A Guaranteed Way for me NOT to Read Your Book

Once in a while when I scour the web for new food to review I come across such glaring examples of someone trying to shove his politics down my throat that actually make me stop in utterly dumbfounded bewilderment. And I say this regardless to the kind of politics that may be involved, be they liberal or conservative or whatever else they might be. As an author, the easiest and fastest way to turn me away from your work is to make it blatantly clear to me that you're just peddling a political manifesto thinly veiled in a layer of fiction.

How does that old line in "Portal" go? I made a note here: Great success! Indeed.

This is the preface of Beneath Gray Skies :

As America suffered under the rule of an extremist government from 2000 onwards, and seemed determined to turn itself into a world pariah, my thoughts turned to why a nation of such generally pleasant people could turn into something that was so alien and hateful to most of the rest of the world. My quarrel was not with Americans, who constitute many of my friends, but with the nation of America, whose ways and values continued to puzzle me as I researched the topic.

In my exploration of the subject, I discovered that many of the underlying attitudes expressed by Bush's America were those of the 19th-century Confederacy, and indeed, much of today's South: xenophobia, belligerence, a tendency to military violence, and a racial and religious intolerance.

Such values were close to those held by Hitler's Nazis, of course, and this set me to wondering what would have happened if the Confederacy had survived, and made an alliance with the Nazis.

However, in writing this story, I didn't want the Confederates to have won the Civil War. For one thing, I couldn't imagine how they could have retained control over the Union states for long, given their relatively small armed forces. Much more likely, I felt, was the possibility that the Civil War had never been fought, and my conversation at the start between Seward and Chase is, as far as I can tell, fairly representative of various shades of opinion in the North at that time. Of course, a divided America would have had other implications on world history as we know it now, and I have tried to incorporate these ramifications into the story. For example, the First World War, here referred to as the Great European War, would probably have gone on longer without American intervention.

You preaching your politics to me - and quite vividly so - as some kind of a mission statement is an instant "no purchase"-decision for me, especially if they are clearly so lopsidedly partisan that your bias has gathered enough mass to attract a moon of its own. And, let me repeat that again, that's regardless of the slant of your politics! If you are writing fiction... write fiction! If you want to make a political point - and it damn sure looks like it - write a political, non-fiction piece.
And, by the way? Without the US intervention and economic support during your Great European War, Germany would've probably won by 1917...