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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 coolingglobal 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.
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.
The Calculating Stars actually started out pretty good. Mary Robinette Kowal is a very skilled writer, and her main character in this book was both likeable and interesting—something that seems to be increasing rare in Hugo-nominated books. It also didn’t hurt that in the very first chapter, a giant meteor wiped out Washington DC and most of the eastern seaboard. But then it gradually turned into a story about the little woman who roared and her band of misfit minorities who team up to fight Captain Patriarchy, and the super-woke feminism just ruined it for me.
I didn’t read Revenant Gun or Record of a Spaceborn Few because I DNFed both series with the first book. With Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, I don’t remember much, except that the first book made absolutely no sense to me, with so much meaningless violence that it bordered on the absurd. With Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series, it started off as an interesting space opera, but the ship quickly turned into a lesbian love boat, with lots of queer and transgender aliens to boot. Wokery ensues.
As for Trail of Lightning, I honestly don’t remember much about that one, other than that it started to give me woke vibes and I didn’t really like any of the characters. I think it also played the Death is Chic and Life is Not Worth Saving trope, which I personally cannot stand. If the main character had struck me as a good and decent person, I probably would have kept reading, but so many books that suffer from wokeness also suffer from having protagonists who are just terrible human beings in general. I don’t think the two are unrelated.
The first chapter of Space Opera was laugh out loud hilarious, and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. Valente’s gonzo humor is a lot of fun! Then… I don’t know quite how to put this, but the story just started to feel depressing, and I’m not sure why. Also, the gonzo writing style started to grate on me after a while, kind of like Chuck Wendig’s writing does for anything longer than a blog article. It wasn’t a terrible book, but I didn’t end up finishing it.
But I really loved Spinning Silver, much more than I was expecting to. I’m not generally into fairy tell retellings, but this one stirred something primal in my Slavic roots and scratched an itch I didn’t even know that I had. Besides all that, it’s just a damn good story. The villains were genuinely villainous, the peril was genuinely perilous, the good guys all had satisfying growth arcs, and the ending was a crowning moment of awesome that brought everything full circle in the best possible way. Really great book.
