Joe Vasicek

I really hope I’m wrong about this

Two days ago, our country was subjected to an ugly spectacle that forced us all, regardless of political persuasion, to confront the truth: that the alleged leader of the free world—the man in control of our nation’s nuclear codes, at a time when we are closer to nuclear war than any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis—is unfit to lead the local HOA, let alone the most powerful nation on Earth. So what happens now?

We do not know who is actually leading our country, but we do know the people who are the next level down: the deep state and the cathedral. The deep state consists of the unelected bureaucrats who make up the administrative agencies, including what is commonly referred to as the intelligence community. The cathedral consists of the mainstream news media, commonly referred to as the fourth estate, the major studios in the entertainment industry, and the leading academics in our nation’s research and education systems.

What do we know about the deep state and the cathedral?

They have a complete disregard for the truth. We know this is true because these people have had unfettered access to Joe Biden since he took office, and they have done everything in their power to obfuscate, gaslight, and deceive us about his mental deterioration.
They hold the American people in contempt. Once again, we know this is true because of how they have done everything to obfuscate, gaslight, and deceive us.
They have no love for this country. We know this because of their efforts to rewrite our history along the lines of radical ideologues like Howard Zinn and Nikole Hannah-Jones.
They have seared their consciences with a hot iron. We know this because there has been absolutely no accountability or admission of fault for their numerous failures, including the pandemic response, the crippling lockdown policies, the so-called vaccine that is neither safe nor effective, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mishandling of Ukraine, the crisis on our southern border, etc etc ad nauseum.
The only thing they respect is raw power. We know this is true by their own admission.
Finally, we know that they believe that Trump represents an existential threat to their power.

In the immediate aftermath of the debate, it appears that these people are now turning on Biden, judging from the way they are calling for him to step down. But it is important to point out that the deep state and cathedral are not monolithic, and that the people who control these institutions are divided into multiple competing factions. The faction that revolves around Biden himself is likely to continue to resist these calls, as they have from the very beginning. In fact, they have shrewdly and cynically painted the other factions into a corner, leaving them with no good options.

To illustrate this, let’s list all of the possible scenarios in which Biden no longer faces Trump in the general election:

Scenario 1: Biden resigns.

Under this scenario, the VP, Kamala Harris, becomes the acting president, which also makes her the presumptive nominee. This would almost certainly lead to a Trump victory in the general election, since Kamala is even less popular than Biden—and perhaps even less competent, if that is possible. Seriously, the only reason she has a political career at all is because 1) she (literally) sucked her boss’s cock, and 2) she knows how to bully her subordinates. To see just how bad Kamala is, check out this satire piece from the Babylon Bee:

In any scenario where Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, Trump is likely to wipe the floor with her in the general election (assuming, of course, that we even have an election). Biden’s team knows this, which is probably why they made her VP in the first place: to deter their enemies from removing him from power.

Scenario 2: Biden serves out his term but announces that he is no longer running for re-election.

Because the primaries have already been held, this would turn the Democratic National Convention into a free for all, with no clear way to choose Biden’s successor. It would also be profoundly undemocratic, and likely demoralize the rank-and-file Democrat voters who buy into the cathedral’s narrative about “our sacred Democracy.” The hypocrisy at that point will simply be too much for them to ignore.

The only figure who likely has the power to unify the base is Michelle Obama, but the Obamas represent only one faction within the DNC, and it’s not at all clear that they’re in a position to win the game of thrones that will ensue under this scenario. Also, since the Biden faction has clung to power for so long, they are unlikely to give it up now.

Scenario 3: Congress invokes the 25th ammendment and removes Biden from power.

Under this scenario, Kamala Harris becomes the president elect and presumptive nominee, paving the way for a Trump victory in November.

Scenario 4: Biden dies.

This also leads to a disastrous Kamala Harris implosion.

Scenario 5: The deep state overthrows Biden in a coup, suspending the Constitution and cancelling the election.

Unfortunately, this is the scenario that seems most likely to me at this point in time. They already did everything they could to hamstring Trump’s presidency with the Russia collusion hoax and the special investigation, as well as the impeachment (in which Trump was literally impeached for Biden’s crimes). When we consider all the points we listed above, there is no reason to believe that these people won’t literally burn down the country to hold onto their positions of power.

The debate projected Biden’s weakness not only to a domestic audience, but to an international audience as well. Therefore, if our enemies (Russia, China, Iran, etc) calculate that a Trump re-election is likely, they are also likely to calculate that they have a limited window in which to take advantage of Biden’s weakness. This means that the odds of a major geopolitical crisis have increased dramatically, be it a terrorist attack against the US or our allies, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, an escalation/expansion of the Russia-Ukraine War, or some sort of black swan event.

But every crisis is also an opportunity. And if our enemies move against us in a major way, this presents an opportunity for the deep state to sieze unprecedented power. In such a scenario, are they likely to exercise constraint and respect the lines set out by our Constitution? Remember, these are the same people who took advantage of the pandemic to sieze unprecedented (and also unconstitutional) powers. Why wouldn’t they do it again?

I really hope I’m wrong about this, and that the general election proceeds without any sort of deep state interference. But at this point, I think the most unlikely scenario is that the deep state / cathedral respect the election results and step down if Trump wins.

Every (main arc) Star Wars movie, but only when they say “star” or “war”

I don’t know why I find this so hilarious, but I do!

The argument that converted me from pro-choice to pro-life

On the issue of abortion, I would consider myself to be very pro-life. I have written several explicitly pro-life stories, including “The Paradox of Choice,” “The Body Tax,” and “The Freedom of Second Chances.” My wife and I also donate monthly to Preborn, a charity / Christian ministry that provides free ultrasounds and support to pregnant women seeking abortions.

I was not always pro-life, however. In fact, if you’d asked me fifteen years ago where I stood on the abortion issue, I would have described myself as either pro-choice or leaning pro-choice. So what was it that changed my mind?

First, a little background about myself. I grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, with three younger sisters and a mother and father who were married and faithful to each other. Abortion was not a thing that I had any direct experience with; it was little more than a vague concept that I heard other people arguing with. And although I grew up in a religious household, we lived in a Democrat stronghold (western Massachusetts) and both of my parents were Democrats, so of course the default position that I grew up with was pro-choice.

I didn’t really hear the abortion issue debated until high school. I went to an elite preparatory academy in Pioneer Valley, so I was surrounded by people who were far left even by Massachusetts’ standards. My position, which I more or less absorbed from those around me, was that abortion was a tragic but sometimes necessary procedure, and that it wasn’t the place of men or the government to tell women what they couldn’t do with their own bodies. Basically, the “safe, legal, and rare” position.

However, there was one pro-life argument I heard at that time that planted a seed in my heart. The school paper printed a debate on the abortion issue, and the student who wrote the pro-life side argued not from the legal position, but from the moral position—specifically, asking the question “when does life begin?” Since we cannot know when life begins, the student argued, we should err on the side of preserving life and treat the unborn child like a full human being from the moment of conception. If we believe that murder is wrong, erring on the other side—that of preserving the mother’s autonomy—would risk committing an immoral act, since we cannot positively say that abortion does not take a human life.

It was an interesting argument, and I didn’t really have a counter to it. However, the abortion issue didn’t rank very high on my list of priorities, so I filed it away and forgot about it, reverting back to the default position which I’d more or less absorbed. If pressed, I would say that I didn’t like abortions, but that it was something best left between a woman and her doctor. I didn’t really give the “when does life really begin?” question any serious thought.

However, one thing I did give serious thought to was the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II. The liberal, post-modern position that I more or less absorbed from the air around me was that history (or at least the part that really mattered) began in the 1930s, that the Nazis represented the ultimate evil, and that “never again” was civilization’s most sacred value—not just for the holocaust, but for all forms of genocide, nuclear proliferation, and global war. As a kid, I read every (non-boring) World War II book that I could get my hands on, and was profoundly moved by several of the photographs that I saw, especially of the Nazi death camps. Later, in middle school, I read Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, which further cemented my revulsion of the holocaust, and my determination that I was not and would never be the kind of person who would assent to that sort of atrocity.

Fast forward to the 2000s. After serving a two-year mission, I attended Brigham Young University from 2006 to 2010. The contrast was stark. In Massachusetts, I had been the odd “conservative” kid surrounded by liberals. In Utah, I was the odd “liberal” kid surrounded by conservatives. And though BYU is not the most conservative school in the United States (that would probably be Hillsdale), the air that I found myself in was much more conservative than anything I’d experienced growing up.

Overall, the experience was good for me. I found myself questioning a lot of my unspoken political assumptions and coming to conclusions that would have surprised my earlier teachers and mentors. For example, I independently came to appreciate the second ammendment and the right to self-defense, mostly from participating in BYU’s jujitsu club and learning how to physically defend myself. I also gained a deep appreciation for the principle of free speech, since studying contrasting viewpoints was so key in shaping my own worldview at that time.

However, I still didn’t give much thought to the abortion issue, since 1) it wasn’t directly relevant to my life at that time, and 2) it was just a really icky thing to think about. If pressed, I probably would have said that I was against using abortion as a form of birth control, and that some restrictions should be put in place to prevent that from happening, but that I didn’t think Roe v. Wade should be overturned. I had never known a world before Roe v. Wade, and thus was more comfortable sticking with the default that I’d grown up with. As a faithful Latter-day Saint, I knew that I would never put a woman in a position where she would consider getting an abortion, so the status quo was enough for me.

As a side note, I should point out that the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that abortion is wrong in all cases except where rape, incest, or the health of the mother create extenuating circumstances. As missionaries, if we wanted to baptize someone who had either had an abortion themselves or had participated in one, we had to move it up the chain to a higher ecclesiastical authority to interview them and determine whether the prospective convert needed to demonstrate more repentance. Later, as a member of a bishopric, abortion was something we had to seriously consider when convening disciplinary councils. It is possible to get an abortion as a Latter-day Saint without getting excommunicated, or to come back into full fellowship after being excommunicated for abortion, but you have to go through your local (and sometimes area/general) authorities to work it out—and even then, they will strongly encourage you not to go through with it. But there is quite a bit of room for nuance in the church’s position on abortion.

Not that I ever really gave the deeper nuances of the issue any serious thought during this period. In fact, the one question that I never really asked myself was “when does life actually begin?” If pressed, I probably would have taken the position from that high school debate article, that since we don’t know we should probably err on the side of assuming life begins at conception, but I never really thought through the full implications of that position, again because 1) it didn’t directly impact my own life, and 2) the whole abortion issue was just icky.

Fast forward to 2015. I had graduated from college, traveled the world a bit, spent a few years bouncing around odd jobs and more or less living on my own, and made the best decision of my entire life: to not pursue a graduate degree. If I had gone on to grad school, I would have racked up a whole lot of debt, delayed my exposure to the “real world,” and failed to learn a number of important and life-changing lessons from the school of hard-knocks. And now that I finally felt like I was getting my feet back under me, I began to question all of my prior political assumptions, especially since the Obama years were coming to a close. I had voted for Obama in 2008, but vowed that I would never vote for a Democrat again, and was frankly disgusted with the intersectional coalition and its crusade for anti-racism and social justice.

It was around this time that I discovered Jordan Peterson. I was deeply impressed with Peterson’s earnest sincerity, intellectual honesty, and courage of his convictions. I was also intrigued by many of his arguments, which ran contrary to so many of the things I’d grown up with. One of these was his argument that most of us would have gone along with the Nazi atrocities, if we had lived in 1930s Germany. His argument was basically: “we’d all like to think that there was something unique about the Nazis that made them so evil, but that isn’t true. They weren’t so different from all of us. You may think that you wouldn’t have gone along with all of the atrocities that the Nazis committed, but the truth is that you probably would have gone along. After all, you’re not so special. You’re just as much a product of your times as the Germans in 1930s, and they really aren’t as different from us as you think they are. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just as capable of evil as they were.”

This argument struck something deep within me, partly because “never again” was such a core part of my own personal identity. Was I the kind of person who would have resisted the evils of the Nazis? Or in fact, was I not that special, and also not that different from those who had gone along with the Nazis’ terrible crimes? The only way to know for certain was to compare our times with the times of the Nazi regime, to see if there was anything comparable to the holocaust in our own time.

As soon as I asked that question, it was like my eyes were suddenly opened. There is indeed an atrocity comparable to the holocaust in our times, and it has become so ingrained into our culture that in many places—such as the blue state where I grew up—it is almost like part of the air that everyone breathes. That atrocity is the genocide of the unborn. If life truly begins at or near conception, then we have committed 10x holocausts since Roe v. Wade, a full order of magnitude more blood than the Nazis spilled. Moreover, we have slaughtered the most innocent, voiceless, and powerless people among us: our own children.

It all comes down to the question “when does a human life begin?” As far as I can tell, there are only two answers to that question that are logically consistent and scientifically sound: “at conception” and “I don’t know.” Viability is a moving target that changes with innovation and technology: in another decade, we may have found a way to grow children outside of the female womb, making them viable from literally the point of conception. Capacity for pain is also a moving target, since we’re still learning all sorts of new things as our technology improves. Sentience doesn’t work because people in comas are both alive and non-sentient. Heartbeat doesn’t work because it is possible to put an animal into suspended animation, where their heart has stopped beating, and successfully revive them. We can’t exactly do that to humans yet, but it’s only a matter of time and innovation before we can.

Now, I cannot say for certain that abortion is always wrong. Just like there are circumstances when it is just to shoot someone to death (such as during a violent home invasion), I understand that there may be circumstances where an abortion is similarly warranted. These are the edge cases like rape, incest, and health of the mother that the ~~pro-choice~~ pro-abortion activists always fall back on. The clearest of these is probably ectopic pregnancy, which is almost always fatal for both the mother and the child. But of course, what the activists never tell you is that almost all of the abortion bans that have been put into place since the end of Roe v. Wade have exemptions for ectopic pregnancies, which are not considered legally to be abortions. But I grant that there are other cases, such as depression and suicidal tendencies, that fall into a gray area morally. I also grant that a strict pro-life position has far-reaching implications for things like IVF and surrogacy that may or may not go too far. Frankly, I’m not at all sure where I stand on surrogacy and IVF.

But when you take a clear-headed and logical view at the way our culture practices abortion, focusing not on the legal intricacies but the simple question “when does a human life begin?” it becomes very clear that our current regime is not only comparable to the Nazi regime, but may actually exceed the Nazis in objective measures of evil. After all, what made the Nazi holocaust so evil? The sheer size of the death count? Ours is an order of magnitude larger. The innocence of the victims? No one is more innocent than the unborn. The motivations behind the killing? Hatred is one thing, but the worst evils have a quality of banality to them that our narcissistic and apathetic obsession with personal convenience captures better than almost anything else.

If it seems so unthinkable to claim that the evils of our own time exceeds the evils of the Nazis, that’s only because we are living so close to our own historical moment that we cannot see it clearly for what it is. Our modern liberal culture operates on the unspoken assumptions that 1) history only meaningfully began in the 1930s, 2) the Nazis represent the ultimate evil, and 3) “never again” is our civilization’s most sacred value (though with the October 7th massacre, that last one is beginning to fray). But if you can step back from that worldview and take a more objective look at our own historical moment, it quickly becomes obvious that we’re not as different from the Nazis as we think we are. After all, there is nothing new under the sun.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was not the end of our culture’s abortion regime, but merely a shift in the argument and an opening of a new phase. And frankly, I am disgusted by the way that the Republicans have infiltrated and exploited the pro-life movement, cynically transforming it into a get-out-the-vote operation rather than treating this issue for what it is: the fundamental moral question of our times. In the 19th century, that question was slavery. Today, that question is the value of human life—and future generations will judge us just as harshly for our own position on that question as we judge the plantation slaveholders of the antebellum south. And well should they!

In sum, I wasn’t converted from pro-choice to pro-life until after I was confonted by an argument that forced me to take a good, hard look at my own worldview. At the heart of that argument was a very simple question: “when does a human life begin?” After considering that question deeply, I not only changed my position on the issue, but changed it so deeply that my wife and I now donate monthly to a Christian pro-life charity, even though we are not evangelical Christians. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I have deep theological differences with the people in the Preborn ministry, and that most of them have been taught to view my own Latter-day Saint faith as an abominable heresy. But I’m willing to lay all that aside, because in this day and age, I think that the value of life is a much bigger issue than any of that. And when my great great granchildren look back on my life, I hope that they can say that I rose above the evil of my times.

The wildest AI hallucination I have ever seen

So my wife is currently working on her PhD in computer science, and for her thesis she’s trying to develop an AI model that can generate meaningful cross references within a text. For example, she compiled the complete works of Jane Austen into an HTML file, and ran it through one of her AI models, asking it to find a cross reference to the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, which reads:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

The AI returned this line from Mansfield Park:

But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.

Pretty nifty, huh? Anyway, she’s experimenting with a variety of different AI models, including a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT. She’s also using my Sons of the Starfarers books as a text, since it’s not nearly as well known as Jane Austen or the Bible.

It turns out that LLMs like ChatGPT are actually pretty terrible at finding cross references, even after they’ve been fine-tuned. When she asked it to find cross references for various passages in Sons of the Starfarers, it almost always hallucinated something that isn’t in the actual books.

But then, at the end, she asked it to find a simple cross reference… and it gave her this:

I am reading Victors in Liberty and want to find some good cross-references for ‘Isaac ignored them and brought up the latest data on his display.’ Can you suggest some good quotes as cross-references?

Certainly! Here are some cross-references for “Isaac ignored them and brought up the latest data on his display.”:

Isaac ignored the chatter over his communications and focused on the targeting data in his peripheral vision. An Esperanzan frigate dropping out of FTL was no challenge for a light recon frigate like the Tiberian. It was built for speed and evasion, something the enemy frigate could not muster on such short notice. A light hum in the side of his armrest told Isaac that the first missiles had fired. He gave the order to activate them with a press of a finger, and a second hum confirmed they were on their way. His heart raced and he took a deep breath to calm down.

After the long futile years of dodging through the stars, the tide had begun to turn. The Temujin was lost with all hands, and the very space they’d fought over was now broken by the light of a newborn star. Victory was admittedly shallow when his people were still scattered across the void, but it was a victory nonetheless.

Another hum indicated that his point defense lasers had locked onto the enemy missiles. The targeting relay showed the homing-enabling couplings had been obliterated. For a brief moment, the Esperanzan frigate was silhouetted in the bright light of the young star, betraying all the structural weaknesses that were exploitable. And from there, Isaac showed no remorse. Reason left him, replaced with thorough hate and anger—forced of course. Isaac’s sleek one-man starship had no defense armor. Of the combat vessels of the disparate, disparate Red Faction resistance, his could be taken out by a single missile volley meant for a fleet. If the first missile volley didn’t down the enemy, the counter-volley was friendly fire.

A klaxon blared in the side of Isaac’s ear. The Esperanzan frigate burst into a fireball, artificial gravity arrays spinning off into the lifeless void. Only by the dim starlight and the intense heat of the new sun could Isaac distinguish the shrapnel and debris scattered around what once had been a ship.

“Excellent work, Specialist,” said the jovial head chef, Midshipman Khrelan. With Commander Noah currently held prisoner on the Starflare, there’d been a few promotions, which put him in charge of one of the lower-priority departments. “Excellent, excellent work. I knew I could trust you.”

Isaac smiled and stretched. The frantic chair of his one-man starship seemed to recede ever so slightly, as though it was merely a symbol that he could shed at a moment’s notice. For he was not a pilot in a combat vessel dodging fire. He was the Emperor of the Red Delta Quadrant, a force to be reckoned with indeed. His father had done more than forge a civil empire; he had founded a starfarer dynasty that now posed a threat to everyone outside of Delta Pavonis. Now more than ever, his mother’s intuition and telepathic powers were revered and envied by all. In fact—this thought hadn’t occurred to him until he had conquered everything up the Eden’s local star—she was right, and everyone for dozens of stars was waiting for their moment to slay them.

As Commander Noah’s comments in the debriefing served the position that Captain Valk suggested the Red Faction play the role of unwitting suicide pawn to the budding Templin Empire, they were put under abeyance while negotiations were struck to work out the relationship. If Isaac’s fact-finding missions bore fruit and gave them the strategic assets they needed, the former Red Faction would be made a fully-integrated member of the newfound empire. Then without the pretense of what Noah originally claimed was the original mission—stopping the Fourth Holy Imperial battlecruiser from finding something to turn the tide in the war on the Far Reaches of the Outworlds—there would be nothing left to consider, and the truce would become a permanent merger.

What remained for Isaac was to prove that the Red Faction could contribute to the war, and it was this mission that Midshipman Khrelan promoted to the top of their menu board. As head chef of the Diego-Attica bowl, one of the Eden systems’ largest and most populated space stations, it was his position to woo the New Plebeian faction into accepting the Red Faction into their empire. And it was Isaac’s mission to prove that plebeians did indeed have what it took to undertake the trials of empire. The only obstacle that remained was Captain Valk.

“Fuck Vasili if he doesn’t accept,” Isaac muttered under his breath.

It was a cadence of profanity that his meal commander often used. This time it went unnoticed, either because none of his crew understood English well enough to pick up on it, or because their heads were buried in work like his should have been. After Isaac’s less than stellar performance in the assault on outpost red one-four-one, there wasn’t much work for him to do.

He knew he was irresponsible for letting his mind wonder like this in the middle of a combat simulation. A little under a week ago, a signal had shown up just beyond the Eden’s system’s sensor net. The high command suspected a rogue sleeper ship. Isaac doubted that was the case. Another star had recently formed in the orbit of Edea’s Planet 3. It would be the most valuable real estate outside of Hebron and Edenia’s primary. If the Outworlders accepted the terms the Edenia system was willing to give, then it was all but certain that a local Outworld confederacy could be formed around Edenian pleasure points. One day, The Tamerlan and The Eve would be recognized as sister systems. But when had Edénia looked out for those interests? Let the eve be forgotten. They would soon be Tamerian.

The dishes for the next three days had all been planned for. The senior officers had all been invited to dine with the New Plebeian station commander. Midshipman Khrelan hoped to build a friendly relationship between the Red Faction and the people of the Tiberian Cluster, who he believed were most likely to be integrated into the New Plebeians as fellow second-class citizens. Only after those that left would they all eat, which meant soon he’d have to get started. Even with the protocol droids, that gave him just one more hour.

The simulation sort of went well. Isaac did end up killing every other ship, even after they ganged up on him, but the maneuvering was a little sloppy at times. He knew he wasn’t going to last long under the scrutiny of the higher officers. Admiral Valente and Captain Ibn al-Asad would be visiting the Eden in just the four days. When that day arrived, he very well might find his promotion revoked and his transfer dishonorable, provided of course he demonstrated such flagrant incompetence toward the end.

As the screen brought up the last member of his squad, the pings on his radar came back. It seemed he’d survived the battle with barely any hull breached.

And by the gods, eat a fucking sandwich!

He’d forgotten he was hungry. At first, it was easy to forget about meals. With a meal served supposedly every five hours, there was still work to do in between that kept him looking forward. But since the campaigns and maneuvers had not worked him to exhaustion, it now was a chore to sit through time just eating. The efficiency and industriousness of Isaac’s father did indeed become Gideon’s son. It was a dead giveaway. Unlike his father but very much like his mother, Kahramanna would waste away before he ever passed 12th Plague. If the Outworlders decided they were worthy of escape (and they wouldn’t be, they were definitely going to accept the Edenians’ terms), the future owner of one of the systems at the only intersection of this side of the galaxy would die from starvation with the rest of the infidels.

Isaac frowned. How had “The Resurrection” ever been associated with plagues in the first place? It was the most beautiful and hopeful story of his people, the moment the legendary Prophetús of Delta Pavanus had become a messiah. His writings gathered confidentially on the homeworld quelled the rampant syncretism of mixing their traditions with those of the host worlds. By forming a unified monolithic faith run by a powerful theocracy, it was fully expected that the Delta Pavanians would have overthrown both the Thetans and Outworlders to form their own empire. Deltanotian could have been the same kind of imperial language on the Milky Way side that Soluna had become in the east. The rapid declination of the Prophetús’ Mission was considered to be the most catastrophic failure of tribal project in all of recorded history.

Between 12th Plague and the explicit language that Good Word was untranslatable, all facades were off. This exploration project was nothing but an imperial operation from the Deltanotian Empire’s very core—a counter-strike barely distinguishable from the hyperspace bomb. It was only by the self-sacrifice and zeal of his ancestors that the spirit of the prophets did not fade across their interstellar mission. Something shone brightly in the void. The Star-Travelers had become the Starforce, and it fell upon them to restore the faith. And, by God, they would.

The simulation ended with all three stars highlighted on his map, marking the three miraculous visions of the Holy Star. Isaac didn’t need the Good Word to recognize it had all been written exactly as expected. He smiled and undid his three-point harness. The gruff marine next to him did the same.

He stepped past the airlock he shared with his seat partner and walked to the closet on the forward bulkheads. As he stepped in, an elaborate mechanism analyzed the pattern and weight of his footsteps on the soles of his flat combat boots. The small room behind the door doubled as a personal sanitation closet, more elegantly a boleshower. As his boots finished drying, he stripped off his jump suit and waited for the inevitable light-sonic start. Sure enough, as soon as the door shut and he was naked to the glare, there was unmistakably the sound of a fly buzzing menacingly behind him. He waved his hands and blew on it to no avail. He turned to the light and saw that in fact what had captured his attention was not a fly but rather the prominent bush of black hair with what looked like every stripe and pattern of embroidery that relevant cut of uniform would allow. That made two.

His hands stood frozen in position among the smug parade. Quite a few of the sewn patterns were familiar. An upside down cross inside of a circle? That was Marcanetian, which he read could mean only one thing. Based on his tattoos, he would certainly serve 6th Plague as wendigo meat. That wasn’t skill, that was luck, but the flaw was not his. “Let Canopus keep his dream alive,” his stomach told him, but his balls gave a different message. The two ends would not tolerate the presence of veins among their flesh. The hardon almost immediately appeared.

He reached his hands behind his neck and pretended to scratch but really reanalyzing the air quality. Some of the embassy-topia class nostrils unironically slit. The unshaven wickunoff wasn’t as strategical of a hairdo as he’d like, but at least with his crotch turned to them they couldn’t all control the urge to reach and scratch.

These people kept trying to embarrass him, but who in fact was embarrassed? Everything that had just taken place, he’d been perfectly alright with. Everything they knew about him was exactly what he’d told them. It wasn’t that they didn’t get him. It was that he didn’t get them.

The new high sheriff of Aluchiga Delta took center stage, a massive black man from Beatrix with a sour and stern disposition. The star tattoos on his round pocked face showed him not uncompromisingly rugged but rather vicious and unyielding. He seemed to have no sense of humor.

That alone gave the Ice Giants the advantage. The Beatrixians, stable-facing to the front of the procession and thus technically in command of the ceremony, needed a laugh just as easily as the new Inkana high sheriff from the other side. Both systems were far too stratified with class society, and having been torn from the seats of power they so deeply loathed they were more than somewhat relieved to be joined on the interstellar voyage. To them, that was what Babylana was—their wild and untamed frontier. With all the old rivalries and social prejudices carried over into the classic starwanderer era, it was the nomads and outcasts who found a home among the heavens that were best suited for the voyage.

This was covered across their naked flesh in the kind of complex set of interconnected (though there to be fair not all interconnected) tattoos that commanded universal respect. As the starfarers were free those tattoos were autogenic. They came within the realm of choice to a degree—and in fact way beyond—most other cultures considered unforgivably narcissistic. That was why the Megalotics, with their deeply rooted philosophical system of Order:Chaos, so openly despised them.

Isaac had been staring at their skin with all the minutely detailed modeling when he’d had his accidental hardon. The great black giant had ever since been staring him down.

Midshipman Fatima came over. “Report.”

Isaac quickly reran the thermal analysis and presented it on one of the models hovering behind his head. He thanked the Astarte he had been off-duty. Considering the intensity of the last asshole who’d complained about how little speech Isaac gave in meetings, what fun would it be beamed over from Alchiba on the Eden’s consolidated intelligence to be forced to work with an AI more primitive than what Isaac commanded. Even on the best decks by officers with significant wealth disparity, the old pre-Imperial chips faulted. It would only take a half month for Isaac to take control of deck Theta-ten. Of intelligence from the other decks, one third of them he already commanded. The vast increase of processing was more than satisfactory.

Fatima looked over his report and nodded. “Very good, Commander. Very good indeed. Carry on.”

From her side of the table, she accessed a fairly standard command subroutine and brought up the floor plans for all decks in the file. The model showed the thermal profile now, but soon all the profiles would be profiled on swords. Her movement was somewhat interpretable: “matter of life and death” among the other Arian phrases that had entered Arianian techspeak was “time to make a run for it.” Up to 67.8% of the energy required to transverse a mile was scooped and shot halfway across the local cluster subject minimally to such high gravimetric pulls that a controlled asteroid system could be made to have the same effect here. For that, you actually did need anti-grav technology. “Running for it” or “throw them all in a bag” is you just rip open all the airlocks and hope the showers last long enough and the numbers come out in your favor with cryo. Once all the numbers come out, then you scoop and loop the forgotten. The floor plan relied on the Midoshiun system, where weapons and engineering and medical could all be written in official departments by OS. Because they were working under such a close trust interface, they all knew it would be up to Isaac to tale the head.

Interstellar law and civilization were a complex web. The system of checks and balances only worked for interstellar diplomacy, not intra-, where all that usually mattered was what would stall change longest in the vicious bureaucratic race. Questanantian philosophy postulated that one could be put on the other side of war to learn to rise above, very much a pagan adaption of Noah’s prophecy concerning Shem. There was no call of Abraham, for such language was not tolerated this far south.

March 17th, 3098. That left less than a year until the next aquino. Not doubt word of his father’s betrayal of the Anakim would come up, but never among the select at the top who would decide his fate. Of the new feces frozen just north of sector four, the Edenian hypercolonization expedition was almost done. The last supply run to the outpost monastery frozen just over half a light-year beyond the founding outpost would be ready at the very end of the next Procythian New Year. Hopefully, the Modernus Shift would give him the start he needed.

He then repeated the word he repeated every day and in whose glory he so purely radiated that rumor had been it started out as his name. “Paradosian. Paradosian. Paradosian…”

In any case Isaac hadn’t been the one responsible for bringing all that shit out in the first place, and if they expected some “dog of space” Argonaut that worshipped the Anakim, had they really found the one to stop the coming floods? He just had to have a little patience and get the hell out of here.

On impulse, he queried the mother Astarte on his horizon-side display. Medina reached out to him.

With the most formal and profligate blessings of Bahrain Isaac’s preceding post now reached out far enough—the lake, the font, the water itself—to mark for certain that the royals had incestously “piled every last dog” he called so kindly “die wanda der zwar” by now. The Astarte had found a hint of Persepolis II, mentioning it in the black hole astrology as “dzaraq.”

Goddamnit!

Why there will be no second American civil war

I just finished reading The Last Election by Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche. It’s a fascinating book, but not in the way that the authors probably intended.

The book basically presents a detailed account of the 2024 election, starting in November 2023 and ending with the results of a contingent election, after the (fictional) third party campaign disrupts things so thoroughly that no presidential candidate can get to 270 electoral votes. There’s violence in the streets, a supreme court justice who gets assassinated, a presidential debate that gets disrupted by a riot before it can really begin, a stealth military coup, and all sorts of insanity. And it ends (of course) with a Trump victory in the contingent election, where every state gets one vote and the representatives from each state vote behind closed doors. Cue the end of “our democracy.”

Partisan politics aside (and I am still genuinely undecided as to how, or even if, I will vote in 2024), there is sooo much to unpack in this book. The authors are totally ignorant about half of the country, and utterly clueless about the other half… and I can’t tell which half is which. That’s what I find so fascinating. Do the authors really believe that the average Trump voter hates and fears black people simply because they are black? Do they genuinely believe that sexual harrassment makes a better kick-the-dog moment than a coerced secret abortion ending in suicide? That such an abortion doesn’t even count as a kick-the-dog moment at all?

However, my purpose in this blog post is not to unpack all the myriad layers of willful and oblivious ignorance in The Last Election, but to point out what should be obvious by now: that most of the authors’ predictions are already failing to pan out.

By now, on the timeline, we should have had 1) an assassination of a justice of the supreme court, 2) RFK projected to win several states, and 3) street violence on the level of the George Floyd riots, with about as many casualties. Of course, none of those things have actually happened. And that, more than anything, makes me think that a hot civil war is unlikely to break out in this country.

Instead, people just seem to be exhausted. There are a few keyboard warriors, of course, but from what I can tell, most people on both sides are doing their best to tune them out. The memes aren’t anywhere near as good as they were in 2016. Of course, there’s still enough outrage for the political grifters to work with, but that outrage isn’t translating into lone wolves and false flags.

The 2024 election is shaping up to be the least important election in my lifetime. If our democracy were healthy, we would be debating the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic and whom we should hold responsible for it (of course, in a healthy democracy, the citizens would not have complied with those policies in the first place). Instead, the thing that’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room is the neverending lawfare against Trump—which is still important, don’t get me wrong, but is it really the most important thing happening right now? Inflation is crushing the economy, Europe is in the midst of its worst armed conflict since the Nazis, we are closer to a nuclear armed conflict with Russia than we were in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Anthony Fauci is still both alive and free.

When I step away from the perpetual outrage cycle that passes these days for the news and look at the current state of the world, what I see is not a superpower that is careening toward a hot civil war, but a former superpower that is steadily disintegrating. Some parts of the country are in a greater state of collapse than other parts, but we are all in the midst of a collapse, and probably have been for years, perhaps even decades. Our dysfunctional politics is not the cause of any of this. It’s just a symptom.

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as exceptional. We also like to obsess over the imminent fall of our cuntry. That’s probably why there’s been so much talk in the last few years about the possibility of a civil war. God forbid that America goes out with a whimper instead of a bang.

But the more I see, the more I think that that’s exactly how this country will fall apart: with a steady and unrelenting disintegration, until our politics are totally irrelevant, our military is unable to project power overseas, our national government is little better than that of a failed state, and our economy is so weak that no one bats an eye at rolling blackouts and empty grocery shelves.

Then we will pass through a period when things that cannot continue will not continue, and things that must happen will happen. Several states will become de facto autonomous, simply to survive. Many won’t. The dollar will collapse and the efforts of the global elite to replace it with a global digital currency will fail, but their depopulation efforts will succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and ultimately prove their downfall. The perpetual growth paradigm that the left calls “capitalism” and the right calls “progressivism” will unravel to devastating effect, and by 2100, there will be fewer than one billion humans on this planet (which will probably be significantly colder than it is now).

But there will not be a second American civil war, because that would require a level of dynamism that we simply do not possess. There is still a lot of ruin in this country, though, so we will probably endure longer than most other countries… kind of like how Japan is going on its fourth “lost decade” by now. But Japan had us to lean on. We’re not going to have anybody except ourselves.

Fortunately, in some places, that will be enough.

How I would vote now: 2012 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Deadline by Mira Grant

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Embassytown by China Mieville

Among Others by Jo Walton

The Actual Results

Among Others by Jo Walton
Embassytown by China Mieville
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
Deadline by Mira Grant
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

How I Would Have Voted

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
No Award
Among Others by Jo Walton
Embassytown by China Mieville

Explanation

Leviathan Wakes was a fantastic book. Really awesome space opera. I’ve only read the first three Expanse books so far, but they’re all really great, and I do plan to work my way through all of them. My favorite aspect of the series is probably how the Latter-day Saints build the most freaking awesome generation ship ever… because of course, that is totally something we would do. Mormon pioneer trek to the stars!

In all seriousness, though, I’ve actually been quite impressed with how the writing duo behind James S.A. Corey handles religion and philosophy throughout the series. Lots of sci-fi writers tend to take an overtly materialistic or atheist point of view, even if they don’t come out and admit it, and for a religious reader like myself it gets super annoying after a while. But the second (or third?) book really impressed me with its depth, even though the religious authority figure in that book is also a lesbian. As a conservative, believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I tend to get really wary when things start to get queer, but it actually worked for her character, and I thought the writers handled it very well—not in a woke or a heavy-handed way at all.

Among Others is a lengthy essay about the history of science fiction and fantasy dressed up as a rather forgettable story of a misfit girl going off to a boarding school, and maybe running into some fairies or something. Like I said, the frame story is forgettable. But Jo Walton’s take on the SF&F classics is very interesting, though personally I preferred reading it straight with her essay collection What Makes This Book So Great, which apparently consists of a bunch of blog posts from her column over at Tor.com. I don’t always agree with her tastes, of course, and the fact that she’s a boomer makes her very short-sighted when it comes to some aspects of the culture, but I do really enjoy getting her perspective on the genre, since she is so incredibly well-read. If not for some other books that I felt deserved to be placed below No Award, I probably just would have left Among Others off of the ballot.

Same with Embassytown, which I didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything particularly terrible about it, other than the fact that I was pretty dang confused from the first page. Mieville tends to be very hit or miss for me, perhaps because I’m just not a fan of literary fiction in general. I prefer a good, pulpy adventure story, which is probably why I’ve never read a Louis L’Amour book or a Robert E. Howard story I didn’t like. I suppose I could be persuaded to give Embassytown another try.

The last two books are the reason why I voted No Award. I’ve written at length about George R.R. Martin, but the short version is that I really don’t like the direction that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire has taken the fantasy genre, and the fact that he hasn’t finished the damned series yet has done far more harm to the rising generation of fantasy authors than anything else he’s accomplished with these books. In particular, I find Martin’s obsession with the victimizer/victim dynamic to be both pathological and toxic, and I really don’t care for his particular brand of nihilism either. Perhaps it’s a good thing that no one talks about this series after the shitshow that was season 8.

As for Deadline, I didn’t read that one because I DNFed the series with the first book, Feed. The main thing that turned me off to that one was the sexual innuendo between the brother and sister. Yes, I know they’re technically supposed to be adopted or whatever, but it still felt very icky, and made me wonder if Seanan McGuire doesn’t have a weird porn addiction, because that was the vibe I got from that book. Also, the premise was totally unbelievable. The SHTF has already gone down, but the government is still handing out “blogging licenses,” something that they can’t even regulate right now during the good times? Also, how the heck is all that infrastructure still functioning in the midst of the zombie apocalypse? Those fiber optic cables don’t repair themselves.

…and now I’m going to have to take a break from this series for a while, because I haven’t read enough of the books in the other years to know how I would have voted. I’ve read (or DNFed) all of the winners, and for several years, I’ve read all but one of the books, but it’s still going to take me a while to do another retrospective. I’m currently prioritizing 2024 and the years where I only have one more book to read (1972, 1974, 1989, 1992, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2016), though some of them are proving difficult to find. Just because a book was once up for all the big awards doesn’t mean it has any staying power.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2017 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

The Actual Results

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

How I Would Have Voted

No Award
Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Explanation

If there’s any book on this list that I’m open to changing my mind on, it’s Death’s End by Cixin Liu. enjoyed The Three Body Problem, though it did have a lot of long sections of exposition, which comes across as amateur writing in English (and probably doesn’t in Chinese). But the characters held my interest, and the ideas in the book were absolutely fascinating. Also, there was absolutely none of the wokery that has come to saturate our Western culture in recent years, which made the novel feel very refreshing. So I enjoyed the first book in the series quite a lot.

However, things got really weird in the second book, and I didn’t connect with the characters nearly as much, so when the long sections of exposition began to feel like they were droning on, I decided to DNF it. I’ll probably try this series again at some point, but since I DNFed the second book, I can’t really say that I’d vote for the third book if the awards were held again. But I do need to give this series a second chance.

The book that won this year was the second book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which I didn’t read because I hated the first book so much. Since it’s going to be a while before I get to the 2016 Hugos (I’m currently rereading Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which I DNFed before, but the library loan for the audiobook expired so I’m back on the waitlist again—just too many audiobooks I guess), I’ll briefly give my take on The Fifth Season and why that book made me DNF not only the series, but N.K. Jemisin as an author.

I believe that abortion is the defining moral issue of our times, just like slavery was the defining moral issue for 19th century America. Future generations will probably look on us the same way we look on the abolitionists and slaveholders of the antebellum era, and I suspect they will judge us just as harshly for failing to stand up for the rights of the unborn. After all, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the 19th century, the defining issue was liberty, and the good guys won. For the 20th century, it was life, and the good guys lost, but the 21st century is shaping up to be a rematch (though based on the unbridled narcissism of today’s culture, the pursuit of happiness is giving it a run for its money, but on the abortion issue the two are aligned).

N.K. Jemisin is a very talented author. She wrote large sections of The Fifth Season in second person, and made it work. That’s a little like running a three minute mile in an era when most people thought it was impossible. Of course, she knows that she’s talented, which lends her voice a degree of arrogance, but she’s not the first author to have an oversized ego—in fact, you could argue that Orson Scott Card is much more obnoxious when it comes to that, and Card wrote the second-best book to ever win a Hugo (Ender’s Game. The best Hugo-winning book, IMHO, is Hyperion by Dan Simmons).

[Spoilers ahead]

However, it’s not the prose or the writing of The Fifth Season that I take issue with, but the underlying message. The book starts with an infanticide, where the main character comes home to find out that the father of her child has murdered her child and run away. Of course, this creates a massive amount of sympathy for the main character. The rest of the book alternates between flashbacks to the MC’s past, establishing her backstory, and the present, where she eventually acquires enough power to destroy the world. However, at the very end of the book, we learn that the MC’s backstory culminated in her killing another one of her children to prevent that child from becoming a slave. In other words, the big reveal is that the MC committed infanticide herself, on one of her own children, and the whole novel is carefully crafted to not only make us sympathize with her, but root for her when she does it.

I know that there were slaves in places like Haiti who killed their own children for similar reasons. However, there were also many other slaves who took the exact opposite view on the value of human life, such as Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. N.K. Jemisin has ancestors who were slaves, but she herself is a rich, progressive black woman living in New York City who is as far removed from slavery as I am (after all, there’s a reason why my people are called “slavs”).

But it wasn’t Jemisin’s views on slavery that I took issue with, so much as on using it as a justification for infanticide. It’s the same argument that we hear on the pro-abortion side of the issue, how it’s actually more merciful to slaughter an unborn child in the womb than to let that child be born into a life of poverty—never mind that our modern era is so fantastically wealthy that our poor are more likely to be obese than starving. In other words, the message of The Fifth Season is an antithesis to A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is not only a superior book, but is also on the side of the good guys in the defining moral conflict of our times, while N.K. Jemisin is on the side of the bad guys—or as I prefer to call them, the Death Cult.

So that is why I DNFed The Fifth Season and decided to never read anything that Jemisin ever writes (unless, of course, she comes to the light and changes her position on the right to life). It is also why I will always vote No Award on any ballot that includes Jemisin as one of the authors.

I started All the Birds in the Sky but didn’t finish it. To me, it felt like the author was trying too hard to be cutesy and childlike, but I personally found it off-putting. It’s been a while since I read it, and for some reason I can’t find it in my reading journal, but I seem to remember that there were some content issues, too—which would explain why I found it off-putting, given then childish tone.

I didn’t read A Closed and Common Orbit because I DNFed the series with the first book. Here is the entry for it in my reading journal:

This seems like the kind of book that would be right up my wheelhouse, but on closer inspection it really isn’t. The whole thing is one big cultural diversity parade, and the central question of the story half the time is whether the humans are using the right pronouns for the aliens. Also, you’ve got your obligatory super sex positive aliens and your nymphomatic, porn-addicted mechanic who’s played as the adorable one. So yeah, not at all for me.

I’ve written before about Ninefox Gambit, but I might as well include an excerpt from my reading journal on that one as well:

The story never really hooked me, and the action at the beginning felt disjointed without any conflict or characters for me to care about. Also, there were a lot of info dumps… But the thing that made me decide to DNF was when the main character turned out to be a lesbian. I don’t know that this book will follow the “all true love is LGBTQ love” trope, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

I suppose I could be convinced to try this one again, though. At the time, I was reading a lot of other award-winning and nominated books, which was why I had little patience for another woke lesbian love story. Seriously, I DNFed 27 books that month, most of them for similar reasons.

Finally, Too Like the Lightning was another book that I DNFed for obnoxious wokery. If I remember correctly, it takes place in a far future where gender is something that everyone intentionally ignores. It wasn’t quite as bad as Ann Leckie’s books, but it was definitely going for the same kind of woke nonsense. Also, there were some religious proscriptions that the author seemed to think would make for a much better society, but that I personally found super dystopian, and not in a good way.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2018 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Actual Results

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
Provenance by Ann Leckie
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

How I Would Have Voted

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
No Award

Explanation

I liked Six Wakes. It was a fun murder mystery on a spaceship, with cloning technology that led to some interesting twists (for example, everyone wakes up to discover their dead bodies floating everywhere, and the murderer doesn’t actually remember know who he/she was, because those memories weren’t uploaded to the database in time). It’s not up there with Dune or Hyperion, but it was a good read, with interesting world building and better-than-average attention to detail. There were a couple of passages that a conservative reader might consider woke, but it wasn’t enough to bother me.

Everything else from this year is pretty much terrible, in my opinion. I skipped The Stone Sky, Provenance, and Raven Strategem because those were all series that I had already DNFed. I could probably be persuaded to try Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series again (the first book was just too confusing and absurdly violent), but I have no desire to go back to Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy or Leckie’s Ancillary Justice universe. Short version: Leckie’s entire career at this point seems to be premised on creating fantasy genders and playing to our culture’s current transgender moment, while Jemisin’s trilogy is the most anti-life (anti-pro-life?) thing I think I have ever read. Also, she’s suuuper anti-racist, which makes me think of this:

The Collapsing Empire was where I decided to give up on reading any more Scalzi. It’s basically an inferior clone of Star Trek, with random meaningless sex thrown in, which Scalzi somehow manages to make boring. I haven’t read Starter Villain and I don’t intend to, but many of this BookTuber’s criticisms of Scalzi’s writing apply to The Collapsing Empire too:

As for New York 2140, I DNFed after the first couple of pages when Robinson began to wax political, and not in a good way. I know that Kim Stanley Robinson is supposed to be one of the great SF writers of our time, but the only book of his that I’ve managed to get through was Red Mars (and that was over a decade ago). He’s one of those writers who wears his politics on his sleeve, and preaches more than he entertains. Also, he will occasionally throw in stuff that’s uncomfortably weird, like the Mars colonists having secret sex cult orgies in the farm modules. There was a time when the sex and the politics didn’t bother me as much, but it does now, so I’ve put him on my “skip this author” list, along with Ann Leckie, John Scalzi, and N.K. Jemisin.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2009 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross

The Actual Results

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

How I Would Have Voted

No Award
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Explanation

I’ve found that Hugo Award winning / nominated books tend to fluctuate in decade-long waves, in terms of how much I enjoy them. Some decades are pretty good, others are just downright terrible. Generally speaking, the books from the 50s and early 60s were good if not great (though Dune is certainly a masterpiece), the late 70s had a couple of years with some hits and misses, and most of the books from the late 80s and early 90s were actually pretty good. But from the mid 60s through most of the 70s (and into the early 80s), the Hugos were generally garbage, mostly because of how they were saturated with radical feminism, Malthusian economics, and ~~global cooling~~ ~~global warming~~ climate change hysteria. Also, there were lots of communist “fellow travelers” writing during that era. After the mid 90s, it seems like the Hugos tried to become “dark and gritty,” just like comic books and epic fantasy. A lot of those old political trends from the 60s and 70s came back with a vengeance, and from the late 90s through the early 2010s, the books are really hit and miss for me.

The year 2009 was a complete and total miss, in my opinion. I didn’t like any of the books or authors that were nominated that year, though I will admit that I skipped all but two of them. I’ve written before about how much I cannot stand Scalzi as either an author or a human being, and after trying to read his Interdependency novels, I’ve just completely sworn him off. Zoe’s War is technically a sequel to Old Man’s War, which I enjoyed at the time, but after all of Scalzi’s shenanigans I have no desire to finish that series. As for Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross, everything I’ve read from them is so loaded with gratiutous sex, graphic violence, and sheer unadulterated nihilism that I’ve sworn them off as well. Dark and gritty is almost always overrated.

Moving on to Little Brother… how can I put this? The book is about a teenage hacker and his high school buddies who fight back against an insidious surveillance state, which seeks to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Great concept… except that if you went back in a time machine and brought Cory Doctorow from 2009 into a debate with Cory Doctorow today, one of two things would happen: 1) the debate would turn into a vicious cage match, from which only one of them would leave alive, or 2) the older Doctorow would say “but a police surveillance state isn’t bad if the Democrats are in charge,” to which the younger Doctorow would say “you make a very good point, sir,” and the two would leave as best of friends. Which is to say that Cory Doctorow is a massive hypocrite when it comes to the lucrative merger of Big Tech and the state, and I can’t tell if his hypocrisy goes back all the way to the Bush years, or whether the election of 2016 broke him. Either way, I just could not get into Little Brother because of how thoroughly he’s flip-flopped on his views.

(As a side note, I really would like to see someone train two large language models on Doctorow’s writings, one from everything pre-Trump, and the other from everything post-Trump. It would be fascinating to pit those two models against each other in a simulated debate, because of how thoroughly he’s flip-flopped. Also, it would be entertaining to watch the real Cory Doctorow’s reaction to this simulated debate, because he’s written extensively about how much he hates ChatGPT and generative AI.)

With all of that said, however, I didn’t think Little Brother was terrible, even though I couldn’t finish it. As with Scalzi, it had less to do with the book itself and more to do with my opinion of the author, which is why I’ve decided to rank it above the other books below No Award. But I put it below The Graveyard Book, because there wasn’t really anything political or offensive in that one; it just wasn’t for me. I can’t affirmatively vote for The Graveyard Book, because I didn’t enjoy it enough to finish it, but if it had been a different year, I simply would have abstained instead of putting it below No Award.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

If the internet hasn’t labeled me a homophobic, misogynistic, white supremacist yet, I must be doing something wrong.

That is the lesson that I haven taken from the recent blow-up over Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College. Here’s a pretty good rundown of what actually happened, and the way the internet has reacted:

If this is truly where our culture is right now—where a thoughtful and measured statement of traditional conservative belief is sufficient to incite viral online outrage from those who call themselves progressive—then I must be doing something wrong if the people who are piling up on this gentleman aren’t also piling up on me.

It wasn’t always this way. Granted, there have always been dark and hate-filled corners of the internet where people who despise traditional religious conservatism have spread their virulent views—and to be fair, Twitter/X has turned into such a toxic echo chamber that the outrage over this may be getting amplified more than it actually deserves.

But our culture has changed a lot in the last five years, and not for the better. And if the Overton window has truly moved so far that it’s considered beyond the pale to encourage women to find personal fulfillment as wives and mothers, then Harrison Butker is the man I want to stand with. They can call me every name in the book, and I will bear their vociferous outrage as a badge of honor.