The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

“Open Up Your Hate And Let It Flow Into Me”

Posted on | March 25, 2016 | 12 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Or, Not Long Before The End


With a little more than a week to go before MidAmericon II closes up nominations for the Hugo, both the Kindly Ones in charge of running Sad Puppies 4 and Our Supreme Dark Lord have prepared lists for your consideration. Predictably, there’s been a rush of authors and editors pleading to be removed from the Sad Puppies List, and these have been rewarded with assterisks for their pains; as for Vox, he has already promised to turn a deaf ear to such pleas. His press release regarding the Rabid Puppies list is here, for your amusement. Also, professional Grauniad wanker and P-List author Damien Walters horked up some nonsense about John Wright’s career being over after Sasquan peed itself and No Awarded all the categories Mr. Wright was nominated in last year. The International Lord of Hate deals with this in his inimitable manner.


You would think that dystopias featuring the Global Caliphate would be a dime a dozen these days, much like tales about the world after the Nazis won World War II, but I can literally count on one hand the number of books set in that future: Tom Kratman’s Caliphate, of course, and Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers For The Assassin, but Kerry Nietz’ A Star Curiously Singing didn’t attract my notice until fairly recently. In some ways, Nietz’ book shows a worse future than the others, because in this one, the Muslims have won, and extirpated all other religions while imposing a high-tech panopticon state supported by kaffir debuggers with brain implants that strongly discourage disobedience. Sandfly is one of the best debuggers, and when he’s called into orbit to troubleshoot the Caliphate’s returned starship, he has no clue that what he discovers may be the greatest threat the Caliphate has ever faced. This is a nice little high-tech mystery, and I liked it well enough that I’m looking at picking up the rest of the trilogy. The first book is free, and highly recommended.


As previously mentioned here, Castalia House is republishing Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War Cold War combat SF anthology series, and I recently picked up Volume IX, originally titled After Armageddon. Most of the stories are set in California, or at least what used to be California, except for a grim tale by the late John Brunner and Don Hawthorne’s “The Contract”, where a train full of renegade Soviet Army engineers tries to patch things back together in Russia after the Gas Bug has eaten our civilization. This, and Pournelle’s own “Kenyons To The Keep!” deserve sequels, but I suppose at this point we’re not likely to see them. Also, Macaulay’s “Horatius At The Bridge” and a tale by Leslie Fish that reads like something straight out of a Fallout game. Recommended.


I have been re-reading John Ringo’s “Paladin of Shadows” series, which begins with Ghost, and my opinion on it hasn’t changed. Aside from the occasional BDSM scene and the concentration on what happens at the sharp end, these are pretty decent technothrillers a la Clancy, but with a lot less infodumping and high-level political stuff. I especially like the subplots having to do with the culture of the Keldara, which is gradually being revealed from novel to novel like peeling an onion. Hopefully once John is done fooling around in other authors’ universes, he can come back and dash off another novel in this series, his muse permitting.


Category: Books, Zeitgeist

Comments

12 Responses to ““Open Up Your Hate And Let It Flow Into Me””

  1. Fail Burton
    March 25th, 2016 @ 1:43 am

    The pleading to be removed is pretty funny. Feminists are confused by their own immorality and don’t know whether they’re coming or going. Some authors are doing it out of fear of feminists. The short version is that very little will be voted on based on art, and that’s how it was before, and that’s the point. I could make a pretty shrewd judgement on much of what would be nominated based – not on the author’s fiction – but on their non-fiction virtue-signaling. This time it’s just a more honest and confused expression of all that. The Hugos can rot for all I care. It’s a feminist dump of anti-white racism and man-hatred.

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 25th, 2016 @ 5:56 am

    “Open Up Your Hate And Let It Flow Into Me”

    Said Anita Sarkeesian to her last boyfriend?

  3. Dianna Deeley
    March 25th, 2016 @ 10:53 am

    As always, I love seeing who other people liked, so I can go read the books.

    The one thing no one told me about becoming the boss was that it would take away my time for exploring fiction, and turn it into “Tell me quick what’s good, K, thx, bye!”

  4. Daniel Freeman
    March 25th, 2016 @ 12:19 pm

    I just finished John Ringo’s Troy Rising trilogy, which starts with Live Free or Die. It’s an interesting take on first contact, and I agree with the 4-star rating on Amazon.

    It’s pretty good, but the counterpoint to Ringo’s prolific output is that his works tend to have a stream-of-consciousness feel to them, where minor things may be addressed in great detail while something big gets handwaved, and foreshadowing sometimes goes nowhere. But it was fun to read.

  5. JollyGreenChemist
    March 25th, 2016 @ 3:40 pm

    I read the whole Dark Trench trilogy by Kerry Nietz several years ago. Its all good. But the dystopic Muslim world presented in the first book is nothing compared to the totalitarian Caliphate the main character encounters when he returns to Earth after traveling to a distant star aboard the spaceship Dark Trench.

  6. Wombat_socho
    March 25th, 2016 @ 5:23 pm

    She has a boyfriend?
    Seriously, though, it’s a direct quote from Our Supreme Dark Lord, from the very end of his press release.

  7. Wombat_socho
    March 25th, 2016 @ 5:24 pm

    Yeah, there’s a ton of loose ends crying out for a sequel.

  8. Wombat_socho
    March 25th, 2016 @ 5:24 pm

    Uh-oh.

  9. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 25th, 2016 @ 9:11 pm

    She had a boyfriend. I think I heard rumors it was a bad break up.

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  11. Quartermaster
    March 26th, 2016 @ 9:43 am

    He knows what’s coming and he gladly embraces the suck.

  12. Daniel Freeman
    March 27th, 2016 @ 3:45 am

    Everything he writes.