Remember last year when the Roe vs. Wade decision was leaked and everyone went into shock (half the country because someone would dare to leak a Supreme Court decision before it was announced, and the other half because they didn’t like what the leak said)?
Well, this is the issue of The New Yorker that came out right after that news hit. The main title on the little flap (I never show that, because it blocks the wonderful artwork) said “The Fate of Roe vs. Wade”.
Now, in my mind, The New Yorker hit rock bottom around 2020. Its traditionally liberal lean went haywire into far-left silliness and they replaced intelligent analysis with political talking points and pure emotion. Since then, they’ve been returning to rationality, to the point where, once again, the content can be tolerated by moderates. I assume the market taught them the error of becoming a megaphone for fringe groups…
Despite this improvement in the tone of the magazine, I was expecting this issue to prompt an explosion of emotion. After all, Roe has always been a hot-button topic whose discussion causes rage on both sides of the political spectrum. Whether written by a left- or right-leaning journo, the article couldn’t be good.
It was written by a left-leaner (no real shock there), but it was actually a lot more measured and rational than I thought it would be. There was a bit of lamentation, but also a lot of information, and in this day and age, that’s about as objective as any major media outlet can get.
The rest of the mag was quite decent. There was a story extremely critical of China (which confirms the magazine’s tendency to return to objectivity), balanced by a weird fiction piece about a white guy who turns black. Like most fiction in TNY, this piece was well-written and readable… but it fell into the same error as fiction around this theme always does: once you get past the original idea, the story doesn’t say much. The whole thing is “wow, a white guy turned black…” and then? I was engaged with the writing, but ended up thinking: “so what?” Most identity fiction is pretty much the same to me, ultimately empty of real interest.
Overall, I see this as a passed test. Trustworthy media outlets need to remain calm and balanced in the face of emotionally-charged events. If they’re screaming and shrill, they are no better than those elements of the public who lose their balance. But the public is allowed to do that, because they have no responsibility to inform. The New Yorker, on the other hand, does.
I’m a year and a half behind. But if the magazine has managed to keep this balanced tone until today, in the current environment, I applaud them.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a high concept science fiction novel entitled–perhaps controversially–Fat Man. He hopes readers enjoy the book as much as he loved writing it… but mainly, he hopes it makes them think. You can check it out here.
I don’t read every issue of The New Yorker, but I get to maybe five or six every year, and I found this one unusual in that not one but two major articles are more of what I’d expect from National Geographic. I suppose many TNY readers would find this annoying, particularly since one of the articles deals with space (and we all know that space is a waste of resources that would better be used on Earth in the minds of some poor narrow-minded souls), but I rather enjoyed it.
The first of these articles deals with the James Webb Space observatory, of all things. This is a wonderful piece of scientific equipment which will extend the boundaries of human knowledge of both astronomy and physics well beyond today’s limitations. Hell, the exoplanet exploration alone might define the course of human expansion in the next few centuries… One can hope. A wonderful article.
The second was more typical TNY fare–even if if was definitely much more comfortable in NatGeo territory. It tells the tale of how Lake Powell in Colorado. This lake, fed by the Colorado River, has been losing water levels over the past years of drought, exposing some beautiful canyons and creating a debate about whether it would be better to allow the lake to drain and keep the canyons, while using Lake Mead as the principal reservoir. In an issue ripe for finger-pointing partisanship, the writer (and editors) kept it surprisingly unpolitical, which is a wonderful feeling.
Not so the cultural section, which pushes minority creators to the point where it’s often hard to know what is good and what is bad from the huge amount of stuff that is praised. Affirmative action should have no place in reviews or criticism, not because the creators don’t deserve it – I’m pretty sure a great number of them do – but because the rule seems to be that everything made by a diverse creator must be lauded as wonderful, making the review itself utterly meaningless. But it’s a political thing, so I guess we’ll just have to learn to ignore the cultural opinion of this mag (and anyone else who follows this path) until the fad passes and people are evaluated for merits and not for ticking a diversity box.
It actually gets comical at times. The reviewer describes some form of performative torture you wouldn’t expose yourself to unless you were feeling particularly masochistic, and then bends over backwards to find positive words to describe it. Beware things that are challenging, attuned, provocative or native.
And while the treatment of art might get annoying at times, I can’t really blame The New Yorker. It is well-attuned (see, there’s that word) to the current sensibilities of its readers: affluent urban elites who like to signal their social consciousness. It’s a fashion, and TNY has to sell magazines. Hell, the current fad annoys me… but I still enjoy reading the issues I buy, so I’d say they tread the line very skillfully.
Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is a dark historical fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna, in which the Etruscan armies attempt to hold the Roman legions at bay… by any means necessary. You can check it out here.
Even though (or perhaps because…) it so often acts smugly superior, I enjoy reading The New Yorker. I feel comfortable in the sort of layman’s highbrow ambience they cultivate (this probably says a lot about me, but I’ll leave what that might be as an exercise for the reader).
It’s quite clear that this particular magazine isn’t aimed specifically at me, however, as politics in Argentina are different from those in those in the US, but it’s close enough that I don’t mind. The target audience is obviously moneyed, well-educated city dwellers who lean liberal. Most true progressives will be lacking the money or the education to truly appreciate the mag in my opinion, but they’ll like some of the politics.
Even though my own politics lean a little right of the mag (I’m a moderate), I find it a pleasant enough read, with some thoughtful pieces.
But every once in a while, an issue like the one from March 15th, 2021 comes along which is more amusing than pleasant (still perfectly fine, but less engaging intellectually). These are the issues in which The New Yorker‘s fine staff abdicates its position and allows the magazine to be put together by the editors of the Daily Worker.
Sure, a deeper left lean might seem to be a logical extension of the magazine’s liberal stance, but it’s amusing to think what the mag’s normal readers would think of it. These are people who spend 9 dollars on a magazine, and who are very unlikely to suddenly decide that their wealth should be redistributed. I would say that New Yorker readers are the very definition of the moneyed Bourgeoisie that real socialists would line up against the wall… and who enjoy all this talk of diversity and equity as a way to relieve their guilt at the fact that they are affluent and very comfortable.
If some of the sillier attitudes from this issue were to take root in society at large, The New Yorker‘s readership would likely evaporate in a spate of revolutionary zeal.
Fortunately, however, that is unlikely to happen, and TNY’s weirdly socialist issues of this era will simply be remembered as part of the corporate virtue-signaling we’ve all gotten used to over the past years. A marketing ploy aimed at Twitter users with no real meaning in the outside world.
Perhaps the best thing about this mag is that even when the lean is excessive, there are interesting articles to read (yes, even the ones that are tendentious can be fascinating if read with an open mind). The mag asks some wonderful questions and goes in depth to help the reader understand the issues behind them. The honesty behind this allows the reader to come to their own conclusions about the issues, even if the articles do paint one side as the good guys and one side as the bad.
No matter what your politics, the articles on current events make for great reading. The writing is of the very highest level even when the investigation might be superficial (not always the case, but when it happens, you tend to forgive it because the writing makes things so clear).
So every reader will understand what the issues are. And once you get there you don’t really need to worry about the conclusion the author wants you to arrive at. Intelligent readers will supply their own, or none at all.
So if the Daily Worker has temporarily taken over the office, it really doesn’t matter. It’s just a veneer of virtue, completely meaningless to those who can read between the lines.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina whose literary works include the linked story collection “Safe and Sorry”, which you can check out here.
Three-quarters of the way through Jonathan Strahan’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 1 (2020), I was extremely annoyed with the book, and considered writing a scathing review. This would have surprised me to no end, as I’ve read other Strahan books and know he is a widely-read and trustworthy selector and editor of anthologies.
Then I realized I wasn’t mad at the book, the stories or the selection. I was mad at the title.
Simply stated, this isn’t a representative sample of the best stories published in 2019. It isn’t even close. In fact, Ted Chiang’s story in this book is the worst I’ve ever read by Chiang – in fact, I think it’s the only bad story I’ve ever seen by Chiang (which is kind of comforting – I was beginning to believe Chiang was incapable of writing a bad sentence, much less an entire hackneyed and predictable flash piece. I’m glad the guy is human, even if it means he missed on this one). I read a lot of Best of the Year / Best of SF Collections of every kind, ranging from the 1950s to today, so I can spot when a collection just rings false.
Does this mean the book is bad?
Not in the least. The stories in here are competently written (or competently translated, as the case may be) and consistently selected. Both the writers and the editor did a good job in that regard, and have created what I feel to be an important document of the state of a segment of science fiction circa 2019.
Not a year’s best, definitely, but what I would call a strong record of the works most representative of the political trends popular among the critics of the genre in 2019. The trends we’re seeing pushed hard in the critical-darling side of SF in this day and age are diversity, eco-consciousness, feminism, LGBTQ+ representation and anti-capitalism.
This books works beautifully as a showcase of those critical concerns. The stories are selected from sources that push these topics and the stories themselves are centered on these issues. And care was also taken to ensure that the writers come from diverse backgrounds and places. The work here is conscientious and extremely professional. We truly do have a book that shows how these topics are being pushed forward in the genre today.
What we absolutely don’t have is a book that can be called a “best of” for the given period. I don’t think it’s even a collection of the best political stories – just the most explicit and didactic. For example, there’s one in which the Israeli government has the Palestinian people locked in a Matrix-like simulation. There is nothing new or groundbreaking in that story, and the story itself is obvious. But it’s very good as a political piece.
The aforementioned Chiang is another case in point. It’s called “It’s 2059 and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning”. You almost don’t need to read the story to know he’s going to talk about systemic inequalities. And then he does.
Most of the rest are in the same vein, and I was able to find exactly one story which didn’t have at least an element of the political in it (or maybe I’m just not attuned enough to spot it), and that one was Greg Egan’s “This is Not the Way Home”, which had another advantage: it was a “man’s ingenuity vs. the universe” plot–the kind of thing we read science fiction for.
But there were precious few of those in this collection. There are zero exploration stories where exploration is viewed as something positive, and hopeful stories are few and far between. I couldn’t find any hard-sf which I personally view as the center of the genre, but I definitely spotted a few where the SF/F lines are blurred, which aren’t my favorites (Strahan addresses this point in the introduction, so no harm no foul on that account). Military SF, space stories and any kind (save one, see below) of SF where the entertainment value trumps the didactic intent are notably absent.
So, within this narrowly defined subsegment of SF (too narrow to be considered even possibly the Year’s Best), which story did I enjoy? The single space exploration one, of course. It’s not a man vs. the elements story, but at least it’s interesting and the politics (completely aligned with the rest of the book) are firmly in the background where they should be, while the story is interesting and weird enough to catch the attention. This tale was Caroline M. Yoachim’s “The Archronology of Love”.
So, do I recommend this? Yes. Definitely. But with the caveats that come with the above review.
If you’re looking for stories where the narrative and characters take center stage and the attempt to teach what should be right from a specific political viewpoint are secondary, you won’t want to read this one. Also, if you’re looking for the best stories of 2019, they aren’t in this book. Perhaps one or two might make the cut with a more inclusive editor.
Likewise, I can’t really recommend this book to anyone who defines themselves of right of center. That kind of thinking is deliberately excluded here. The book might irritate centrists and moderates as well. It is a very politically-specific tome aimed at a certain kind of reader.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for the definitive record of the political fiction of the critically-approved wing of science fiction, this is an important book to have on your shelves, and I will likely be purchasing future volumes for myself. It is a well-crafted, scholarly and important book that does a specific task extremely well. It’s just not the book its title says it is.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short fiction writer from Argentina whose latest novel, Splinter, is a science fiction thriller which takes a balanced look at space exploration and the advance of technology, from the colonization of other planets to advances in cybernetics. The good and the bad are there for all to see… and you can check it out here.
The best part of The New Yorker is probably that feeling of being immersed in a comfortable world of intellectuality where an attempt is made to discuss things like reasonable adults while keeping the infantile extremist dialogue of the far left and far right, which is taking over the rest of the world, out of it. The perfect spot to read this magazine would be in a leather chair in the corner of a good home library (wood-paneled walls would complete it perfectly). Always a lovely experience.
That’s not where this issue fails. It manages to keep the genteel veneer on its treatment of controversial issues (unabashedly from the left side of the spectrum), but it did miss on its coverage of the Chilean constitutional crisis. In attempting to make the Chilean story fit the current fashionable narrative, they published an article which paints Chile as a land of inequity which needed a new political system.
While it’s undeniable that every country in Latin America is ripe for reform, the article barely glossed over the fact that Chile truly was an oasis in the wilderness that is Latin America, and one of the pillars of the fact that it’s the best country in the region was the constitution. And now, a year later, they have a constitutional crisis with the process mired in the deepest of swamps. The left thinks that this is an opportunity to sink the single working economy in Latin America. The right thinks it has to defend everything Pinochet put into the original document. And the people now understand they they voted incorrectly when they decided to completely overhaul a working document instead of updating it progressively.
So yeah, I enjoyed this mag because that sense of genteel intellectuality, that progressive illusion that the world isn’t a hard-edged dog-eat-dog place, is utterly intact. But I was irritated by the over-simplification of something right next door to me.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina whose latest book of literary fiction, Safe and Sorry, is a collection of liked stories that explore the world we live in from the point of view of the people doing the living. You can check it out here.
Making a film about a strike in a mine in which you cast the picketers and the international unions as the good guys was a brave thing to do in 1954. After all, this was the era of the Red Scare and McCarthyism. You could have a really, really hard time coming back from it.
As usual with films of a socialist bent, this was a depressing exercise in trying to convince viewers that, despite the evidence of their own perfectly good lives, the world is an awful place that needs more communism.
This one was not quite as depressing as others, but what it lacked in utter despair (are all socialists really that sad or only the filmmakers?) it more than makes up for in bad acting and melodrama. The acting is not really a surprise, as this film was not made with professional actors but with a mix of pros and random passers-by. The melodrama, though, is squarely on the shoulders of the scriptwriters who, in the worst crime a narrator can commit, let their message overwhelm their story.
I guess this one earns its place in the 1001 movies list on sheer bravado and balls… but it’s in no way, shape or form an enjoyable film. And it’s especially out of place in the US in the hope-filled 1950s.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelista and short story writer whose book Safe and Sorry is a literary exploration fo the lives of a group of apparently unconnected characters, from a homeless man to a serial killer, with all the intermediate echelons of society also explored. The stories will entertain while also putting a microscope on modern society. You can check it out here.
For today’s post we welcome back frequent contributor Stacy Danielle Stephens. We’re delighted to have her historically erudite and thought-provoking writing with us once more.
We may well leave it to the instincts of that common humanity which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow-men of all countries to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters . . . Our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man is tempered by profound contempt for the impotent rage which it discloses.
-Jefferson Davis, January 12, 1863, in an address to the Confederate Congress
You probably know already that the first year of the American Civil War did not go well for Abraham Lincoln. His attempt to restore the Union wasn’t merely a failure, it had been a spectacular failure. So spectacular, in fact, that both the British and French empires were edging toward formal recognition of the Confederate States of America as an independent nation, with the implication of material support if Lincoln did not begin to negotiate peace terms on the heels of this recognition. The Royal Navy would end the Union blockade of Confederate ports, and the French army was already engaged in a land war in Mexico; an alliance with the Confederacy would be a natural next step, and with French support, the Confederate States could extend westward at their leisure, and might in time annex California. Lincoln was a desperate man in desperate circumstances, and could only resort to desperate measures. Since he could not win the war he was engaged in, he doubled down, and made it a different war entirely. If the rebels would lay down their arms and return to the Union by the end of the year, they could keep their slaves. If not, this war of reunification would irrevocably become a war against slavery as well. Lincoln’s disclosure of his impotent rage worked. Because Britain had outlawed slavery in 1833, and France had outlawed slavery (for a third and final time) in 1848, it would be politically impossible for either empire to oppose a war against a slave state. Although the American Civil War would continue for another two and a half years, the Confederacy would have no foreign recognition and no foreign support.
Now if you read and/or write Steampunk or SFF, you’re probably content with that first paragraph. Old Honest Abe, who had promised at his inauguration that he wouldn’t interfere with slavery, went back on his word and pulled an effective trick out of his hat, or maybe out of his septic tank, and managed to win the war in the third book of the trilogy. What’s next in the TBR stack?
But if you write historical fiction, you’re wondering how it was possible that two empires with centuries of history, and both key players in the international slave trade, could have outlawed slavery while it still existed in the United States, a relatively new nation, where it was purportedly held to be self-evident that all men were created equal. Actually, if you write historical fiction, you’ve probably already looked at this question, and it may even be a significant undercurrent in everything you write.
But first, let me tell you how it happened. Two unrelated things occurred in the early 19th century. The Napoleonic wars and the invention of the cotton gin. Because of the former, continental Europe had been blockaded, and could not import sugar. So Europeans had to resort to growing sugar beets, and producing sugar for themselves. After both the war and the blockade ended, domestically produced beet sugar continued to dominate the European sugar market, making the importation of cane sugar, which depended on slave labour, impractical. In turn, slavery itself became infeasible throughout the colonial empires. And because there was no longer any great profit in slavery, moral indignation against it was no longer a luxury, but a practicality. Meanwhile, the cotton gin made it possible for plantation owners in the US to sell literally all the cotton they could produce. This, in turn, made slavery obscenely profitable, and opposition to it a luxury which no one concerned with making a great deal of money would feel they could afford.
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, let’s suppose you’re writing about slaves. The first wrinkle to be smoothed out is the question of technology. You see, slavery existed in Ancient Rome because there were no machines. Slaves did the hardest work, as well as the most dangerous work, If your world has heavy machinery and labour-saving devices, slavery will be an expensive anachronism. So what absence or deficiency of technology in the world you’ve built would make slavery feasible? For that matter, why would a society maintain slavery if they could use immigration law to create a class of disadvantaged workers willing to do the worst work at the greatest risk, and then deport these workers when they’re no longer needed?
While you’re mulling that over, what are the rights of slaves in the world you’ve built? And what are the responsibilities of slave owners? Although the particulars varied, every slave state in the US had laws spelling out the rights of slaves as well as the obligation of slave owners toward both their slaves and to the state. It was, for instance, illegal to free a slave who was unable to work. This was actually more pragmatic than humanitarian; no state wanted to assume responsibility for such persons, and so wrote laws to ensure that they would not have to.
Wherever slavery has existed, there have been slaves purchased for sexual purposes, and the “sex” has always been rape, at least by coercion, or more often by some degree of physical force. Keep in mind that the perpetrator in these situations has almost no outside restraint, and will rarely have more than minimal self-restraint. That is the very essence and nature of slavery. For me, this has always been the most repugnant aspect of any fiction I’ve read in which slaves are portrayed or depicted. Not the actual presentation of such things, which is typically dreadful enough, but the absence of them, which I find to be abysmally worse. There is too often an easy willingness on the part of authors, particularly white authors, to ignore this most hideous reality of slavery; or even an eagerness to romanticize such relationships, to translate the unthinkable brutality into a gently benevolent condescension. If sex between a slave owner and a slave is not forced for the perpetrator’s scintillation, than it is to some degree forced by the circumstance itself, by the slave’s knowledge that they can be whipped or sold or sent to do the worst work, or the same could be done to members of their family. And this will be particularly true if the slaves are of a different ethnic/racial group, or from a different planet.
Assuming that you can somehow avoid both the Scylla and Charybdis of this most odious aspect of slavery, there are further considerations. Slaves of an inferior social class (serfs) will be mistreated to a lesser extent than slaves who were captured in war, who will be mistreated to a lesser extent than a class of slaves expressly captured for the purpose of being sold as slaves. This last class of slaves are treated the worst because there will be no other rationale for their enslavement than that they are believed to be inferior, and behavior toward them will reinforce this essential belief. Also, if slaves are regarded as racially inferior, anyone too poor to own a slave would usually make a point of treating slaves badly in public/social situations, and would consistently do anything necessary to demonstrate that they were better than a slave, especially if they really weren’t. The key factor here is the “free” person’s self-esteem.
But regardless of which class of slaves exist in the world you’ve built, keep in mind that there will be a “pecking order” among slaves, and the distinctions slaves make among themselves will be more pronounced and inviolable than the distinctions their owners make. A slave who does skilled work regards himself as superior to a slave who works in the field, a slave who does house work is the next step up, a slave who does professional/technical work is the next step, and a slave kept for sex will be a psycho with an attitude. Essentially, the more time a slave spends near the owner, the more often the owner speaks to a slave for any reason, the more highly that slave will be regarded by all other slaves, even if they resent that slave’s superior standing. They will hate, loathe, despise and respect that slave, and they will curry that slave’s favour.
Keep in mind that slaves could be rented or leased, and that a skilled slave rented out for some purpose will probably do additional work on the side for less than the rental rate, and keep the money for himself. A slave used for unskilled labour won’t have the opportunity to do that.
If slaves are not regarded as racial inferiors, a child born of a slave might be generally regarded as the equal of a child born of a free woman, if the father wishes it, and there will be much less social stigma for a free woman who becomes pregnant by a slave. Everyone will gossip about her, yes, but no one will lynch her.
If you have determined what forces created slavery in your world, and what forces sustain it, you must then ask yourself what are the forces that oppose it, aside from moral indignation? Bear in mind as you consider this that during the American Civil War, New York City considered seceding from the union (and from the State of New York) because slavery was very profitable to businessmen dealing in cotton, even though they themselves did not own slaves, and did not care to. But on careful consideration, New York City realized that without an Army and Navy of their own, they could not survive as an independent city, and that the expense of raising and maintaining armed forces would more than offset the profit realized in supporting slavery.
Also consider that when cotton became inexpensive and widely available, growing flax to spin and weave linen at home became impractical. This left more land available for other crops, and left women, who had done most of the spinning and weaving, with more time for other activities. How will slavery in the world you’ve built have similar effects?
Finally, and most importantly, if you are writing about slaves and slavery, you must ask yourself why. This is particularly true if you are white, and even more so if you are American. Slavery is so much a part of who we are, yet even those of us who will admit it are hard-pressed to fully and honestly acknowledge it, almost to the point of breaking. I cannot say that the lingering residual effects of slavery are worse for white Americans, but must observe that they are more insidious. if only because we have the privilege of pretending that slavery hasn’t affected us at all.
So why did I write about slaves and slavery? Because 165 years ago, when my great-grandmother was a little girl in Ohio, a slave trader who had caught a runaway spent the night in her family’s home. Throughout the night, she was awakened again and again by the rattle of chains, and a man sighing and weeping quietly. That hopeless agony has been an integral part of me all my life. I can never excise it, but can only try to express it as clearly as I am able to.
Stacy Danielle Stephens – is the great-great-niece of Edward Eggleston and the great-granddaughter of a character in Willa Cather’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning roman à clef One of Ours. As heiress to two of America’s most profoundly groundbreaking literary traditions, she strives to write as Picasso painted, using an ink metaphorically distilled from the blood, sweat, and tears of a great cloud of witnesses seldom interviewed by a more typical author.
The Dog Who Knew Too Much (Omnium Gatherum Media) For homicide investigator Stefanie Tricarico, an anticipated weekend in South Central Nebraska, to be spent quietly with family on the farm her Bohemian ancestors homesteaded, becomes a remembrance of things past in the worst possible way when she learns that her long-estranged younger brother has become a regional leader of the White Supremacy movement.
As regular readers know by now, a couple of years ago, I placed second in the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest, and part of my prize was a huge box of books, which have now cycled to the top of my TBR pile. The first couple of books were decent albeit urban fantasy which isn’t my favorite subgenre (although one of these books was still hugely enjoyable).
But now I’ve gotten to some of my favorite parts. Straight SF (with a military slant) telling a story in the form of short fiction.
Freehold: Resistance is pure entertainment. The stories are fast-paced, the action is relentless and the characters are fun to be around. Every single writer in this book did his or her job with precisely the right touch, and I found myself loving every moment of it.
In short, and without spoilers, the Freehold is a freedom-loving space colony that is invaded by the forces of Earth so that they wouldn’t become independent. It’s kind of the American revolution played on a galactic scale and with modern weapons and attitudes…
It’s also a political book in a certain sense (highlighting the advantages of a society where freedom is respected versus a more regulated and sanitized vision of society), and we all know what I think of message fiction. But the action and characters overcome that particular drawback most of the time, so you don’t get pulled out of the action to think about the philosophy.
Anyhow, I really enjoyed this one, and like the Freehold universe quite a bit, so this is definitely a keeper.
Quick caveat on this one – I’ve been published alongside a couple of the writers in this book – I don’t think it colored my review, but I wanted to establish that up front so readers can take their own conclusions (here and here are the books where I’ve appeared alongside writers from this one).
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest genre book is a monster romp through tropical islands in the Indian Ocean. It’s entitled Lost Island Rampage, and you can check it out here.
Okay, apparently those “be offended at everything that subsegments humanity” classes didn’t take. Just a few days ago, I was busy telling everyone how good the Vince Flynn book I read was. If you’re unaware of Vince Flynns style, he pretty much says that he doesn’t care if all his bad guys are Muslims: as long as muslims are terrorists, he’s going to gleefully enjoy having Mitch Rapp blow their heads off. It’s awesome stuff.
And here I am about to tell you that The English Spy by Daniel Silva is just as good, if not better…
Now, a pattern emerges. In this book, the bad guy is a former IRA bomb maker. Now, while the PC police will likely tell you that type-casting the Irish is just as bad as type-casting muslim terrorists (and yes, there are ALSO muslim terrorists in this one), I’m here to tell you that it makes for excellent reading. Once you get beyond the politics, you need to remember that both of these groups exist, and writing them only shows the world as it really is. Avoiding them just panders to people who want to rewrite reality to fit their own vision of how others should think.
(Pro tip: NEVER let anyone tell you what to think. Left- and right-leaning, politically correct or savagely un-PC, written by dead white guys or angry activist black women, read it ALL. And only after you’ve done that, come to your own conclusions. You’ll find that the stuff political movements (left, right, up or down) are trying to sell you is a distorted and extremist viewpoint, and that, in the end, politically active people are either lying to you or to themselves.)
But back to the book. Anyone who is offended by stereotyping is missing a spectacular spy book (apparently a series, in fact). This one is written with what is either a deep knowledge of how things happen behind the scenes or by a man who is a master of the art of making it feel that way. This one should be obligatory reading not just for fans of the genre, but for anyone taking a college-level creative writing class. Maybe leave the drudgery of Katherine Mansfield aside for a few days and show writers that it’s possible to actually engage readers with a story. If teachers did this, we’d leave the doldrums and train a generation of writers to bring forth a new golden age.
Yeah, and watch out for flying pigs.
I won’t go further into my review than that. It’s an international-intrigue manhunt tale with a few fun twists, a spectacular down-taking of the Lady Di legend and a decent body count. As I said, fun reading of the kind there should be more of. It was good, suspenseful fun, which is what these things should always be.
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose thriller, Timeless, is a fast-paced sexy romp through the smuggling paradises of Southeast Europe. You can check it out here.
I think everyone agrees that the dumbest law in US history was the 18th Amendment. Prohibition, as it was popularly known, banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The problem was that a bunch of goody-two-shoes Pollyannas believed that, if you wished hard enough (and got an unrealistc law passed), people would realize that the preachy zealots were right all along and mend their ways.
A few years of wonderful profits for Capone and New York’s Five Families later, the idiocy was repealed, and Americans learned that Utopias never work.
Unfortunately–and despite having the very obvious example of the Soviet Union to remind them about the danger of Utopias and how they always fail–American legislators and the kind of people who love to impose their views upon the public didn’t learn their lesson, and they passed the second most reviled law in US history: the National Maximum Speed Limit, and set it at the ridiculous level of 55mph.
As you’d expect, a magazine aimed at auto enthusiasts such as Road & Track was firmly in the camp blowing raspberries at this piece of moronic big-brotherism, but perhaps what you don’t know (especially if you were brought up in the 2000s where twitter comments are considered journalism, is that, during the late seventies and early eighties, journalistic giants walked the earth.
These were men and women of integrity and honesty who valued truth over ideology, and the people working at R&T were among them. They decided to get to the bottom of the issue and looked into several aspects of the question: whether the speed limit saved lives, whether it really saved fuel (remember that this one was initially instituted as an emergency measure during the fuel crisis), whether it generated more enforcement and put officers who should have been elsewhere on traffic patrol, and whether anyone was paying it the least bit of attention to it.
The answers: the safety was insignificant, and could have been achieved cheaper and better with other methods. The Fuel savings, again, were insignificant, especially when weighted against the lost productivity–the US lost enormous amounts of money because of 55. Yes, it generated more enforcment, because states were held hostage: federal highway funds were denied unless motorists were obeying the law… so cops were pulled from actual crime duty to enforce the idiocy. Finally, no one was paying it the least attention except where savage radar traps were employed.
Not content with this, the R&T ran a survey in which its readers answered a batter of questions about the issue. It’s not often you see such a unanimous response from 20,000 people. The best were the comments from cops saying how stupid it was.
Well, I suppose you would have seen the same thing during prohibition, but that’s about it.
So why did the law survive twenty years (in modified form) before it was canned to thunderous applause? Because it’s hard to be the one to argue against a law in favor of public safety, no matter how discredited the numbers used are. Public safety and “the public good” are the arguments that governments use to limit personal freedoms. It’s like a blank check, you can do whatever you want to people, as long as you’re “protecting” them.
I live in Argentina, a country whose government, no matter how you look at it, has abused this power during the Covid crisis, and I’m here to tell you that everyone in the free world needs to push back HARD against government overreach. The government in a free country exists basically so that the people can enjoy their freedoms in peace and security, not to cut those freedoms off in service to either ideology or overly frightened individuals who manage to push through laws and regulations that a majority hate.
Those who don’t learn from 55 are destined to repeat it.
Oh, and there was also a wonderful article about Triumph race cars in these mags and also the death of Patrick Depallier, but I only have enough room to mention them in passing–there were weightier issues at hand.
Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer whose work spans almost every genre, from literary to horror. His literary work is collected in Love and Death, a collection of linked short stories for those who enjoy reading about true crisis points in people’s existence as opposed to reading about the angst they feel when doing laundry. You can check it out here.
Classically Educated 