Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 12
July 26, 2023
Book Review: Joan Biskupic’s Nine Black Robes…
Nine Black Robes. Joan Biskupic (2023). “No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”—Dissenting opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thus begins and ends this excellent expose of the fascist takeover of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) written by CNN commentator and SCOTUS expert Biskupic.
Yes, fascist SCOTUS! Unlike the author, I’ll call a spade a spade, and the SCOTUS’s new majority are rabid fascists who conspire with the Good Ole Piranhas, which include ...
July 19, 2023
Celtic civilization and history…
It’s not easy to discover facts about the ancient Celts. Their origins seem to lie in Central Europe. They were pagans…if one can say they paid any attention at all to religion beyond their myths and legends. They didn’t record their history, so the historical records are distorted by others’ descriptions. It’s known that they won important battles against the Greeks and Romans because we have the latter’s (badly biased) records of those events. Bodica later on made the Romans’ miserable in anci...
July 12, 2023
Nazis…
No, this isn’t one of my political blog posts (see pubprogressive.com if that’s what you like). It’s about villains in fiction—my fiction and others’.
The new Indiana Jones movie has the Alan Quatermain-like Indy battling Nazi villains once again. He’s made a career fighting them. Every sane person hates Nazis. (Exceptions are found among the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Boebert, Cruz, Gaetz, Greene, and other fascists, of course.) Even Putin used them as scapegoats, comparing Ukrainians to Nazis—qu...
July 5, 2023
What to do with Goodreads?
Amazon has been anti-author/anti-publisher for quite a while (I boycott it as much as possible), belying its beginning as an online bookstore, and it has dragged Goodreads down ever since it was purchased by Amazon. Goodreads has become so bad that even the New York Times is going after it (article in the June 27 edition). That’s not surprising when you read the article. The Times caters to the Big Five publishing consortiums, and the latter’s authors are also getting whacked by trolls on Goodre...
June 28, 2023
The “divine feminine”?
Dan Brown made the phrase “divine feminine” famous in his Da Vinci Code. (My Son of Thunder does the same a bit more realistically.) But anti-machismo story lines have traditionally been rare in fiction. (I’ll give Dan the credit for trying to change that.)
From Bond to Solo, Reacher, and Rhyme, male detectives and PIs have dominated mysteries and thrillers. Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and other Hollywood hunks strove to project their macho allure to worshipping w...
June 21, 2023
What have I got wrong?
Sci-fi authors often extrapolate current events, inventions, and issues into the future, so they run the risk of getting it wrong. Usually, the farther they extrapolate, the safer the extrapolation, because who knows what things will look like thousands of years hence? Near-future extrapolations can easily be proven wrong later on in the life of a novel. I’m more than a sci-fi author, of course, but I’ve written enough speculative fiction that I’ve guessed a lot about what will occur in humanity...
June 14, 2023
Breach of contract?
I’ve explained a few times here in articles in this blog how I’ve chosen prices for my books, both ebooks and print versions (also see the little course “Writing Fiction,” the free PDF download). Some prices of print versions are out of my control for books published by my two small-press publishers, Penmore Press (Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder) and Black Opal Books (The Last Humans). Now pricing is out of my control for my other print versions—not that there are many (most of my books ar...
June 7, 2023
“ABC YA Sci-Fi Mysteries”…
From my own experience as a reader, I generally consider sci-fi tales as a young person’s sport, although that doesn’t stop a lot of people young-at-heart from being great fans of the genre. Some of those dedicated readers are purists too—people who avoid boy magicians and cute robots and androids from those slick fantasy tales and even the inheritors of all those Buck Rogers-style space operas—so the sci has to be in the sci-fi to keep them happy. But youth is always present if only in the sens...
May 31, 2023
Reading is more than literacy…
Literacy is not equivalent to reading and writing. You can be literate without even reading a book. (Baldacci’s literacy project is a misnomer in that sense.) Today’s younger generations might be literate but most are not readers. I can’t blame them too much because they have so many entertainment alternatives now besides reading a good book. I pity them instead because they’ll never have the wonderful experience of reading a good story that grabs them and makes their imagination run wild. Their...
May 24, 2023
Another Amazon atrocity…
Most readers who visit this website and especially this writer’s blog know that I’ve been boycotting Amazon KDP (“Kindle Direct Publishing”) services for a while. No recent books have been published by KDP or even appeared for sale on Amazon. In general, Amazon is not an author’s friend—far from being one; in my case, its abuses and atrocities have led to my complete boycott. (My latest books have been released by Draft2Digital and not distributed to Amazon as a retailer.) The atrocities have be...
