For yer enjoyment

Excerpt from Chapter 16 of Rose Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by Keiran Halcyon:


Minnie walked towards ye forest; I followed uncertainly in 'er wake. We stopped just before ye tree line.

“What be we waitin' for? ”

“Our intentions t' enter ye Forest should 'ave been noticed by Cerelian, she will come shortly, ” replied Minnie, “I cannot enter with ye, 'n only with 'er by yer side can ye enter ye tree line. Avast!”

We waited for another five minutes until I heard a soft rustle o' leaves comin' from ye tree line. Out o' ye shadows o' ye forest appeared a tall naked wench. Ye first thing that caught me eye about 'er because o' ye contrast, were a dark triangle settled between toned 'n strong legs. 'er wide hips tapered t' a narrower waist, 'er stomach were flat 'n athletic, while full breasts were tapered with slightly brown nipples. Yarr! Intelligent blue eyes glittered in 'er narrow, pointed face, while a wild mane o' dark brown hair fell into ye small o'er back. Which I could hardly begin t' guess 'er true age for some reason, she seemed as hale as an old wench in 'er eyes, but still ye beauty o' youth adorned 'er body.

“Sister McGonagall, ” greeted ye druidess with a slight bow o' ye head. 'er voice were silky smooth, not like Professor Snape’s ominous tones, but almost seductive in nature. Ahoy!

“Sister Cerelian, ” returned Minnie.

“It 'as been a long time since ye embraced ye beliefs, ” said Cerelian.

“I 'ad t' honour a debt t' an old hearty, 'n 'awe been busy ever since, ” replied Minnie.

“The druids respect that, 'n respect yer decision t' remain in wizardin' society, ye would still be welcome with us at any time, ” said Cerelian. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

“I appreciate that greatly, Sister, ” said Minnie with another bow o' ye head. Yarr! Cerelian now turned those strange blue eyes on me.

“Are ye ye one who wishes t' learn 'n train 'n eventually become a Druidess? ” said Cerelian. Yarr!

“Yes, ” I answered shortly.

“Why would ye wish this? Why would ye so forsake ye comforts o' ye wizardin' world ye 'ave just barely entered 'n hardly understood?”

Me mind raced, it were clear that Cerelian knew about me from that statement. Minnie 'ad said she were in correspondence with ye druidess, what they said in ye letters I 'ad no idea, but it were clear now that Cerelian knew a lot.

“I shall be honest 'n say that at ye start, all I wanted t' do were practice Nudatio in peace at Hogwarts, as ye circumstances o' me first eleven years o' life were hardly ideal, clothes 'ad become an annoyance t' me durin' those years. Shiver me timbers! Minnie allowed me t' continue ye practice under ye initial pretence o' druidic belief. But as she told me more 'n more o' what bein' a druidess be ye more a sense o' rightness about it rang in me. Until I finally told 'er o' me determination t' train as she did when she were a druidess, ” I said with more confidence than I felt. Yar!

“Interestin', ” said Cerelian, a small smile graced 'er lips as 'er eyes surveyed me. Arrr! Which I suddenly felt a gentle ... somethin' lay itself o'er me mind ... but just as quickly ye feelin' were gone 'n Cerelian’s smile grew large. “You will do fine. Yarr! Please remove yer clothes. Shiver me timbers!”

Automatically, I fin'ered ye amulet 'n me ‘apparent’ clothes dissipated into thin air. If Cerelian were surprised she certainly did not show it. She turned t' Minnie.

“I thought it best t' get 'er started on at least one aspect o' druidism, ” said Minnie. Cerelian nodded.

“Thank ye, it will most certainly sawe time if she 'as gotten past 'er shame already. Ahoy! ” Ye druidess held out 'er hand. “Please remove ye amulet as well; I shall keep it safe durin' yer six week stay 'ere. Avast, ye scurvy dog! ” I reluctantly handed it o'er, 'n for ye first time I were completely naked as ye day I were born. “This be where ye must say goodbye t' yer mother. Avast!”

I sighed 'n with a heawy heart hugged Minnie goodbye.


***


First chapter from beckymac666's Forbiden Fruit: the tempation of Edward Cullen:


Chapter 1 - Altantiana

Shiver me timbers! Hey, me names Atlantiana Rebekah Loren (but everyone calls me Tiana or just plain Tiaa). Which I be a 16 year old wench 'n I liwe in Forks, Washin'ton! Me hair be long 'n pale like spun gold 'n skims t' me waist like a pale shimmerin' amber mist. Me eyes be deep forgetminot blue 'n me delicate fentures be lilly white 'n pure as ye winter snow in moonlight. Arrr! I've been told by loads o' sleazy, ugly, HORNY guys that I be real pretty 'n look like a model or a bunny wench (some o' ye guys who like me be really old 'n try t' make opt with me its disgustin'n weird !) but basically a lot o' ye girls I meet tell a different story. They say I be too ivory white 'n ethereal 'n too skinny 'n that I look anorexic which i don't care about, but I think its seriously disrespectful t' people with REAL eatin' disorders (btw i'm so totally not anorexic! Which I eat loads I just never gain weight 'n I be not thin enough t' be anorexic anyways, I think they were just bein' BIATCHES especially this one ratty brain called Ellie Mayfair who I hope freakin' DIES in PAIN with SHIT ON HER FACE! Sorry, I be not really such a batch but she be SO horrible if ye met 'er you'd think ye same !) Avast!

Anyways I be quite tall 'n slim 'n but with really big boobs that I used t' HATE because they look noticeable on me slender body 'n draw t' much attention but now i like them 'n don't care who stares at me! Which I 'ave a lip ring 'n recently put black 'n indigo 'n magenta streaks in me long pale blond hair. Which I smell like mint 'n cinnamon. Which I wear mostly black 'n hot pink, deep purple 'n neon blue 'n listen t' COOL music!

Yar! It be me first day at school in forks as I just moved 'ere t' live with new foster parents Dave 'n Marie. They be nice 'n all wery hole some sweet people but it be not like havin' a real family. I'we been hurt t' many times t' let people close t' me 'n I don't talk t' them wery much. Me real mom died when I were born 'n I never knew me real dad. Which I sometimes wonder what 'e be like 'n if I will ever get t' met 'im. Dave gave me a ride t' school 'n I smiled faintly as 'e wished me good luck 'n I got out o' ye car 'n went into ye school. Loads o' people freakin' stared at me as I walked down ye hall. Which I were wearin' tight black leather pants with silver chains at ye waste 'n a red fishnet-like top 'n ye could see me black lacy bra through it. Which I ignored whispers 'n ye big pink cheerleader imbosils pointin' at me. Which I were used t' it 'n I paid no at-tension t' ye guys askin' desperately for me number (like hell I'd even LOOK at ye horny little donkeys !) 'n told a ditsy blond cheerleader called Jessica t' STFU (!) when she called me a freak! Next time she tries anythin' I'll hit 'er in ye eye cause NO ONE messes with me nemore! Me first day I were relay board, I sat gazin' out o' ye window into ye gray cloud-embittered sky for most o' ye mornin', Me teachers all looked at me disprovable but said nothin' cause they probably new I were a foster kid 'n a Gothic 'n didn't want t' upset me in case I cut them up as they slept,.

Me ears be pierced four times, I 'awe a tattoo o' a scorpion (like S me birth-sign !) on me ankle 'n a Gothic cross on me shoulder, 'n on me hand i 'awe a weird birthmark in ye shape o' a seven-pointed star that I've 'ad all me life. Arrr! Yer probably wanderin' why I be botherin' t' tell ye this, well I tell ye now I be no ordinary sixteen year old wench. Which I 'awe a secret, a dark 'n forbidden secret witch I be only just beginnin' t' understand. Yarr! When I sleep I hear whispers in another language 'n even though I understand them at ye time, when I wake up i can't remember it! Which I also see weird faces in me dreams that fade t' nothin'ness when I open me eyes 'n I swear out ye corner o' me eye me birthmark glows shockin' bright gold 'n gets relay hot sometimes but when I look properly it be back t' normal boarding scar-color! Which I be really gracefull like ye runnin' anti-lopes when I run wery fast 'n be stronger 'n faster than most people. Which I used t' just think i were relay athletic but now I be not so sure, I think there might be somethin' else at work, somethin' so much more mysterious 'n eeire. Shiver me timbers! Ye truth hovers so softly on ye brink o' me memory sometimes but if only i could remember ye weird things that clung t' ye edge o' me mind as I slept!

At lunch I sat alone in ye corner 'n scanned ye cafeteria quietly with me eyes smolderin' dark blue beheath me long black lashes 'n me slim thighs curled under me. Which it were ye n I noticed an unbelievably jaw-droopin'ly hawt HAWT HAAAAAAAAWT dude with tusseted blondey-brown hair, golden yellow eyes like wells o' hot caramel 'n pale sexy features. Which 'e were tall 'n mussel 'n looked like 'e were wearin' eyeliner 'n me body got hot 'n cold all at once as I looked at 'im. I'd never felt this way about anyone before 'n I'd totally never felt this weird feelin' that I'd met someone before but I 'ad no idea where 'n i knew it were impassible because I'd freakin' remember someone THAT hawt! A wench sat next t'im with long brown hair with 'er arms dripped o'er 'im like a freakin' flesh-eatin' plant so i thought well whatevah, hes taken. Arrr! She wasn't nearly as hawt as 'e were, she wasn't ugly though. Which I figured I were maybe prettier then 'er. Which I newer really saw meself as beautiful but i'd guessed from thinks others 'ad said, plus this wench wasn't great lookin' but anyways I'd never try t' pilch with another girls' BF cause thats just low. So I got up t' leave ye hall thinkin' I'd go 'n smoke some bald drugs in ye locker room while no one were there. Shiver me timbers! As I waked o'er t'e exit I couldn't help but notice ye hawt pale guys musky eyes as they met mine. Which I locked away hurriedly. Yarr! Which I smocked dope in ye locker room for a bit then I wondered t' me next class. Which I bumped into someone in ye corridor 'n me bocks fell everywhere! FRICK! FRICK! FRIIIICKK!

"WTF!" I screamed loudly, "watch where yer FREAKING goin' ye asshole!" (i 'ave anger problems)

"I be so so sorry" 'e said in a woice like wet heaven "please forgive me me lady"

Which it were ye hawt pale guy!


***


And finally, chapter two from the classic Eye of Argon by Jim Theis:

-2-

Yarr! Arrivin' after dusk in Gorzom, grignr descended down a dismal alley, reinin'is horse before a beaten pub. Ye redhaired giant strode into ye dimly lit hostelry reekin' o' foul odors, 'n cheap grog. Ahoy! Ye air were heavy with chockin' fumes spewing from smolderin'torches encased within theden's earthen packed walls. Tables were clustered with groups o' drunken scallywags, 'n cutthroats, tossin' dice, or makin' love t' willin' wenches.

Eyein' a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishin' t' wholesomely occupy 'is time. Ye flickerin' torches cast weird shafts o' luminescence dancin' o'er ye half naked harlot o'is choice, 'er strin'y orchid twines o' hair swayin' gracefully o'er ye lithe opaque nose, as she raised a half drained mug t'er pale red lips. Yarr!

Glancin' upward, ye allurin' complexion noted ye stalwart giant as 'e rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from ye pair o' deep blue ovals o' ye amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticin'im t' join 'er. Yarr! Ye barbarian seated himself upon a stool at ye wenches side, exposin'is body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishin' a long steel broad cutlass, an iron spiraled battle helmet, 'n a thick leather sandals, t'er unobstructed view.

"Thou hast need t' occupy yer time, barbarian", questioned ye female? Avast, ye scurvy dog!

Arrr! "Only if somethin' worth offerin' be within me reach." Stated Grignr, as 'is hands crept t' embrace ye temptin' female, who welcomed them with open willin'ness.

"From where d'ye come barbarian, 'n by what be ye called?" Gasped ye complyin' wench, as Grignr smothered 'er lips with ye blazin' touch o'is flamin' mouth. Avast!

Ye engrossed titan ignored ye queries o' ye inquisitiwe female, pullin'er towards 'im 'n crushin'er saggin' nipples t'is yearnin' chest. Without struggle she gave in, windin'er soft arms around ye harshly bronzedhide o' Grignr corded shoulder blades, as 'is calloused hands caressed 'er firm protrudin' busts.

"Ye make lowe well wench," Admitted Grignr as 'e reached for ye wessel o' potent grog 'is charge 'ad been quaffin'. Ahoy!

A flyin' foot caught ye mug Grignr 'ad taken hold o', sendin' its blood red contents sloshin' o'er a flickerin' crescent; leashin' tongues o' bright orange flame t' ye foot trodden floor. Yar!

Yarr! "Remove yeself Sirrah, ye wench belongs t' me;" Blabbered a drunken soldier, too far consumed by ye influences o'is virile brew t' take note o' ye superior size o'is adversary.

Grignr lithly bounded from ye startled female, 'is face lit up t' an ashen red ferocity, 'n eyes locked in a searin' feral blaze toward ye swayin' soldier.

Yarr! "T' hell with ye, braggard!" Bellowed ye angered Ecordian, as 'e hefted 'is finely honed broad cutlass.

Ye staggerin' soldier clumsily reached towards ye pommel o'is danglin' cutlass, but before 'is hands ever touched ye oaken hilt a silvered flash were slicin' ye heavy air. Ye thews o' ye savages lashin' right arm bulged from ye glistenin' bronzed hide as 'is blade bit deeply into ye soldiers neck, lopin' off ye confused head o'is senseless tormentor.

With a nauseatin' thud ye severed oval toppled t' ye floor, as ye segregated torso o' Grignr's bovine antagonist swayed, then collapsed in a pool o' swirled crimson.

Avast, ye scurvy dog! In ye confusion ye soldier's fellows confronted Grignr with unsheathed cutlasses, directed toward ye latters scowlin' make-up. Arrr!

"Ye slut should 'ave picked 'is quarry more carefully!" Roared ye wictor in a mockin' baritone growl, as 'e wiped 'is drippin' blade on ye prostrate form, 'n returned it t' its scabbard.

"Ye fool should 'awe shown more prudence, howewer ye shall rue yer actions while rottin' in ye pits." Stated one o' ye sprawled soldier's comrades.

Grignr's hand began t' remowe 'is blade from its leather housin', but retarded ye motion in face o' ye blades wavin' before 'is face.
"Dismiss yer hand from ye hilt, barbarbian, or ye shall find a foot o' steel sheathed in yer gizzard. Yarr!"

Grignr weighed 'is position observin'is plight, where-upon 'e took ye soldier's advice as ye only logical choice. T' attempt t' hack 'is way from 'is present predicament could only warrant certain death. Which 'e were o' no mind t' brin' upon 'is own demise if an alternate path presented itself. Ye will t' necessitate 'is life forced 'im t' yield t' ye superior force in hopes o' a moment o' carlessness later upon ye part o'is captors in which 'e could effect a more plausible means o' escape. Yar!

"Ye may steady yer arms, I will go without a struggle." Yarr!

"Yer decision be a wise one, yet perhaps ye would 'ave been better off 'ad ye forced death," ye soldier's mouth wrinkled t' a sadistic grin o' knowin' mirth as 'e prodded 'is prisoner on with 'is cutlass point. Yar!

Ahoy! After an indiscriminate period o' marchin' through slinkin' alleyways 'n dim moonlighted streets ye procession confronted a massive seraglio. Ye palace area were surrounded by an iron gratin', with a lush garden upon all sides. Shiver me timbers!

Ye group were admitted through ye gilded gateway 'n Grignr were ledalong a stone pathway bordered by plush vegitation lustfully enhanced by ye moon's shimmerin' rays. Yarr! Upon reachin' ye palace ye group were granted entrance, 'n after several minutes o' explanation, led through several windin' corridors t' a richly draped chamber.

Confrontin' ye group were a short stocky man seated upona golden throne. Tapestries o' richly draped regal blue silk covered all walls o' ye chamber, while ye steps leadin' t' ye throne were plated with sparklin' white ivory. Ye man upon ye throne 'ad a naked wench seated at each o'is arms, 'n a trusted adwisor seated astern o'im. At each cornwr o' ye chamber a guard stood at attention, with upraised pikes supported in their hands, golden chainmail adornin' their torso's 'n barred helmets emittin' scarlet plumes enshroudin' their heads. Ye man rose from 'is throne t' ye dias surroundin' it. 'is plush turquois robe dangled loosely from 'is chuncky frame.

Avast, ye scurvy dog! Ye soldiers surroundin' Grignr fell t' their knees with heads bowed t' ye stone masonry o' ye floor in fearful dignity t' their sovereign, leige.
"Explain ye purpose o' this intrusion upon me chateau!"
"Yer sirenity, resplendent in noble grandeur, we 'ave brought this lubber before ye (ye soldier gestured toward Grignr) for ye redress or yer all knowin' wisdon in judgement regardin'is fate."

"Down on yer knees, lout, 'n pay proper homage t' yer sowereign!" commanded ye pudgy noble o' Grignr. Arrr!

Shiver me timbers! "By ye surly beard o' Mrifk, Grignr kneels t' no man!" scowled ye massive barbarian.
"Ye dare t' deal this blasphemous act t' me! Ye be indeed brawe stranger, yet yer valor smacks o' foolishness."

"I find ye t' be ye only fool, sittin' upon yer pompous throne, enhancin' ye rollin' flabs o' yer belly in ye midst o' yer elaborate luxuryand ..." Ye soldier standin' at Grignr's side smote 'im heavily in ye face with ye flat o'is cutlass, cutting short ye harsh words 'n knockin'is battered helmet t' ye masonry with an echo-in' clang. Yar!

Ye paunchy noble's saggin' round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up t' a lustrous cherry red radiance. Shiver me timbers! 'is lips trembled with malicious rage, while emittin' a muffled sibilant gibberish. 'is saggin' flabs rolled like a tub o' upset jelly, then compressed as 'e sucked in 'is gut in an attempt t' conceal 'is softness.

Ye prince regained 'is statue, then spoke t' ye soldiers surroundin' Grignr, 'is face conformin' t' an ugly expression o' sadistic humor.
"Take this uncouth heathen t' ye vault o' misery, 'n be sure that 'is agonies be long 'n drawn out before death can release 'im."

"As ye wish sire, yer command shall be heeded immediately," answered ye soldier t' starboard o' Grignr as 'e stared into ye barbarians seemin'ly unaffected face.

Ye advisor seated in ye back o' ye noble slowly rose 'n adwanced t' ye side o'is master, motionin' ye wenches seated at 'is sides t' remove themselwes. Which 'e lowered 'is head 'n whispered t' ye noble. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

"Eminence, ye punishment ye 'ave decreed will cause much misery t' this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then release 'im t' a land beyond ye sufferin's o' ye human body. Why not mellow 'im in one o' ye subterranean vaults for a few days, then send 'im t' life labor in one o' yer buried mines.

T' one such as 'e, a life spent in ye confinement o' ye stygian pits will be an infinitely more appropiate 'n lastin' torture."

Ye noble cupped 'is droopin' double chin in ye folds o'is brimin' palm, meditatin' for a moment upon ye rationality o' ye councilor's word's, then raised 'is shaggy brown eyebrows 'n turned toward ye advisor, eyes aglow.
"... As always Agafnd, ye speak with great wisdom. Yer words rin' o' great knowledge concernin' ye nature o' one such as 'e," sayeth, ye king. Ye noble turned toward ye prisoner with a noticable shimmer reflectin' in 'is frog-like eyes, 'n 'is lips contortin' t' a greasy grin. Avast! "I 'awe decided t' void me previous decree. Ye prisoner shall be removed t' one o' ye palaces underground waults. Ahoy! There 'e shall stay until I 'ave decided that 'e 'as sufficiently simmered, whereupon 'e be t' be allowed t' spend ye remainder o'is days at labor in one o' me mines."

Upon hearin' this, Grignr realized that 'is fate would be far less merciful than death t' one such as 'e, who be used t' roamin' ye countryside at will. A life o' confinement would be more than 'is body 'n mind could stand up t'. This type o' life would be immeasurably worse than death. Ahoy! Shiver me timbers!

"I shall never understand ye ways if yer twisted ciwilization. Which I simply defend me honor 'n be condemned t' life confinement, by a pig who sits on 'is royal ass wooin' whores, 'n knows nothin' o' ye affairs o' ye land 'e imagines t' rule!" Lectures Grignr?
"Enough o' this! Away with ye slut before I loose me control!"

Avast, ye scurvy dog! Seein' ye peril o'is position, Grignr searched for an openin'. Crushin' prudence t' ye sward, 'e plowed into ye soldier at 'is left arm takin' hold o'is cutlass, 'n boundin' t' ye dias supportin' ye prince before ye startled guards could regain their composure. Agafnd leaped Grignr 'n 'is sire, but found a cutlass blade permeatin' ye length o'is ribs before 'e could loosed 'is weapon. Yarr!

Yarr! Ye councilor slumped t'is knees as Grignr slid 'is crimsoned blade from Agfnd's rib cage. Ye fat prince stood undulatin' in insurmountable fear before ye edge o' ye fiery maned comet, 'is flabs o' jellied blubber pulsatin' t'n fro in ripples o' flowin' terror.

"Where be yer wisdom 'n power now, yer magjesty?" Growled Grignr. Yarr!

Ye prince went rigid as Grignr discerned 'im glazin' o'er 'is shoulder. Which 'e swlived t' note ye cause o' ye noble's attention, raised 'is cutlass o'er 'is head, 'n prepared t' leash a vicious downward cleft, but fell short as ye haft o' a steel rimed pike clashed against 'is unguarded skull. Then blackness 'n solitude. Silence enshroudin'n ewer peaceful reind supreme. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

"Before me, sirrah! Before me as always! Ha, Ha Ha, Haaaa ... ", nobly cackled.

Best short fiction ever

Or at least the best short fiction I've ever read:

The book in question is a collection of short stories, all based on this Dinosaur Comic from five years ago. You can get it from Amazon. I suppose that in order for this to be a proper book review, I'd have to explain what it's about and then wax lyrical about how awesome it is. But this is the Internet, so just read the comic and you'll get the idea.

My biggest problem with the book is that I read very quickly. The stories are so good I don't want to finish the book too soon, so I'm trying really hard to pace myself and only read a couple a day. It's difficult.

So yeah, it's the best fiction I've read for a long time. That should be enough of a review.

Racial thinking in fantasy role-playing

Years ago, I've run a couple of role-playing campaigns with ICE's Rolemaster standard system. For all its flaws, not least of which is encumbering the GM with a metric ton of tables and charts, it works surprisingly smoothly, and even if I wouldn't say I like it, I've found it useful. As a curiosity, one of the first things I ever wrote was a small article for a role-playing "netzine".

A while back I picked up a copy of ICE's RM supplement "Races and Cultures", from 2004. The way they published the system was that they came out with the basic rules, the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), and then started adding supplements to cover areas they'd only done sketchily in the basic ruleset. Some examples include the ludicrously overpowered Martial Arts Companion and various sets of magic rules.

Races and Cultures (R&C) aims to expand on character creation. In the RMSS, each character had a race, and if they were human, a culture. So dwarves and high elves were just dwarves or high elves, while humans were hillmen, mariners or something like that in addition to being humans. So humans had cultures, while everyone else just had race. As a side note, I have a personal gripe with R&C because it practically eliminates urban cultures, and a lot of the material on cultures is, to a person with even a nodding acquaintance with anthropology or cultural studies, ridiculous. But that's beside the point.

Now, using RM as an example, I'm going to argue that the vast majority of fantasy role-playing games reproduce European racism. I'm sure that some people reading this are going to be completely turned off by that, but bear with me. This is important.

As far as I know, one of the first civilizations to put an intellectual gloss on "us versus them" were the ancient Greeks. To them, the world was divided into Greeks and barbarians. "Barbarian" was a racial pejorative; while Greeks spoke Greek, the barbarians didn't even have real languages but just made a kind of "bar-bar-bar" noise when they talked. Modern Finnish also has several racial pejoratives for people from the Middle East and Africa based on the same idea.

In Greek thinking, all Greeks were individuals with their own motivations, desires and personality. If a Greek did something, and you wanted to know why he did it, you would find the reasons in his individual attributes. On the other hand, if a barbarian did something, it was because he was a barbarian. For example, a Greek who murdered a fellow Greek would probably do it because he was somehow disturbed, or maybe the other guy had insulted him, or whatever. If a barbarian killed a Greek, it was because of his "barbarian nature". Greeks were individuals with personalities, but barbarians were just animals driven by their animal natures.

This thinking went on to form the basis of all European racism since. Alert readers may notice powerful parallels between what I've just described and the discussion on immigration and Islam going on in Europe right now. In that discussion as well, European violent crime is caused by a complex series of forces and motivations, but immigrant crime is caused by the fact that immigrants are immigrants. The IRA, for example, are terrorists because they are pursuing a political agenda through violent means, but Hamas are terrorists because they're Muslims. This kind of thinking is still everywhere, and that's why it's interesting, and scary, to find it replicated in fantasy role-playing.

**

In fantasy, humans take the place of Greeks/Romans/white Europeans. As I said, in the original RMSS, humans had different cultures that determined their background and outlook, while Halflings were just Halflings no matter where they lived. In other words, for humans their cultural background determined a lot about the character, but for the other races, their race determined everything.

R&C tries to eliminate this by giving every character both a race and a culture. Now elves, dwarves and even orcs have cultures, too! However, it isn't quite that simple.

The writers of R&C couldn't bring themselves to jettison the determining role race plays in their world. Here's some pieces of text from the race entry for Common Men:

However, the prejudices of all Men, their affections and disaffections, are always subject to local circumstance. (...)

Religious Attitudes: Mannish religious practice generally conforms to the norms for their particular cultural template.

Preferred Professions: All professions are open to Common Men. (...)

Typical Cultures: A full range of culture options are available to Common Men. (...)

Character Concepts

Men are everywhere; they exist in just about every cultural niche, every profession, every situation in which an intelligent being can find himself.

Basically, humans don't have racial attributes in R&C. They can go anywhere, do anything, and their attitudes are a product of their culture and environment. To a 21st century person, this seems like a reasonable description, and I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have agreed.

However, when it comes to other races, it turns out they're not such a tabula rasa.

As a race, Dwarves have a universal reputation for ruggedness, practicality, unwavering loyalty - and stubbornness. They are intensely clannish and stand up for their fellow Dwarves regardless of circumstance and come what may. (...)

Character Concepts

A concept for a Dwarven character could take into account his inherent racial prejudice.

The entry for Dwarves also describes their distrust of elves, their hatred of the "evil" underground races, and their religious beliefs. Remember that these are racial characteristics; Dwarves are this way because they're Dwarves. In the R&C system, a Dwarf raised in a harbor city hundreds of miles from the nearest mountains would "instinctively" hate other underground races. The same thing goes for Halflings and Elves, too. And then there are the Orcs.

Prejudices: Orcs hate all other races (...)

Religious Attitudes: Orcs worship dark gods and calue nothing so much as power and dominion over others.

Preferred Professions: Common Orcs stick to the non-spell using professions: Fighter, Rogue, Thief. They are not intelligent enough to make good spell users and they never bother to try.

That last bit isn't even true, by the way: going by their stat bonuses and power point progressions, Common Orcs could actually become spellcasters. Except that they're expressly prohibited because of their race. In the "Character Concepts" section they lay it on particularly thick:

Orcs are living, breathing fighting machines. They exist for no other purpose than to do violence, and war and mayhem are all they ever really think about.

Again, remember that this describes any Orc anywhere, regardless of where or how they grew up. They can pick any culture template they like, but apparently none of it really applies to them, because the fact that they're orcs overrides any influence their environment could possibly have on them. For them, the culture template only provides adolescence skills and starting items.

**

So, the Races & Cultures supplement sets out to undo RMSS's confusion of race and culture, but ends up replicating it exactly. Elves were actually the only race that was in any significant way freed from the constraints of its "racial nature"; Dwarves are still always Dwarves, Halflings are always Halflings, and Orcs are always Lawful Evil, as the trope goes. It's a D&D trope, by the way, and it's alive and well in third edition D&D: elves are always good, orcs are always evil, humans are anything they want to be or end up being.

This is precisely the same thinking as the original Greek racism and its descendants, and it persists throughout fantasy role-playing. A human's individual outlook and personality are shaped by his personal attributes and background, but a non-human's is a product of his racial characteristics. It is testament to how deeply rooted this thinking is that even a determined effort to break away from it, the Races & Cultures supplement, failed to do so.

To a large extent this is because the other races don't really have any intrinsic value. They're mostly there to define humans, not themselves. R&C is quite explicit about this:

Build: In a sense, it is useless to describe the body shape of a Common Man, because it is the baseline to which the shape of all other races and creatures are compared. All other reference points relate to the typical range of body types for Common Men, so to use those other reference points to try to define Common Men would create a circular description.

Obviously, this selection shows a terrible intellectual poverty. Surely one can fairly describe humans as, for instance, bipedal mammals with a given average height and weight? That isn't a circular definition. But more importantly, this piece of text very powerfully conveys the way the authors, and I daresay nearly all other fantasy RPG authors, think about the various races. Humans are the baseline, and everything else is defined by how it's different from humans.

This informs the racial thinking when it comes to culture and attitudes as well. Really, the definitions of the other races aren't there to define themselves, but to define humans. Dwarves are stubborn and prejudiced; compared to them, humans are open-minded. Elves are unworldly and haughty; compared to them, humans are humble and practical. Halflings are comfort-loving and gluttonous; compared to them, humans are rugged and Spartan. The other races serve to define us. In order to do this, they have to be denied the same subjectivity and freedom of choice that humans have, to preserve the caricature. A liberal, open-minded and cosmopolitan Dwarf would destroy the very idea of the Dwarf as a cultural marker.

The most drastic contrast is with Orcs, who in most fantasy role-playing games are little more than animals. Orcs are inherently evil and violent, and they hate everyone else. How could anyone not fight orcs? After all, they're always evil! Orcs are a handy way to escape any kind of moral dilemmas: killing orcs is always right.

The history of orcs in fantasy fiction is very informative in this respect. J.R.R. Tolkien "invented" orcs as we know them, and his orcs were originally elves who had been corrupted by the Great Enemy, Morgoth. So in Tolkien's world, even the orcs are ultimately victims, not offenders. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has Gandalf express pity "even for Sauron's slaves". Much of the Lord of the Rings is informed by Tolkien's experience of World War I, and it's not hard to understand how witnessing the senseless slaughter of trench warfare would make him feel sorry even for the enemy.

After Tolkien, though, these distinctions have gone out of the window. To most of the English-speaking world, the Second World War was morally absolutely black-and-white, and the same mentality entered into fiction as well. Orcs are the Nazis of fantasy; fighting and killing them is so deeply, inherently right that it never needs to be questioned. In much of post-Tolkien fantasy, orcs have simply become cartoon villains.

Later, there's been a partial rehabilitation of orcs, and in many games and books they've come to symbolize strength and stupidity. The big, dumb, working-class orc has even taken on something of a class nature, and I say this as someone who abhors Marxism in any way, shape or form.

**

In conclusion, fantasy literature and games have become one of the most direct ways in which racism and racial thinking are reproduced. Given that fantasy is usually considered "young people's" reading, this is actually more than a bit scary. It's been fashionable in leftist circles to lambast Tolkien for this for decades, but I believe this is based on a fundamental, and to some extent deliberate, misunderstanding of his works and of the context he wanted to set them in. After the Second World War, Tolkien's imitators met with the other big strand of fantasy, pulp, which was usually explicitly right-wing, chauvinist and conservative. Conan the Republican is hardly an exaggeration in contemporary American terms. Two of the most influential pulp authors to modern readers were Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft; the first occasionally wrote blatantly racist stories, and the second we know was a nearly hysterical racist.

Like conspiracy theories, part of the appeal of fantasy literature is that it often provides simplicity in the middle of a complex world. Unless you're a lunatic, the world just doesn't divide neatly into friends and foes who you can tell apart by their flags and uniforms. In this day and age, the kind of fantasy where elves are always good and orcs are always evil has a definite appeal.

There's nothing wrong with that in itself. All the partly leftist counter-movement to the perceived right-wing character of fantasy has managed to accomplish is to produce "intellectual" fantasy that usually collapses under the weight of its own pretentiousness and is only read by fellow travelers, or fantasy works that are practically indistinguishable from the ones they supposedly oppose. A case in point is Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, which makes a point of making the villains white and the "good guys" colored. How the author feels that upholding the fundamental idea of different "races" fighting each other is antiracist is beyond me, and anyway, the first time I read the books I didn't even notice that she'd swapped the skin colors, so to speak.

So I don't mean to endorse the left-wing "countermovement", because as far as I'm concerned, China Mieville is just as bad, if not worse, than Andy Remic. Mieville has accused Tolkien of furthering exactly the thinking I'm talking about here, which to me indicates that like many other Tolkien critics, he hasn't actually bothered to read the Lord of the Rings.

I don't really mean to endorse anything. I do, however, want to draw attention to the way in which fantasy role-playing games and literature perpetuate and reproduce a way of thinking that I find worrying and frightening. In fantasy, ethnicity is more important in determining a person's nature than culture, upbringing, environment or anything else. Our worldview is so permeated by racism that this is perfectly natural to us, and we accept it without question. After all, it doesn't matter how an orc is brought up or what he's like as a person, he's Always Chaotic Evil. Because he's an orc. Because that's just how orcs are. All of them.

And that's really racism in a nutshell.

Why I am not going to read China Miéville

Earlier in this blag, I wrote about why I'm not going to read Jared Diamond, and in the same spirit, I thought I'd say a few words about why I'm not going to read China Miéville, either.

There's a lot of things that make me ill-disposed toward him. For starters, this is what Miéville had to say about Tolkien:

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

In short, Miéville repeats the tired old Marxist critique of Tolkien, which I've always felt is largely based on not bothering to read him. I would submit that anyone who thinks Tolkien's works can be described as "boys-own-adventure glorying in war" cannot actually have read the Lord of the Rings, let alone the Silmarillion, or certainly not with any other purpose that to find things to vilify in them.

That Miéville should regurgitate a Marxist critique that was inaccurate and fairly pathetic even when it was invented is hardly surprising, as the man describes himself, hilariously, as a Trotskyist. He's even stood for the House of Commons on that platform, and unsurprisingly, has failed.

For all these reasons, I've always suspected there might be something wrong with the man, and a surprising confluence of things has absolutely confirmed my opinion. As it happens, I've posted about seasteading a couple of times on this blag. There's a fairly good article on the topic at wired.com, in case you're unfamiliar with the movement. In brief, it means founding libertarian communities on the high seas, to escape the laws of states á la Sealand.

Mind you, I'm of two minds about seasteading; while I personally like the idea, I'm not at all sure that this is the kind of thing the libertarians of the world should be directing their energies toward. So I'm not approaching this as a die-hard partisan.

What provoked this post was the fact that China Miéville, too, has written about seasteading. He authored an article called Floating Utopias: Freedom and Unfreedom of the Seas, in a sensible and unpartisan-sounding book called Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. The article can be found here. Here's a quote in which Mr. Miéville summarizes both libertarianism and seasteading:

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarianism’s nemesis, “the state,” is no less abstract. This is particularly so for libertarianism’s seasteading wing, for whom the political entity “the state” is bizarrely geographically literalized. Their intent is to slip the surly bonds of earth not up but sideways, beyond littoral borders. It is a lunatic syllogism: “I dislike the state: The state is made of land: Therefore I dislike the land.” Water is a solvent, dissolving “political” (state) power, leaving only “economics” behind.

I should point out that Miéville actually has a Ph.D. in international relations, and his doctoral dissertation was on the subject of international law. So by any rights, he should know perfectly well what the legal basis for seasteading is. He just chooses to ignore this and write the ham-fisted strawman attack of the second quoted paragraph. Instead of a considered legal position based on international law, and in the case of Sealand actually upheld by precedent, Miéville gives us "a lunatic syllogism".

I'm sorry, but if the man thinks this is fair treatment, I can't take anything he writes seriously. The kind of bile he's spewing in this article is just too childish to be taken seriously. Either his Ph.D. is a complete joke, or he could have presented seasteading in an intelligent, critical light, but just chose not to. If what he's written there is a fair representation of libertarianism and seasteading, then I guess Obama really is setting up death panels.

To reinforce this image, all I need to do is repost the picture Wikipedia has of him.

I believe I've found the left-wing Andy Remic. I understand his prose is better, but really, I'm past caring by now. I've never met the man, but based on everything I've read so far, he's a class-A idiot.

The real question, however, is not whether to read his books or not. I'm not going to. The real question is this: how much would you like to see a political debate between him and Andy Remic?

War Machine: coda

It's not often that I admit failure, but this time I will. I just can't finish this travesty of a book. Over the summer, I've tried to keep reading it, but every time I even look at the cover I manage to find something better to do.

There's a reason for this, and it's not just the excerable prose. I don't want to downplay that aspect, because Remic is without doubt the worst writer I've ever read. The reason I can't go on reading War Machine is not only that it's awful, but it's also deeply disturbing.

Last time around, I talked about the inept characterization of the protagonist, Keenan, as both a tortured, alcoholic PI and an ultra-cool, über-macho supersoldier, at the same time. Later on in the novel, Remic adds another dimension. The protagonist is also a serial killer.

There's a series of scenes in which the characters' pasts are explored. Franco gets a ridiculously badly written backstory where he basically comes from a Welsh mining town where the evil mining company was mean to him, and then he blew it up. It reads like it was written by a 12-year-old, and is truly pathetic. Pippa, on the other hand, has a history of violence; first an abusive, alcoholic father murdered her mother, then her sister was raped, and Pippa solved all these problems by killing. It's no exaggeration to say that she is a psychotic murderer, but she still manages to get patronized and belittled by macho Keenan.

Now, however, we get a good long look at Keenan. Apparently, he used to be a policeman, and this gives Remic the excuse to write a very thinly disguised political commentary on crime and the justice system. Apparently, ten thousand years in the future, in the Quad-Gal or whatever, the justice system is a toothless joke run by social workers who release paedophiles convicted of raping and murdering 8-year-old girls on parole. The whole sequence is an encapsulation of macho rage and posturing at its most pathetic and its most disturbing. Keenan, you see, has a solution for this.

In the early chapters of the book there had been brief references to paedophiles, and Keenan and Franco's unremitting hatred for them. There was even a mention that they would stalk and murder paedophiles, apparently for the fun of it or something. It doesn't feel like too much of an exaggeration to say that the author is somewhat preoccupied with child molesters. As I've pointed out earlier, it's very difficult to read the book and the author's self-descriptions without coming to the conclusion that Keenan is a projection of the author, a fantasy-self. In the most disturbing section of the book, these two strands meet.

Keenan made his way into a maximum-security prison (which turned out to be surprisingly non-maximum-security), and there to the "Area of Sexual Misconduct", which is Remic's ludicrous attempt at an official name for a prison wing where sex offenders are housed. I'd quote some sections of the text, but I really can't be bothered. The point is that in a very disturbing, almost masturbatory section, Keenan makes his way to the prison and murders all of the inmates of the sex offender wing with a flamethrower. One section I will quote, from just before the massacre:

Understanding filled him. They were not human. Something had happened to these deviants, turned them into what they were: some alien virus, some genetic malfunction. They had no sorrow, no empathy for their victims. They were focused, entirely, on their own petty sexual desires, enthralled within a cocoon of spiralling depravity.

In a piece of dialogue with a colleague called "Volt" (...), Keenan tries to justify himself:

"This isn't murder, Volt. When a rabid dog kills a child, you destroy it. It's no longer a dog. This is the same. Can't you see that?"

He then murders 40 people with a flamethrower. But, of course, to Remic/Keenan, they're not people, they're paedophiles. I should point out that we're not told what the crimes they've committed were, as apparently it's enough to throw out a blanket condemnation.

After this scene, reading the rest of the book, and, indeed, re-reading the beginning, becomes more than a little difficult. Remic's protagonist, and his ideal self, Keenan, is a complete psychopath. This one act makes him a psychopathic spree killer, on par with the École Polytechnique or Virginia Tech murderers. Of course, Keenan justifies his acts according to his own system of ethics, where all people don't count as people. I'm sure those killers did, too. Keenan is no different. His logic here is the logic of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dresden and Kolyma: my enemies are not human.

Based on what we've been told so far, Keenan and Pippa are sadistic, depraved, completely psychotic serial killers. Yet they're supposed to be our protagonists. With this background, they still operate as an effective military unit, fly around the galaxy in a spaceship and lead more or less normal lives. We're treated to their gay banter and jokes. We're supposed to sympathize with them, at least on some level. That's a little difficult, made even more so by the fact that by this point, all of the characters are walking contradictions. On one hand, they're wisecracking squaddies; on the other hand, they're psychopaths. Remic's characterization is so inept that it is perfectly possible to just forget all this background, because you'd never connect it with the characters in question.

On the face of it, Remic's violent vigilante justice fantasies read like the outpourings of an angry, angsty 12-year-old, but on several levels, they're deeply disturbing. They make me uneasy in the same way that Japanese pornography makes me uneasy. Yes, I sort of see what you're doing, but there's still something very wrong about it.

Add to this the rampant sexism of the book. As I've said, with the exception of mothers and daughters, who are helpless victims, and Franco's boss, who is Evil, we've seen every female character in the book in the nude. All of the women Keenan meets apparently can't resist his sex appeal, which, considering that Keenan basically is Remic's self-projection into the book, is a little sad.

And I really must stress that Remic's writing is epicly bad. To read War Machine is to undergo a constant linguistical assault on your mind. Like a good terrorist, Remic changes tactics constantly. He occasionally abandons grammar and punctuation, at times uses ALL CAPS, and unpredictably dives into the heady waters of his thesaurus, for instance calling the "deviants" Keenan slaughters heteroclites. As Wiktionary tells you, it doesn't mean what he thinks it does, but then again, I think you were expecting that.

Okay, so it's a trashy "military science fiction" novel. One can reasonably expect there to be violence and misogyny, as well as bad writing. But the violence and misogyny are simultaneously inept, pathological and disturbing, while the writing isn't just bad, it's abysmal. When you add to this the repulsively macho self-portrait Remic doesn't just paint but shoves in your face at every opportunity, the mix is truly vomit-inducing.

So, my verdict: never buy, read or even look twice at anything that had "Andy Remic" written on it. Seriously. It's worse than you can possibly think.

Brief book review: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Last weekend, I took it upon myself to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having read it, I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Also, it was apparently an influence on Fallout 3, and that influence is responsible for all the stupidity I complained about in my game review.

Basically, the Road is a rip-off of JG Ballard's early sci-fi novels, most notably Drought. The novel is startlingly similar to Ballard's stuff, but with the imporant difference that it's stylistically decisively inferior. McCarthy writes a very simple, down-to-earth style, which he occasionally interrupts with ridiculous flights of purple prose. The impression is occasionally very jarring. Overall, the writing and plot is captivating enough that it keeps you reading, but the purple prose is sometimes so awful it reminds me of Andy Remic. Seriously.

I didn't think the book really had any theme or message. Of course, I could be wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Oh, for crying out loud. You needed a novel to tell you that we would find it hard to live without any plants or animals at all? That, though, really is the sum total of the environmental message of the Road.

On a Fallout note, this is apparently the reason there isn't any vegetation in the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Having read the book, I now understand that the makers of Fallout 3 were trying real hard to give the game a "Road" vibe. I wish they hadn't, frankly.

To rant for a moment, I feel like these days, entertainment and art only comes in one of two varieties. Either it has no theme at all, no message, nothing to say about anything, or it has a single message that it bludgeons you senseless with.

The Road is firmly in the first camp. I didn't think it had any meaningful theme. Overall, it's captivating enough to make you read it through, but it's short enough that that isn't any challenge. It's a forgettable, mediocre novel. I can't for the life of me understand why it won awards.

Verdict: don't bother. Read J.G. Ballard's Drought or Drowned World instead.

War Machine: an evil jetski

My close reading of Andy Remic's War Machine continues. The previous part is here, and the introductory post is here. This post covers Chapter 1 of Part 1.

**

I can't get it to work on my browser, but if I recall corectly, if you go to amazon.com and pick "Look inside", you'll find an excerpt from this part.

The first sentence, again, is inimitable.

Kotinevitch exercised naked.

We are treated to a description of a naked woman exercising with a "yukana sword". A Google search for "yukana" turns up a Japanese voice actress; a search for "yukana sword" turns up only that passage from Remic's book. So yet again, he's just using made-up words. A "yukana sword" has "an ugly curved blade formed from a single molecule". I'll leave you to work out the physics of this.

An incredibly tedious scene follows, where we learn that the naked Kotinevitch is a General Kotinevitch, known as Vitch the Bitch. She and some other generals posture to each other in a tiresome scene with awful dialogue. Suddenly in the middle of it, "Vitch" drops her robes and slaughters a cow with her sword. She then kills the generals.

I couldn't make that up if I tried, like I said earlier, and it's a scene one generally has to read several times to understand how much it sucks. It is, however, notable for several reasons. First of all, we'll unfortunately be seeing more of Kotinevitch, by the end of the scene familiarly shortened to Vitch.

Several minor details are also worth noting. When "Vitch" has done her naked swordfighting routine, she puts on a robe. Remic: "The hem fell to the floow in a series of gathered, neatly stitched folds and the garment cooled her superheated skin."

Wikipedia: "In physics, superheating (sometimes referred to as boiling retardation, or boiling delay) is the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling." Is her skin above its boiling point? I doubt it.

Why do I bring something that minor up? Because the blurb, and the author, say this is science fiction. What with the invented weapons that don't make sense, the totally haphazard use of words like "singular", and now throwing around physics concepts with no understanding of their meaning, this is looking more and more like some of the most inept "science" fiction I've ever read. And I've read some bad stuff.

The laws of physics are also suspended for "Vitch". At the end of the scene, one of the visiting generals is holding a gun to her head. She kills him with her sword. One wonders what the general in question was waving the gun around for if he was incapable of pulling the trigger? None of the action scenes make one iota of sense if you think about them.

**

Finally, a larger point becomes apparent.

So far, we've met two women in Remic's book. Both have instantly been sexually objectified. At this point, we don't even know what Keenan or Franco look like, but we've had both female characters introduced very physically. Immediately on meeting Pippa, we're given Keenan's sex fantasy/reminiscence of her, and Kotinevitch, of course, is naked the first time we see her.

In addition to this, both characters immediately get their putdowns. The naked sword-exercising chick turns out to be a lunatic who is generally known as "the Bitch"; Pippa turns out to be a scared little girl who needs Keenan to protect her because she's a woman. So far, Keenan and Franco have been cool, professional soldiers, but both women are not only crazy but either despised or compared to children.

I know that many people are very leery of feminist literary criticism, but when I read this stuff I can't help myself. I'd say the author is maybe treating the two genders a little differently.

**

In the next scene, Keenan wakes up with a blinding hangover. He staggers to the veranda of his beach house. A tennis-ball -sized robot tells him someone wants to see him at his office, so Keenan takes a shower and goes to work. To get to his office, he rides a jetski, which is described in loving detail. At his PI's office, he smokes a cigarette and drinks coffee during a conversation with a client that's taken straight our of a really bad film noir script. This sets up the story: Keenan's wife and kids have been killed, and he's hired to reform his Combat-K group and find the Fractured Emerald, which can tell him who did it. We learn that Pippa is exiled on a prison planet and Franco is in a mental hospital, but Keenan accepts.

During this sequence, there are several ridiculous details I want to pay attention to. Keenan's jetski is described as follows:

...Keenan strode across the crunching shingle to the edge of the sea, and the TitaniumIII mooring. His black metallic Yamaha SeaWarrior jet ski, 380bhp, three cylinder, two stroke and 1800cc of pure muscle with a 10 blade impeller and Titanium glass-alloy panels, bobbed at its mooring against the warp-planked jetty.

So, the way I understand that is that the mooring, i.e. the cable that holds the jetski to the dock, is made of titanium, but the dock is wood. Okay.

Yamaha has a series of Warrior motorcycles, which I suppose inspired the SeaWarrior. But the larger point is this: isn't this supposed to be the post-Singularity future? If it is, what's he doing riding around in a jetski? If we're supposed to be in the far future of interstellar travel and the Singularity, are we meant to be impressed by a 400-horsepower jet ski? That's ridiculous.

The whole scene reads like a really bad ripoff of Miami Vice, not a sci-fi novel.

During his conversation with his client, Keenan pulls a gun on him at one point. Make a note of this, as Keenan makes a habit of this throughout the book. Apparently Remic's idea of a real badass is someone who points a gun at people when he talks to them. Keenan actually comes off as an idiot, but never mind.

The more important thing is one that me and my co-readers have a philosophical disagreement on. I maintain the most pathetic part of this sequence is the Yamaha jetski. It is maintained by others that the most pathetic part is, in fact, this:

Keenan pulled free a silver case, unhitched the tiny lock and opened the device. He rolled himself a thin cigarette with evil looking Widow Maker tobacco, lit the weed, and breather deep the unfiltered drug.

It has been represented that the height of pathetic is a man who is so badass that he smokes badass cigarettes called Widow Maker without filters. I think that's a fair point.

Over the initial sequence, Remic seems almost desperate to represent Keenan as the baddest motherfucker ever. He smokes "evil tobacco" and he drives a 380-brake-horsepower jetski to his job as a private eye. It all manages to come off as pathetic macho posturing. Let's run through what we know of Keenan.

Previously, he:

* had a wife called Freya and two "young bright stunningly beautiful girls".
* lived on a ranch where he had horses and a dog, and drank beer and ate tortillas.
* was the "protector, brother, father and lover" of his squadmate Pippa.
* was a special forces soldier in an elite unit who was superhumanly cool under fire

Now, he:

* is an alcoholic private investigator
* drives to work in a jetski
* smokes "evil" cigarettes

At both times, he's simultaneously the cool, unflappable über-macho and a tortured, deeply conflicted man. Can you believe this is an actual person? Reading the book, I find it impossible. Keenan comes across as a total caricature.

**

A digression. I don't generally go in for psychological criticism or any kind of author-based criticism. It has its time and place, but I find that both are far more rare than its proponents believe. However, reading Remic, it is simply impossible to avoid asking a question. Is he actually presenting Keenan to us as a protagonist, through whom we're supposed to live out the events of the book, or is Keenan an idealized alter-ego? If you refer back to my introductory post, you'll see the self-descriptions he's given.

I feel that it's impossible to read Remic's War Machine without getting the very powerful impression that Keenan is an idealized projection of the author. Given the way he presents himself and Keenan, I can't help but get the feeling that Mr. Remic's life hasn't quite turned out the way he wanted it to and he's creating Keenan as his larger-than-life alter ego.

It's possible that's totally unfair. In all honesty, I don't know anything about Andy Remic or his life, so I can't say if that's true or not. I feel that saying that is uncharitable, but if I'm going to do a close reading of his book, I feel it would be dishonest not to convey this impression as it's incredibly strong.

**

The rest of the chapter gives a sort of preview of the next one. Franco is locked up in a mental hospital where he's given drugs and for some bizarre reason, his testicles are electrocuted. It doesn't make any sense, and again, physics and anatomy are suspended. He's heavily beated with steel truncheons, including taking "a slam" across the forehead, but he's barely injured. We meet his doctor, Betezh, who administers this torture.

Betezh has a telephone-analogue conversation with Vitch which I quote from to demonstrate the kind of dialogue Remic writes.

"Do you want me to kill Franco? I can do it tonight."
"Not yet. He knows a lot about our operation, if only he could remember it. What you have told me amounts to shit. His recall is as blurred as his history. However, he could still be useful to us."
"We walk a dangerous wire," said Betezh carefully. He did not want to antagonize.
"What is life without a little danger? Without thrill? Without challenge? It becomes nothing more than a stale and second-hand experience; an armchair performance, a fucking banality."
"It's ironic," said Betezh, voice low, "but sometimes I wonder if you should be the one locked away, instead of Franco. I wonder who is the more sane?"
Kotinevitch's brown eyes narrowed. She smiled, showing neat little teeth. "Insanity is my middle name," she said.

Again, it's practically impossible to imagine two actors running through this dialogue. The totally random profanity, the constantly shiting tone and style. All of the conversation in the novel seems to be like this; the author can't decide if he wants his characters to talk in a sophisticated, civilized way, or to swear and posture. So they invariably end up doing both, and the result reads like it was written by an inept 13-year-old.

The most hilarious detail I'll leave to the last. Franco's full name?

Franco Haggis.

**

By the end of the first chapter, I think most of the basic themes of the book have been set. From now on, I think I'll be doing this close reading by themes, but I haven't quite decided yet. The macho posturing is simply hilarious and deserves a good look at; I didn't take those Women's Studies classes for nothing! Also, the rampant misogyny that goes hand in hand with it needs to be looked at as well. On the other hand, the book's constant failures of logic and language are just too much fun to leave untouched. A particular bone to pick is Remic's assertion that he's writing a science-fiction space opera á la Iain Banks, or as he put it, "Space Opera – The Punk Remix", and his ongoing failure to do so. I don't remember Iain Banks devoting particular attention to jetskis.

So far, The Punk Remix, appropriately incorrectly capitalized, sucks. But I think it sucks in interesting and amusing ways.

War Machine: A clipped drawl

Welcome to the first part of my close reading of Andy Remic's "rock-hard military science fiction" opus War Machine! The introductory post was here. This post will cover the Prologue and following Excerpt.

**

In my opinion, the first sentence of a book is always one of the most important. It does more than any other part to set the scene for the reader. In this case, though, the first three are worth quoting.

She hated scissors: their gleam; their simple function. She laughed, and it was a bitter laugh like a tumbling fall of worlds. There within the maelstrom of her mind - a cold constant, like the elliptical spinning hub of a galaxy - was fury.

I think you get the idea. Quite apart from the florid language, there is the bizarre notion that scissors would be more agreeable to the woman if they were more complicated. With a pair of unnecessarily complicated matte scissors, maybe she's be less like the elliptical spinning hub of a galaxy!

After this strange prologue about a woman who hates scissors and cries, we meet the Combat-K team. They're holed up in a bunker in a jungle on the planet Terminus5. The scene itself is strangely difficult to reconstruct. On the one hand, the "corrugated bunker" was submerged in vines dangling down from hardwood trees; on the other hand, somewhere beyond the bunker is a treeline. But this is far less important than meeting our characters!

The first to be introduced is the main character, Keenan.

Admittedly my biggest problem is that the only person I can think of when he writes Keenan is Mike Keenan. You know, him:

Keenan is looking out of the doorway of the bunker, and he's joined by our second character, Pippa. Pippa is a British diminutive form of Philippa (hilariously, Wiktionary gives this definition: pippa, Swedish, Verb: 1. (vulgar) have sexual intercourse).

"I can't believe they spotted us," whispered Pippa, crawling up beside him on her elbows, commando-style. Her mouth was a grim line, grey eyes suggesting something unholy: a single concept.
Trap.

I'm not sure the writer understands how to use a colon. In this case, the colon means that "a single concept" is in itself unholy, not that the unholy thing she is suggesting is both hunholy and a single concept. So bizarrely, we've learned that Pippa is a woman and that she considers single concepts unholy. A trap is "unholy" because it's a single concept; if it were more multifarious, presumably she'd be OK with it. I want to make it clear that in English, the above quotation does not mean that her eyes are suggesting "Trap"; they're suggesting "a single concept". This kind of language is par for the course for Remic.

From Pippa's strange epistemological views we move on to Keenan himself.

Keenan's voice was a deep smoker's drawl, smooth, calculating, his words clipped and economic.

A drawl is, according to Wiktionary, "a way of speaking slowly while lengthening vowel sounds and running words together." A clipped way of speaking is one "with each word pronounced separately and distinctly." The Macmillan English Dictionary has "speaking clearly and quickly, in a way that seems unfriendly."

In other words, clipped speech is more or less the exact opposite of a drawl.

Occasionally it's remarkably difficult to visualize what authors write; the less competent the author, the greater the difficulty. Here's a selection from The Eye of Argon; try visualizing the scene, specifically the man's face, in your head.

"Up to the altar and be done with it wench;" ordered a fidgeting shaman as he gave the female a grim stare accompanied by the wrinkling of his lips to a mirthful grin of delight.

A grim stare combined with a mirthful grin and fidgeting. I got Charlie Murphy.

Similarly, Keenan is speaking in both clipped tones and a drawl at the same time, which is, if not impossible, going to be considerably challenging as the two things are logical opposites. The way he's talking is going to be something like how Charlie Murphy carries himself as a playa hata. In other words, totally ridiculous.

**

Combat-K is on a mission to destroy a shield reactor, which will allow the Quad-Gal's "Peace Unification Army" to invade the planet. As we briefly meet the third character, Franco, he is easing free "the micro-barrel of his Bausch & Harris Sniper Rifle with SSGK digital sights. The weapon sported a rapid single action fire linked to a hairline trigger: a devastating gun in the right hands."

The brand names and abbreviations are pure fabrications, but the weapon description itself is more interesting. A "hairline trigger" is more usually known as a hair trigger, which is unexceptional; the single action fire is more puzzling. Remember, this is an elite military outfit in the post-Singularity future. A single action rifle is one where the shooter has to manually reload the rifle after each shot, so given that the others are carrying automatic weapons, that's hardly a very rapid fire. Also, it seems more than a little anachronistic for people in a post-singularity future to be lugging around bolt-action rifles. I mean, it's even surprising to find them using gunpowder, but clearly these are guns we're talking about. But as we'll learn, this is par for the course.

In addition to that, there's the simple fact that as "military science fiction", the military science on display is incredibly underwhelming. You've just described a sniper rifle that is functionally nearly identical to ones being used in the 19th century. Only the "digital sights" would be out of place in the American Civil War.

There's also time for another Remic moment:

"There are four of the bastards." He spat on the earth floor, glancing rigt towards Keenan and Pippa - lying vulnerable and coiled by the warped doorway where fingers of sunlight raped by swirling dust pointed arrows of accusation through the pepper-pot interior.

One thing I will say for Remic: his use of language is surprising. In what is otherwise an inept, adolescent narrative of short sentences and tortuous exposition, he, seemingly at random, comes up with these wild endless sentences of strange visual metaphors. They're never good, but at least they are unexpected.

**

The team comes under fire, and Keenan reacts:

Above the cacophony Keenan licked salt lips, annoyed now, and lit a cigarette. "Take them, Franco." He eased his bulk around the doorway, smoke stinging his eyes, locked his MPK to the tree line and sent a savage sweeping volley of thundering firepower.

I'll run through this is reverse order. Keenan is in a bunker, under fire, so he sits in an exposed doorway with a lit cigarette in his mouth and fires a sub-machine gun. This is really a minor detail, though, as they're taking fire, he licks his lips "above the cacophony". That is to say, the sound of Keenan licking his lips is louder than the gunfire in the jungle around them. That is what the sentence means. And that's... startling.

As the attack continues, Keenan and Pippa get to their feet and walk across the bunker doorway, shooting down attacking soldiers. Of course, this somewhat begs the question of what the soldiers themselves are doing at the time. After the firing subsides, Keenan brazenly stands in the doorway, looking for the enemy. In this prologue, the enemy seems to have all the military aptitude of Imperial Storm Troopers or COBRA Vipers. Of course, Keenan himself is almost superhuman, according to Remic. Here:

His gun came up, stocky, black, deathly serious, held in strong hands that had no right to be that steady in the midst of a fire-fight.

If there's one thing we're going to learn in the course of this book, it's that Keenan is not a little man. One can only presume he must have a hat.

Before Keenan indulges in a brief sexual fantasy/reminiscence of Pippa, she has this puzzling line:

"We've got to get to the reactor. We're fast running out of time!" soothed Pippa, words tickling his ear she was so close.

Either Remic is taking a dip in the waters of beat poetry or his editor is inept, as the last part of the sentence doesn't quite work out grammatically, but above all the characters are still talking incredibly weird. We're running out of time! she soothed. That is just bizarre.

**

As the team prepares to assault the reactor, another flashback takes us to Combat-K graduation.

A bugle sounded, forlorn, wavering, and sixteen thousand boots stamped in perfect unison as the battalion wheeled - a well-oiled machine - and every greased cog saluted officers standing stern but proud on a high fluid compress alloy podium. This was the climax of four years hardcore training.

One presumes that should read "years'". Also, "fluid compress alloy" is just gibberish, but marks our first encounter with an alloy. There'll be more ahead.

Most puzzling, though, is that in something that calls itself military science fiction, one expects military terms to make some kind of sense. A battalion of 8 000 men? Generally a battalion has always been used of a formation of some 1 000 men. In modern military terms, a formation of 8 000 men is a reinforced brigade or maybe an understrength division. A battalion of 8 000 is as pointless a concept as a squad of 50 or a company of 800.

**

On their way to the reactor, Keenan muses on the fact that they've been compromised.

During covert Impact, the Terminus5 government should not have had time to scramble units to protect what was considered planetary low-key targets, such as this global reactor site.

The logic here is unfathomable. On page 8, their mission is "pivotal, crucial"; on page 14 they're attacking a "low-key target". The reactor they're going to destroy is powering some kind of shield system that's stopping an army from invading the planet, and it's a low-key target?

From Keenan's musings we enter another erotic flashback featuring Pippa. During this, we learn that Keenan has a wife called Freya and two beautiful young daughters, but he's still sleeping with his squadmate. We now enter Remic's characterisation of Pippa in all its brutal misogyny:

She was a hard woman, a killer, a devastatingly brutal assassin. But within her lurked a core of insecurity, a child in need of nurture, a young girl locked in a room craving nothing more than love and caring, and - ironically - protection. He had become her protector, her brother, her father, and, against all probability, almost forced by circumstances, he had become her lover.

Lest anyone get any womens-lib ideas that Pippa is a soldier just like the men she serves with, she is instantly reduced to a child who needs a man to protect her. In case someone might have thought that Keenan and Pippa might have a relationship as equals, she's a simpering little girl who is, by implication, his daughter, his sister, his protege. Isn't it far more disturbing to enumerate the relationship that way?

**

They arrive at the shield reactor, which has an alloy door (check). There's a scene in which they rappel down to the reactor and destroy it, facing a "metal AI" on the way. Keenan reminiscences on his ranch, his horses, his dogs, his wife and daughters, and his tortillas and beer, giving us another glimpse into a non-little man's world. The chapter abruptly ends as Keenan, Franco and Pippa are presumably captured by Terminus5 troops.

I've covered the prologue in this much depth as it's really a very good microcosm of what's to come. The contracictory narrative, the bizarrely inept language, the stereotyped, misogynistic characterization. The only thing "science fiction" about this is strings of nonsense words and occasional lasers and AIs. The "military" part isn't doing much better.

There are several intriguing strands that I'll be following throughout:

Keenan. He's clearly the central character of the book, and given what I posted about the author earlier, it doesn't seem like too wide a stretch to say that Keenan is an idealized projection of Andy Remic. That falls outside my mandate of text-based criticism, but even within the text it seems that Keenan is being set up as an archetype of sorts.

Pippa. So far, she's a brutal, tough soldier who's really a scared little girl. Speaking as a feminist, I have to say that the way she's treated is typical of misogynistic fiction. One sets up a strong female character, and then proceeds to textually emasculate her by reducing her to a little girl. This isn't just a staple of fiction written by men; a particularly galling moment in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is Hermione's self-emasculation in the first volume.

The post-Singularity future. So far, we've had guys running around a jungle firing sub-machineguns and sniper rifles. There have been some references to far higher tech, but on the whole the basic narrative could easily have happened in the 1960's. There isn't really anything science fiction about it at all; it just seems to be a war story with some random gibberish thrown in to make it science fiction. And that isn't science fiction. The only truly bizarre anachronism is the single-action sniper rifle, but later there'll be more. Much more.

Repeated motifs. Licking lips and alloys have already been noted. They'll recur.

**

Before Part I: Combat-K gets under way, there's a strange bit of text in the book. Its title:

being an extract from:
THE HELIX WAR-A HISTORY
kv 4788-hv3792
written by
Professor Marsaal Su b-Krδiy∞

For the font-challenged, that's b-Kr delta iy infinity. The text that follows is Remic's horrible attempt to imitate or parody academic prose. Reading it is pure torture. Seemingly random proper names are CAPITALIZED. The text runs through three theories on the causes of the Helix War, and ends up saying that one of the theories on the causes of the war actually caused the war. That's right, what happened happened because of a theory on why it happened. That doesn't make any sense, but then again, neither does anything else. This is what it ends with:

Atrocity followed atrocity. Escalation led to destruction, to escalation, to destruction in an apparent Catch 22 of spiralling violence. From three possible origins, all time/space strands intercepted and moved along in a sequential and singular course...almost written in stone.

First things first: a Catch-22 (properly hyphenated) is not a spiral. For the uneducated, Catch-22 refers to Joseph Heller's book of the same name. In it, a Catch-22 is an example of circular logic, not of an escalating process. Also, isn't it a little strange to be supposedly reading an academic work in the post-Singularity future where reference is made to a 1961 novel?

Furthermore, Remic is again having serious difficulty using English. The "time/space" (spacetime?) strands "intercepted". Intercepted what? To intercept means to stop or catch something before it gets to where it's going. What did the strands catch? To say that they intercepted each other would be bizarre; an interception requires an interceptor who catches and an interceptee who is caught, and therefore is going somewhere or doing something. He doesn't say they intercepted each other, though, just that they intercepted, which is pointless.

After "intercepting", they move "sequentially". Sequentially means one after the other. How are we to visualize three theories moving sequentially? Presumably Remic has no idea what sequentially means. Also, their course is "singular". Singular means something strange, exceptional. The "strands of time/space" move on a strange course, one after the other?

Presumably what he means is that the strands converge. For someone who is apparently a teacher, this total inability to use a dictionary is puzzling. I just hope he doesn't teach English. The misuse of singular recurs later in the work, making one strongly suspect that not only does he have no idea what many of the words he uses means, he can't even be bothered to look them up.

Somewhat more worryingly, neither can his editors.

**

Overall, the Prologue and "being an extract" give an overwhelming impression of ineptness, both literary and linguistic. Now that I've taken a fairly close look at the prologue, I hope you've gotten an idea of what it is we're dealing with and I can move through the rest of the book considerably more quickly, focusing more on themes and characterization and items of interest rather than continue to trudge through his hideous language and repated errors.

Coming up next: an alcoholic private investigator, a mental hospital and a naked woman killing a cow with a sword. I couldn't make this stuff up even if I tried.

War Machine: a close reading, part 1

Recently, a friend of mine ran across a novel that seemed so hilariously awful he had to share. The book in question was Andy Remic's War Machine. Just using Amazon's "Look inside" feature led to so much fun that I obviously had to get him the book.

I mean, it's got Edge and Bono from U2 on the cover. How can I not buy that?

You'll notice it's billed as "rock-hard military science fiction". For so many reasons, I felt I had to read the damn thing. I mean, I've been writing about all things military for a living for nearly ten years now, I've been reading science fiction for nearly twenty years, and hell, I'm still technically majoring in English. It's a book I simply have to read. What's more, it's published by Solaris Books, which is ultimately owned by Games Workshop! And because I believe I have to read it, I'm also going to be sharing it with the world, i.e. you.

In other words, I'll be doing a close reading of Andy Remic's novel War Machine on my blag, starting soonish. Before I get to the text itself, though, I'd like to say a few things.

In doing this close reading, I may occasionally be a little harsh. I tend to be a little harsh about a number of things on this blag, but I'm not going to apologize. I don't criticize people in order to offend them or to get kicks out of it; the easiest way to describe my approach is that I follow my version of the somethingawful.com credo: if you publish it and it sucks, I'm going to make fun of it. We'll shortly be seeing if War Machine sucks. (if you visited amazon.com and read any of the excerpts, you may already know the answer)

My approach to literary criticism is strongly text-centered. To exaggerate, I don't particularly care who wrote a text and why, and I certainly don't want to try to discover the author's opinions or preferences by studying their text. The approach I'm going to be taking here will be reading the text as it is, without more context than the one provided by the book itself. I'll probably make an occasional foray elsewhere, but in the main I intend to concentrate on the text itself.

**

Having said that, in the interests of good writing it'll be proper to get in some background first. The author, Andy Remic, is a former English teacher from Manchester, UK, who has written a number of games for the ZX Spectrum back in the day. That's him, from Wikipedia:

In his blog, he described himself as an "Author of high-octane fast-paced kickass Fantasy and Science Fiction novels". On his website, he poses with a chainsaw (bottom of page). And the book itself contains both a dedication and an "about the author" section. Here's an excerpt from the surprisingly long dedication:

"How many men have been where we've been? And seen what we've seen?"

No matter what happens, we're not little men.
Hats on!

Not to be outdone, here's "About the Author" from the end of the book:

Andy Remic is a young British writer.
He has an unhealthy love of martial arts, kickass bikes, mountain climbing and computer hacking. Once a member of an elite Combat-K squad, he has since retired from military service and works as a biomod and weapon engineer at the NANOTEK Corporation.

From amazon.com:

About the Author
Andy Remic is a young British writer and teacher from Greater Manchester. During his teaching career he developed an interest in martial arts and is now expert in unarmed combat. He can kill a man with a single blow, but prefers writing and hacking computer systems. War Machine is his fourth novel.

There's so much I could say about these descriptions. I'll just note, though, that in case you're fooled by the recurrence of the word "young", a Google search leads one to understand that he was born in 1971. If 38 is a "young author", then, well. You know.

**

This is the kind of fellow whose work I'll be reading. Oh, and, um, do you suppose this counts as a book review? Because this is what he says about book reviews, on the aforementioned website:

How do you deal with the people who don't like your books, and tell you as much? If a person doesn't like my books - no problem. Everybody has different personal tastes, and I suppose my work is as acquired as any Islay whisky. After all - there are plenty of books I don't like. However, the pieces of shit I really do hate are failed-writers turned book reviewers - they really make me boil, and then know who they are. I'd certainly like to meet a few face to face.

I could be a real dick and wonder what, exactly, a failed-writer is, but I won't, nor will I ask whether he hates failed writers who review books or hates everyone who reviews books and is insulting them. In the first case, he should be OK with what I'll be saying, but in the latter case, I guess not.

Why am I being a dick about this? There's a real simple reason. He isn't, by any means, the first or the last author who hates book reviewers. I have no sympathy for this rubbish at all. In my opinion, it's perfectly simple. If you publish something, let alone if you're selling it, you're going to be criticized. Sometimes that criticism is probably going to be unfair, and it's perfectly OK to respond to that. But as for hating book reviewers in general?

In a free market economy, criticism has an important function. Every book that's out there has some gushing blurb from a publisher telling you it's the best thing ever, and every book that's notable enough to be commented on will probably have at least a page of quotes of other people gushing about it. Because practically every book has this, it contains no real information. Most of us people who read book would like to know if the books in question are good or not before we make a decision to buy them. That's what book reviews are for. They're a fairly essential service. If you hate the people who write them, or are going to respond with some inane argument on the level of "well why don't they write themselves then", you have a problem.

If you choose to write and publish a novel, you're putting it out in the public domain for us to see, read and experience, and to talk about. If you don't like some of the things people say about your novel, that's just tough. As for the level of class it shows to rail and swear about them on your website, well, like I said, I don't go in for biographical criticism.

A wit suggested to me that maybe he's looking to set up as the Uwe Boll of literature.

**

Let's get to the book itself. Here's what the author himself had to say about it, in an interview for SFX magazine:

SFX: Again, no spoilers! But what's the basic premise of your new novel?
RE: "War Machine is a sizzling rollercoaster of a novel with a gratuitous excess of violence, sex, dark humour and exotic aliens all wrapped up in a high-octane cling-film plot concerning an elite military unit illegally reformed who must battle across alien planets to discover justice, truth and revenge. Initially, the story begins with a quest to find an artefact which will reveal to Keenan the person who killed his wife and children."

Can you imagine a person really talking like that? Would you call something you wrote a "sizzling rollercoaster" "wrapped up in a high-octane clingfilm"? If not, then you're clearly not the kind of non-little man who writes Combat-K novels.

SFX: Solaris are calling you "the new master of rock-hard science fiction" - what's the appeal of this sort of writing, and how do you deliver?
RE: "I have a very low boredom threshold. And I love science fiction. However, in years past, nothing I read seemed to deliver the sort of high-explosive thriller-driven adventure I was looking for. So I decided to write my own. I suppose one way of looking at it is that if the work of Iain M. Banks (of whom I’m a great fan) is categorized as Space Opera, then my work would be classed as Space Opera – The Punk Remix. So, a sprawling canvas of interesting yet volatile characters, exotic war-torn alien locations held together with fast action, guns, chases, fights and battles, clever plot twists and a liberal pepper sprinkling of black comedy. Dune crossed with Jonny Rotten. Disney merged with The Clash. Doctor Who on heroin. Buffy, when she’s grown up and become a hooker. Hell, Star Wars with rag doll corpses and the Sith being real evil bastards."

So, we're in for some Rock-Hard Military Sci-Fi, or Punk Space Opera. What does that mean? Damned if I know. It all sounds really edgy!

This is what amazon.com says about the book itself:

Product Description
In a time of post-Singularity and FTL travel, the Helix War has raged across galaxies. When ex-soldier turned privite investigtor [sic], Keenan, takes on a new case, he must overcome his demons and gather together his old military unit, a group who swore they’d never work together again....

The first sentence is reproduced verbatim on the book's back cover. It's the first issue I have with the book, so I'll start there.

In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which an equation "blows up", as Mathworld puts it. Back in the '80s, US professor and author Vernor Vinge coined the idea of a "technological singularity", which meant a point at which the growth of technology reaches such a high rate that we cannot extrapolate the future beyond it from where we are now.

As Remic's novel doesn't seem to provide any alternative meaning for "Singularity", the assumption that a sci-fi reader will make is that the blurb is referring to a technological singularity à la Vinge.

And that's why it's so pointless. If the future beyond a singularity can't be predicted, then it's logically impossible to write a novel set in a time after a singularity. In the same interview, Remic says his "Combat-K" novels are set "a million years into the future". That's a ridiculous number; we, homo sapiens, haven't been around for even close to a million years. A million years in the future is an impossibly long time to make predictions, as is any time beyond a technological singularity. The best you can do is guess, and by the very definition of a singularity, your guess will be based on incomplete data and can't really be accurate.

The blurb on the back cover continues:

Ex-soldier Keenan now works as a private investigator on a planet at the peaceful fringes of the Quad-Gal. Following the brutal death of his family he's run up hefty debts, gained a bad reputation and become a heavy drinker.

So it's a post-Singularity novel featuring an alcoholic private dick? Some singularity.

**

So we have a book called War Machine, with half of U2 on the cover, billed as "rock-hard military science fiction". It's set in the pointless contradiction that is a "post-Singularity" future where there are alcoholic private investigators. The author poses with chainsaws, describes himself like a 12-year-old and hates book reviews.

All this, and I haven't even started reading yet.