[Initial fissures in the cracked pottery are translated into words in brackets.]

New Blog on a tired subject...

Brian Jewell

Feb 18, 2021, 11:27 AM (4 days ago)

Entering The True Science Fiction World In 2020 and 2021

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy recently. Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick have been especially interesting. When I was mu…

sifujewell.wordpress.com

[To round these speculations out I suggest: Robert H. Heinlein, The Door into Summer and Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer. The former covers struggle to stay human in a tech driven rat race and the latter places an orphan—we are, all of us, orphaned in many way by the modern condition—as a functionary within an overtly evil society. Look, for all the weirdness on bot sides of the Left-Right American cultural polarity, they do both agree that the world we live in is evil. They believe this for opposite reasons that compels them to behave as servants to that very evil machine by supposing themselves to be the mechanics of its restoration to purity, every one of us possessing but one nail, or screw or turn on the wrench or swing of the hammer, in the form of our vote. Wolfe is vastly more mature, spiritually, than these other writers, of whom Gaiman is the most intelligent.]

James,

The other day, my wife told me I needed to write what makes me uncomfortable and go outside my comfort zone. Hence, my most recent blog entry.

[You are lucky to have her so involved.]

Then we had a discussion about how this wasn't exactly what she was talking about. She is afraid something "bad" might happen to me if I express ideas that are unpopular or controversial.

[Bro, she is right. You will lose your job. This is why I've been pointing young writers at fiction any chance I get. The only place where the free-thinking soul will not be hunted to extinction is in fiction.]

But why write at all if I am only going to play it safe?

[Fiction has a much longer shelf-life than non-fiction, by about 20-fold and gives you a chance to reach minds as yet unborn. Your non-fiction is going to be erased from the internet one day if you don't start a list of words that cannot be used and abide by it. Have your wife compile a dictionary of bad words that you cannot use, which must be updated monthly. In a recent post you actually used the name of the Sacred Disease, the only plague to ever hit humanity, an object of Steerage Cult Obsession. Bro, back away from the keyboard and realize, that this machine is the mouth of your cave in the jungle, that leopards and lions and Great Not-so-Bright Hunters prowl there. Understand, that it is not what your thoughts and opinions are that matters. It is the fact that you think along your own lines of inquiry. Thinking is the crime. The bad thoughts will oscillate in and out of favor—but thought will forever be the true threat to the Self-Aware System.]

I do hope that the subject matter hasn't been beaten to death. I do read your blog and realize you've touched on this subject quite a few times. Yet I've had to the urge get this out there ever since the first time I hear that overhead voice....

Thanks,

Brian

(I'll leave it up to you if you want to include this part. You'll notice I used the phrase "identify as a republican or democrat." This is because no one is born a republican or democrat. It's something people choose one way or the other. Unlike other things such as gender. I was born with male parts and, therefore, I AM a man. (I refuse to say I identify as male).

[Brian, this craze with designer self-definition is a prequel to system-assigned definition of you. To say that you have a certain born nature will be a crime, and has been a crime in most civilized societies since the Old Testament. Currently, social justice politics, the key driver of social intercourse and conduct, is focused on and oriented along the lines of racial and gender-based guilt. When you and I spar with Craig or Erique, we believe ourselves to be acting in partnership with an autonomous man. But, according to the Greater Social Construct we are violating martyrdom statutes based on the very real fact that you and I hopped in a time machine and raped their great-great-great grandmothers. That might seem absurd to you. But that last sentence is what most current meat-puppets believe, that we are blood criminals, evil welling in our misbegotten veins. Our blood is our time machine and no passage of centuries can erase our pre-gestational crimes. If you want to flex against this, you better do it in fiction. I have lost most of my family and my ability to pay room rent on this basis. That's alright on me as a bachelor. But you have a wife.]

(I didn't go on about this in my blog as it would take me off topic. My biggest problem with the world today isn't even the political nonsense permeating society. As a writer, my biggest frustration is how language is being manipulated and changed to the point where words themselves no longer reflect reality).

Brian, we live in an evil world, dedicated to our tormented limitation and ultimate consumption. Do not under estimate its malice, the persistence of its predators or the tenacity of its livestock's dedication to delusion. Our escape into fantasy fiction as boys was different than the delusion that most mind-cattle seek, indeed opposite. Do not think that you share commonality with the zombies that surround you. As soon as they discover that you are human they will be driven to the grizzly feast upon your offensive identity. This is why reading Wolfe should help. He uses the most creative oblique diction I have ever read. Play with this goddamned language of slaves and make it your own. Freedom is at the fiction door. Remember always that your writing foundation, martial arts self-help, is a pit of vipers. Martial Artists are mostly terrible people with an oft-marked tendency towards a high level of parochial cultism. These sissies are PC-Bots waiting for a new program or are dedicated to an outmoded one. You will most likely end up being burned ethereally as a thought criminal by a martial arts reader.