Brings the Lightning now in hardcover

For those of you who prefer your books in print, I’m pleased to be able to let you know that Peter Grant’s new and very well-regarded Western novel, Brings the Lightning, is now available in hardcover. Book One of The Ames Archives is 272 pages and retails for $19.99.

The production team is working hard at bringing all of our 40+ full-length ebooks into print; our current goal is to publish two ebooks and four print books per month. The next books to go into print will be John C. Wright’s Iron Chamber of Memory and the omnibus hardcover of There Will Be War Vols IX and X. We also intend to re-release A Throne of Bones in a new, royal octavo editions in July, case-bound hardcover and paperback.

From the reviews:

  • Lean and taut. A tale told well. Grant has written an old fashioned western, and the subject fits his writing style well. His prose is spare and straightforward, without any extraneous elements, flowery descriptions, or narrative asides. The plot is straightforward, yet interesting. And, best of all, he’s easy to read.
  • I’m primarily a science fiction,
    fantasy, and self help reader, but found this book very enjoyable. It
    was thoughtful and steady, some twists, with good solid characters and
    believable action. Usually westerns just don’t ring true like this one
    does. I’ve recently read The Heart of Everything That Is and Empire of
    the Summer Moon    , both non-fiction, and both fully supportive background
    for the story in Brings the Lightning. I’m hoping that there is another
    one in the works.
  • Wonderful! I am thrilled that a real western has been written once more. This book rings true to me having grown up amongst the last remnants of the world Grant writes about. 
  • Zane Grey has a peer! Mr. Grant, author of several other novels, brings his expertise to bear on this authentic Western. The characters are genuine, and the writing is true to life, with historically accurate details. You’ll like the characters, you’ll like the writing, and you’ll like the story. I can’t help but compare Brings the Lightning to Zane Grey’s novels, because that’s the only other author whose writings are comparable. HIGHLY recommended!
  • Author Peter Grant has done his homework, and it shows. Before the main journey even begins Ames has to deal with bushwhackers, Union occupation, and the aftermath of the Missouri guerrila war and Bleeding Kansas. The collection of colorful characters are entertaining too, including cheating gamblers, corrupt army officer, and the lecherous husband of a schoolmarm. Grant’s descriptions really add a “you are there” feel to the book. As someone who grew up on the plains, his descriptions of the terrain and dangers were spot-on. Grant also provides great how-to details, such as moving and defending a wagon train on open ground. Gun buffs will love the trip to the Nashville gunsmith early in the book.

The multilingual requirement

Heartiste explains why both rhetoric and dialectic are necessary in today’s politics and political commentary:

Dialectic is the preferred form of communication when level-headed White men are drawing up policies to ensure prosperity for their nation and a future for their posterity. But we don’t live in that world anymore. Our world is tribal wagon-circling and feral women. Dialectic falls on deaf ears in an Idiocracy and in a Jizzocracy.

Rhetoric has the stage now. The beta male who patiently and thoroughly explores all the logical implications of a woman’s emotional extemporizing will bore her to tears. No sex for him. As it is in 2016 American politics; the cuckservative who patiently and thoroughly explores all the Constitutional implications of a liberal’s destructive anti-White animus will ostracize himself from the public discourse. No influence for him.

The ideal set-up for the alt-right rebel is rhetoric + dialectic. Get your kill shot in, then cow the others with an unanticipated foray into informed dialectic.

This is why Alpha Game had this motto from the start: Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.

In any society where women have the vote, both sexual politics and Game are going to be absolutely integral to the process of government. As women are much more inclined to favor rhetoric over dialectic, this means that it is vital for anyone who is interested in influencing the process in even the smallest regard to learn how to communicate with the rhetorically-minded.

Why she doesn’t read women writers

For a different reason than I don’t, as it happens:

So, what is this all about?

It is about the fact I’m tired of getting fan letters saying “I
finally read your books, having hesitated long and hard to start.
 Forgive me, but the fact that you’re female made me doubtful.”

Ah, yeah, that.  And then I became conscious of an hesitation to pick up female-written books, myself.

I, who am a female writing books, and who have been formed as a
reader by a veritable battalion of writing females, suddenly subjecting
to greater scrutiny books by females, and asking friends “is she okay?”
before starting a new female author.

Why?  Oh, not because of what is between the author’s legs.  No, that
never interested me, before or since.  What makes me hesitate is the
mush that younger females have had their heads filled with, often from
primary education.

One of the first warnings of this was when a young college student
joined our writers’ group.  (She is now a bestselling author.)  Her
education had been exquisite and expensive, and yet… And yet she believed things like that there had been great women
fighters in the middle ages, and the men had suppressed all memory of
them.  Or that my best friend and I didn’t have college degrees (both of
us had Masters) because we were stay at home moms.

I don’t judge her too harshly on these beliefs.  It’s really hard to
examine the things that adults told us when we were very young.  Note
how until recently I believed my cousin Dulce had died because I refused
to share my bread and butter with her.  (I suspect being rebuked, then
hearing she’d died got conflated in my mind.)  And that wasn’t even an
intentional guilt trip.

But I find myself reading about women as they never were, women
without agency oppressed by a far  more coordinated patriarchy than any
male I know could manage, let alone a group of males.  I find myself
reading about men as they never were, too, men who are all plotting and
evil and powerful or else cringing ball-less cowards.  And then there is
the Marxism that afflicts the younger, “well educated” ones.  And the
preaching.  Oh, my LORD, I never took well to preaching, even in
religious books.

So, I hesitate before picking up new women writers.  Though I do pick
them up.  I even tolerate a fair amount of feminism and left wing
ideology if it’s so well wrapped in the story it doesn’t pop me out of
it.  Most of the women and some of the men above are/were definitely on
the left, but they can tell a story, and that’s all I care about.

Looking at my reading lists for the past few years, it is readily apparent that although women are some of my favorite authors – Tanith Lee, Ellis Peters, Agatha Christie, Susan Cooper, Murasaki Shikibu – I very seldom read women who write today. If it weren’t for the Hugo Awards, I wouldn’t have read any at all this year.

Why? Because, for the most part, they bore me. Women write best when they write about what truly interests them, which is interpersonal relationships. But shoe-horning a woman’s novel into a science fiction, or fantasy, or worse, military science fiction skin is not only uninteresting, it’s quite often downright cringe-worthy.

The problem, as I see it, is that most female writers are too solipsistic to be interested in ideas beyond pushing the current Narrative. It’s too bad, because they are vastly superior in their understanding of socio-sexual relations than are their gamma male counterparts in the SF/F genre. At the very least, women writers understand that men pursue women and that women are attracted to men for reasons that have nothing to do with how assiduously he respects her and avoids expressing any undue interest in her. (I can reliably ID a male writer’s socio-sexual status by how he describes male-female relations, and most male writers in SF/F are gammas.)

But at the end of the day, I don’t give a damn about whether the author’s Mary Sue protagonist goes for Alpha Male 1 or Alpha Male 2, which is the central question around which most female-written fiction revolves. This may explain why, when I look at the female authors I like reading, I notice that they almost uniformly utilize male protagonists.

Ellis Peters – Brother Cadfael. Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot and the famously celibate Miss Marple. Susan Cooper – Will Stanton. Tanith Lee utilizes a broad range of protagonists, but most of them are male. Even Lady Murasaki’s classic novel revolved around Hikaru Genji, the shining prince.

Now, there are no doubt exceptions to be found, but as a general rule, name a woman author with a female protagonist and you can be fairly certain that regardless of what else might be going on in the book,  a significant percentage of the text will be devoted to answering one of two questions: a) will she or won’t she? and b) Alpha Male 1 or Alpha Male 2?

If that interests you, fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But I, for one, am not very likely to read it. A great book is a great book, and it doesn’t matter who writes it, but women writers should keep in mind that many readers have been burned many times by other women writers who have attempted to sell them a romance in non-romance wrapping.

Play the reader dishonestly that way and he – or she –  will never give you another chance.

Politics by other means

It’s not at all surprising that European politicians have been attacked in more than one country. I’m only surprised that more of them haven’t been targeted, considering what they have done to their nations.

Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and injured in an attack in her constituency near Leeds today. The 41-year-old mother of two was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire, an eyewitness said. She is in a critical condition in hospital.

Cox isn’t the first pro-immigration politician to be attacked in Europe. It would be astonishing if she was the last.

That being said, we’ll have to wait and see if the attacker is a genuine pro-British activist, if this is just another antifa false flag, or if it something else entirely.

Arabic and Greek wanted

2016 Hugo nominee Kai Wai Cheah is nearly done with his first Castalia novel, No Gods, Only Daimons, and he’d like to know if there is anyone who speaks Arabic and/or Greek among the Ilk. He says it would be best if you are familiar with Classical
Arabic or Biblical Koine.

Only contact me if you are fluent, or very nearly so, please.

Also, if you are an EXISTING volunteer proofreader, please confirm that you are still interested in more proofreading. I don’t want to burn anyone out.

Don’t talk to the media!

In light of my ridiculous experience with Wired and after seeing how multiple media outlets turned to George RR Martin and John Scalzi to ask them to interpret my actions, I now turn down most media requests. I do so literally every week; I just turned down two yesterday alone. The media is not in the business of reporting the news, they are in the business of selling their masters’ Narrative.

In Free Speech Isn’t Free, Roosh explains that he learned the same lesson from the Canadian media.

I began to understand that the purpose of the mainstream media is to push a specific agenda while concealing the strength or victories of anyone who fights against that agenda. Montreal showed me how deliberate and pre-meditated it all was. There was little use talking to the media further when I already had my own effective media channels, so in Toronto I would refuse nearly all of the two dozen interview requests I received.

The mainstream media, especially the biggest outlets, are crypto-activist organizations that share nearly complete ideological overlap with mega-rich globalists and the most degenerate members of society, who help those globalists keep power and wealth by destroying tradition, the family unit, and nationalism. Social justice warriors are little Frankenstein creations of billionaires. That was hard for me to believe at first, but to see the machine whirl to action and be turned against me offered a confirmation that will stay with me for the rest of my life. The enemy is clear to me now. 

The key phrase there is “concealing the strength or victories of anyone who fights against that agenda”. That’s why the media comes running as soon as anyone starts to look like a threat, to shape the Narrative about them and minimize them. The media is not a microphone, it is a combination muzzle and fun house mirror. One gun shop owner learned why you don’t talk to them the hard way:

Yesterday the man in this video from the NY Daily News called and asked if he could come and interview us about the basic principles of how an AR-15 works. We acknowledged his offer so that we could prove that an AR-15 is indeed a great and safe weapon as stated in the video. After the video was filmed there was another Q&A type conversation on how things work in other countries, what are some of the things others believe would be a step into the right direction of gun control. To our knowledge we did not know that Mr. Kuntzman would completely turn things around and make our establishment look like one of anti-gun advocates.

We have received dozens of phone from all over the country in regards to the article. Many of these callers expressed disgust with the article and told us to stay away from the media. I can assure everyone that we do not support mental health screenings like they do in Europe and we don’t think that government officials should take away guns from people as it was portrayed in the article. Currently we are doing everything we can to take this article down because after reading it we are just as disgusted about it as all of you are. Our team here at Double Tap would like to sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding and report that we are doing everything in our power to get this article removed.

I implore all of our supporters to share our apology with everyone in order to help defend ourselves from the media who is doing anything in their power to blemish the face of all gun owners and attempting to add more rule to the fire of the attempt of the liberal gun-grabbing agenda.To those that are writing negative reviews about us, please understand we had no intentions of having this article cause such an issue, nor intentions of us looking like anti gun advocates but, to educate which in turn did the complete opposite due to Mr. Kuntzman. If anyone has anymore questions or concerns please feel free to come in or call us we will gladly discuss this issue with you.

Now, I do make occasional exceptions depending upon the journalist, the publication, and the specific situation. But in general, I now reject phone interview requests out of hand. If I agree to answer questions, I do it in writing and I keep the answers short enough that they cannot usefully edit them.  I do not ever do television; even if I was a major media figure I would not do any television that was not live, as the TV editing is particularly deceptive and dishonest.

Self-destructive ideologies

Most people understand that communism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The same is now obviously true of feminism. What is remarkable is that Steve Sailer grasped that this was also true of American conservatism as long as 12 years ago:

As a native Los Angeleno, Northern Californian snobbishness has always gotten on my nerves. Nonetheless, the payoff has become undeniable. Rather than being inundated with unskilled immigrants from one country, Northern California mainly attracts skilled immigrants from a wide diversity of countries.

The lesson for the GOP is sobering. If it won’t fight to enforce immigration laws on the national level, citizens will try to parry the effects at the local level.

And the socially acceptable way to keep out swarms of poor immigrants is the Northern Californian liberal way: environmentalism, unionism, historical preservationism, NIMBYism—indeed, the whole panoply of Democratic Party policies at the state and local level.

There are a number of structural flaws in conservatism, but the fatal one has proved to be the embrace of the Proposition Nation mythology. In the same way that communism destroys personal initiative and feminism destroys reproductive rates, conservatism destroys the ability of a nation or even a community to sustain and preserve itself.

The #AltRight may or may not replace conservatism as the primary challenge to the Left in America, but we already know that conservatism was destined to fail. It doomed itself to failure as soon as it embraced the “equality of opportunity” concept, which inevitably led to the doctrine of accepting “hard-working immigrants”.

Those who argue that because DNA is not 100 percent determinative, it is irrelevant, are failing to grasp that in this regard DNA is a necessary factor, though it is not, in itself, a sufficient one. And while I welcome disagreement, do try to avoid putting on a clownish demonstration of how you are limited to binary thinking. That’s not criticism, that’s just embarrassing.

UPDATE: WF has an intriguing thought:

Evil is always ultimately self-destructive, suggesting the latter, when found in a system, likely indicates the former. In other words, if a system  (ideology, structure, philosophy, individual, or thought) contains within it the seeds of contradiction, be it internal or external, or systemic collapse, it’s a good bet it is against God and therefore evil. This is just as true for individuals with unresolved or incorrectly resolved cognitive dissonance, for example.

This is because God is both real and Creator of reality, and all that is in conflict with reality is necessarily in conflict with Him, too.

Forget tolerance

Steve Sailer observes the media handwringing about the fact that Donald Trump keeps being proved correct by events:

Trump’s pragmatism was also calibrated to drive mad with rage the bipartisan Washington establishment that has grown rich off the conventional wisdom of Invade the World/Invite the World. The New York Times, for example, threw aside all pretense of objectivity, “reporting”:

Mr. Trump’s speech…represented an extraordinary break from the longstanding rhetorical norms of American presidential nominees. But if his language more closely resembled a European nationalist’s than a mainstream Republican’s, he was wagering that voters are stirred more by their fears of Islamic terrorism than any concerns they may have about his flouting traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity.

The #AltRight doesn’t give a quantum of a damn about “traditions of tolerance and respect for religious diversity”. We’ll do more than “flout” those traditions, we’ll fillet them before we incinerate the remains. We respect one religion, Christianity, even if we do not subscribe to it, because it is the basis of the Western Civilization formerly known as Christendom.

We’ve been told for decades that the Constitution is either a) a living document, or b) a meaningless piece of paper. Fine. We accept that. And now we will interpret every word however it happens to suit us at the moment, and we will consider ourselves as bound by it as we would by any other piece of paper used by the American Left in the toilets.

The old rules are dead. We’ll write the new ones.

On a personal note, I found it more than a little amusing to see Sailer take a perfectly justified shot at the Proposition Nation idiocy inherent in the concept of poetry as the legal basis for government policy.

After all, the fact that everybody in the world has the civil right to immigrate to America is written into the Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution. Granted, it’s not actually a law that any American ever voted on, it’s just an 1883 poem by Zionist Emma Lazarus. But how dare any candidate for president not treat it like holy writ just because it’s all bogus retconning by the New York media?

Don’t feel bad if you fell for it without ever thinking the matter through, as it is admittedly powerful rhetoric to which you were subjected as a child. The emotions, are they not moved? But there is no meaningful information content in rhetoric. And if you still buy into the Proposition Nation concept after its historical basis in retroactive rhyming rhetoric was pointed out to you, well, I’m sorry, but you’re observably an idiot.

It’s also nice to see the Magic Dirt term being adopted and utilized more widely. After all, as we know, rhetoric matters.

A pair of reviews

Josh Young, who very recently turned in his long-awaited debut novel, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep?, wrote a detailed review of Rod Walker’s Mutiny in Space at Castalia House:

One of the things that I’m grateful to my parents for is that they made sure I knew the value of media from by gone decades. I grew up watching Arsenic and Old Lace, Charade, and North by Northwest. When I watched This Island Earth it was with wonder and without the ironic overlay of MST3K. And as much as I enjoyed Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventure books, I spent way more time reading things like Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Andre Norton’s Star Rangers. I say all this because I want you to understand that when I say Rod Walker’s Mutiny in Space is the product of a by-gone age, I’m giving it the highest praise I can.

I’m not sure that Mutiny in Space would be considered a
juvenile, but it’s clearly got that adventure in its DNA and an
old-timey vibe. Even though Nikolai’s world has things I never remember
seeing in the juveniles– video games, artificial gravity, quantum
entanglement– there’s plenty in it that conjures up the memories of all
those old adventures I used to read. The heroes are bold and heroic, the
villains villainous and craven. And looking at that sentence, it seems
ridiculous that I’d have to type “the heroes are heroes and the villains
are villains,” but I think we all know the world well enough to
understand why that’s refreshing. I mean, heck. I intentionally
use a grey morality in my own writing, and I’m part of a group or
writers that are theoretically not fond of those things.

If you enjoy old school Blue SF and you haven’t picked this one up yet, you really should. I mean, I’m the editor and I can’t wait to see what Mr. Walker has up his sleeve next.

On the fantasy side, the Hugo-nominated Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson demonstrated the superlative nature of John C. Wright’s excellent Iron Chamber of Memory by selecting a series of choice quotes from the book.

The book that all of these passages are taken from is Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright. And while you’ll see contemporary authors ranging from Saladin Ahmad to Terry Brooks, N. K. Jemisin, George R. R. Martin, and Patrick Rothfuss incorporated into the latest iteration of D&D’s “inspirational reading list”, I’m doubt any of those additions are going to be anything like this. Fantasy role-playing and the genre of fantasy in general have just changed too much over the years.

Speaking for myself, reading this book… it was as if someone had read everything I liked about Appendix N books and everything I disliked about post-1977 science fiction and fantasy… and then made a novel that addressed every single point I’d made about them. It’s astonishing, really, but this is the book that has forced me to retire my “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” spiel. Today’s fandom may be divorced from its roots for the most part, but I think it’s fair to say that the depth and breadth of classic science fiction and fantasy informs nearly every paragraph of Wright’s stories.

Speaking of book reviews, I just finished reading Roosh’s new book, Free Speech Isn’t Free. I’ll write a full review soon, but suffice it to say that it is very detailed, very good, and very useful in the manner of SJWAL. I think I must have highlighted 12 or 15 quotes for future reference.