Book Bomb Results, More Free Stories, and Sad Puppies Slate Update

Yesterday’s Book Bomb went much better than expected. You’ve got to understand, I’ve got a few set rules for running BBs that I’ve learned over time. Don’t do them too often. I try to never do more than one a month. Stick with plugging one book, don’t spread it out too much because it is all about putting momentum behind one object. Stick with books, because shorter works are really difficult to move up the charts.

Despite violating all of those things at once, and pushing a bunch of different short fiction things a week after we just did novellas, it still went surprisingly well. The only Amazon available item we didn’t get onto a bestseller list wasn’t even on the Sad Puppies suggestion list, and we still moved it up 1.5 million spots on Amazon. Everything else ended up somewhere on their respective lists, but most importantly the authors were exposed to new readers and Got Paid.

I posted the results in the BB thread. I’ve got to say, good work guys. Next week we’re going to do the same thing for the Campbell nominees for best new writer (the one I’m excited for is giant monster books, because I am a kaiju loving nerd) and Best Related Works.

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One of the short stories yesterday was available for free, and I know that was popular. However, because it was released right at the end of the year, and the copyright date wasn’t until the beginning of January so we’re trying to figure out if Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer is actually eligible this year or not. I’ll let you know before the end of the voting deadline so you don’t waste any of your slots.

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But since you guys like free short stories, in addition to the Sad Puppies slate there is the even More Eviler RABID PUPPIES SLATE, prepared by Lord Voxemort the Malevolent. There are a couple of short stories on there I’d encourage you to take a look at, and here they are, FREE for your convenience:

The Parliament of Beasts and Birds by John C. Wright. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-parliament-of-beasts-and-birds.html  Which I have read, and it is great… But this is John C. Wright we’re talking about, who I think is one of the best wordsmiths alive.

Turncoat by Steve Rzasa http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/turncoat.html which I’ve not read yet, but I’ve heard that it is really good.

And they’re both free, so check them out and I hope you enjoy them.

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And finally, last but not least, one of our Sad Puppies suggested nominees for best novel is Chuck Gannon’s Trial By Fire.

One of the things which has been said about Sad Puppies is that the authors we support don’t get awards, not because they fail to appease political cliques, but because we’re all just horrible, awful, terrible, shitty writers, and the mass consumer market that pays us large sums of money for our stuff are just stupid poopy heads.

But wait… Chuck Gannon’s Trial By Fire, which was already endorsed by Sad Puppies, has just been announced as a finalist for the Nebula Awards. So before they screech about Larry Correia’s evil ballot stuffing and crowd hypnosis, this is an award which can only be nominated by the ultra enlightened, cultural, always charming and never rude, immune to my nefarious mind control powers, members of SFWA.

Holy shit! Unpossible you say! Surely this is a fluke. Sad Puppies couldn’t possibly endorse something that some SFWA members would also think is good! This must be a fluke!  It has been declared that Sad Puppies only pushes trash and pulp!

But wait. There’s more!

Now, you’ve probably heard how Sad Puppies writers are all big, mean, ugly,, and stupid, and how Larry Correia is “anti-intellectual” Sure, I went to college and got an accounting degree instead of something important like gender studies, but I hang out with rocket scientists and brain doctors and I’m teaching a creative writing class for Weber State soon, but whatever, it’s narrative, I hate education. Run with it. I don’t like SJWs, and they declare that they’re super smart because… stuff and reasons… ergo, Larry Correia hates smart people.It is hard to fault that logic.

On the contrary, Sad Puppies is not anti-intellectual. We’re anti-boring. Though to be fair I can see how they’d come up with that theory, since there is a lot of crossover, but let’s take a look at NEBULA NOMINEE Chuck Gannon’s resume for a moment.

Oh, wait. That’s Professor Chuck Gannon to you,

Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Graduate Program in English (SBU, ret.); Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Literature & Culture (2004-2009).

Four Fulbright Fellowships, three accepted (England, Czech Republic, Scotland) one declined (Moldova)

Two Fulbright Travel Grants: Slovakia, Netherlands

Six International Senior Scholar Grants, US Embassy: UK (4), Czech Republic (2)

One International Scholar Grant, U.S. Consulate: 1 (Scotland), 2004.

University Fellow (at various levels): Palacky University (Czech Republic), University of Liverpool, Fordham University, Temple University, Syracuse University,

PhD and MA, Fordham University (honors)

MS, S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University (honors)

BA, Brown University (magna cum laude.)

Whew… Okay, now I know that isn’t a “Concentration” in The Collective Unconscious by any means, but to this poor country auditor, all them big words make Chuck sound like one of them smart folks. I had to ask Chuck what all that stuff meant, but he said it means he knows the book learnings pretty good.

Sadly, not a single one of his many degrees is in Gender Studies, but we’ll let that slide… For now.

So, the book isn’t trash, SFWA members said so, and he’s one of them educated types, so obviously Larry Correia must be suggesting this novel because of Gannon’s politics… Except, wait a second… Hold on. Nobody knows what Gannon’s politics are. He’s an intellectual and an academic who gets along great in that community, he’ll debate policy and positions, and he has no patience for churlish posers.

Beyond that, the dude gets a big fat question mark in the politics box.

Basically, everybody who talks to Chuck comes away saying what a reasonable, intelligent, articulate, moderate person he is.Don’t take my word for it. Go talk to him and decide for yourself.

Chuck’s good and deserves the recognition, but his problem is that he’s too busying being brilliant to spend sufficient time kissing any WorldCon voting clique’s ass enough to get himself a Hugo nom. He’s a brilliant author, but he’s not a darling of the In Crowd. Wait… This sounds like the exact sort of thing that makes puppies sad!

So why did the Evil Legion of Evil promote this guy’s book?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we’re telling the truth and YOU SHOULD READ THE BOOK BECAUSE IT IS GOOD.

Mad Mike's Trigger Warning Shirts, MHI approved
BOOK BOMB! Short Stories from the Sad Puppies Slate!

53 thoughts on “Book Bomb Results, More Free Stories, and Sad Puppies Slate Update”

  1. One of your major accomplishments is to make anyone you praise guilty by association in the eyes of the SJWs. Keep up the good work.

  2. I have, in fact, met Chuck Gannon. It was two Capclaves ago, and we ran into each other and started talking. I mentioned I was a freelance editor and a (non-liberal, follow-the-rules) Catholic. He immediately pounced on that, because he’d been wanting a Catholic to review his 1632 series stuff. We geeked out about history and shared Catholic jokes about Jesuits and I agreed to review Papal Stakes. (https://novelninja.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/1635-the-papal-stakes/) I absolutely loved it, too.

    Now, I went away from that conversation thinking he was a great researcher who understood his craft and the need for research. I did not, however, have any evidence that he was political, religious, or even had a strong opinion about the Lost finale. It was a conversation without preconception, without bias, without a particular lean of any kind.

    Which, of course, made me wonder why SFWA could stand him, but since I don’t have an ideological test for authors, I really didn’t care all that much.

    I did try to talk to him at DragonCon last year, but he was busy and holy crap that’s a big place. Running into people at Capclave was a lot easier.

    1. I’m sorry I missed you, Matthew. I’ll be at Capclave again this year: pop me a Facebook message when the time approaches and let’s carve out a few minutes to catch up, yes?

      1. Sure. I had to miss it last year because of work stuff. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat of that. It’s sad when frivolous things like earning a living and making the world a better place get in the way of the important stuff.

  3. The thing that sticks out to me about the rantings of Bradford/Scalzi and their kindred is that they clearly have much more free time than I do. Between working full-time, martial arts, working out, cooking, writing, keeping up with my friends/family, and spending time with my girlfriend, it’s a rare day when I can dedicate more than about 30 minutes to reading for pleasure. I don’t have _time_ to read authors simply because they check a box on some census list I’m compiling to impress my friends.

    I do seek out new authors. I recently discovered the Grimnoir books thanks to your online presence. I also do try to challenge myself by reading fiction I consider profound or insightful as well as entertaining, which is why I have Shusaku Endo and Flannery O’Connor on my shelf.

    But man, these people seem to approach leisure reading like it’s their job, and selecting authors based on race and social category will pump up their bonus.

      1. That takes me back. I allowed the players in my campaign to get ahold of a 10kt nuke … I figered if they could survive disarming that demo charge, it was theirs.

        ( PS, I also like giving newb D&D players a wand of fireballs )

        They kept it through the entire campaign without using it, as couldn’t figure out how to use it and not turn the campaign into a sudden rendition of Traveller: Penal planet edition.

        1. I’ve been known to drop them a variant on the Greater Rod of Wonder — The Rod of Controlled Chaos. Roll twice and give the user two vague descriptions of what will happen. They have a short period to try to figure out which will give them the best advantage.

          Once, the party was in the Underdark, and the one with the rod was the only one who couldn’t see in the dark. I gave my vague descriptions: “You see two fleeting images . . . one is of a stone wall, blocking your path. In the other, you see night turning into day.”

          Had she picked the first option, then the majority of the drow ambushing them in that scene would have been cut off, they would have made short work of the rest, and I wouldn’t have blocked off the direction they were trying to go.

          Instead, she immediately said “Night into day! What happens? Can I see now?”

          “Nothing happens.”

          “Wait, nothing? At all?”

          Two sessions later, they’re back in civilization. They go to a tavern to figure out where they are, exactly, and what might have been happening.

          “You hear a lot of people still talking about the calamity a few days ago, when the world’s night and day cycle somehow advanced twelve hours. It caused significant trade and farming disruptions for hundreds of leagues that still haven’t been sorted out. Those sailors are complaining about how it’s created storms and delayed shipping, and that it’s probably a curse brought about by someone messing with the gods.”

          The look on my players’ faces was worth the wait.

      2. Matthew:

        I had some idiot 5th level thief use an unlimited wish in a pick up campaign … I wouldn’t have given a player such a thing.

        He wanted to be the highest level thief in the world. I said yes.

        Suddenly, all the players with theif abilities higher than level four died. When they got back to town, their was some kind of turf war going on in the slum district. And a lot of unsavery characters were paying good money for various diveners.

        Then Loki showed up in disguise, looking very worse for wear, and advised the player that he was in really big trouble, the gods were fighting each other over who had the right to punish him, and he should come with him to be safe. He went with Loki, and was never seen again …

    1. That’s very cool. Traveller was one of my very favorite games back in the day. One of the most epic games I ever played was a Traveller campaign. I still have the original rule books.

    2. Mr Gannon wrote Traveler! The first space rpg I ever played was Traveler!

      (I was a privateer named Mad Anthony Wayne, and I was roughly 70 years old, since I kept killing and rerolling characters until I got one who owned a starship. My rule: in a space game, always be the player who owns a starship. In an Amber game, always take Pattern Imprint.)

      Being a science fiction writer is no great shakes. I am one myself. Ah, but working on a game, that has the aura and scent of elfland clinging to it, the luminous gleam of glamor!

      1. Wow, you’ve been with the lotos-eaters again, John? 🙂 Working a game…different. And working with Marc Miller was an absolute joy…and we’re still in touch; we just traded FB messages today about a post of mine. But all that said, being an SF *author*? John, do not envy me the work on the games; THIS is the real deal! And not a day goes by where I do not admire the sheer poetry of your prose.

        But yeh, working on Traveller, 2300 AD, Twilight 2000, Dark Conspiracy… there were plenty of cool moments.

        1. I can understand what he means, though. When one writes a story, one tells a single story. When one creates a game, one tells a million million stories, as all who play it spin their own tales.

      2. Write a man a story, and he will be entertained for a day. Teach a man to invent stories in the form pf roleplaying games, and he will be entertained for the rest of his life. 😉

  4. First, much as gracias for Los Perritis Dolorosos y Srs. Correia y Torgerson for including me on the distinguished list. Best of luck to all nominees, including my competitors.

    An addition to Chuck Gannon’s resume:

    Member of SIGMA, the science fiction think tank I founded while working in the White House Science in 1992. Google for our activities.

    In Mensa, Intertel, SFWA, the Unitarian church I used to attend, the Libertarian Party, and on the Interwebz, I have been accosted (by Left and Right) for not fitting the stereotype of a person with advanced degrees, high-tech startups, writing short stories, and such.

    I only learned last week what “cismale” even is, and guess I are one of themselves. But with my somewhat gender-ambiguous first name, I have also received emails for “Ms. Arlan Andrews,” wanting me to join various genderous campaigns. Who, moi?

    I want to read SF that I enjoy; I didn’t know as a kid, that Leigh Brackett and Andre Norton, nor even James Tiptree, Jr., were of a different species. Loved their stuff, all that mattered.

    Keep up the good fight, Perritos. I for one am lovin’ it.

    -Arlan (aka Nekultura elsewhere)

  5. Gannon’s politics are hard to figure?

    There’s a strong scent of racial animus towards persons of incorporation in his books, and in some of the things he has said.

    Wait, is that supposed to be a trait of the right or of the left?

  6. How well represented are studies degrees in science fiction writers of any stripe? The bloggers that Larry Fisks may be relatively likely to have them, but how common are they among the Nebula nominees?

  7. If Chuck Gannon isn’t able to negotiate the SF cliques well enough to get a nomination, then how did he end up on the Nebula short list? If the theory is that the SFWA also promotes writing to checkboxes shouldn’t one expect him to have a similar problem negotiating the cliques of the SFWA. After all, it was the Nebula and not the Hugo that went to If You Were a Dinosaur my Love.

    1. Racism against persons of incorporation is very popular among the left. For them, it is a message story. For me, it is a story first and he is very careful to keep things moving and not to let his personal biases overshadow things.

      1. I will step out for one significant moment to point out that I try to establish a very profound distinction between “industrial” megacorporations and “opportunistic transnationals”.

        I will add/confess that my impressions are not based in theory or anything I learned or taught in a classroom. I was working, in media, at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street the day of the Mexico City Earthquake (fall 1985). I was on the 22nd (23rd?) floor, which was the international debt (re)financing exchange. Watching them make book while the bodies were being dragged out, and laughing as they did–literally gesturing to pulverized infants and shouting, “Hey, there’s a million dollar baby!” left me with certain impressions. I plead guilty to that…but it is not a critique of capitalism. I worked with many fine corporations as well. But certain corporate cultures tend to evolve in certain directions.

        I have not spoken to this before because I try to let my fiction speak strictly and solely for itself (and not to ram any particular -ism down anyone’s throat). But I *have* seen a few presumptions that I am anti-business. To which I respond: read the passage (in *last* year’s Nebula finalist, Fire With Fire) between Caine and the representative of the Industrial megacorporation on Mars. I hope the distinction made manifest there speaks for itself.

        Thank you all for reading the book(s)–and for caring enough about them to discuss them at all!

      2. Well, Chuck, now that they know you’re not actually against capitalism, they’ll do their best to turf your Nebula chances.

        Best of luck anyhow.

      3. To be fully serious, I don’t think it reasonable to expect that any type of organization is immune to turning to, or being turned to evil ends.

        Is the emphasis where I would put it? Doesn’t matter, especially if the story works for me.

        Your experiences necessarily are different from mine. I remembered that anecdote of yours when I first posted to this thread.

        You helped me care enough about the good guys that my anxiety on their behalf kept me going. I turned pages too fast to figure out the twists at the end before they happened.

        Yours was one of the three Sad Puppies novels that I had already read. All three seemed credible proposals.

      4. So, ummm…help me out here, because maybe I’m a bit slow. Is the phrase ‘racism against persons of incorporation’ being used ironically here? Because I’m mapping it to the phrase ‘deep-seated distrust of corporations and their motivations’, which is not exactly a topic that is strictly owned by one particular political ideology.

        But then, the subphrase ‘persons of incorporation’ immediately pings my bullshit meter, so maybe I’m too far left to judge.

      5. “… I try to let my fiction speak strictly and solely for itself (and not to ram any particular -ism down anyone’s throat).”

        Buying all this man’s books right now. Thank you, sir.

      6. Josh,

        Irony is probably a misclassification.

        Item: I can describe transhumanism as an area of science fiction that looks at intelligence and quasi-intelligence that goes outside the category of human while not having an extraterrestrial basis. That might make the real life adherants of transhumanism angry at me.

        Item: The mostly leftist narrative of expanding definitions of personhood. Broadly, any political argument that draws a line from women’s suffrage and the end of segregation through a contemporary position into the future. Bonus points for arguing that prior to the 19th amendment women were cattle. Key example being animal rights, particularly any one who opposes animal model testing, especially any one who thinks it more ethical to do such to a human than to an animal.

        Item: The conflation of personhood and citizenship. Such things as arguing that merely being a human entitles one to voting, passport, or entitlement spending rights. One would have to hide under a rock to miss the argument about providing criminal trails to foreign national prisoners of war.

        Item: The leftist crusade against racism. Features of relevance are the expansive models of racism, and that insufficient enthusiasm is itself racism.

        The entire defining purpose of a corporation is to be a legal person. A right winger may disbelieve all the above items. From such a framework, one laughs at the charge of racism, because it doesn’t follow.

        Even if one concedes that corporations can be a victim of racism, Gannon’s stuff is clearly only on the level of Kratman or Ringo, stuff that is only racist in the eyes of a SJW.

        Take your statement of ‘deep-seated distrust of X and their motivations’, and plug in Jews or Isrealis for X. Does it seem racist to you?

  8. Turncoat: a great little cavalry coming over the hill at the last moment/Bolo-esque story that satisfied the little child in me much as the penultimate scenario in The Excalibur Alternative – which I tend to re-read when current events drive me to a dark place.

    Gannon: Since he appears to be a white male, I hope he at least has some gender peculiarities. Otherwise, we’re not allowed to read his works for a year.

    Reading Fire With Fire now, and it sounds like it was written by somebody with a jaundiced view of the corruption in the elite “ruling” classes. But that viewpoint is probably shared by every intellectually honest, non-elitist, being, right, left, or center [or any other orientation].

    1. I’d like to say something about that: SF is purpose-built to re-imagine viewpoints. It’s not a question of whether they’re typical liberal or conservative memes but of how convincingly they’re put forward. We can be made to prefer demons, E.T. or a thark over a human. Ancillary Justice in the hands of a better story-teller could have been very good. One could say Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman are feminist tracts but they are so well presented I didn’t care. They effectively engaged a point of view but without demonizing half of mankind. That may have been hidden there in some small way but I think “hidden” is the key.

      But when Le Guin writes “He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman. She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance,” well, forget about it. I can get that at Xojane.

      It is true I prefer someone like Jack Vance who reduced everything to generic to be put at the service of art and exploring a theme in a classic sense. For Vance to have presented a gay person or someone of African descent would’ve brought his stories to a screeching halt. Unfortunately SJWs take that to mean a world without gays, non-whites and even women. This is what SJW authors don’t get about when to put in who and why. A book is not like reality. If you actually live in Damascus and have a Norwegian family next door that won’t yank you out of reality because it is reality. But it will destroy a story because a story is a fabricated construction. Pie-chart that in an unconvincing manner and you may as well bring a wrecking ball to your story.

      I never had the sense Vance was trying to tell me a single thing other than to present the wonderful foibles of humans and in a prose style that is unsurpassed. If SJWs would stay away from Clarion writing workshops they might actually do that some day. But then they wouldn’t be conformist redneck SJWs who are incapable of understanding metaphor and perceptual shifts. I can’t tell you how often I’ve made the analogy of equal protection and SJWs act like I dragged in a Monster Truck Rally. They literally have no idea what I’m talking about, even while they insist on it rhetorically and ignore it in reality.

      1. “No, she’s absolutely right,” said Zeb, patting the enormous pistol at his hip. “This _is_ a penis substitute. After all, if I could kill at a range of thirty meters with my penis, I wouldn’t need to carry this thing around, now would I?”
        — James Drew

        A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
        — Sigmund Freud, “General Introduction to Psychoanlysis”, 1952

  9. BTW, just a disambiguation note. The first book in The Tales of the Terran Republic was *last* year’s Nebula finalist. **This year’s** Nebula finalist is book two, Trial By Fire. Thanks!

  10. For those of you who might care, you need to at least read this post at The Other McCain, where he also announces the release of his expose book Sex Trouble. The entire thing is available as a series of posts there, under “Sex Trouble,” but I don’t know for how long.

    http://theothermccain.com/2015/02/26/sex-trouble-yes-feminists-do-practice-witchcraft-and-become-lesbians/

    Once you’ve read that stuff, all the stuff I’ve been telling you for months will become crystal clear. It will also in part explain why so many SJWs, particularly the men, parrot French Queer Theory phrases without the least hint of awareness of where they came from. They seem to think they are promoting the old equal rights feminism. Believe me, SJW Third Wave intersectional gender abolition feminism is nothing more than a racist, sexist, supremacist cult that has no real connection to feminism.

    McCain knows exactly what this war is all about and the fact he is in one. So is core SFF.

    1. Seems like a pretty broad brush to me. I don’t find it surprising that some feminists are lesbians, or witches, or whatever…but seriously, who cares? Isn’t that their private business?

      Some feminists are just people who think women should be treated with the same level of respect accorded to men. I won’t argue that there aren’t excesses in pursuit of this goal, but the goal is a laudable one.

      The notion that the modern feminist movement is a unified force aimed at…well, I’m not really sure what exactly even after reading that blog post…but in any case, I think that the word I’m looking for is ‘preposterous’.

      1. You are correct to say that feminism, as it applies to the real world, is laudable. The pursuit of equality among the sexes is a great thing. Personally, I follow the pursuit of Humanism which is to say that we are all human regardless of gender and ethnicity. We are all deserving of respect and the right to be judged by our character.
        Then you have the fantasy land that is Radical Feminism. It isn’t in any way reflective of the real world, and actually lends credence to that previous article. I will provide a link, but read it at your own risk.
        http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm

      2. Like social justice warriors, you are having trouble distinguishing between the KKK and white people. There is a difference between lesbians and a ideology of lesbian supremacy.

        No where have I or McCain ever said feminism is a unified force – quite the opposite. There is a clear difference between feminists who changed the laws for getting into a military academy and the gender feminist war on heterosexuality itself. They are two completely different movements. The fact you have been fooled into seeing both as the same is the exact problem.

  11. Have people actually been complaining about Gannon’s book being on the Nebula nominee list? Or on the Sad Puppies list? Or is this more of a preemptive strike?

    I read Fire with Fire last year because it was a Nebula nominee. I will probably read Trial By Fire for a similar reason, plus the fact that I liked the first book well enough to read the sequel.

    1. No idea on Nebula complaints. I have a hard enough time keeping up on the complaints about the things I’m involved in. 🙂 I just really liked how we put out our slate and it was jumped all over for being low brow pulp trash and anti-intellectual when we’ve got Chuck Gannon on it.

      1. Military-style fiction is just fine as long as S.A. Corey or Myke Cole do it. The real question is the same as the “question” the Inquisition put: do you boil your rice with salt or not?

  12. Crap. Now I have to go out and buy all of Mr. Gannon’s books.

    (Mr. Gannon, if you had anything at all to do with Traveller, thankyouthankyouthankyou – and tell Mr. Miller the same.)

  13. Decide to se if Mr. Gannon had any books in audible format. I’m a apartment manager so I’m wandering around all day, and having ear phones in give me an excuse to ignore people. For some reason everyone thinks I want to know about their personal lives.
    Just clicked on the sample for Fire with Fire, since Trial is the second book I might as well get the first one as well. I knew the voice of the narrator, and sure enough it is the same guy who did the Ilium books by Dan Simmons, Kevin Pariseau. He has a gravelly voice with a great cadence, and just enough change in his voice for different characters you don’t get confused on who is talking.

  14. And again, Larry sells someone else’s book to me! I appreciate it, especially when it’s someone who’s written so many games that have been near and dear to my heart. Though I will say this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to say “This guy’s got more degrees than a thermometer!”
    Keep up the great writing (both of you)!

  15. “Cecily Kane retweeted Ze-Hulk @awhooker · 11h 11 hours ago You can use trans-inclusive language about reproductive rights AND also acknowledge that anti-choice rhetoric is grounded in misogyny.”

    In the old days of SF, that last bit of obsessively and endlessly Tweeted paranoid gibberish above that has come to replace SF in the SF community would have been part of some snidely satirical dystopian fiction by someone like Phillip K. Dick. Instead, satire worthy of the Onion has come to replace SF itself as a serious religion for the mentally insane and any straight depiction of SF is now itself considered a satire of Marching Moron conservatism where one laughs at anyone stupidly quaint enough to still believe in marriage and adventure fiction. Normal sex is considered as funny and retro as a kitschy lava lamp, bowling shirt or rotary dial telephone, or medieval dentistry for that matter. That poses the question of what is considered satire in a mental institution and the answer is normal people. And what kind of satire does the new disturbed edge of SF produce: “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.”

    The new age of SF and its cultural relativism no longer have the walls of an asylum by which to judge the sane from the insane. Like that imaginary Phillip K. Dick story, the mad have been unleashed on society to the accompaniment of prozac, klonopin, xanax and a whole host of pills that has allowed high functioning adults to bring their meticulously constructed paranoid fantasies to life. They have long learned wrap their fantasies of persecution in plausible anti-oppression narratives which hijack women’s, black and gay rights to the point reality itself is dubious and few can say for sure where reality ends and insane theories of white privilege, micro aggressions, rape culture, an oppressive patriarchy using heterosexuality as a weapon and a whole host of delusions wrapped in safe-spaces and trigger warnings begins. SF now exists in a unknown haze of benzodiazepines and antidepressants unleashed on a community unprepared for the flood of sociopathic behaviors which renders the whole indistinguishable from reality-challenged characters in a Dick story. In this new analogy to a Dick story the question is not who or what is human but who is sane and what is sanity and it is no speculative fiction but real people touching real lives and winning real awards.

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