Category: Books

Feminists and Their Problems

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The 1979 psychological thriller When a Stranger Calls is a cult classic, famous for one line: “The call is coming from inside the house.”

That line came to mind Tuesday night after I learned about an interesting controversy on BlueSky, the left-wing echo chamber where many Trump-haters fled after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. A Canadian feminist, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, recently published a book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. A website published a 23-paragraph excerpt of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book and, when this excerpt was promoted on BlueSky, the book’s theme and its author were angrily denounced.

Of course, I immediately ordered the book from Amazon. Anything that sends the BlueSky crowd into paroxysms of apoplectic rage must be good. After skimming through the excerpt of The Last Straight Woman, however, I quickly located the nexus of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s problem, specifically in the sentence when she declares “we need to be looking for feminist approaches to female heterosexuality.”

“Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’,” first posted here in July 2014, became the first chapter of my 2016 book Sex Trouble. What most people don’t understand about feminism is that, almost from the very beginning of the so-called “Women’s Liberation Movement” in the late 1960s, lesbians were influential in the movement’s policies and rhetoric. Lesbians were involved in the creation of the first Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities, and the curriculum in such programs has always reflected the anti-male/anti-heterosexual bias of the lesbian faculty.

Anyone who cares to research the biography of Charlotte Bunch can understand this. Prior to becoming involved in the feminist movement, Bunch had a husband, but in 1971 she got divorced, came out as a lesbian and founded a radical commune/cult called The Furies. From there, Bunch went on to become a professor at Rutgers University and an adviser to Hillary Clinton. The incompatibility of heterosexuality with women’s liberation was the essence of Bunch’s feminist ideology:

Bunch’s 1972 manifesto, “Lesbians in Revolt” essentially declared universal lesbianism as the end goal of feminism:

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s “innate” need for men. …
Our rejection of heterosexual sex challenges male domination in its most individual and common form. We offer all women something better than submission to personal oppression. We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.

This argument was expanded . . . by Margaret Small in “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” which was cited in such later books as Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana Shugar and The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. In 2015, while researching my own book, I summarized Margaret Small’s argument:

[Small] offered a Marxist interpretation of “lesbian consciousness” as part of a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” in the “relationship of slavery,” as she called marriage. …
Invoking the historical theories of Friedrich Engels (colleague of Karl Marx and co-author of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), Small declared: “Class society arose because of the oppression of women. . . . The exploitation of all women by all men made possible the exploitation of some men by other men. The more exploitative the relationship between men and women becomes, the stronger and more vital become the institutions of male supremacy.” …
“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” Small wrote. “In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”
Under male supremacy, Small asserted, women “become defined as appendages to men” in a system “which maintains the ideological power of men over women.”

Marriage is slavery, “heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” and if you don’t believe that, can you really call yourself a feminist? . . .

Read the rest of my latest Substack article and, while you’re over there, please sign up for a subscription to get updates regularly.



 

FMJRA 2.0: Morning Glory Milking Farm

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

I may not have done a book post in quite a while, but as longtime readers can attest (and this website as well) this book by C.M. Nascosta is not anywhere near my normal tastes in books. However, being the public benefactor I am, I felt obligated to give this book a read and report on it. Now that I have done so, I must ask for your prayers and contributions to the tip jar, because brain bleach isn’t cheap.
Having said this, I must congratulate Ms. Nascosta. This is a well-written book, succeeding not merely as a sexual fantasy but as the sort of multi-species Hallmark movie script one might expect from a particularly raunchy D&D Fifth Edition session. Indeed, if you deleted the sex scenes, this wouldn’t look out of place on the Hallmark Channel. On the other hand, if you deleted the sex scenes, there would be no point to the thing, because the whole novel is about the mousy, fairly average looking heroine’s increasing sexual obsession with the strapping young minotaur who’s enjoying his regular visits to the glory holepharmaceutical company much more than he used to. The author is to be congratulated for not making the protagonist a Mary Sue but rather, a more sympathetic girl who’s trapped in a situation many of her readers are probably all too familiar with: a college graduate with degrees worthless in the job market, trying desperately to find some work – any work – that will keep her from having to move home into Mom’s basement. The bottom line? It’s a good, well-written fantasy on a couple of levels, and apparently the sort of thing horny women are reading these days. So in conclusion, I can do no better than to quote Honest Abe Lincoln: “If this is the sort of thing you like, then you will probably like it.”
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Just what it says on the can.

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A Return to Frontier Justice?
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In The Mailbox: 09.05.25 (Evening Edition)
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Thanks to everyone for all the links!

 

 

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And on the Eighth Day, God Said, ‘Everybody Should Buy Evan Sayet’s Book’

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“Not liking something doesn’t mean that that something doesn’t exist. If it did, then there’d be no such thing as a Jennifer Aniston movie.”
— Evan Sayet, from his new book

Ten years ago, I credited Evan Sayet with having written “the most important book since Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type,” and now he’s topped even that achievement with his comprehensive demolition of the Darwinian worldview, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth.

Evan and I go way back. It was at CPAC 2007 that I was wandering through the lobby of the Omni Shoreham Hotel after midnight and happened upon Evan in the company of a fellow I recognized, Andrew Breitbart, who had not then ascended to his status as the world’s most famous Internet provocateur. Because I knew that Breitbart was Matt Drudge’s right-hand man, and because I worked at The Washington Times — where getting Drudge links to our stories was essential to maintaining our profile — I immediately insinuated myself into this group, which also conveniently happened to have picked up a 12-pack of beer. So I ended up spending the night in their hotel room, where Evan tried to sleep while I listened to Andrew tell his amazing stories. Was this meeting a matter of mere chance? Was it a random accident? Or was it destiny — fate, kismet, or dare I say, the will of God in action?

Dear friends, there are no coincidences, and the same divine force that put me in that hotel drinking beers with Breitbart until 3 a.m. also brought forth other miraculous events that the godless would have us believe happened by mere luck. This is the crux of Evan Sayet’s attack on what he properly calls the Militant Materialist worldview of those atheists who claim that Darwinian theory disproves the existence of God.

Coincidence — chance, random luck, statistical probability — is what the atheists offer as the explanatory alternative to Creation. Evan Sayet grabs hold of this point with the ferocity of a pitbull and does not let go until the Godless Serendipity Theory is bleeding out from a loss of credibility:

Atheism is not a scientific belief. In fact, it is neither scientific nor a belief. Militant atheism is not an ideology. It is a weapon used by demagogues and would-be revolutionaries to clear the moral path to their rise to power and the godless way in which they intend to rule.

Evan’s book is crammed full of pithy paragraphs like that, as well as many laugh-out-loud punch lines like that gag about Jennifer Aniston movies. A veteran stand-up comedian and writer for TV comedy shows, Evan knows how to make his points with humor, but as much as you’ll enjoy his jokes, you’ll also understand that Magic Soup is a very serious project, given the totalitarian implications of the atheist worldview.

Ask yourself a question: “Why am I reading this?” Out of all the blog posts in the entire World Wide Web, why are you reading this one? Could it be that Almighty God wants you to buy Evan Sayet’s new book? Far be it from me to presume to speak on God’s behalf, but let the reader ponder the improbability of any other explanation for why you are, in fact, reading a blog post with such a headline. There are no coincidences.

Whereas I tend toward a Calvinistic explanation of how God’s will operates in human affairs, my good friend Evan Sayet is arguably closer to the original source of our monotheistic faith, IYKWIMAITYD.

When Evan contacted me to let me know he had a new book on the market, one of the first things he told me was that it had gotten a glowing review in Chronicles, to which I replied, “Wow.” Because, as I was aware, Chronicles has sometimes had a reputation as being not entirely friendly toward Members of the Tribe. It would be grossly unfair to say that Chronicles is, or ever was, anti-Semitic, but the magazine is proud of its status as the de facto journal of paleoconservatism, and thus the nemesis of neoconservatism, and if you’ve followed the history of that obscure conflict — as I have, by necessity — you perhaps understand why I was impressed to learn that Chronicles had heaped praise on Magic Soup.

How often must I repeat myself: There are no coincidences. Because you see, dear reader, that when I went to find the Chronicles review of Evan’s book, I discovered that it was written by none other than former Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter — who just happens to be the political hero of my co-blogger Smitty. What are the statistical probabilities of such a happenstance? Never mind — it’s the divine will at work, and you can believe whatever you want to believe, but as for myself, I’m 100% certain that it was none other than Jehovah who aligned this so perfectly.

We live in troubled times, my friends, and never has it been more urgent to rally the faithful to defend against the worldwide armies of godlessness that have now surrounded the Camp of the Saints (Revelation 20:9).

You can — indeed, you should, and I would argue, you must — click here to buy Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth for $15.99, and by purchasing it through this link, of course, you’ll provide a small commission to me, at no extra cost to yourself. It would be a mitzvah, and may God bless you for it.



 

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David Drake, RIP

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— by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

David Drake, 9/24/1945-12/10/2023

Has it really been two years since I posted this? I guess it has. Twitter has had a fair chunk of tweets over the last day or two devoted to mourning David Drake, whose impact on science fiction, fantasy, and horror cannot be overstated. There is a wealth of autobiographical information and occasional comments on his writing at his website, which I cannot recommend highly enough. The various pages devoted to Dave and his works on TVTropes.org are also worth reading, though I warn you that they’re loaded with spoilers.

My connection with Dave started when I was in high school in the late 1970s, reading the collection of Galaxy I’d been gifted by the school librarians, and discovering “Under The Hammer” and “But Loyal To His Own”. I wrote him some letters, to which he politely replied, and I kept an eye out as he began to become a Big Name in Baen’s stable of authors. A few years later, I joined the Army, and as most of you know, managed to wangle an assignment to the 340th ASA Company of the 11th ACR. This was not, strictly speaking, the same company Drake had been in during Vietnam, but it carried the lineage of that MI detachment, and when we finally met years later at Arcana, he was pleased that we had that connection. With the exception of his Cthulhu mythos stories (which were arguably more horror than fantasy) I was never that interested in his fantasy novels, but I read and/or bought just about every SF story he ever wrote. As others can testify, he was a fine writer, a great guest at conventions, and a wonderful human being. Not an officer, but definitely a gentleman, and a good friend, as Sarah Hoyt attests on her blog. We had hoped to have him as our Guest of Honor at the upcoming Son of Silvercon II, but as Stacie Collins reminds us, “You wanna hear God laugh? Tell him about your plans!”

See you at Fiddler’s Green, sir.

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The High Price of Forgetting

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“The dullards and malcontents among us are always anxious to acquire by coercion and bullying what they cannot gain by merit. Because of this, their simple-minded doctrine is attractive for a certain type of disaffected bureaucrat.”
— Stanley K. Ridgley

When I was young (says the Baby Boomer, because you callow punks don’t know this stuff) everybody knew Communism was bad. And when I say “everybody,” I mean everybody I knew growing up, as opposed to some freaky radicals in Berkeley or wherever. Stopping the spread of Communism was the primary focus of America’s national policy for at least 10 years before I was born, going back to when Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. The evil of Communism was so widely recognized that it was usually taken for granted and, in hindsight, this was a mistake. I was never taught anything in school (or college) about the ideology of Communism. There was no critical analysis of the writings of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky. Nor, for that matter, did we learn anything about the Bolshevik Revolution, the failed Communist revolution attempt in Germany, the short-lived Communist regime in Hungary, etc. Keep in mind that, until I was 14 years old, our troops were fighting Communists in Vietnam. So why weren’t our teachers tasked to explain to us exactly what it was we were fighting? The closest thing we got to it was in fifth grade, when our English teacher, Tom Dowd, read Animal Farm aloud to us, over the course of a couple of weeks, explaining it as a parable of the Russian revolution: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

It was not until I was in my 30s — after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union — that I began studying the history of Communism on my own and, as I’ve often said, I’ve read more Marx than most Marxists. I’ve also read Lenin and Trotsky, for that matter, and everything I’ve learned in this autodidactic education has only reinforced what everybody knew when I was a kid: Communism is bad.

All of this is by way of introduction to Stanley K. Ridgley, a business professor at Drexel University and author of Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. (Hint: Amazon pays me a small commission when you purchase products through my affiliate links, because capitalism!) From the book description:

Much of university life is controlled by subsidized paranoiacs, amateur psychotherapists, neo-Marxist totalitarians, “student affairs professionals” imbued with authoritarian mentality, and racialist thought reformers who run workshops that destroy family ties and traditional beliefs to clear the way for new relationships grounded in racialist ideology. These are the brutal minds who threaten and abuse students in the name of an academic fraud called “antiracist pedagogy.” . . .
An educational charade masks activities and ideology as dangerous as those that inspired Communist China’s tragic Cultural Revolution. This book strips away the façade of the modern American university to reveal the malignant bureaucratic viscera inside the institution. It is a dark world, an anti-intellectualist sanctuary where brutal minds find purpose, protection, camaraderie, subsidy, and power.

This sounds intriguing, but the reference to the Cultural Revolution in China will have zero resonance in the minds of most Americans, who know little or nothing about the history of Communist regimes in power. The only totalitarian regime that most Americans do know about is Nazi Germany, but their knowledge even of that is superficial, and the main lesson they take from the Third Reich is as simple as, “Hate is bad.”

Professor Ridgley writes about the parallels between Nazi Germany and the 21st-century “antiracist” education regime:

In the Third Reich, anti-Semitism infected every aspect of German society, even the domain of science. This was most memorable in the anti-Semitism that corrupted the discipline of physics. In accord with the Nazi authorities, the work of Jewish scientists was delegitimized by declaration. The Nazis dismissed the theories of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr as “Jewish Physics,” “Jewish Science,” “Jewish World-Bluff,” and the product of “Jewish Spirit.” Something called Aryan Physics was erected as the authentic alternative.
The major characteristic of such a primitive patois is that it attracts and works for only two types of people—those stupid enough to actually believe it (the storm-trooper class) and those who don’t believe it but see it as a useful tool to achieve their vision (vanguard puppeteers). . . .

You can read the whole thing (hat-tip: Robert Shibley at Instapundit).

What the Nazis did in demonizing “Jewish Science” was mirrored by the Soviets using “bourgeois” or “capitalist” as an epithet to demonize anything they opposed, whereas the bogus “science” of Lysenkoism was promoted as truth because it was seen as compatible with Stalinist ideology. Ridgeway’s point is that very similar coercive methods are being used to impose equally dubious beliefs about “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” etc., which conform to the Left’s radical ideology.

Certainly, it is not a coincidence that the Left is now supporting protests (or rather pogroms) to terrorize Jewish students on university campuses.



 

 

The Annual Admiral of the Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

This is the day when we remember the brave Genoese navigator who talked Queen Isabella of Spain into financing an expedition intended to sail west across the Atlantic to the Indies and their fabulous spices, avoiding obstreperous Moors and well-armed Portuguese. As we all know now, there were some sizable continents in the way, which became an abundant source of gold, silver, souls and lands where hungry young Spaniards could found estates of their own. True, Columbus never set foot on North America, but aside from some Portuguese fishermen off Newfoundland, nobody much cared about that relatively worthless land until the English decided to see what, if anything, lay on the shores of the Chesapeake and Massachusetts Bays. So: go read Morison’s epic biography of the great Christopher Columbus, appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. As for “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”, promoted shamelessly by the shameless wannabee Cherokee from Massachusetts, she who is called Fauxcahontas in the true language of her people, we could care less.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

“In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero.” Damn right.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Sweden Is Unprepared For Gangs
EBL: Happy Canada Thanksgiving Tomorrow
Twitchy: And now for some feelgood news from Danica McKellar, Obama bro Tommy Vietor whines about Israel cutting off Gaza’s power, and RFK Jr.’s siblings try to sink his third party run faster than Uncle Ted sank his car at Chappaquiddick
Louder With Crowder: Girl born a dude crowned “Miss Portugal,” will now compete in “Miss Universe” against another girl born a dude, Should Women in Relationships Go Clubbing with Single Friends?, and Joe Rogan shares shocking story about LA schools
Vox Popoli: Fireworks in Israel, How KU Destroyed the Ebook Market, An Informative Analogy, A Tale of Two Invasions, and Forza Milan!
Stoic Observations: Cricket Flour

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: 24,669 Americans Murdered By Terrorists In One Day, 
Dana Loesch: What Israel Must Do Now
Don Surber: We lost 9/11
Glenn Reynolds: Is Everything Suddenly Going To Hell?

AN ASSORTMENT OF RECENT BOOKS
The latest installment in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series is out, Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever, co-written with Jason Cordova, and like the other novels in the Memoirs series, this is a look into the past of MHI at some of its legendary hunters. In this case, the hunter is Chloe Mendoza, and she’s got a little something extra going for her: she’s a nagualii, a shape-shifter who’s the daughter of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca. This comes in handy as she and the newly formed Los Angeles MHI team find themselves up against what initially seems to be a werewolf pack but -as sometimes happens with MHI- turns out to be something far worse, something that has its hooks into the local Monster Control Bureau office. Agent Franks makes a cameo appearance but serves mainly to inject more tension and mystery into an already tense situation. A solid addition to the MHI library.

John Wright’s Null-A Continuum was a wild ride. People familiar with Wright’s work may see some similarities to his Eschaton series (Count to a Trillion, etc.) but on balance it is faithful to the first two of A.E. van Vogt’s Null-A novels, The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A*. Continuum starts with a murder that Gilbert Gosseyn appears to have committed, but he has no memory of doing so -and this is the least of his problems, since Enro the Red is on the loose again and there are apparently some non-human aliens who would like to eliminate humanity and take our galaxy for their own. Still, Gosseyn has an extra brain, Null-A training, the ability to replicate the distorter effect with his extra brain, and allies in unexpected places. This is a really good combination of A.E. van Vogt’s wild imagination and Wright’s gift of descriptive prose, and if you liked the first two Null-A novels, this will be a welcome treat.
* We will not discuss Null-A Three, for reasons Wright explains in the foreword.

The conversion of Ralts Bloodthorne’s Behold Humanity! epic from posts on r/HFY into actual books continues with Ashes, Ashes, the eleventh book in the series. The alien Atrekna, time manipulators from a dying universe and creators of a previously unseen form of berserkersPrecursor Autonomous War Machines, make their appearance in the midst of the Confederacy’s war against the Lanaktallan Great Herd, and almost immediately make a pair of serious mistakes in dealing with Terran Descent Humanity (quite aside from meddling with time, which our Universe Does Not Like) although at first it seems they’ve managed a killing blow as first the SUDS devices that allow dead Terrans to revive in new bodies go offline, and then a temporal attack aimed at “gentling” Terrans goes awry in a fashion lethal to 90% of Terran Descent Humans. This series has been an amazing mulligan stew of influences and shoutouts to all manner of science fiction and horror works from the last sixty years, and I’ll be sorry when it finally comes to an end. Highly recommended.

I met Rebecca Kuang at a Balticon some years ago, when The Poppy War had just come out, and I was so excited by the idea of a fantasy loosely based on the Second Sino-Japanese War that I went down to the dealer’s room, bought the book, and spent much of the convention reading it. Well, here we are in the third and final book of the trilogy, The Burning God, and to quote Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, “I am already in a world of shit.” I should have known better than to accept a Washington Post review at face value, because the war our protagonist (I hesitate to call her a heroine at this point) is fighting looks a lot less like the war that started at the Marco Polo Bridge than it does like a hellish combination of the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars, and (to a very,very tiny extent) the war the Post reviewer thought they were seeing. This is a brutal book with a lot of nasty, horrible things happening in it, much like all the aforementioned wars, and I am taking a break from it because the amoral carnage got to be a bit much for me. I’ll finish it, if only because after reading the first two books in the trilogy I want to know how it ends, and the idea of spending $15 on a book I’m not going to finish is just Wrong. Still, if you’re not comfortable with genocide, near-constant treachery, and a very unhappy protagonist who’s not sure she’s doing the  right thing, this may not be the book for you. 
(Portions of the preceding book reviews appeared in somewhat different form in Esmeralda County Line #5, an apazine for N’APA #266.)

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Science Fiction, Gatekeeping, And Why Awards Are Useless

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— by Wombat-socho

First, let me give a shoutout to Son of Silvercon‘s Guest of Honor, Maggie Hogarth, who has a new book dropping at the end of July, An Exile Aboard Ship. It’s the start of a new series set in her Peltedverse, which has a lot of cool aliens in it, and if you want some background to this new adventure, you should start with Earthrise, which is available (along with its two sequels) through Kindle Unlimited. Also, one of our other guests, Jon Del Arroz, has the sixth book in his Baron von Monocle steampunk series, The Crystal Conspiracy, out today. It’s been a while since I read For Steam & Country, the first in this series, but it’s good stuff, and I regret not having the time/money to pick up the other four books when they came out. 

And speaking of buying books from authors that don’t hate you, The Big Based Book Sale continues on through tomorrow. 

Pic unrelated.

I saw on the Twitter last night that the execrable John Scalzi has won the LOCUS readers award*, apparently for his recent work of lameness Kaiju Preservation Society, which judging from his earlier work is probably a “transgressive” riff on Pacific Rim, and no, I’m not reading it to find out. Someone posted a couple of embarrassing extracts from the book, which inspired a lot of mockery at Scalzi’s expense.** Anyhow, I grumped about how this was a good example of why nobody should be using awards like that to pick reading material, and this got me into an argument about gatekeeping.

Which, as I noted in this tweet, is silly because unlike gaming, where you can refuse to play with idiots, you can’t do that with SF. Anyone can go down to the library or the B&N, or log onto Amazon, and get them some skiffy. Or they can stream some Star Trek, or The Expanse, or Black Mirror, or Neon Genesis Evangelion…you see where I’m going with this. SF fandom is equally wide open thanks to social media. It’s a lot harder to blackball somebody from the Internet than it was to keep people out of your conventions – and as the old school literary fans found out in the 60s after Star Trek, they’ll just go off and start their own conventions with Fizzbin and Orion slave girls. As a result of this mass influx of fans into the SF ghetto, which I sometimes refer to as the geek victory in the culture war, and the subsequent capture of SF fandom’s organizations by the woketards and other leftists, the awards given by those organizations became warning signs rather than recommendations as to what was good. The fact that (relative to the huge numbers of people who read or otherwise consume SF) most of these awards (except for the Dragon Awards) are handed out by a tiny community of fans makes them even more worthless, because most of these people suffer from a bad case of groupthink and don’t dare express Wrongthink for fear of not being part of the In Crowd any more.  So instead of gatekeeping either science fiction in general or even fandom, I see my role as more of a native guide who’s been wandering around this part of town for 50+ years who advises the new folks not to read that stuff because it’ll make you barf, or at least make you regret spending $15 or three hours on Fuzzy Nation.

Now, on the other hand, there’s Ralts Bloodthorne. The Wordborg is up to ten books in the Behold, Humanity! series, of which I have just finished the tenth, Victory or Death. These are conversions from his long-running series of posts on r/HFY, and in some places duplicate material found in the Tales of the Terran Confederacy series because the shorter series focuses on individuals and their stories while Behold, Humanity! covers the wider war between the Terran Confederacy and its neosapient allies (Telkans, Hamaroosans, Tuknarn, etc.) against the Lanaktallan Unified Council Worlds and the Precursor Autonomous War Machines. Unlike a lot of the current Pink Goo authors, who like to pretend that nothing happened in SF before they were born (and if it did it was all written by Racist Male Wypipo so it doesn’t count), Ralts has clearly read a lot of the classics of SF, thought through the implications of the technologies, and had a lot of fun mixing it all together into a tasty stew of not just combat SF but a look at how humanity itself will adapt and change to technologies developed across 8,000 years of war with occasional brief periods of peace. Highly recommended.

*This says a lot about the kind of people who read LOCUS, who are mostly the kind of people that ante up the money to join Worldcons.
**Tor is paying him an insane amount of money to poop out crappy books, so what does he care?

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Gone To The Dogs

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— by Wombat-socho

10/10, would borf again

O, the shame. O, the embarrassment. While compiling the last book post, I inadvertently omitted The Best Tweets From Actuary Problem Dog, originally recommended by In The Mailbox’s Favorite Actuary, Mary Pat (“Meep”) Campbell. While this may seem to be an extremely niche joke book, a lot of what Actuary Problem Dog is tweeting about will be immediately familiar to not only actuaries, but accountants, tax professionals, randos using Excel, and just plain socially awkward folks. Highly recommended.

Speaking of socially awkward folks, Komi Can’t Communicate is up to volume 22, but since that’s still in the shipping pipeline (Amazon claims they delivered it, but it’s not in my mailbox) we’ll talk about Volume 21, wherein Komi’s class goes to New York on a trip and Komi reunites with her friend Rei Natsukido, who’s acquired an uncommunicative American friend of her own. I’m really happy with this manga, since it’s slowly evolving from a high-school slice of life series (with some seriously weird characters) into a romance between the main character and her first friend, the “completely average” Tadano Hitohito. 

Spy x Family also continues to progress in interesting ways, as the Forger family gets a dog – but not just any dog, a dog that’s been subjected to experiments and can now see the future. This immediately becomes an issue when Bond (the dog) shows Anya a future in which Loid dies in a terrorist bomb attack, and she rides to the rescue with Bond. Having solved that issue, we then get an amusing pair of issues in which Yor’s brother Yuri (an agent of Ostanian State Security) visits and is very suspicious of his sister’s husband – and then Loid’s protégé Nightfall drops by to assist with the mission, while futilely attempting to break up Yor and Loid’s marriage because she doesn’t think Yor is good enough for her old teacher. People are already pairing Yuri and Nightfall  for the sole reason that neither one of them wants the Forgers to remain a couple, though for entirely different reasons. Highly amusing. 

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