“Fiction is something that never seemed direct enough. But you, a fiction guy—the first books we put up on the sight were fiction—you saw things coming before others. I’m about ready to read Robert E. Howard. There is so much—entire genres—where do you start with fiction?”
-During a car ride through Harford County, MD
…
With fiction, your taste is a greater factor than non fiction. The value of Fiction is primarily in experienced perspectives of the human condition in addition to our own. For instance, Little House on the Prairie, and Tarzan of the Apes appealed to city dwellers very much, because the setting was opposite of that which the reader lived. The novelist must connect emotionally and in authentic view with the reader to be able to gain trust that he or she really understands how people interact with one another. In this way, modern soap operas, still popular, are a crime against humanity, as they have instructed four generations of women that men think and act exactly like women. The selling of soap powder and now weight loss medication through addictive story lines with a circular migration of the narrative gate, has done very much to sell anti depression and anxiety medication to women and porn to men. Modern fiction in general is constructed to mislead the reader as to humanity’s general condition. Up through the 70s fiction was more authentic than nonfiction. Now both forms work together in weaving fakeness into the mesmerized mass mind.
For a nerd of your type, who actually ended up becoming a really good fighter, there is hope in fiction. If you never had taken up stick or knife, this would be a waste. Something was done to you non retards in school that disabled your reading and comprehension while I was in sepcial ed reading class for tards of distinction. I the ducked out of school and into the library at 15, luckily avoiding the general contagion. Modern education, through some mechanics I do not understand has been structured as a negation of the printing press and now ether press.
In some conclave it was said in the mid 1800s, “When trash has learned to read, then writing must be rendered into trash.”
This list is no particular order. I will begin with a modern work that is a rip off of an actual confession from 130 years ago. My hope is that one or more of these writers will catch your fancy and you will devour their books. Just as writing fiction helps a historian be more readable, reading fiction instead of news help the nonfiction reader.
-Blood Meridian by Cormac Macarthy is realistically brutal, not too long and rendered in a postmodern friendly cadence. Alone of his major works, this book has not been made into a movie.
-Journal of the Plague Year by by Daniel Defoe is based of an event which occurred in the author’s childhood, which he writes as an adult view point character, and includes government documents. If you like this try Moll Flanders.
-Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard, is heroic horror, two genres that only Howard combines. Horror is easily generated with weak protagonists. The atmospheric structure required to place an action hero in terror is a high order of writing.
-People of the Black Circle by Howard is a heroic fantasy in which a barbarian bandit takes on the analogues of the banking trusts that wrecked the Depression Era America the writer lived in.
-H.P. Lovecraft’s collected works, of which my favorite is Into the Mountains of Madness, I suggest as an antidote to the heroic stuff. Reading a Lovecraft short between novels, or between switching from fiction to nonfiction, is helpful. Lovecraft was a pussy and wrote from a physically emasculated yet heroically aware perspective. Howard actually borrowed his fantasy cosmology from his pen pal Lovecraft.
-Phillip K. Dick’s selected short stories should be used like Lovecraft, to be read between more heroic works. This man had brain injuries and did a lot of drugs. He saw the social expression of the high tech future better than any other writer of the 1950s thru 1970s. His Exegesis is a 900 page dream record which you might find of interest. I have covered part of it under the Logos tag on this site.
-Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolf is the first of 4 novels in The Book of the New Sun. Try that to see if you can stomach the other 3. Wolfe writes about a future we are entering now, and did so in the 1970s. His 4 volume Litany of the Long Sun is a nice read as well.
Note that quality science fiction is currently absent while fantasy has expanded some and not reduced in quality as had science fiction. I suspect that the Dick’s and Wolfe’s of the present age, have, like Greg Bear, who began writing for the FBI after 911, as the best hard science fiction writer alive, now work as captured government futurists.
-Blood Music by Greg Bear is a genius work that predicts your current condition.
-Poul Anderson, father in law of Bear, was the best historian among science fiction and fantasy writers. His best book was the Boat of a Million Years.
-Robert Silverberg, best prose writer of the late 1900s in science fiction and fantasy, authored The Face Upon the Waters.
-Tarnsman of Gor, an anti feminist fantasy makes a nice break in the list. Read after any lefty book on utopian sociology. Slave Girl of Gor and Priestkings of Gor are a lot of fun. The series drags after Volume 7.
-The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs is good working class fun that is somewhat ruined by the upper class female love interest.
-The Iron Heel by Jack London along with his science fiction stories such as The Scarlet Plague and Enemy of all the World, are highly recommended for a man of your left wing sensibilities.
-Dracula, by Bram Stoker holds up as a chilling reminder of our fall.
-Louis L. A’Mour’s The Key Lock Man is my favorite of his. He is regarded as a formula writer. You may not know that from western dime novels to over 200 John Wayne movies, that frontier narratives have done more to shape our worldview, even if you have not watched one, by establishing the narrative shape of American thought, the grooves of our collective vinyl mind that the needle of media plays upon. The Quick and the Dead was lame like the movie. But Briowne, Down the Long Hills, The Fergussen Rifle, Last of the Breed, Sitka, To the Far Blue Mountains, The Walking Drum, Fair Blows the Wind were all good reads. His biography, Education of a Wandering Man, is very readable. He won like 50 pro boxing bouts.
-The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis along with the transcript of his lecture on modern mind control given during WWII, titled The Abolition of Man are the perspective of the keenest mind of his time. Most of Lewis’s fiction is either for children or is really dense and plodding adult fare. So I recommend these short works.
-David Brin’s Uplift trilogy, Postman and Glory Season are decent reads which appeal more to your frame of mind than to mine.
-Return to Howard is important, as he seems to have channeled the malevolence built into civilization on a mythic level. Reading Howard appealed to my early teenage mindset and seems to have helped me resist the inherent mesmerism by omission that is modern nonfiction writing. His favorite hero of mine is Solomon Kane. I would get that collection and never read the foreword for any book on this list reprinted in our age. Howard’s best short stories are Conan yarns:
-The Tower of the Elephant
-Rogues in the House
-Man Eaters of Zamboula [about 1990s+ Baltimore]
-Queen of the Black Coast [a swords and sandals Bonnie and Clyde]
-Beyond the Black River, a novella that is essentially an American frontier adventure
