So here we go! First a Barye Phillips cover for a political thriller, the first such to use the idea of mentally programmed sleeper agents.
Another strange Patrick Woodroffe cover for one of Moorcock’s Prince Corum novels.
I like this Victor Kalin cover for one of John Creasey’s (under a pen name) Gideon police procedurals.
An Ed Emshwiller horror cover—
And a Gervasio Gallardo cover I’ve posted before. Derleth’s Lovecraftian stories were piss-poor, but the cover’s sooo cool.
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.
Monthly Archives: May 2023
It’s been a while since I did a paperback cover post …
E. Jean Carrol’s win against Trump triggers rape apologists
E. Jean Carroll sued Trump in civil court for rape, sexual assault and defamation and won $5 million in damages. The jury took around three hours to decide Trump had sexually abused Carroll but didn’t find for Carroll on the rape charge. In other words they believed Trump had groped her, inserted his fingers into her but not necessarily his penis (the latter is a necessity for the New York definition of rape).
As Shakezula says, this is a win for Carroll and human decency but it was never going to change Trump voters’ views. And it didn’t: Trump supporters, however, are loud and proud, claiming TFG has been vindicated: the jurors said he didn’t rape her! The jurors said she lied! Clearly he didn’t defame her either! Misogynist Matt Walsh is among the right-wingers demanding harsher penalties for false rape accusations — they should go to prison for just as long as a rapist would get. Unsurprisingly there’s no suggestion we go beyond that, that false pedophilia accusers get the same sentence a pedophile would.
No surprise. Trump’s misogyny and his ability to get away with treating women like shit (not all women, but many of them) is a big part of his appeal: “Fear and hatred of women is at the absolute center of right wing politics in this country. That fascism is a wildly misogynistic ideology is not exactly some sort of coincidence.” Plenty of right-wingers (and a lot of people who aren’t right-wingers) think prosecuting rape is an attack on men.
Like all misogynist arguments, this is bullshit. The jury not calling it rape is a technicality. They believe Trump assaulted Carroll but they balked at labeling it rape — it’s a laden word, even though I think it’s the right one — or questioned whether he’d used his penis rather than his finger. This is not saying “Carroll lied” but She Lied is a common rape apologist argument. According to them, a woman accusing the wrong man isn’t mistaken — mistaken identity happens in many criminal cases — but willfully lying or lashing out because of her buyer’s remorse.
As the National Sexual Violence Resource Center says, this also affects police reporting on rape. Cops can close a case as “unfounded” if they investigate and determine the rape didn’t happen. In practice they routinely brand a case unfounded without an investigation: the victim didn’t report immediately, doesn’t want to talk, is vague about details, etc. All of these are common in real rape cases but cops buy into bullshit about women making it up as often. Trump supporters aren’t outliers in American rape culture … but that’s not an excuse.
For more of my opinion on rape culture and rape apologists (spoiler: I’m not a fan), check out Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holders.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
The 1970s in fact and fiction: books read
NO DIRECTION HOME: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 by Natasha Zaretsky argues that 1970s America saw the seismic shocks of the oil crisis, defeat in Vietnam and the loss of millions of good-playing blue-collar jobs as blows to the American family, not just the nation. Vietnam holding American prisoners of war, for example, deprived military families of husbands and fathers; the Arabs (or the oil companies) jacking up prices left families financially strapped, and so on. Even the Bicentennial devoted a lot of time to families as stressing roots and heritage played to minorities and activists who didn’t feel much like celebrating America.
Interpreting all this was another matter. Did losing the Vietnam War mean America had lost its military prowess or that we’d simply over-reached? Had OPEC made us the Arab nations’ play-toy or was the problem that Americans had become too greedy, consuming too much? A lot of the debate blamed women for whatever the problem was: women who didn’t want to give up family leadership when their husband came home, permissive moms whose spoiled kids became radical protesters, cold mothers who drove kids crazy, etc. Zaretsky concludes, however, that the sense of the decade as dysfunctional and despairing (as in Invisible Bridge) didn’t take hold until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign portrayed the 1970s as the decade of The Family Besieged with himself as the solution. An interesting job.
VANISHING IN THE HAIGHT by Max Tomlinson is a 1978-set noir mystery in which a female ex-con turned PI goes to work for a San Francisco millionaire whose daughter wound up murdered a decade earlier, during the summer of love. Can the PI find the truth before the dying millionaire passes away? This is a solid mystery though I find the serial-killer POV chapters uninteresting, as I usually do. However I do like the period detail, from fashion to gas at the outrageous price of 65 cents a gallon.
#SFWApro. All rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Reading
Women in black break the criminal code! One book, two movies
THE WOMAN IN BLACK by Susan Hill is an old-school ghost story in the style of M.R. James. A solicitor sitting with his family as the kids tell ghost stories reluctantly decides to set down one that happened to him, for the kids to read once he’s dead. We follow him to an isolated village to wrap up a deceased client’s estate, but it seems a spectral woman in black is watching wherever he goes. Ah, surely that’s his imagination, right? Right?
Much like the spooky stories of James’ era, this is slow, creepy, without gore, and full of descriptions of rural England (I don’t associate that with James in particular but it’s common to a lot of similar stories I’ve read). The results are effective and evocative, though the most nerve-wracking part was worrying whether the protagonist’s terrier would buy it (relax, he lives).
I’d probably have liked THE WOMAN IN BLACK (2012) more if I didn’t have the book fresh in my mind; it’s well executed but nowhere near the source material and the changes don’t improve anything (while Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation also makes changes, I’ve read that it’s brilliant). Radcliffe plays the solicitor whose visit to the old mansion drives the eponymous ghost into a fit of even more child-slaying than usual — she’s a lot more murderous than the print version. Radcliffe is good in a tortured role and the film revealed to me that Hammer Films has (appropriately) risen from the dead, as they were one of the production companies involved in this.“You should have left when we told you to.”
The next Howard Hawks films following Fazil are lost, and I mistakenly thought that included The Dawn Patrol. It doesn’t but by the time I learned that I’d already watched THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931) out of sequence. Not that I think watching in sequence would give this adapted stage play any more oomph.
The key players are Phillips Holmes as a young man who kills a guy in a fit of passion and Walter Huston as the ambitious prosecutor who steamrolls Holmes and his attorney, resulting in the young man getting a ten-year stretch in the state pen. Wouldn’t you know, when Huston loses his bid for governor he gets prison warden as a consolation prize. And it seems a lot of crooks he put away have some resentment …
This has some striking moments, such as Huston confronting an angry mob of prisoners but the clunky moments outweigh the startling ones and Holmes is too bland to make his role work. What does work is Boris Karloff as a fellow inmate of Holmes, quietly plotting to settle scores with a pair of squealers. Karloff steals scenes merely by standing there, even though he’s not credited on that poster above; while he’d been working in Hollywood for more than a decade but mostly extras and bit parts. A role like this was quite a step up, though of course his star-breaking role as Frankenstein’s creature is looming. In any case The Criminal Code is better as a Karloff film than a Hawks. “What good is it to save a man if you destroy him while you do it?”
It’s day 139 of 2023; so how am I doing?
The 139th day of 2023 — 38 percent of the year — isn’t any sort of benchmark, but I did spend a morning this week reviewing my year goals and how they’re progressing. I had a couple of nights of really bad sleep this week so by mid-week I needed to work on something that didn’t require any creativity.
(Here’s another photo of Wylan the kitten, with one of his favorite toys.)
The year is going well in many ways. I’ve already finished the six shorts I wanted to get done this year. I’ve written 150,000 words of fiction when I’d planned on 100,000 by this point. Work on 19-Infinity is progressing well (I’m debating using the word Infinity rather than the symbol). So is the work on Let No Man Put Asunder and Impossible Takes a Little Longer. I wanted to make 10 story submissions by the end of May; I’ve submitted 18. My blood pressure has improved from late last year (next week my doctor will tell me if it’s improved enough) and I had a fun birthday.
This month, however, I’ve felt the energy slacken. Part of that is that instead of focusing on one or two short stories at a time, I’m now working on multiple stories so none of the get anywhere. Partly that’s because they’re still raw enough I don’t know which one of them will finish first. Even so, I think I need to start concentrating on one or two at a time. I also need to prioritize in other ways. 19-Infinity, Oh the Places You’ll Go and Let No Man Put Asunder come higher than first or second draft stories.
My writing income is still flat since Leaf and my other client stopped soliciting my services last year. Fortunately I have Social Security but it’s still a lot tighter — and lord knows what will happen with the looming debt crisis. And of course it would be really nice to sell something now and again.
As for this week’s performance, it was underwhelming. Even with a writer’s work day last Sunday, I just barely made my hours for the week. Maybe it’s that working six days is pushing it, or some other reason but today and yesterday I really slumped. It felt like the days before TYG worked from home, when the dogs would scrunch up with me and erode my personal space to the point my brain fried. As I haven’t had more dog-care than usual this week, I don’t know why that would be. But it was.
That said, I did get some of those 18 submissions out and I met my monthly quota for Let No Man Put Asunder. I read part of Chapter Two to the group and got a big thumbs up (some criticism but more enthusiasm). Big enough I feel slightly nervous living up to it with Chapter Three. But that’s far from the worst problem to have.
Hopefully next week I’ll be fully focused. Wish me luck …
#SFWApro.
More Wylan photos
Yep, another visit with the cute kitten up the street. Here he is exploring our shoes.
Then he climbed into my lap to chew on the string hanging from my hat.
He’s growing fast so I’m glad we made time.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
The hate that dares not speak its name
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, when I was a columnist for the Destin Log newspaper, nothing generated more outraged mail than writing about right-wing terrorism.
It didn’t matter if I situated it carefully in the context of terrorism overall (a lot of groups in American history have resorted to terror tactics), readers still screamed there was no such thing! I was trying to tarnish respectable American conservatives by claiming they were outlaws like eco-terrorists and Muslims! Shut up, shut up, shut up!
They were, for the record, completely wrong: right-wing terrorism is a serious threat. Nevertheless, I’m not the only one conservatives complain about: any time Homeland Security brings up right-wing terrorism there are screams of outrage that conservatives are being demonized! Routinely on Twitter I see people equate “armed thugs showing up at school board meetings is bad” with “Democrats say parents are armed thugs!” Or Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville complaining that fighting white supremacy in the military is fighting ordinary Americans. Funny how they don’t have any problem with the military excluding “woke” Americans.
I thought (and still do) that part of this was that it disturbed the post-9/11 narrative that equated Muslims with terrorists. Fear, too, that the massive security state developed in the Bush years might be turned against them. The same people who insisted that spying on nonviolent liberal groups or tapping hundreds of phone calls didn’t matter — people who had nothing to hide had nothing to fear! — squealed like stuck pigs at the thought of being on the receiving end.
A third, uglier reason is that many right-wingers were on the terrorists’ side. On Substack, Noah Berlatsky makes this point about the neo-Nazi shooter in Allen, Texas: rather than argue “the problem is Nazism, not guns” they deny the shooter’s politics: “Gun rights proponents won’t tactically distance themselves from the far right because their ideological and personal connections to the far right are too strong.”
As plenty of liberal bloggers have said, the same is true of the Republican Party. For all their claims that left-wingers are fascists, real American Nazis are a solid block of Republican voters. The party’s leader moved to overthrow the government on 1/6 and Republicans still support him. They still welcome anti-Semitic support while squealing about their support for Israel. Party leaders talk all the time about getting violent while insisting they have no responsibility for violence. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has talked about pardoning the man who murdered a BLM protester, though he’s been silent about it as the killer’s extremism became clear.
Like Tuberville they’re not going to denounce the extremists. They’ve met the enemy and the enemy is them. As Michelle Goldberg puts it, “guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve.” Their ability, not anyone else’s.
As LGM says, this will continue to be a problem: “we are going to have a kind of low-level very informal civil war for many decades to come, as Red America and Blue America increasingly come to the conclusion that they don’t want to live with each other any more, but can find no way, either practically or emotionally, to break up.”
Filed under Politics
Magic in fantasy: use vs. works
Back last December on Camestros Felapton’s blog (I don’t remember the specific post) there was a comment about two ways of approaching magic in fiction: “it seems to me that some ways of thinking about magic are ontological/analytical, and some are teleological/practical. How does the magic “work” vs how the magic is used. Which is most important to you as a reader/reviewer/critic? Which is most important to the writers creating these systems? Which is most important to the people who live in the worlds created by the writers? There isn’t a single right answer.”
Stories about how magic works would include, of course, the many stories with magic systems: the Mistborn books, Alan Moore’s tedious Promethea comics (very much about his theories of magic), D&D novels. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry where wizards draw power from an individual’s life force. Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. A. Merritt’s science fantasies.
The Silver Age Dr. Strange stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (who was probably the prime mover ont he project) are much more about how magic is used. What’s important is that Stephen Strange uses magic to stand between us and the dark forces: Baron Mordo, Dormammu, Nightmare, Umar and Taboo, Tyrant of the Eighth Dimension.
Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books likewise focus on magic in action: the bad guys using it to hurt people, Harry using it to protect them, as in the first book in the series, Storm Front. In Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, what matters is Conan fighting the magic, not how it works.
That doesn’t mean “magic has no rules” (the standard complaint by those science fiction fans who dislike fantasy). The Dresden books give us magic rules but the system isn’t the important thing; Ditko’s Dr. Strange stories use magic consistently, they just don’t spell them out. Conversely, stories that emphasize magic systems usually deal with how magic is used: the Lord Darcy stories are all about Darcy and his sidekick Sean using magic to solve crime.
Some stories are a mix of both. In Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, there’s a lot about the rules of magic; protagonist Norman wins because he’s able to analyze them logically and apply them more effectively than his adversaries. However it’s also about how magic is used: stay-at-home wives working sorcery covertly to advance their husband’s careers.
In Southern Discomfort I deal with the rules enough to keep things consistent but I’m much more interested in what magic does. In Questionable Minds, the rules governing psychic power are much more important. In Let No Man Put Asunder, it’s all about how it’s used: there are multiple character operating under different magic system so the rules are a free-for-all (though individual characters’ skills stay consistent).
No real deep insights, I know, but I still find Camestros’ comment interesting.
#SFWApro. Images top to bottom by Rodney Matthews, Steve Ditko, Lee Macleod and Samantha Collins. All rights remain with current holders.
Filed under Reading, Science vs. Sorcery, Southern Discomfort, Writing
No wonder people think Tik-Tok is a problem!
I mean just look at it! Weird shit, man!
#SFWApro. Cover by Peter Gudynas
Republicans continue treating women as incubators: abortion links.
“Rather than introduce a fresh bill, they gutted an unrelated measure on child safety and then inserted 46 pages of abortion restrictions. ” — from an article on North Carolina’s new abortion ban. It’s bad (no surprise) and Sen. Tricia Cotham, who just switched to Republican, has thrown away her solid pro-choice record by voting for it. Among other details “People would also only be allowed to get a medication abortion until 10 weeks of pregnancy, and to get one, they would have to go to three separate, in-person appointments that are 72 hours apart.”
Two other Republicans who said they wanted to stick with current law switched and voted for it; another didn’t show up at all. Rep. John Bradford responded to reporters’ questions by not answering and blathering about liberal propaganda.
That particular point is noteworthy because “anti-abortion activists know that so long as abortion pills—and accurate and reliable information about how to use them—remains widely accessible, their entire crusade is doomed to fail. ” No wonder they want mifepristone outlawed. And they’re increasingly fighting abortion providers by resorting to criminal tactics.
The American College of Pediatricians is anti-abortion and anti-trans and as a Wired article shows, full of shit: “Most of the College’s research had been ‘written by one person,’ according to minutes from a 2006 meeting, which were included in the leak. The College was failing to make a splash. In the future, one director suggested, papers rejected by medical journals ‘should be published on the web.’ The vote to do so was unanimous (though the board decided the term ‘not published’ was nicer than ‘rejected’).” Shakezula has more.
Despite the right-wing touting adoption as an alternative to abortion, Marjorie Taylor Greene dismisses a stepmom’s opinion because she’s not “a biological mother”
Exceptions to abortion bans typically don’t amount to crap. In Tennessee, for instance, a woman with a life-threatening pregnancy still couldn’t get an abortion.
The Montana Supreme Court has ruled the state constitution protects abortion. Republicans just passed multiple abortion bans anyway. Over in Oregon, Dems have the votes to pass abortion-rights and other legislation but Republicans simply walk out so there’s no quorum. In Ohio they’re engaging in elaborate gamesmanship to keep an abortion-rights measure off the ballot.
“She told her friends Slaton drove her home the next morning, stopping at a drugstore so she could obtain emergency contraception. Slaton at one point proposed to penalize the use of emergency contraception, including what is known as the Plan B pill.” — from an article about Bryan Slaton, a Texas state legislator who supposedly hates groomers but had no trouble hitting on an intoxicated 19-year-old staffer.
On a sort-of up note, the South Carolina legislature has been debating a ban on abortion after conception but women in the legislature, including pro-life Republicans, have blocked it. So that’s a point in their favor but on the other hand, two of the Republicans were fine with a six-week ban.
Over in Louisiana, rape and incest victims testified in support of a rape and incest exceptions to the state’s abortion ban: “Some Republican committee members got up and left in the middle of witness testimony.”
NC’s misogynist Lt. Governor Mark Robinson thinks mass shootings are punishment for abortion. It’s always abortion or gays with religious conservatives, never that the US doesn’t beat its swords into plowshares or usury or that rich people don’t give enough to the poor. I wonder what he’d say about a Texas man murdering his girlfriend after she got an abortion. Then again, I don’t really want to know.
For more on forced-birther arguments and why they’re bullshit, check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holders.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
