the book.

And then there’s the sinister NATO intelligence officer who oversees the whole operation. A classic manipulative bureaucrat, using blackmail and coercion to get others to play into his hands.

It’s an interesting concept, and the characters have potential. Unfortunately, a number of things didn’t work for me. The dialogue is quite stilted, and much of the prose seemed choppy and repetitive. Also, a number of key plot points were telegraphed early on.

Also, early on in the book, a traumatic event happens to one of the characters. It’s mentioned briefly, and then people carry on as if nothing happened. Then it comes up again much later in the story, as part of a plot twist (although this is one of those things that I could see coming), but then it’s dropped again, and it really shouldn’t be. Because it calls into question the whole modus operandi of what is being presented as a largely sympathetic faction, but it’s just hand-waved away in a couple pages. I wish could be more specific, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The book feels very much like the later Tom Clancy books: many of the plot beats are predictable because it’s quite clear who is supposed to win. Also, like Clancy, the book does get politically heavy-handed towards the end. I’m not against political messaging in books, and I try not to let whether or not I agree with an author’s views color my opinion of a book.

But what does color my opinion of a book is whether the political commentary is handled deftly or not. I mean, what is the point of putting your story in a futuristic sci-fi setting if you are just going to have exactly the same political dynamics as present-day Earth? To me, the advantage of a different setting is to be able to create allegories and analogues to political issues, to allow discussion of topics that otherwise would be too charged to raise.

In summary, I think New Dawn is an interesting concept, but the execution was so-so. But I will say this much: I kept reading it, because I wanted to know what would happen next. And to me, that’s the ultimate test of a story.

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Do you like cozy mysteries? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a cozier mystery than this one. Indeed, I believe it is an example of what the young people call cozy-maxxing.

Of course, this is no surprise for fans of Litka’s work. All his stories take place in a warm, gentle world where even the crimes have a certain pleasant kind of charm. It’s like the world of Wodehouse, albeit with sci-fi technology. But this story is even closer to a Wodehousian never-never land than Litka usually gets. It has a quaint country fair, complete with games and sports. Shades of “The Purity of the Turf.” As if that weren’t enough, there’s a scene where a lady is painting in a field when she is surprised by a sudden rainstorm. Reading this, I instantly was reminded of this intro to a Beatrix Potter video I watched as a child, which is possibly the coziest thing ever.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot yet. Well, once more, the lawyer-turned-detective Redinal Hu, AKA “Red Wine”, is hired to investigate an intrigue among the Great Houses. A mysterious character called “Agent Nine” has been leaving ominous notes in the dead of night at a wealthy businessman’s estate. No one knows how this Agent Nine gets in or out. Some believe that he or she is no living creature at all, but a ghost haunting the old manse.

A good plot, but if we’re being honest, the plot is not really why we’re here. It’s just an excuse; much as Red’s frequent walks with his dog Ellington are an excuse to see the attractive lady painter holidaying in the nearby village. So if you want an escape into a far more pleasant world than our own, I encourage you to pick up this short story. My only complaint is that it goes by so fast—but then, Litka has given us no shortage of other delightful tales of near equal-coziness to enjoy as well.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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! 🙂

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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!