Tag: SJW

Social justice convergence at the bookstore

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have a new tactic at our disposal:

I’ve talked to a couple of book store owners in Toronto and someone is sending out Jim Hines roundup of the SP/RP affair. As a result, they are stopping making orders for Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Williamson and others of the worst broadcasters who have supported homophobic statements. I would assume the originator is part of Toronto’s gay community (which was oddly intertwined for years when Baka Books and the GLAAD bookstore were next door). It’s only the independents that I’ve heard so far, but if it hits Book City or Indigo, that could be a big repercussion. – Dexfarkin on January 2, 2016 at 7:59 pm

Remember this when they start crying about how morally reprehensible it is that we are daring to nominate books for awards and rate books on Goodreads.

Capital-F Fandom, on the other hand, is actively trying to destroy the careers of some of the most popular authors in science fiction and fantasy. Apparently it’s not enough that they publicly rejected anyone and everyone connected with Baen Books at Worldcon last year, they want to make sure that Baen books are not sold in any bookstores either.

If you live in Toronto, please find out which independent bookstores have done this and let me know.

They don’t like comments

Lis Carey apparently doesn’t like comments on her reviews.

this may explain a recent comment on one of my reviews of last year’s Hugo nominees–and means maybe I can expect more. (sad face)

Even I occasionally forget how fragile these psychologically decrepit specimens are. Anyhow, it’s a good reminder to ALWAYS USE RHETORIC on them. They’re vulnerable to it; they can’t take it. That’s why they resort to it even when it doesn’t make sense in the context of a discussion, because they are trying to make you feel the emotional pain that they feel whenever they are criticized.

Remember, SJWs always project.

They don’t have the numbers to do much to the awards, but if someone has the time and energy it might not be a bad idea to keep an eye on other activities, if they’re going after reviewers. Individual reviewers are a lot more vulnerable to malicious actions and I find it hard to celebrate Rabid activity in that area even if the continued lack of impact on the awards results next year proves something.

“Vulnerable” the Lacedaemonians said.

Just remember to play by the rules; you cannot criticize the author, only the book. You cannot criticize the reviewer, only the review.

In other SF-SJW news, Rape Rape has run into writer’s block now that he can’t reasonably expect to get away with writing one rape every twenty pages. That, or whining about the Rabid Puppies is cutting into the Dorito-eating binges with which he powers his writing.

‘THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished. You’re disappointed, and you’re not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed… but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me.

‘For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, ‘I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER’ on or before the last day of 2015. But the book’s not done.’

I’m not disappointed. I’m laughing at the fat bastard. It should be amusing to see who will push their next book into 2018 first, Rape Rape or McRapey.

PNH’s assault parakeet

Scott Lynch, whose lips have been firmly attached to Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s posterior for over a decade now, is speaking out for the Macmillan-silenced Tor Books senior editor in falsely accusing John C. Wright.

This was especially frustrating in the wake of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, after which the ponderously self-important blowhard John C. Wright publicly accused veteran editor and lifelong fan Patrick Nielsen Hayden of both assaulting Wright’s wife and masterminding the long-term “corruption” of the Hugo Awards, to which the SF/F field largely replied: “Meh.” Now, some of that is certainly due to Wright’s tireless self-marginalization and frothing bigotry, but regardless, I think Patrick deserved better of his friends and colleagues. He deserved to have someone stand up and state plainly what he could not– that John C. Wright talks a big game about truth and courage, but that he is demonstrably full of shit. 

The only individual here who is completely full of shit is the habitually vulgar Scott Lynch. Wright was telling the truth about Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s unprofessional and inappropriate verbal attack on Mr. Wright’s wife, and he is also telling the truth about PNH’s involvement in corrupting the Hugo Awards. No one stood up and defended PNH because they knew that Wright was telling the truth: PNH is a hot-tempered, unprofessional, and literally uneducated awards whore.

I know it too. I have had direct, personal conversations with a senior executive at an SF publishing house who confirmed that Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a shameless award-chaser who was finally persuaded to finally step back and recuse himself one year so that a perennial second-placer could have a chance to win an award, before promptly putting himself forward again in order to chase more awards.

I don’t know if PNH’s awards-whoring is due to his shame at being one of the very few without a high school degree in a highly literate field; perhaps he thinks collecting awards will somehow compensate for his inferiority complex or perhaps he simply requires external approval for his efforts. Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that PNH and the little coterie of authors around him have connived, pimped, and collaborated to manipulate the Hugo Awards process on their own behalf for well over a decade. This isn’t up for debate. It’s the recent history of the Hugo Awards.

In fact, the ONLY reason that two different Best Editor awards exist in the first place is because PNH was whining and crying to anyone who would listen about the fact that he kept losing out to short form editors like Gardner Dozois. And no sooner did the Puppies knock him out of contention in 2015 than his site became the center of efforts to change the rules so that PNH would be able to reliably nominate himself for Best Editor (Long Form) again.

Wright makes these points clear over and over again on his own time, and the fact that he’s a bigoted goofball is hardly a state secret. What is important is that nothing he’s tried to push about the Hugo Awards or about Patrick Nielsen Hayden has any scintilla of truth to it, and anyone who tries to tell you differently in the coming months is either a liar or a water carrier for a depressingly stupid conspiracy theory spun by liars.

It’s amusing to see Lynch talk about what isn’t a state secret, considering what he obviously doesn’t know about PNH. Scott Lynch clearly doesn’t know a damn thing about any of this. He wasn’t there at the time that Patrick Nielsen Hayden verbally attacked Mrs. Wright and he isn’t sufficiently well connected in publishing circles to know the truth about what an insecure little awards whore PNH is.

In a post to his own weblog, Scalzi expresses regret that I personally didn’t make the “Best Professional Editor” ballot, despite the fact that I acquired three out of the five Best Novel nominees and personally shepherded two of them to publication. This is generous of John, and I wouldn’t have declined the nomination, but in fact as every book editor in our field knows, while the Best Professional Hugo is regularly awarded to high-profile magazine editors and anthologists, it only goes to book editors if we die. It’s for this reason that there’s a pending proposal to split the editorial award into “long form” and “short form” categories; whether this will be ratified by this year’s Worldcon Business Meeting is anyone’s guess.

How generous of John indeed! Fortunately, PNH was able to repay that generosity at Macmillan’s expense. Notice that PNH doesn’t see fit to mention mention that he was the co-sponsor of the new award.

I sought out Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s support for the Editor’s split and brought him into the fold; I needed a prominent editor to co-sponsor the amendment or it would never have been taken seriously by the Business Meeting.
– Chris Barkley

Both Mr. and Mrs. Wright were published by Tor Books, and they know the same thing I do as a result of my conversations with the publishing executive. PNH was colluding and conspiring and campaigning for awards long before the Sad Puppies entered the picture, and long-time industry professionals know it.

In any event, the fact that Macmillan still hasn’t responded to the complaints about PNH’s Code of Conduct violation means that it is time to start requesting responses from them again. And if they don’t respond to his unprovoked and unprofessional attack on a woman of Jewish descent, then the matter will be brought to the employment authorities.

McRapey’s take: “What it looks like when one writer calls another writer onto the carpet, and then sets the carpet on fire…. Seriously, I think I’m just gonna spend my day eating ice cream and
figuring out what part of science fiction I’m totes ruining next.”

Well, we already knew he’s not going to spend it writing….

Are you ready for 2016?

The Rabid Puppies are stirring in their kennels beneath the Dark Tower, straining at the chains that bind them. The Vile Faceless Minions are being starved, the better to whet their appetites. The Dread Ilk are gearing up and sharpening their blades. The Ilk are oiling their guns and adding to their ammo stores.

And we’re not alone. Because in 2016, an all-out war on social justice has been declared.

In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone….

Had progressives wanted to stem the tide
of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could
have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they
doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free
expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio
apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock-records and let them know
that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style
hand-wringing nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re
going to use it — whether they like it or not.
 

If you take their crybully pronouncements at face value, social justice warriors believe,
with all the fervor of a paranoiac, that they are helpless, fragile
things, buffeted by sinister structural forces they are powerless to
resist. They believe that their opponents possess power that, if used
ruthlessly enough, could eradicate them. What do you say we prove them
right?

2015 Book of the Year

Fourmilab selected SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police as the Book of the Year for 2015:

Nonfiction:
    Winner:
        SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day

    Runners up:
        Concrete Planet by Robert Courland
        What If? by Randall Munroe
        GPS Declassified by Richard D. Easton and Eric F. Frazier
        Rocket Ranch by Jonathan H. Ward

It has been very gratifying to see how well SJWAL has been received across the political spectrum. SJWs are not merely dangerous to those of us on the Alt-Right, they are a very real problem for conservatives and liberals and those who are entirely apolitical as well.

In other news, Castalia House’s new Audio Editor is on a roll.  The audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible for $19.95. I believe it is also available to Audible members for free in some capacity, although I’m not familiar with the system.

Written by: Vox Day, John Red Eagle
Narrated by: Thomas Landon
Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins

The audiobook for A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld is also complete and will be available soon.

Science SJWs always lie

Orac Knows is always looking for a chance to take a shot at me because I spank him every time he tries to attack  my vaccine skepticism or whatever. He’s a typical scientist, educated, but not very smart, and totally unable to grasp the fact that his science degree doesn’t make him a match for an opponent with a significant advantage in intelligence.

He tried to leap on the fact that, according to him, the study cited by the New York Times in the story I linked to yesterday was flawed, and thereby claim that I don’t know what I am talking about.

There was just one little problem with that. I never read the study. I never pretended to read the study. I neither linked to nor cited the study.

From @oracknows: Quoth Vox Day: Antivaxers are more educated. Quoth the study Vox cites: Not exactly…

Vox Day @voxday 
You’re dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I’m smarter.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Of course, it amuses me that someone who is so “smart” didn’t seem to understand what the study he touts actually says. 🙂

Vox Day @voxday
You prove my point. I never read any study. I merely linked to the New York Times. You’re not amused, you’re dishonest.

Orac ‏@oracknows
In other words, to borrow a phrase from @WilliamShatner, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.

Vox Day @voxday 
My intellect is observably superior to yours. And you’re not laughing. You’re posturing.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Nope. I’m mocking you for being so lazy and anxious to believe the NYT version that you didn’t bother to check!

Vox Day @voxday
Why would I check it? I don’t check most news sources I link. The only
person leaping at anything is you. Why attack me, not NYT?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And you also claimed I cited the study. I didn’t. You even knew I didn’t. You lied. See, YOU, I would check. Because you lie.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Proof @oracknows lied:

1. “Quoth the study Vox cites”
2. “it’s obvious that he just read the news…but didn’t actually look up the paper”

Notice how as soon as he’s busted on his two bait-and-switches – he tries to substitute “more intelligent” for “more educated” and “Vox is stupid because he got it wrong” for “I think the New York Times got it wrong”, he tries to back up and say that he’s just mocking me for excessive credulity in citing the New York Times.

You know, the leading American liberal news standard. Someone had better alert Wikipedia! The New York Times is no longer a reliable source!

This is like me claiming someone doesn’t understand economics because they cited GDP or inflation figures reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s just ludicrously dishonest. But then, Orac isn’t actually interested in correcting the science or he would have focused on the New York Times and not me. He’s just another SJW with such short-term time preferences that he’s willing to throw his own reputation as well as the reputation of a liberal newspaper and a science reporter under the bus just to take an ill-advised shot at me.

The funny thing is that Spacebunny can land a killshot 100x more effective than all the SJWs desperately flailing about, and she can do it with considerably less effort.

UberFacts @UberFacts
A study found that astronauts had more difficulty doing things that required spacial reasoning and motor skills after 6 months in space.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@voxday would come back a vegetable…..

Remember, free speech is firable

If you are a manager or an employer, don’t hesitate to investigate your employees’ social media pages and fire those who express SJW views. The precedent has been clearly established: anyone who makes “unacceptable” remarks that do not reflect a company’s values can be terminated:

A man accused of sending racist private messages to a Black Lives Matter Facebook page has lost his job with food giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Brad Schultz used a racial epithet in referring to the group and told them “get out of town with your [expletive] protesting,” based on screenshots of the messages widely circulated over social media. Schultz’s message added that they should “just leave, white people don’t like you.”

At least one Facebook group posted the messages publicly last week along with a number for ADM, where Schultz was employed. The post was shared more than 1,000 times. According to screenshots of Schultz’s Facebook page, he lives in Mankato.

    (3) The employee who posted these statements no longer works for ADM.
    — ADM Mankato (@ADMMankato) December 27, 2015

    (2) As previously stated, these remarks are unacceptable and do not reflect ADM’s values.
    — ADM Mankato (@ADMMankato) December 27, 2015

    (1) ADM has concluded its investigation regarding recent social media comments made by an ADM employee in Mankato, Minnesota.
    — ADM Mankato (@ADMMankato) December 27, 2015

Archer Daniels Midland said in a statement Tuesday that it conducted an investigation into the employee’s comments and that he no longer works for the company. They would not specify whether he resigned or was terminated. “These remarks are unacceptable and do not reflect ADM’s values,” the statement said.

Schultz did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday afternoon.

Screenshots show he later apologized to Black Lives Matter, seemingly after the comments had gone public. “It was cruel, and I didn’t mean it,” Schultz wrote in another private message. “In no way is my workplace affiliated with these comments. Please delete them.”

“Internet justice is real,” Minneapolis NAACP President Nekima Levy-Pounds posted on Facebook Tuesday afternoon. “Hopefully, individuals will learn from Brad Schultz’s mistake and think twice before making racist statements on social media.”

In like manner, any anti-Christian or even anti-Christmas statement is sufficient grounds for termination, as it can be described as “unacceptable anti-religious bigotry”. Those will probably be the easiest to find, especially among millennials. It should be relatively easy to disemploy any militant atheist working in the corporate world. There are also an increasing number of anti-white comments that can be identified.

Note once more that apologizing is utterly futile. Given the amenability of the authority involved, it probably didn’t matter what Schultz did. But the point is that an apology is NEVER going to save you once you have made yourself vulnerable to SJWs and been targeted by them.

SJWs disemploying people

Those who whine and cry about my responding to SJWs who place fake attack reviews on Amazon, among other things, like to pretend that I engage in unprovoked offensive tactics rather than in defensive deterrents.

But as we know, SJWs always lie. Consider this recent tweet of SJW Margaret Cho:

Margaret Cho @margeretcho
http://racistsgettingfired.tumblr.com  is a great resource on what to do with racists on here.

The site, RacistsGettingFired, even maintains a list of people who have lost their jobs as a result of their actions, such as this woman.

SJWs always cry out in pain as they strike you. And the main reason they fear me now is because I pay no attention whatsoever to their cries of innocence and self-justification and being off-limits despite their aggressive tactics. They know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they cannot take a shot at me, my allies, my friends, or my supporters without taking a hit or three in return. Because we are disciplined, because we tell the truth, and because we only respond to their attacks by utilizing tactics they have themselves introduced, we are beating them at the moral level of cultural war.

It’s very simple. They act, I observe, I decide on the reprisal, and the VFM go into action. I know a lot of the VFM are feeling restless and underutilized, but the fact is that of the six successful actions in which they have engaged over the last two months, I have only required the participation of about eight percent of them. The goal is to achieve the objective, not to make a noise. When the objective is to make a noise, trust me, I’ll let you know.

The fact is that SJWs are out to disqualify, discredit, and disemploy everyone who does not share their dedication to social justice ideals. Everyone. Liberals. Insufficiently dedicated leftists. Conservatives. Cuckservatives. Cross them, even inadvertently, and they will attempt to destroy you, your career, and your family.

A Minneapolis City Council member is drawing criticism for what some see as an effort to publicly shame constituents who objected to her involvement in Wednesday’s Black Lives Matter rally at the Mall of America and the airport. Council Member Alondra Cano, who represents the Ninth Ward, has been accused of “doxing” — posting personal information about people who criticized her for supporting the Black Lives Matter events — on Twitter.

Those protests shut down movement in and out of the Megamall and also interfered with airport traffic; she’s a City Councilwoman and she’s doxxing those who take the controversial position of preferring the international airport and the state’s largest retail outlet remain open for business.

That is the reality. So, the only question is, are you going to submit or are you going to resist?

You don’t say

Chaos Horizon provides additional evidence of how the SF-SJWs guide their bloc vote:

A few weeks ago, the 2015 Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice list came out. Over the past several years, this has been an important list to track for several reasons. First, it gathers recommendations from 11 Tor.com critics, making it a collated list of its own. Second, it has been fairly well synced up to the Hugos and Nebulas, at least before the campaigning of last year. In 2013, they recommended Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice three times; it swept the Hugo and Nebula. Last year, Goblin Emperor was recommended 3 times; it scores Hugo and Nebula noms and that could very well have won the Hugo if not for the Puppies.

Tor Books has been an award-chasing publisher for decades. That fact that the Puppies have risen up to stop them from dominating the awards every year is why they changed the rules with E Pluribus Hugo. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his little coterie calculated that as long as they can guarantee themselves a single nomination per category, they can muster enough muscle to win at the final round.

What Puppykickers quite willfully fail to understand is that in 2015, the Puppies, even the Rabid Puppies, engaged in less bloc-voting, in percentage terms, in 2015 than the SJWs did. In the past, the Tor-led SJWs didn’t need to publish public lists because it was all a whisper campaign among a few dozen people; you could see references to it in every “I haven’t read X yet, but I’m voting for it because I hear….” statement. You could also see the Nebula logrolling take place in the SFWA NAR every year, until it was hidden from the public; to Cat Rambo’s credit, she has apparently made public what, if I recall correctly, John Scalzi was responsible for hiding.

Table 1: Correlation Between Top 6 (and Ties) of the 2014 Nebula Suggested Reading List and the Eventual 2014 Nebula Nominees

Novel: 4 out of 6, 67.7%
Novella: 6 out of 6, 100%
Novelette: 5 out of 6, 83.3%
Short Story: 6 out of 7, 85.7%

Total: 21/25, 84%

The Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice has reinforced, and to a certain extent supplanted, the Tor whispering campaign; based on the way in which reviewers tend to chase the crowd, we can anticipate that the novels the SJWs will be pushing for the award season include:

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

It’s all women, as one would expect, but surprisingly light on Tor-published books. One would assume the fifth book would be The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three Body Problem, but there is very, very little SJW buzz about it. Perhaps the SJWs finally figured out that Cixin Liu is a man. Or perhaps it is perceived to have been tainted by the Puppies playing kingmaker last year. Who knows? These are not rational people.

We now also know why John Scalzi very publicly counted himself out in 2015; unlike last year, he is aware that neither Tor nor the SJWs are pushing his latest mediocrity for any awards. No doubt he’s waiting for EPH, when Tor can again guarantee him a spot to make up for his declining popular support.

Now let’s go and see what the top novels are in the 2015 SFWA Suggested Reading List. And note that I did not see these until AFTER reaching my conclusions based on the Tor.com reviewers’ choices.

21     Uprooted     Novik, Naomi     Del Rey
17     The Grace of Kings     Liu, Ken     Saga Press 
16     Karen Memory     Bear, Elizabeth     Tor Books
15     Updraft     Wilde, Fran     Tor Books   
14     The Traitor Baru Cormorant   Dickinson, Seth  Tor Books
12     Ancillary Mercy     Leckie, Ann     Orbit
11     The Fifth Season     Jemisin, N. K.     Orbit   

Interesting, is it not? All four novels identified are there. After looking into the three previously unmentioned novels, I think it’s likely that Seth Dickenson’s debut novel will turn out to be the book that Tor is pushing in 2015. They badly need a new star now that Scalzi is running out of steam and they lost the HALO books; based on this review, Dickenson certainly appears to understand the Tor Game: “While I enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and will read the second
book in the series when it arrives, I felt at times I was being giving a
sociology lecture by someone steeped in women’s and LBGT studies and
political economy.”

Seth Dickinson, we are told, “is the author of THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT and more than
a dozen short stories. During his time in the social sciences, he
worked on cocoa farming in Ghana, political rumor control, and
simulations built to study racial bias in police shootings. He wrote
much of the lore and flavor for Bungie Studios’ smash hit DESTINY. If he
were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.”

Yeah, about that… “Destiny’s initial release was met with a chorus of ‘meh’.  It
wasn’t a bad game, but it was hampered by a damp squib of a main
storyline.”

In any event, Mr. Dickenson sounds like an ideal standard bearer for Tor Books for the next few years. Regardless, I won’t be reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, because BOYCOTT TOR BOOKS.

Settle down, ladies

La, such a catfight! It’s always a bit amusing to see when a disagreement here moves to rhetorical metargument, where instead of arguing about the actual point of disputation, the argument is transformed into who can generate more feelbads in the other side.

It is readily apparent that “you’re arguing like an SJW” has become the new “that’s a logical fallacy”, pseudo-dialectic that is both rhetorical and ineptly applied. It’s not quite as irritating, of course, as SJW is a more recent and less perfectly defined term; it used to make my teeth itch to see people use “logical fallacy” as a synonym for “statement with which I disagree”.

I stomped that inept rhetorical device out by the simple tactic of always asking the individual a single question: what was the logical fallacy? Was it the Undistributed Middle? Denying the Antecedent? Ignoratio elenchi? The fact that they could neither identify nor even describe the “fallacy” they had decried usually sufficed to teach them their error in a sufficiently embarrassing way to prevent them from again resorting to the rhetorical tactic.

Now, who is “arguing like an SJW?” Neither “the new Star Wars is a great movie everyone should see” nor “the new SJW Wars sucks and I wish I hadn’t seen it” crowd has, as far as I can tell, lied. Neither side has decried the other’s right to hold its opinion, or made any attempt to shun, discredit, or disemploy the other. Neither side has attempted to claim that the other side is intrinsically immoral, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted.

Both sides have indulged heavily in rhetoric, but while SJWs are limited to rhetorical communication, so are most non-SJWs.

So, it’s simply not true that anyone is “arguing like an SJW”. And the fact that someone could imagine the other side doing so is not reflective of anything but the individual’s own imagination. I could imagine that JJ Abrams might one day make a movie that I want to see, but that does not indicate that he has actually done so, or that he will do so in the future.

I knew I wouldn’t bother seeing the Disney movies as soon as I learned he was the director. Mr. Abrams has had a long, distinguished, and successful career in Hollywood, during which he has not made a single movie or television show that interested or entertained me in the slightest. Considering that I saw one of his Star Trek movies when it was on TV one night, I was not surprised to learn that he has delivered what is essentially an repetitive remake of one of its predecessors. He may be a master of lens flare, what he is is not is an original story teller.

And to turn the old saying on its head, while history rhymes, it does not repeat. The absurdity of what Abrams has produced, from a story perspective, can perhaps be best understood if one applied his storytelling technique to a hypothetical remake of Lord of the Rings.

Imagine the Shire. Imagine a party, not a birthday party, but a 50th wedding anniversary for Sam and Rosie Gamgee. In the midst of the party, they disappear, and leave behind them a mysterious piece of jewelry for their daughter, Frodette Gamgee. Then, one day, a grey-bearded, dark-skinned stranger appears; it is Gandhi the black dwarf, warning Frodette that it is a shard of Morgoth Bauglir’s iron crown, in which the fallen Ainur had imbued with his immortal essence. The shard had escaped notice in the War for the Ring, but now that Sauron and the One Ring are gone, it is the key to ruling Middle Earth.

A new power, an evil power, an invisible power has risen in the East, and the King of Gondor, Aragorn’s son Sarugorn, has been acting strangely of late. Frodette must bring the iron shard to Aglarond, where the King of the Glittering Caves will know what do… but beware, the Knight Riders of the Invisible Empire are hunting for it!

Personally, the only movie review in which I am genuinely interested in is Mr. John C. Wright’s. Those who have read Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
 will understand why.