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rfmcdonaldOut of curiosity, I picked up John Ringo's latest, Ghost, for a read. It features an interesting protagonist indeed, a special operative for the United States given a license to do whatever he wants in the pursuit of terrorists who've kidnapped the womenfolk of prominent Americans and mined Paris with a nuclear bomb. He's an interesting character, and likely a sympathetic one. Have you ever had one of those days when you're so stressed out by the incompetent Europeans and women who hamper your pursuit of justice that you have to go out and repeatedly rape an eastern European prostitute? Ringo's dozen pages of description add enormously to the description of the character, devoted to his search for self-fulfillment but responsible in the bargain: Not only does he use condoms, but he pays her very well and she even gets to like it. Anyone who isn't impressed by how he does her up the ass is clearly a fag. Oh, Ringo's protagonist helps us realize that all hot women are bisexual, especially the hot ones.
Elsewhere, I'm pleased to announce that I'm quoted approvingly on the front page of Thomas Kratman's website. Go inside, and you'll discover the first chapter of Thomas Kratman's impending volume. We don't know much about the plot, but we do see a United States military officer order both the crucifixion of surviving al-Qaeda members in the Arabian desert and the sale of their dependent women and children to the Japanese as sex slaves. Eminent realism, for not only are the Japanese the sort of people who'll take a couple hundred traumatized women and children and make them animate sex toys rentable by the hour, but the officer corps of the United States army is composed entirely of men who are both willing and able to make these kinds of tough decisions.
If I was uncharitable, I might say that a United States acting on the fictional policies of Ringo and Kratman would leave me with no moral choice but to take up the advice of Ray Smith in his 1969 short story "Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada" and become a violent anti-American terrorist. Alternatively, I might identify a crude sort of Freudian displacement at work in how they respond to the violation of their country by ordering the violation of others. But no, I'll refrain. What strikes me most how their advocacy of the policies of the SS in the war against terrorist in their collaborative work Watch on the Rhine now makes sense. They love the United States so much that they want to free the forces defending the United States from all limits, not only the organizational-bureaucratic limits that bedevil every complex organization but the moral-ethical in the bargain. They want to free the United States of such decadent concepts as "prudence," "justice," and "mercy."
In Ringo and Kratman, I think that we may see the future of both the American technothriller and of American military science fiction. That's hot.
UPDATE (10:48 AM) : Crossposted at rec.arts.sf.written.
Elsewhere, I'm pleased to announce that I'm quoted approvingly on the front page of Thomas Kratman's website. Go inside, and you'll discover the first chapter of Thomas Kratman's impending volume. We don't know much about the plot, but we do see a United States military officer order both the crucifixion of surviving al-Qaeda members in the Arabian desert and the sale of their dependent women and children to the Japanese as sex slaves. Eminent realism, for not only are the Japanese the sort of people who'll take a couple hundred traumatized women and children and make them animate sex toys rentable by the hour, but the officer corps of the United States army is composed entirely of men who are both willing and able to make these kinds of tough decisions.
If I was uncharitable, I might say that a United States acting on the fictional policies of Ringo and Kratman would leave me with no moral choice but to take up the advice of Ray Smith in his 1969 short story "Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada" and become a violent anti-American terrorist. Alternatively, I might identify a crude sort of Freudian displacement at work in how they respond to the violation of their country by ordering the violation of others. But no, I'll refrain. What strikes me most how their advocacy of the policies of the SS in the war against terrorist in their collaborative work Watch on the Rhine now makes sense. They love the United States so much that they want to free the forces defending the United States from all limits, not only the organizational-bureaucratic limits that bedevil every complex organization but the moral-ethical in the bargain. They want to free the United States of such decadent concepts as "prudence," "justice," and "mercy."
In Ringo and Kratman, I think that we may see the future of both the American technothriller and of American military science fiction. That's hot.
UPDATE (10:48 AM) : Crossposted at rec.arts.sf.written.
