Alexander Hellene's Blog, page 13

Family Reunion Shows That Black Entertainers Have the Right Idea, and Should Be Emulated

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At the dentist a few weeks ago with my son, the TV in the waiting room was playing a television show called Family Reunion. It’s a sitcom that debuted in the summer of 2019 that chronicles the changes when a former pro-football tight-end named Moses “Moz” McKellan and his wife Cocoa and four children travel from Seattle to Columbus, Georgia to be with Moz’s family, and decide to stay in order to be closer to the family.

It just so happens that the family in question, the McKellans, are black, as are most of the show’s characters. I say this only because of some interesting aspects of how there are aspects of this show–positive aspects, mostly–that you would never see in a modern TV show about a white family.

A word about the casting first: Family Reunion features many excellent actors from other shows and movies, and I’m happy to see them continue to get screen time. For starters, the mighty Richard Roundtree plays Moz’s father Grandpa, the family patriarch. Grandpa is a pastor. For any readers who don’t know Richard Roundtree, he is most famous for playing private eye John Shaft in the 1970s film adaptations of Ernest Tidyman’s novel. 

Veteran film and Broadway actress Loretta Devine plays M’Dear, Moz’s mother, and she’s wonderful. Tia Mowry, who was famous for being on the TV show Sister, Sister with her real-life twin sister Tamera, plays Cocoa, and Anthony Alabi, who actually was a pro-football player, plays Moz. Other famous actors have supporting roles or cameos, such as Jaleel White, Tempest Bledsoe, Mark Curry, and Telma Hopkins. I know these and many of the other guest-stars listed on the show’s Wikipedia page from the sitcoms of my 90s youth. 

Now, I grew up in an era where white kids watched TV shows about black families, hugely popular shows like The Cosby Show, Family Matters, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and didn’t care that the characters on our TVs looked different than us. The 90s–the early 90s especially–was a wild time where we actually believed the “color blind” and “content of character” stuff we were taught. That is not the case now. Here in the thick of the 21st century, race is all that matters in America. It’s a very different time.  

Anyway, two episodes stood out while we were waiting in the dentist’s office. The first was more topical in that it touched on problems the black community faces with the police. At the outset, I have to mention that the show is very charming and wholesome, and while I know I keep referencing the 1990s, Family Reunion is very much in that late-80s/early-90s heartwarming loving family vein a la The Cosby Show. Second, the family is firmly upper-middle-class, as is their town, and Maya Angelou High School is full of high-achieving young black boys and girls. You understand the message the show is trying to send in how it portrays its world, and I approve . . . but I’ll have more to say about this later. 

Anyway, in this episode, Moz and Cocoa’s two sons Shaka and Mazzi, along with their neighbor Elvis, have a friendly competition to see who can mow the most lawns and earn the most money; standard, typical, wholesome Americana kind of stuff that would be at home on an episode of Leave it to Beaver or something. Anyway, they are out cutting lawns too late, and unbeknownst to them both their parents are at a trivia night at the local pub with some friends, their sisters are being watched by other family, and their grandparents are also out on a date–and each thinks the boys are with another family member. So when the boys return home and try to get back into the McKellan’s home, a white cop comes and pulls a gun on them, finds the money they’d earned but thinks they stole it, and holds them until the parents arrive.

Moz and Cocoa return, and find the boys still handcuffed and frightened out of their wits. The parents are horrified, of course, explain everything, and manage to hold in their anger. The cop is, as expected, a jerk about it, calling the ten-year-old boys “young men,” and then asking for Moz’s autograph. Moz and Cocoa have to explain these dynamics to their frightened sons, and this is of course inspired by the racial violence that has been gripping America for several years. It’s an intense scene, but I couldn’t help but be taken out of it by the fact that a cop would literally have to be mustache-twirling evil to (a) think that three ten- and eleven-year-old boys are “young men,” or “thugs,” especially when they’re (and this may ruffle some feathers) clean-cut, well-spoken, well-behaved, AND CAN EXPLAIN THAT THIS IS THEIR FREAKING HOUSE. Yet he holds them up at gunpoint. It’s ridiculous.

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What works better is, after Moz and Cocoa register a complaint against the officer, they get pulled over on the way home after another trivia night some days later. It’s the same cop. He wants to test Moz for being drunk, and then basically tells Moz and Cocoa he’ll be keeping an eye on them, and he didn’t appreciate losing pay the way he did. This is a much more plausible scenario to show what blacks face at the hands of vindictive and racist small-town cops. It works also because whites in small towns face the same thing–I personally know instances where cops harass people in town due to personal grudges, and it has nothing to do with race. This isn’t to diminish the racial aspect of these situations; I’m only saying that it works in this show for multi-colored audiences because multi-colored audiences can relate.

The episode after this began with the McKellans and their neighbors and friends, some white, celebrating the news that this bad cop had been fired. And then we get into a more perosnally interesting aspect of black entertainment that is handled far differently than in white entertainment: Christianity.

Grandpa is a preacher, and M’Dear is a devout Christian herself. Cocoa is kind of New Age-y and gets fed up with M’Dear thinking of her as a “heathen.” The McKellan children–teenage Jade, Shaka, Mazzi, and little Ami–have not been raised religious at all . . . and Moz himself is pretty much agnostic. The conflict of this episode is Ami–she wants to get baptised and so is speaking with her grandparents about the process. She’s scared, because in Grandpa’s church, baptism actually requires getting dunked in a river. Ami then, with typical little-kid innocence, asks her parents if they are baptised. When they say no, she asks why, and this inspires Grandpa to ask why none of the kids have been.

Jade is, of course, not into the religion thing, and neither are the boys . . . though there’s another subplot where Shaka, Mazzi, Elvis, and another friend have a singing group that Grandpa agrees to let sing at the church, but their hip-hop–what Grandpa calls “devil music”–does not go over well. 

Anyway, Moz and Cocoa, out of respect to Grandpa and M’Dear, talk to the kids about religion to see if they want to be baptized. In the course of this, Moz realizes he got so turned off by having religion “shoved down my throat” while growing up a preacher’s son, he just left it behind when he moved away.

What got me about this part of the show is that it was so earnest, sincere, and even-handed. Characters discussed spirituality, what they believed in and why, and what they didn’t believe in and why, in a very mature way. Further, the name Jesus Christ was spoken many, many times. If you’re used to “white” entertainment where Christianity is routinely mocked and ridiculed, and Christiains are portrayed as ultra-corrupt super-hypocrites and bigots who are probably secretly self-loathing gays, this is refreshing and a little shocking. There’d probably be an incest or other weird sex plot thrown in to boot.

Thus conditioned, this episode did not go where I expected.

While practicing baptism with Ami in the pool by the river where Grandpa conducts this sacrament, Moz slips, goes under the water, and hits his head. When he wakes up, he’s in the same place, but all alone. He walks around and, in the woods, sees a vision of his grandparents, long dead. They look happy, and tell Moz it’s not his time, but that they’re fine.

Moz, of course, has questions. I’m paraphrasing, but one of them is “Is God real?”

“You already know the answer to that,” says his smiling grandfather. They then fade out, the screen goes black, and Moz wakes up surrounded by his family and EMTs. Turns out Ami was able to get some help in time to save her father. 

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We then cut to the baptism where, after Grandpa baptises Ami, Moz walks over for his turn to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. 

It was, and I say this without hyperbole, a beautiful piece of TV. And it was one you would never, ever see on a mainstream show about a white family.

I wondered why this was. White Americans are as religious as black Americans, and that religion is usually some form of Protestant Christianity. As an Orthodox Christian, it’s interesting to note that lots of Africans are Orthodox, particularly Ethiopians–when I lived in the D.C./northern Virginia area, there were a lot of Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, and a lot of Ethiopian families at the Greek Orthodox Church we went to. So it’s not like Christianity is a “black” thing or a “white” thing, as many try to claim.

Why is this, then?

I looked into show creator, Meg LeLoatch. She’s very political and racially minded, and in articles about the show, I discovered an entirely unsurpsing fact: she wanted an all-black writing room, and by God, she got it.

Therefore, this show is written in a way that makes the McKellan family, and black Americans in general, look good, and it portrays aspects of black culture in a positive light.

I have no problem with this, or an all-black writing room. All I would ask for is the same courtesy given to other races. But I digress.

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Entertainment and stories are important, and I think a show like Family Reunion is a pretty powerful counter to entertainment made by whites–the vast majority being non-Christian and non-Gentile–that have not portrayed black culture and black families in a, shall we say, nice manner.

Black writers would obviously have more insights into the world of black Americans than a bunch of white or Jewish writers, the same way black writers wouldn’t have insight into Jewish culture, or Jewish and black and atheist writers wouldn’t have into white Christian culture. If blacks want to create their own entertainment that promotes positive messages, I am all for it. It’s important to note that, at least in the episodes playing while I was waiting in the dentist’s office, there was nothing anti-white in any of these episodes. There was nothing anti-anything, save for anti-police . . . yet the episode also didn’t condemn all police forces in general.

Which brings me to the point of this episode. Black entertainment is able to do things that white entertainment can’t. A pro-Christian mainstream white show would be called all sorts of nasty names, propaganda among the least nasty. There’d be the alphabet groups demanding representation, racial-grievance groups calling it racist, somehow; atheist and non-Chriatian comedians calling it lame and stupid and so on, and probably Jewish and Muslim groups calling it harmful to their faith. You know I’m right. 

This is why I completely agree with black entertainers who want black entertainment. Good for them. It’s the only way to counter the disgusting narratives Hollywood has been pushing about almost every group. Sick of TV shows and movies portraying blacks as either criminals and gangbangers, low-IQ buffoons in need of white help, and otherwise perpetual victims? Make your own show. And kudos to DeLoatch for doing this, and not trying to usurp a previously existing show or other property.

Every group should strive to do what DeLoatch did with Family Reunion. As a white Christian, scanning the writers rooms of popular shows and movies, and the ownership of various production companies, it’s no wonder that Hollywood makes us look so, so bad. 

If you want to support a Christian writer, my book The Last Ancestor is on special Labor Day Weekend sale for the next few days. Buy it here.

Book Review: Endymion by Dan Simmons

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It is 274 years after the Fall of the Hegemony precipitated by the destruction of all farcasters. All of the worlds in the former WorldWeb have become more isolated, and have developed more unique cultures, as travel distances again become a limiting factor. Into the void left by the Hegemony’s absence comes the Pax, spearheaded by a resurgent Catholic Church under Pope Julius XIV, born Lenar Hoyt, and the cruciform parasites which, thanks to the grace of God, now have the power to resurrect bearers time and time again without the mental retardation seen on Hyperion’s Bikura people.

In this world, a Hyperion tribesman named Raul Endymion is tasked by the poet Martin Silenus to meet Brawne Lamia’s daughter Aenea at the Sphinx Time Tomb, where she will be emerting, bring her to safety, destroy the Pax, and bring Old Earth back from where it had been stolen. All it’ll take is a journey down the River Tethys, where some entity has reactivated the long-dormant farcaster portals . . . portals that seem to work only for Aenea, mankind’s messiah, who is only twelve years old. Of course, the Pax has sent Father Captain Federico de Soya and his crack team of Swiss Guard to bring her back to the Vatican on the planet Pacem by any means necessary.

This book is wild, a total trip. And while more straightforward narratively than both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion’s seemingly simple chase narrative has layers of complexity, thanks to its excellent characters and thoughtful worldbuilding.

Notice how I didn’t say “detailed” worldbuilding. Because while I’m sure Dan Simmons had a story bible somewhere, and while his world is detailed, every detail he shares is necessary to the overall plot.

And you might also be thinking that a river journey is a boring, contrived narrative device. In Simmons’s hands, it is not. We travel with Raul, Aenea, and their android friend A. Bettik through multiple worlds, and the adventures they have on their journey to a place neither Raul nor Aenea know are what propel the narrative. The Hyperion Cantos are meticulously plotted, so the river journey is not a plot device of last resort for a writer who does not know what to do next, but the plot device. For each world the trio visits is carefully chosen by the unknown entity that has activated the farcasters for a reason. And when they finally reach their ultimate destination, you will be chomping at the bit for the fourth and final book. At least I was.

Of course, the Shrike appears, but when it does, it’s unclear what its purposes are, or who sent it. For the Shrike had previously been thrown back in time by the TechnoCore AI’s god-like Ultimate Intelligence to drive the empathy part of humanity’s Ultimate Intelligence triune out of hiding to rejoin its brethren so their war can rage on in the future. This time, the Shrike seems to be on Aenea’s side . . . but why?

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The imaginative worldbuilding, deep philosophical contemplation, and pulse-pounding action we’ve come to expect of this series is all here in Endymion, but I have to give a special shout-out to Simmons’s putative villain, Father Captain de Soya. De Soya is not a “bad guy” per se–he is a decent, intelligent, deeply pious man of God who is doing what he has been told by his superiors at the Vatican. And even though the church, with its promise of being born again that has led the overwhelming majority of the galaxy’s citizens to accept the cruciform and become Catholic, is the putative villain, Simmons avoids facile and trendy anti-Christian bigotry. It’s an incredibly delicate balance that Simmons walks with the skill of an utter master. It’s both a completely engrossing book on a story level and a breathtakingly impressive one on a technical level.

There are planets of frozen atmosphere and tribesmen who live in ice tunnes, the violet-sea-covered world of Mare Infinitus, the Hegemony Consul’s old ship and hawking mat (flying carpet), interstellar travel by means that kill the passengers, who can be resurrected by the cruciform, and a resurgent AI who was not really defeated and has created an even more deadly and implacable foe than the Shrike.

The word “masterpiece” gets thrown around quite liberally, but three books into the Hyperion Cantos and I already feel safe using the term to describe it. Everything I look for in sci-fi is here, and the fact that Simmons’s prose is fantastic is the icing on the cake. 

My only complaints are these: Raul Endymion isn’t all that interesting of a character, and I can’t quite pinpoint why; and the fact that this book and the next, The Rise of Endymion, are presented as Raul’s memoirs–albeit from a deathtrap/prison spaceship, sort of tip us off that Raul survives the obstacles he faces in this book. These are minor gripes that do nothing to detract from the enjoyment I got reading this book, a book that kept me up way past any sane hour many, many nights.

Obviously, I don’t recommend starting a read of the Hyperion Cantos with Endymion, because you’ll be utterly confused. Start at book one. You won’t be sorry.

Also: Yet another exquisite cover by Gary Ruddell. What you see on the cover is an accurate representation of what happens in the book. I can’t get enough of Mr. Ruddell’s covers. Give me this over generic spaceship shot number 6,000 or close up of some face any day.

Here’s the full painting: simply gorgeous. This is why I have Manuel Guzman do my book covers–he’s an artist in a similar mold.

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Authors like Dan Simmons are why I got into writing sci-fi in the first place. Check out The Last Ancestor here.

On Cultural Confidence

[image error]My father-in-law is from a region of Greece that felt the after-effects of Ottoman rule long after the Greek Revolution of 1821 and the end of World War I, where the Ottoman Empire finally fell and Greece and Turkey engaged in a massive population exchange (not to mention a war that Greece lost, with bloody atrocities on both sides). He grew up speaking Turkish as his first language (he still speaks some), remembers a bit, and in his lifetime there were old-timers whose grandparents actually lived under Ottoman occupation. Therefore, he has somewhat of an interest in Turkish culture, and has found a Turkish historical drama called Resurrection: Ertuğrul, which is about the 11th century Turkish Bey Ertuğrul, the father of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. There has since been a new series all about Osman.

Ertuğrul, it could be said, is the grandfather of the Ottoman Empire,  Turkish national hero, and for a people with such a long history, that’s saying something that he’s still remembered with such reverence nearly 1,000 years later. 

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The show is well-acted, the costumes and settings are fantastic, and it’s bery dramatic. Like, every single scene is fraught with tension and really intense music. There are fights, though none too bloody despite the show being nicknamed “The Turkish Game of Thrones.” There is also no sex or nudity, perhaps owing to Turkey’s strong Islamic identity which is still a huge influence despite generations of Kemalist attempts to secularize Turkey. There are also some storytelling differences between it and a Westen made show. For example, much of Resurrection features people standing around talking, interspersed with action scenes. However, there are some episodes where the same characters are in the same setting talking for the entire episode. There is also a lot of people getting ambushed in the wilderness. 

Anyway, a little research into the show taught me that it was incredibly popular in Turkey and most of the Muslim world, though not necessarily in the Arab world, where it was banned outright in some countries for seeming to promote the redrudescence of the Ottoman Empire. 

I don’t watch it regularly, just here and there when my father-in-law has it on. But one thing that strikes me about this show, and I contrast with Western entertainment, is how much it reveres its title character, his faith, and what it stands for. 

In Resurrection, Ertuğrul is portrayed in only a noble light. His tribe guards a trade route and bazaar or something, and he treats everyone–including the hated Christians–with respect. The Muslim faith is taken seriously by all and is never mocked or its adherents belittled. Even Ertuğrul’s fellow Turkish rivals, some of whom are his brothers, are not caricatures or hypocrites. And Christians, whether they be Venetians, Templars, or traders, are mean, nasty, vicious, bloodthirsty, and bigoted. 

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And while I find myself rooting for the Templars whenever they appear, even though I know they’ll all die–seriously, in one episode something like 15 Templars waylaid five or six Turks, and not a single Turk died–I understand this. Because the Turkish makers of this show have a strong confidence in the goodness and rightness of their culture and their religion.

Imagine a Western-made show about, say, the Reconquista. There’d be a gay priest or three, or at least some sort of gay subplot (and the gay priest would be the only good priest); the church hierarchy would be venal, corrupt, and hypocritical; the fervent Chrisitans would all be easily duped and bigoted rubes; the only good priest or Christians would be the ones who don’t really believe in all of the religious stuff anyway; the Moors would be viewed as sympathetic; Christian characters would openly express admiration for Islam, and wish that Christians could be more like Muslims; some bad-ass female would be the real hero, winning sword-fight after sword-fight against evil Spaniards; a Spanish woman would have a steamy love affair with a Moor, and the Reconquista would happen despite our hero’s best efforts. Ultimately, the message would be that Europe is worse off for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella having reclaimed their land, there’d be lots of foreshadowing about how this would lead to entirely justified Muslim violence against Christians in the future, and that the Reconquista was, ultimatley, a horrible atrocity.

You know I’m right. These are 21st-century American pop culture trusisms. 

Or to think of another potential western-made historical drama, how about one chronicling the Siege of Vienna of 1683? You know John Sobieski would either be gay or a bad guy (never both); the Ottomans would be sympathetic heroes only looking for a better life; the Hapsburgs would be the real badguys, along with the Catholic church; there’d be a strong, bad-ass female Winged Hussar who manages to convince the Ottomans to retreat (becuase no way the Europeans would actually beat them, ha ha); and there’d be some relativistic “We’re just two sides of the same coin (but Christendom is really worse) moral equivalence nonsense or other as the denoumant, followed by myriad Golden Globes.

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Our entertainment is so boring, predictable, and harmful because our storytellers are people who hate us and our history, culture, and faith. The most frustrating thing about this is that they got into these positions of power in the first place because we were all blinded by both our decency, our upbringing in a high-trust culture, and the fact that for a long time economic conditions were so good we were willing to accept anything as long as we had shiny new toys.

The biggest problem with the Western world is Westerners. We have lost our cultural confidence, the faith that made us great and allowed us to build this civilization in the first place, and the ability to recognize objective truth, speak it and point it out, and live according to it. Whether this started in the stories we tell and it trickled into our philosophies, or it started with the philosophers and trickled into our stories, I don’t care. All I know is that my hat is off to Turkey for maintaining true to its history and culture and not force-feeding its people horrible degenerate slop designed to make them feel horrible about themselves and who they are. 

This is why I’m convinced there will still be a Turkey 1,000 years from now, but I’m not sure there’ll be a United States.

If you want stuff that doesn’t hate you, your culture, your history, and your faith, you need to look at independant art. I’m doing my part. Check out my sci-fi novels here. 

Signal Boost: Wretched Son by Jon Mollison

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Summer keeps getting better as yet another killer author has a new release: Jon Mollison is back with Wretched Son, a post-apocalyptic tale that’s sure to entertain:

THE HUM OF RUBBER TIRES ON HOT AND DANGEROUS ROADS

THE WHITE DOTTED LINE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

A YOUNG BOY’S FIGHT TO CHART A ROUTE TO MANHOOD

Take a ride through a different sort of apocalypse. A world on the verge of forging a better tomorrow, or repeating all the same old mistakes. And the fate of the world to come rests on the shoulders of a young boy as uncertain of his future as the world in which he fights to survive.

Jon always delivers the goods, whether it’s his sci-fi, his fantasy, or his cyberpunk. I highly recommend you check out Wretched Son. Jon’s a luminary of the PulpRev, truly embodying what heroic fiction is all about. You won’t be disappointed with this one.

There is so much good fiction out there, so support what you want to see so you’ll get more of it. Buy Wretched Son here! 

And after you’ve read Wretched Son, here’s more independent fiction for you: part one of my sword-and-planet series, The Last Ancestor. 

Signal Boost: The Stars Asunder by Jon Del Arroz

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He’s not on Twitter any more, but by God, the man is still writing!

I mean, of course, Mr. Jon Del Arroz, the leading Hispanic voice in science-fiction. Book 2 in his Aryshan War space-opera series, The Stars Asunder, finally drops today! 

A deep conspiracy upends a civilization…

…which could cost the lives of billions.

The war rages on between Earth and Arysha, even after the death of a prominent Aryshan leader.

Sean Barrows is sent into Aryshan space a second time to gain details on their fleet movements and objectives, but he has a greater goal in mind: find the love of his life. But a major threat looms for everyone: a new fleet of Aryshan ships which can go unseen and launch deadly stealth attacks. Can two civilizations survive?

Fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Earthrise by Daniel Arenson will love The Stars Asunder!

Jon’s a great writer who knows how to craft fun, action-packed stories with a lot of heart. I really enjoy his steampunk and his comic books, and if those any indication, I’m going to enjoy his sci-fi too.

Buy The Stars Asunder here! 

 Jon gave The Last Ancestor a nice review on his YouTube channel, which meant a lot to me since his opinion is one I respect greatly. Check it out for yourself for more fun sci-fi after you’ve ready Jon’s books!  

Natural Science

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If you’re in the business of regularly putting down your thoughts onto paper or screen, you’re probably a pretty curious sort, and probably pretty observant. People who don’t regularly exercise their God-given writing talent probably think the rest of us just aren’t paying attention to them, or are paying jvfattention to small, insignificant things.

And we are. We are daydreaming.

Those small things aren’t insignificant. They’re interesting. That person we’re looking at–we’re not “checking them out” or “giving them the staredown.” We’re trying to capture how they look or sound or walk in words so we can use it in a story somewhere. The trees overhead might spark a descriptive passage for use later. The sound of running water might inspire a new way of conveying that sound into words. And so on.

The other day, I was lying on the trampoline with my daughter, looking at the clouds. It was a bright sunny day before a massive thunderstorm moved in, and I saw a massive cloud moving in from the east, proverbially white and puffy, looming over the trees like a continent in flight. The edge of it looked like a giant, screaming face with a snub little nose, mouth agape in either a cry of pain or triumph. Smaller, darker wisps of condensation moved at lower altitudes from the west, flitting by like butterflies trying to avoid the notice of an approaching eagle. I could have stared at these clouds  and their intricate archipelago of ever-changing islands all afternoon, but it was time to get dinner ready and my daughter wanted to get off the trampoline. The point is, I wasn’t doing nothing by staring at the sky. I was working.

There’s so much to inspire if you just look around. For me, it’s the ocean, my children, walking through the garden, stargazing . . . I take heart knowing that the late, great Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart used to birdwatch (how rockstar of him!) and that many of his lyrics were inspired by his love of hiking, cross-country skiing, and motorcycling across the continent. This is apparent in his imagery and the metaphors he uses to make broader observations about the human condition. 

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If you find life boring, or the world boring, my best guess is that you may be too plugged in. We have the modern concept of being “very on-line” for a reason. There is something refreshing about being out in nature. It’s both frightening in its awesome magnitude and comforting in its elemental connection to what lies deep in every human soul. Whatever your inclination, or your profession, I suggest taking some simple awe in the glory of creation. 

Readers love my books. You will too. Come see what all the five-star reviews are about. Buy The Last Ancestor here!

Vacation

[image error]I’m taking the weekend off. From everything. Getting out of town with the fam. The works.

God bless, be excellent to each other, and see ya on the other side! (i.e., Monday)

Ignorance Is No Virtue

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Deliberate ignorance of your chosen art form’s history and past works is not something that should be lauded or encouraged.

It’s not edgy. It’s not “punk.” Hell, punk rockers–the good ones–are very aware of the history of their art form and work to expand upon it.

The canon, of anything, matters. It’s how civilizations communicate with their past and their future. Prior works matter. The old masters matter. They matter more than conforming your art to the fleeting political pieties of the day.

Some things are eternal. Others are not. Yet we see modern creators, particularly in the fields of science-fiction and fantasy, discuss how the canon is “dead,” “doesn’t matter,” and is “irrelevant.”

It’s dead, doesn’t matter, and is irrelevant because you hacks have decided to kill it.

I understand wanting to forge a new creative path. If you want to “kill the past” for your own purposes, that’s fine. But if you want to kill the past for the rest of us, you’re going to run into some fierce resistance. Canon matters because it is the only way you can have the much-vaunted conversation lots of current writers talk about wanting, but act as though they do not. In the words of E. Darwin Hartshorn, it’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants when you have cut these giants down. Imagine the state of science when we decide we’re going to ignore research and discoveries done in the past because they were made by straight white men–

Oh, wait . . . 

HItching your wagon to the dominant, ephemeral, ever-shifting cultural forces and topical subjects will make your work dated and insubstantial. It’s as simple as that. Nobody cares about how many trans, non-binary, POCs you cram your book full of if your book is bad. Nobody cares about the identity of the author if the book is bad. If one uses the demographic density of characters or creators as a litmus test for a work’s quality, then they must be a moron.

This explains so much of the current state of sci-fi and fantasy, why it’s dying out, and why most people still prefer the old, irrelevant classics. There is a reason why Hollywood is working on yet another Dune movie, but nobody is beating down John Scalzi’s door to make an Old Man’s War film franchise. 

I’m not saying that movie adaptations are an indicator of quality–one would have to be a moron to believe that–but I am saying that the canon is far from dead or irrelevant.

I think much of this animus is based upon jealousy. There’s also the willful ignorance factor to think about. The current crop of angry, axe-grinding authors of various demographic groups who are, like, totally the first ones ever to write sci-fi seem to act as though Octavia Butler, Charles R. Saunders, Samuel Delaney, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Leigh Brackett, or Margaret Weiss, among others, never existed. Nope! History began yesterday when these badasses totally kicked down all sorts of barriers, started giving themselves awards, and locking people who didn’t look like them out. So there is residual racial anger and sexuality anger, because straight white men are the worst, but there’s also professional anger because THE OLD WRITERS SELL BETTER AND ARE MORE POPULAR AND WELL-KNOWN THAN THE AWARD WINNERS OF TODAY.

America reads plenty. They just aren’t interested in reading what’s shoved down their throats.

Yesterday’s heroes will become today’s monsters at the whim of the woke. And the rest of the hordes will go along with this thinking at the drop of a hat, like a school of not-too-bright fish, because the one thing they fear above all else is exclusion. They want to be a part of this group so badly, they’re willing to forfeit core beliefs they held for years in favor of their new core belief they were instructed about five minutes ago. Is it any wonder why the NPC meme took off?

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I understand wanting to blaze your own creative path. I understand doing so without reliance on what came before. All of this makes sense to me. You aren’t beholden to the past in the sense that you don’t have to do everything exactly the way it had been done before. Without deviation from the norm, as Frank Zappa was fond of putting it, progress is not possible. Yet even Zappa based a good chunk of his music on blues, jazz, rock, and classical that came before him.

I can also understand liking what you like. What I don’t understand is hating–literally hating–other people for not liking what you like

What I similarly don’t understand or condone is the active destruction of the canon, the desire to burn it all down and have a Year Zero–with the cultural arsonists as the new arbiters of canon–and ruin everything for everyone. We’re at a point now, in this inverted world we call home, where encouraging people to read and understand writers of the past is considered fascist, while throwing the canon in the memory hole, discouraging curiosity about the past, and, presumably, burning books and destroying digital copies of said canon is considered the heart of progress.

But what do you expect from a bunch of Godless communists?

I’m aware that I don’t know the exact political bent of the canon-destroyers, but my guess is that they’re probably big fans of the hammer and sickle, or at least its methods of attaining power and control. I’m also aware that I don’t know their exact religious bent either, but I have a sneaking suspicion it ultimately involves worship and praise of that guy with the horns and pointy stick.

Because at the end of the day, the dismissal and destruction of those who came before is based on resentment and does not lead to the creation of good culture, but the destruction of good culture, and its replacement with garbage that will not stand the test of time because it is not based on anything good, beautiful, or true.

Maybe you’ll like my writing. Maybe you won’t. One thing you’ll notice, though, are nods to the past, a vision for the future, and the fact that I don’t insult anybody. Check out The Last Ancestor here.

If people like other works better than mine, fine. I don’t take that personally. It just means I have to work harder.

I love my readers! All of you!

The Only Piece of Internet Advice You Should Take

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You shouldn’t blindly follow Internet guru advice. Except for this piece:

INTERNET ADVICE, AND MOST ADVICE IN GENERAL, IS FROM THE GIVER’S OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE THAT THEY THEN PASS OFF AS UNIVERSAL. 

That’s it. Here’s why this bit of Internet advice is 100 percent true, and how you can recognize when other bits of Internet advice are worth following, and when they are not.

Internet advice commonly takes the form of relationship advice, business advice, diet and exercise advice, and yes, writing advice, at least in the circles I run in. Here are some common forms of Internet advice and how to separate the wheat from the chaff (hint: it’s easier than you think):

1. MASSIVE GENERALIZATIONS. How many times do you see this? “All men are trash!” or “Marriage is divorce-rape!” Boo hoo. People who give advice like this usually (a) just got out of a bad relationship, or (b) just had a nasty divorce. They are taking their own, singular, discrete experience and extrapolating it onto an entire demographic. In this case, one-half of the human population. You had a bad breakup, or have had trouble meeting a nice man or woman; therefore, some 3.5 billion people on Earth are all garbage. It’s absurd. 

You see the same thing with race. It used to be a white person had one bad experience with a black person and therefore thought all blacks were like that, but lately we’ve seen where a white woman (and nine-times-out-of-ten racial hatred seems to be directed at white woman) did or said something that gave a non-white person the bad-feels, so therefore white women need to be abolished or something. It’s ridiculous, but this brings me to advice discernment tip number one: THE LARGER THE POPULATION A GENERALIZATION IS ABOUT, THE LESS LIKELY IT IS TO BE TRUE. 

2. WHAT IS THE PERSON SELLING, AND HOW? Whether it’s relationship advice, fitness advice, or writing advice, lots of Internet gurus love to sell their advice as some sort of lifestyle. There is nothing wrong with this, but you really have to look at what the person is selling and how they sell it. Lots of gurus give away 95 percent of their advice, and then charge money for the remaining 5, which may include increased access to their expertise. That’s fine, and it makes sense. But some Internet gurus use lots of insult marketing and outrage marketing to peddle their wares. It’s when you get here that I think the buyer should beware. Secondly, and more importantly, check out if the guru is selling their product or expertise as the one true path, that if you don’t follow, you’re some kind of loser. Third, test the claims the guru is making. It’s become a cliche to make fun of the whole “I woke up at 3:00 a.m., lifted for 4 hours, took a cold shower, GRIT AND GRINDED, and made $20,000K before lunchtime on 2 hours of sleep,” but people actually make claims like that, very often posted underneath pictures of them standing next to a Lamborghini and/or some kind of scantily clad woman. It shouldn’t take a trained prosecutor to tell that most such claims are utter nonsense. Here’s our second advice discernment tip: BRAGGADOCIO MAY BE A USEFUL SELLING TOOL, BUT THE HUMBLE GURU IS VERY OFTEN THE MORE TRUSTWORTHY.

3. UNIVERSALITY. Many gurus will claim that their way is the only way. This should give you pause. Other gurus admit that their way worked for them, and that it may work for you too. This second type of guru will usually invite you to test-drive their advice to see if it works for you, too, before shelling out the money or making some kind of time-commitment. This brings us to our third and final advice discernment tip: CLAIMS OF UNIVERSALITY SHOULD BE GREETED WITH EXTREME SKEPTICISM. 

There is a lot of advice out there, and almost as many purveyors of such advice. You may be looking for guidance in some sphere of your life, and the Internet is a great resource for doing so. I just hope that you will take heed of my advice, which actually IS true and universal, and discern if the advice is worth following before you spend your time and money on following it.

There is nothing wrong with basing your opinion on personal experience, although personal experience supported by cold, hard fact is even better. But unless you’re Jesus Christ Himself, claiming that your way is the only way, or that your hot take is the only true hot take, is a gigantic red flag.

. . . .

Okay, yes, this post was inspired in large part by Tomi Lahren’s incredibly shrill and tone-deaf “All men are trash!” video. Chick got dumped and she’s bitter and it’s all men’s fault and she doesn’t have an ounce of self-awareness. Newsflash, Tomi: YOU DON’T SEEM LIKE ALL THAT PLEASANT OF A PERSON. I’m sorry that I’m just basing that on my personal experience of you as a public figure, but dang . . . at some point it might not be the rest of the world. It just might be you.

I don’t spread despair. I spread discernment.

I relied on a lot of good writing advice when I wrote The Last Ancestor. Check out the fruits of my labor by buying it here. 

August 15

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O spotless, undefiled, incorruptible, chaste and pure Virgin-Bride of God, who by Your wondrous conception united God the Logos/Word with man, and joined our fallen nature with the Heavens; the only hope of the hopeless, and the help of the persecuted; the ever-ready to rescue all that flee unto You, and the refuge of all Christians, spurn me not, the branded sinner, who by shameful thoughts, words and deeds, has made my whole being useless, and through indolence has enslaved my judgment to the pleasures of this life. But as the Mother of the Merciful God, mercifully show compassion unto me, the sinner and prodigal, and accept my supplication which is offered from impure lips unto You.

With Your maternal approach entreat Your Son, our Lord, and Master to open for me the merciful depths of His loving kindness; and overlooking my countless transgressions, guide me to repentance, and show me forth as a worthy worker of His Commandments. As You are merciful, compassionate and gentle, be at my side; and in this present life, be my fervent protectress and helper, thwarting the assaults of the adversaries, and leading me to salvation; and in the hour of my passing take care of my wretched soul, and cast far away the dark faces of the demons. And at the dreadful Day of Judgment, deliver me from eternal punishment, and prove me an heir to the ineffable Glory of Your Son, and our God.

May this glory be my share, O my Lady, Most-Holy Theotokos through Your mediation and help, by the Grace and mercy of Your Only-Begotten Son our Lord, and God, and Savior, Jesus Christ; to Whom is due all glory, honor and worship, together with His Eternal Father, and His All-Holy and Good and Life-Giving Spirit now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.