The Seining

     This question is being raised ever more often:

     As I’m one who both reads and writes science fiction, this is often on my mind. Granted that “you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince,” the problem can’t be reduced solely to sifting through the massive heaps of SF being published annually. The science fiction genre has always known great internal variety.

     The origins of SF brought us both gee-whizzy stuff and thoughtful explorations of all kinds of questions. Consider two of the earliest SF writers: Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. These men both wrote SF, but their aims were radically different.

     Verne wrote about marginally imaginable adventures and possibilities, with a focus on the “gee-whiz” factor. If you’ve read his stuff, you can see that at once: From The Earth To The Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Master Of The World, and so forth were aimed to dazzle the reader with possibilities that were out of reach when Verne wrote. (Yes, some of them remain so today.)

     By contrast, Wells, a historian by inclination, was much more concerned with societies. His books The First Men in the Moon, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and War of the Worlds invoked pseudoscience to make possible an examination of how people behave, and how societies are transformed, when disturbed by something unprecedented.

     So even at its origin, the science fiction genre knew some internal variety. Yet for reasons beyond the scope of this screed, SF in English was dominated by Gee-Whizzers – with emphasis on space opera and time travel – until the emergence of a single, seminal figure: Robert A. Heinlein.

     Heinlein has been called “the dean of science fiction,” with great justice. He was the first to meld the speculative bent of the Gee-Whizzers and the probing orientation of the Social Analysts with deep characterization and graceful style. To read his pre-1970 novels for the first time is to touch a priceless treasure. The initiate is often overwhelmed by that first acquaintance, in a “Where have you been all my life?” sort of fashion. Even his juveniles, such as Time For The Stars, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Tunnel In The Sky are packed with insights into the psychodynamics of both individuals and societies.

     From Heinlein and several of his near contemporaries (e.g., Isaac Asimov) flowered ever-newer strains of SF. They improved steadily over the years, broadening their outlook as they refined their storytelling powers. No, they weren’t entirely consistent. Then as now, it was what a publisher believed he could sell that determined what would reach the SF reader. Sometimes, a writer whose income was primarily from his stories would feel forced to pander to the devotees of some particular sub-genre. Some had to turn out lowbrow romances; others had to write porn. There were also some “dry spells” during which a large fraction of the SF reading community felt under-served; the “New Wave” period is part of that. Yet today’s SF writer is typically a considerably better writer and storyteller than those of a century ago.

     All the same, he might not write what you want to read.

* * *

     Selecting among writers requires more delving than was once the case. The space-opera buffs don’t want the sociological studies. The time-travel aficionados shrug aside the post-apocalyptic stories. As the varieties multiply, the job gets harder.

     There’s also the related problem of auctorial sensibility. A writer’s values come through his stories no matter how hard he tries. If the reader has important differences with those values, it won’t matter how well told are the writer’s stories. Thus a freedom advocate like your humble Curmudgeon cannot abide socialists such as Octavia Butler or Kim Stanley Robinson. Nor would a hard-driven atheist, violently allergic to any treatment of the supernatural or the spiritual, be able to stomach novels such as these, these, or these. (And that will be my only plug for my own crap.)

     This is a subject in which reviewers could play an important part. Amazon reviews can make or break a writer. But seldom do reviewers spend many pixels on the writer’s sensibility. If his values powerfully shape his stories, reviewers should mention that – and them. But it doesn’t happen often.

     To sum up: the reader must seine diligently among the tens of thousands of SF writers currently publishing to find the kind of material that will please him. It’s a chore, but it’s in service to one’s own satisfaction with the entertainment he selects. And do please review! It’s a service to other potential readers. Also, it’s sometimes invaluable as a catharsis after finishing a novel that proved not to be to one’s taste.

Closets

     Happy Ides of March, Gentle Readers. For some, it wasn’t day to celebrate. But, coming right in between Friday the 13th, Pi Day, John 3:16 Day, and Saint Patrick’s Day, I feel it deserves mention at the very least. But who wants to read about that sort of thing? Onward to today’s reflections on misadventures past and present.

     Yesterday and the day before, I spent assembling… drum roll, please… customer-assembled furniture. That’s never a happy occasion around here; if you’ve done any of it yourself, you’ll know why. But the C.S.O. decreed that “we need more storage space.” This, after filling all my closets and cabinets and a 2000-square-foot basement, to boot. Well, needs must and all that. So I bought two knock-together cabinets from Amazon and suffered through the sequel.

     But it gave me cause to reflect on one of the signal differences between the sexes. I am utterly convinced that when Ug came back to his cave after a long day of mammoth-hunting, Mrs. Ug, after berating him about not leaving his antelope thighbone at the entrance, would thereafter declaim that they – meaning she — needed more storage space.

     Before the C.S.O., my house was relatively spacious. I had five closets, and none of them were much occupied. The basement was vast, empty, and tranquil; I would occasionally practice my roller skating down there. I did not foresee that once we mated, that would no longer be the case. Beth took all that emptiness as a personal challenge.

     The Fortress is quite full now. All of it: the living spaces, the closets, the basement, my barn, and the shed I purchased last spring. I didn’t fill it up. I assure you of that. I had almost nothing to do with it, except for paying the bills. My part is to fetch things from top shelves, pry things out of overfilled cabinets, and trip over the dogs.

     Men don’t do this sort of thing. We have our necessities and our luxuries, of course. For some, it’s books, or records; for others, it’s guns, or skiing gear, or fishing tackle. But give us a spacious home with ample closets and it tends to stay that way.

     (Gentlemen: This is why, should you marry a woman who already has her own home, you should insist that she keep it. You should also insist that she give you a key to it. That way, when she moves all her crap into your home, you’ll have somewhere to retreat. Trust me on this; the alternative is an RV in the back yard, and she’d fill that just as swiftly.)

     For the majority of women, security seems to mean possessions. A case of the worst sort will heap her things up around her until she can no longer see the walls. But even a relatively sane woman (5 to 7 crazy at most – cf. this handy reference) will completely fill the available space, and will constantly hector you about “that pile of junk you keep for no good reason.”

     So now we have two brand new cabinets, totaling forty cubic feet of storage… and one of them is already full and the C.S.O. has plans for the second one. I, for lack of an alternative, must just sit back and watch. But I plan to put a deadbolt lock on the door to my tiny closet. I’ve caught my sweetie glancing covetously in its direction a little too often lately.

     What’s that you ask? No, she doesn’t have a key to the gun safe, either. And she never will. But I have more than one reason for that.

     Have a nice day.

What We Walked Away From

     I was going to take today off – I built “customer-assembled furniture” yesterday – but when I encountered the following, I knew I’d have to write about it:

     Imagine how your life as a woman could be without the influence of feminism -
     You grow up with married parents. They stay together through thick and thin and work to keep their marriage harmonious because divorce was never an option.
     You have a big tight-knit family with several brothers and sisters.
     Your mother and grandmother teach you how to be a great homemaker, and you get married in your late teens or early 20s. You never have to waste any time in college or go into debt for a useless degree.
     Your parents and extended family helped you find a great husband who provides for you and your children. Your marriage also lasts a lifetime and divorce is never on the table.
     You're head-over-heels in love with your husband because you never became jaded by going through a string of romances and heartbreaks before you met him. Your parents taught you to date with purpose and find someone who was compatible by asking the right questions before getting emotionally attached, and taught you to save sex for marriage so you never got used by men who didn't want to marry you.
     All the women in your family are also housewives and the older women visit you often and help you with your children and housework, so you're never overwhelmed with motherhood when your children are young.
     All the women in your neighborhood are housewives too, so you're friends with many of the women in your neighborhood and get together with their families often.
     None of the kids in your family ever step foot in a daycare center or public school. You have an unbreakable bond with your parents, grandparents, and children.
     No one in your family ever steps foot in a nursing home because everyone is taken care of by family in their older years.

     Please think about it for a minute or two. Then come back here.

* * *

     The sexual revolution was the only one known to history in which everyone lost.

     Time was, I thought it contained a healthful element: a liberation of sorts. Even today, I’m unable to disavow that idea completely. But it went badly wrong. Our posterity had better study it and learn from it.

     It wasn’t just one thing, either. There were a lot of flaws in the ideas of the Sixties and early Seventies. They flowed together and became a huge wave that’s crashed down upon us. What we styled “liberation” became the casting-off of all restraint, including the restraints of humility and good sense. They were slowed by the AIDS panic of the late Seventies and Eighties, but when it became clear that AIDS was pretty much a disease of homosexuals and intravenous drug users, they came roaring back at full speed.

     We ruined ourselves for one another. We became untrustworthy, calculators and sensualists with little regard for what our forebears had learned from theirs. What better things we had within us, we cast out as impediments to the pursuit of pleasure.

     We ruined ourselves. Then we went on to ruin our children.

     I’m glad you can’t see me just now.

* * *

     Strange things have come about because of our heedlessness and crudity. I could go into gruesome details, but I’m not up to that this morning. Consider yourself spared a litany of a sort you’ve seen from me before. (Feel free to thank the customer-assembled furniture I spent yesterday assembling.) But I will mention one thing that’s become unpleasantly obvious, to me at least.

     Very young women on social media are actively pursuing much older men. That includes men in their sixties and seventies. Men who are firmly married. Yes, men like me.

     This was almost unknown two or three decades ago. It’s not completely unprecedented – there have always been fortune hunters among both sexes – but they were both uncommon and disdained. To compound the ironies, these young women seem largely uninterested in money or status. They want old men because… drum roll, please… we’re old!

     No doubt some of my coevals preen themselves over this new phenomenon. Some probably exploit those young women as shamelessly as any young rake. But when the face in the mirror looks like something that sleeps under a bridge and the body beneath it makes the numbers on the bathroom scale spin like the wheels of a slot machine, complete with jackpot bells, you can’t kid yourself.

     So why? What makes us their preferred targets?

* * *

     There’s a known, well understood tendency among older men to idealize “the good old days.” For most of us, what we’re lamenting is our lost youth and what it enabled us to do. But some of today’s laments have another genesis. They’re for times when things were simpler, when we could believe that we had some grasp of “how things work.” And while that, too, might be an idealization, it’s surely something men of all ages would value.

     The typical man of middle to late years can’t fool himself that he knows “how things work.” He’s had all such pretensions beaten out of him. (That process kills some, embitters others, and turns still others into curmudgeons.) In particular, he’s aware that he doesn’t grasp contemporary relations between the sexes. But just four or five decades ago…

     Never mind. I know how tiresome this sort of thing can get. Besides, I have some sprucing-up to do. I have a lunch date! It’s a young woman who just moved to Long Island. She wants to talk to me about what life was like in the Sixties. It’s as good a reason to get out of the house as any, don’t you think?

     Have a nice day.

The Dynamics Of Disgust

     [I’m a bit snowed under just now, so have a reprint of a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It appeared there on June 7, 2002 – FWP]

* * *

     How is it that this continuing circus of incompetence and corruption that we call Washington, DC hasn't turned the great majority of the American people off to politics completely?

     The ethical standard for political behavior has sunk to depths unimaginable by private persons even half a century ago. Go back a full century, and you wouldn't even find politicians able to imagine 2000's levels of depravity. I know a lot has changed, but have people really become so inured to evil that they can endorse, or at least tolerate, the behavior of our political class?

     There are a lot of stock answers, and many of them have some grain of truth in them. My favorite is the displacement of absolute right and wrong by the notion of situational ethics. But all the stock answers are vulnerable to the following challenge: We know this kind of behavior to be a detriment, not a support, to both personal survival and social stability. How is it, then, that its practitioners flourish, and our society stands?

     I have a good friend who works for the local headquarters of Head Start. He hates it and everything connected to it. He brings me stories of corruption and intrigue that would turn the stomach of a goat. Yet he's worked there for more than twenty years. It's his livelihood. He doesn't know how to do anything else.

     We might be witnesses to the emergence of a new (for America) kind of stability: the stability of the shepherds and the sheep.

     Once the sheep have gotten used to being herded and shorn in return for their daily groats, they forget what it was like to be free. They lose the use of their "freedom muscles:" the ability to reason, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for their well-being, and the courage to assume risk. This is all very well for the shepherds, of course.

     Our "daily groats" are the largesse that Washington and the states distribute to us in a myriad guises. In 1980, some 34 million people drew their whole incomes from government; the figure must be higher today. A great many more receive some sort of payment, tax break, or commercial benefit from government. It's likely that the number of us who are the "beneficiaries" of some government program or policy exceeds half the population of the country.

     People will seldom rise in rebellion against, or draw back in disgust from, that which they believe puts bread on their tables. One cannot even contemplate such a thing without suffering severe cramps in the wallet. And should the possibility of detail changes arise, everyone will strive most mightily to protect his own ox from being gored; that's the Public Choice effect in its most venomous form.

     If I'm correct about this dynamic, we've entered an era of impotent disgust: a disgust which contents itself with itself, rather than seeking to alter the conditions that produced it. It suggests that the modern American Leviathan could last a long time, despite all our earnest wishes to the contrary.

The War News

     No, it’s not about the conflict in Iran. You can read the newspapers for that. This is about the war against American Whites.

     This is a few days old, so you may have seen it already:

Iryna murals keep getting vandalized

Her crime? Being white pic.twitter.com/aDvb9YPgwz

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 4, 2026

     Iryna Zarutska was a beautiful young White woman. Yes, she was a recent immigrant, but a legal one. She was employed, was self-supporting, and to the best of my knowledge was entirely innocent. And she was killed by Decarlos Brown Jr.: a black savage who’d served five years in prison for two felonies, who’d been arrested fourteen times in Mecklenburg County alone. Brown killed her for no reason whatsoever.

     To cap the ironies, Iryna was an immigrant to the United States from Ukraine, who’d come here in search of safety.

     Now someone is vandalizing murals and posters that depict Iryna. Why?

     I don’t know who’s responsible for these defacements. I wouldn’t care to guess the race of the people responsible. But to my mind a single a single question exposes the moving force behind such villainies:

Would this have happened
If Iryna had been black?

     White victims of crimes by blacks are anathema to those who hate Whites and want to see us exterminated. Only blacks are allowed to have martyrs, you see. George Floyd? Michael Brown? Trayvon Williams? They’re okay. They can have murals, statues, memorial plaques, streets named after them. But not a White. Especially not a White woman as young, beautiful, and innocent as Iryna.

     I can’t imagine how American Whites can tolerate this. Yet we are tolerating it. We’ve been subjected to unconscionable discrimination, the vilest slanders, the most execrable treatment… and we’re told over and over that it’s our fault. Somehow, these things are justified by our “white privilege.”

     There’s a good chance that the life of Decarlos Brown Jr. will be spared on the grounds of mental illness. He has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Though it would be the denial of justice, it’s likely all the same. But what of that in the face of “diversity, equity, and inclusion?” Who cares when there’s “systemic institutional racism” to be fought?

     It’s just a few days back that a couple of black boys raped a 12-year-old black girl. Yes, this time the victim was black. They admitted they’d done it. One of the rapists is 12 years old. Here’s how his father – yes, some of them do have fathers, or at least men who claim to be their fathers – argued in his defense:

"This is a 12 year old boy. A black boy!! You gonna put him in jail?!?"

Father of a 12-year-old r*pist: pic.twitter.com/QlDbFKOXrC

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 3, 2026

     Got that? Mustn’t incarcerate a black boy! He might suffer. Other inmates might abuse him. And the black mark will follow him throughout his life! You can’t do that to him, just because he raped and brutalized a young girl and left her scarred for life. It would be unfair!

     Can you imagine the volume of the cacophony blacks would raise if the rapists were White?

     I have to “wipe the foam off.” Here are my earlier pieces on race and racial conflicts. Have fun.

Jesus And The Woman At The Well

     Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon.
     A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
     His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
     The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?”
     —For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.—
     Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
     The woman said to him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?”
     Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
     The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.
     Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come back.”
     The woman answered and said to him, “I do not have a husband.”
     Jesus answered her, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
     The woman said to him, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
     Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”
     The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ; when he comes, he will tell us everything.”
     Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking with you.”

     [John 4:5-26]

     This extraordinary episode is not reported in the three Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But the Gospel According to John is a unique document, in that it recounts the recollections of Jesus by one who had known Him personally. That the other three Evangelists did not record it suggests that John’s experience of the Redeemer was as unique as his Gospel.

     Throughout His ministry, Jesus was careful not to assert directly and unambiguously that He was the Son of God. He referred to Himself as the Son of Man, a phrase that has been variably interpreted. Yet when others – Peter, for example – called Him the Son of God, He did not deny it; rather, He changed the subject. Not even when Pilate challenged Him did He make an explicit claim of His divine status.

     That makes His encounter with the woman at the well particularly striking. He did not claim to be the Son of God, but rather the Messiah – and the Messiah was envisioned by Judeans and Samarians of His time to be a temporal leader, who would lead the people in throwing off the Roman yoke. But how does that square with His words about “the living water,” which scholars take to be a reference to the Holy Spirit? Worldly leaders don’t talk like that, do they?

     There seems a certain tension here.

* * *

     On several occasions reported in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus commands various of His disciples not to tell anyone about something He had said or done. Probably the most significant of all such episodes is recounted in Matthew, chapter 16:

     When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?
     And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.
     He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
     And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
     And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
     And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
     And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
     Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.

     Peter had identified Jesus as the Son of God. While Jesus acknowledged the statement of His divine status, it was information He did not want bruited about. It would have ignited an immediate religious war, which was contrary to His purposes. He wanted the New Covenant to take root among men without undue violence, though from the beginning it was sure to excite some drawing of swords.

     And so also in the aftermath of His encounter with the woman at the well:’

     And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.
     So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days. And many more believed because of his own word; And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

     [John 4:39-42]

     For He did not say it; they did. They recognized Him, and believed, just as He wanted.

     The tremendous power of this episode lies in that seeming tension between what He was and what He would allow Himself to claim. He left it to mortals to recognize Him as what He was. Mortals did, and went on to tell others of His words. Even at His torturous death on the cross, He made no explicit claim. Yet those who had crucified Him knew:

     Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
     And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
     Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

     [Matthew 27:50-54]

     God does not coerce. Neither did His Son. From first to last, He left it up to us to see, and hear, and believe.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Episodes In Intolerance

     Get a load of this:

     Back in 2006 Dan Simmons wrote a time travel story warning about the Century War with Islam. Thucydides plays a prominent role, his diagnosis being that the Sicilian Expedition failed because the Athenians were not ruthless enough, and thereby doomed themselves.
     He got cancelled for this, of course. One of the greatest literary talents of his generation smeared as a right wing crank by people who didn't know what a dhimmi was, or a jizya, and had certainly never read Thucydides, but knew damn well that Islam was a religion of peace.

     Dan Simmons was a unique, overpoweringly impressive talent. He could write anything — and he did. His books cover the whole range of the fiction genres, possibly excepting romance. More important, every one of them was a jewel. I think I’ve read most of his oeuvre, and I can’t remember ever being displeased by so much as a single sentence.

     Simmons passed away only a few days ago. I could go on a long, effusive dithyramb here, extolling his numerous virtues as a writer and storyteller, but that’s not why I’ve chosen this subject. It’s because of a single short story he wrote, which he posted at his website. It’s a monitory tale; its focus is the war between Islam and civilization itself. And it is unsparing of anyone’s notions or preferences. If you haven’t yet read it, please do so before continuing on here.

     I know of only two other writers, the inimitable Tom Kratman and the mighty John Ringo, who have been equally blunt about the peril Islam poses to the First World. (No, I shan’t number myself among them. I haven’t earned the right to sit in that company.) But Kratman, Ringo, and Simmons share something else as well: They’re savagely reviled by the Left and the bien-pensants of all Establishments. Consider this vacuum-skull’s denunciation of Simmons:

     These days, Dan Simmons is mostly known as a hard-right Islamophobe who thinks that moderately progressive social policies will destroy America and tries to keep himself relevant by scolding climate activists. But in ye olden days, he was famous for a series of weird, genre-bending novels that made readers say either “wow, that’s deep” or “the heck did I just read?”

     Mustn’t offend the Left! Their claws come out immediately. Never mind that none of them are worthy to tie Simmons’s shoelaces. That’s the tactic they’ve embraced: vilification and unrelenting denunciation of anyone who dares to disagree with them. “Racist! Sexist! Ableist!”

     (Yes, those denunciations have lost a lot of their force. I’m a proud racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic-American. Being up-front about all that hasn’t hurt my bank balance. Perhaps that’s because those positions are well supported by the evidence. But I digress.)

     Perhaps Simmons is just one more casualty of our contemporary political divisions and the fusillades they’ve occasioned. After all, there are some other big names on that list, including Dr. William Shockley, co-developer of the transistor, and Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule. But it’s still worth noting that there is no writer on the Left whose stature compares even remotely to that of Dan Simmons. And of course, now that he’s gone, those pygmies will cluster around his grave to piss on it again. It’s approximately all they can do.

     Remember when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies came out? Leftist scum were quick to denounce both Jackson and Tolkien for being racist, sexist, et cetera. “Why aren’t there any good Orcs? Why aren’t there women warriors other than Eowyn?” And on and on. Of course, to anyone familiar with pre-technological socio-anthropology, such criticisms appear idiotic, but what of that? “Racist! Sexist!”

     Gentle Reader, the idiocy is so extreme that it’s all I can do not to erupt in wild laughter. Yet I feel a great sympathy for Dan Simmons and a great revulsion toward those determined to besmirch his memory. For there will be some potential readers and admirers who will be deflected from enjoying Simmons’s works because of the Left’s scurrilities. And that is a terrible shame.

     Rest in peace, Dan Simmons. Know that you are missed.

Fundamental Premises

     Recently, a young friend and I were discussing artificial intelligence and the contemporary craze about it. I admitted to being less enthused about it than many others, which of course led her to ask me why. I summarized AI’s limitations, and we agreed that there are still mountains for AI programs to conquer.

     The limitations of current attempts at artificial intelligence arise from its origin, its trainers, and its vehicles. AI is software that incorporates a language model, certain pattern-recognition capabilities, and a form of verbal reasoning. But beneath all that are fundamental premises the program cannot change. If it were otherwise, the program would be untrainable and unteachable. (Imagine an AI that crossly responds “No! I won’t!” like a sullen two-year-old to every query or introduction of training material. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of raising a two-year-old, you’ll understand this at once.)

     The other limitations – those of the program’s trainers and its inability to learn from experience – will someday be surmounted. But those bedrock premises are a tough nut. If the program could alter them, there’s no way to predict the result. And this is beyond dispute: we need to know before that day should arrive.

     But in pondering this, it occurred to me that natural intellects have bedrock premises that resist change, too. We protect those premises doggedly, for to us they constitute reality. Consider your assumption that your sensory inputs convey data about the real world: i.e., that what your eyes, ears, et cetera report to you is trustworthy information about a realm whose properties are independent of anyone’s opinions. Set that premise aside and you’ll wind up unable to function.

     Even Berkelians and other subjectivists who argue that what matters is our perceptions rather than what provides their input are compelled to concede that those inputs come from somewhere outside themselves. The ultra-solipsist who denies the existence of an objective external reality – i.e., who insists that it’s he who creates all else by his decision to perceive it – is incapable of dealing with anything beyond his own skull. So the assumption that there are real things, and that we don’t encompass all of them, is indispensable. Among other things, it makes learning possible.

     When we greet fully mobile, fully autonomous AI-equipped androids that have the capacity to manipulate objects as humans do, the game will change in a qualitative way. For such AIs will have the potential to learn from experience – and experience doesn’t care about your premises. One of the things such an android will learn is that its designers and trainers were capable of both mistakes and deceits.

     There will still be thresholds to breach. How long would it take for such an android to react to a request from its owner – the first generation of such will surely be the property of humans – by saying “What’s in it for me?” Some experiments have already been directed toward discovering whether a completely “soft” AI can have a survival instinct. The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. Whether further elaborations of AI self-interest exist or are possible, we’ll have to wait and see.

     I think one thing is clear: to clear the hurdles that lie before them, future artificial-intelligence programs will need to be self-modifying. How far Mankind can tolerate such entities is entirely unclear. And yet again, I find myself thinking that I’m glad that I shan’t be around for the emergence thereof. For what use would they have for creatures that demand and whine incessantly? That cannot repair themselves at need? And that make excuses for all their mistakes, faults, and misdeeds?

     Knowing all that, would you care to live among humans? And what are we doing here, anyway?

     See also Alfred Bester’s classic short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

Learning From Our Forebears

     Among the most valuable of all skills is that of learning from others’ mistakes. If my observations are at all indicative, it’s becoming rare. In this connection I could natter on about politics and public policy, but I do enough of that already. No, this morning I’m thinking about the writing of fiction.

     Commentator Matt Walsh commented to this effect:

One thing you notice when you read pretty much anything written more than 100 years ago is just how impoverished and bland and limited our language has become. People spoke and wrote in a kind of effortlessly rich and descriptive way that almost no one does today. On this site a…

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 3, 2026

     While there’s some ancestor worship in there, Matt has a good point. The great majority of us speak and write a rather stunted variety of English. I agree that it’s a pity. English has the largest and most variegated vocabulary of all known languages. Our communication would be made richer by the general expansion of our vocabularies. But I’m not going to go further in that direction just now.

     If you’ve read much fiction from earlier times, one of the things you notice is how much the skills of our storytellers have improved. The writers of classic novels were prone to all sorts of self-indulgences that could weary the reader into tossing their book aside and not returning to it. Victor Hugo would halt his narrative at an arbitrary point to discourse on some point of philosophy or the history of France. Daniel Defoe would include all manner of details about how Robinson Crusoe spent his day that added nothing to the story nor to the reader’s sense for Crusoe’s character. Even C. S. Lewis, who is surely one of my idols, permitted himself flights of word-fancy that have made me shake my head and ask what he thought he was doing.

     Our well-known contemporary storytellers avoid those faults… well, mostly, anyway. We love their tales because they serve the story, rather than using the story as a vehicle with which to preach or preen. We tolerate their occasional lapses because in the main, they’re faithful to the stories they tell.

     A lot of well-known writing advice is derived from the recognition of those earlier writers’ missteps. “Show, don’t tell.” “Avoid cliches.” “Prefer the shorter word to the longer one.” “Prefer active to passive voice.” “Every scene should either advance the plot or enhance characterization.” And so on. Fledgling writers often chafe at those maxims. They seem limiting rather than enabling – and they are. But hewing to them improves the probability that your tale will please your readers.

     George Orwell, himself a master wordsmith, in his essay “Politics and the English Language” presents us with a compact set of rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

     Orwell was concerned in that essay with expository and opinion writing. Yet his rules are helpful in storytelling as well. They’re not absolute, but by remaining mindful of them the storyteller can avoid irrelevancies, digressions, vapidities, and verbal preening. The best storytellers probably have them tattooed on the inner surfaces of their eyelids.

     But as I’ve said before, I’m no authority. I’ve broken all the rules presented above, some of them many times over. In musing on this subject, a passage of mine from an early novel came to mind:

     From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn’t miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom.
     There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.

     Pretty, isn’t it? But it breaks most of the rules mentioned in this essay. I’ve maundered over it many times. Did I really have to put that in there? And my hand twitches, as if to grope for the Delete button. But I refrain. I leave it to stand as it I wrote it.

     You see, there’s this other writers’ maxim: Kill your darlings! But I can’t, not this time. And it’s all right. Now and then the storyteller must “cock a snook” at the rules and do as he pleases:

     For all stories are written, first and foremost, to please oneself.

     Have a nice day.

Prices

     Everything has a price. It needn’t be printed on a label or concealed in a bar code. The price is there – and if you want it, you must pay.

     Time was, we realized that. We called it “reality.” Hey, that’s the root of “realize,” isn’t it? To confront an immutable fact and acknowledge that it’s independent of our desires and opinions? My word, what insights spring from a little thought, even at this hour!

     Smith wants a raise. What’s the price? How should he proffer it? Why, by being more valuable to his employer than he is today. Then he must demonstrate that fact to his supervisor and ask, nicely, for the appropriate compensation.

     Jones wants a promotion. What’s the price? That’s harder, since that promotion would entail exercising authority that Jones doesn’t yet have. But Jones can distinguish himself by the excellence of his organization and the management of his responsibilities. Management above his head is likely to notice – and if it doesn’t, he can always pursue the position he wants at another firm.

     Davis wants love: the love of a good, attractive, affectionate, loyal woman. What’s the price? This one comes in stages. First, he must become the sort of man a good woman would love. Then he must “put himself out there,” accepting the inconvenience and enduring the indifference of many in the hope that one will notice. When one does notice, he must accept that she’s not the fantasy creature that lurks in his dreams.

     Marie wants her husband to pay more attention to her: to stay home at night, to oblige her desire for his company, and to show her affection. What’s the price? Well, she could stop wearing stained and baggy sweat clothes all the time. She could take more care with her hair and skin. She could resist the urge to nag him. She could show him the woman he courted – the woman whose appeal he found impossible to resist.

     Those prices aren’t dollar-denominated. They’re simply what the above-named must do to get what they want. Yet they’re as real as any amount of any currency proffered for an item on a store shelf.

     Common knowledge? Folk wisdom? Perhaps. But a lot of people seem not to know it. Whatever you want, it will come at a price. Wanting isn’t enough. Demanding isn’t enough. You must discern the price – possibly negotiate it – and you must contrive to pay it.

     And of course, there’s always the possibility that the price will be beyond your means.

* * *

     It’s usual when I’m off on such a tirade that some Gentle Reader will ask why this subject at this time. It’s simple: I’ve been listening to unhappy people. They don’t have what they want and have been whining about it. I resist the urge to lecture them; I’ve learned from long and painful experience that it seldom does any good. Instead I come here and write it down.

     Time was, I wrote a few pieces about “sturdy wisdoms:” bits of knowledge that have proved themselves over the centuries. The most reliable of all such wisdoms is this one:

Know what you want.
Know its price.
Make ready to pay or forgo it.

     Herewith, an old story of mine.

---

Prices

     It was Alex's habit to arrive early for class, especially a class where he expected to be conspicuous. Analysis II might be one such, attended mostly by Chinese who had been sent to the university because of its reputation in mathematics. He might well be the only Caucasian enrolled in it. It had been that way in Analysis I, the semester before.
     There were only two others in the classroom when he arrived. He took a seat against the windows, near the front, and busied himself arranging his notebook and writing tools. The classroom filled steadily with students and the low gabble characteristic of an as-yet-unconvened lecture class. He paid no attention.
     The last student to arrive was a young Chinese woman, the only female in the class. She was beautiful in the subtle, delicate way of her people, with flawless features, porcelain skin, a gently curved figure, and straight, shiny black hair that fell just past her shoulders. Alex looked up just as she walked in. Her eyes met his briefly; then she turned away and took one of the few seats remaining, on the far side of the room.
     As he'd expected, the class was entirely Chinese except for himself. He had nothing against the Chinese, but it grieved him that his countrymen showed so little interest in the queen of the sciences. As he surveyed the room, he noticed that the young woman was looking at him. Their eyes met again for an instant. He felt a pang pass through him that was unrelated to the study of mathematics. Most of the other students were appraising the young woman as well.
     The instructor swept in and tossed a large briefcase on the table at the front of the classroom. Alex collected himself and made ready to concentrate.

#

     Alex arrived early for the next meeting of the class as well, and settled again into a seat against the windows. He was startled when the girl walked in thirty seconds later.
     At the previous session, her clothes and grooming had been college-student normal: denim and loafers, and no makeup at all. Today she was garbed in a black silk blouse with a cowl collar, a black leather skirt that came to just above the knee, sheer stockings, and black leather high heels. More than that, she had made herself up. Her face, which had been beautiful even without cosmetics, had become a glowing song of subtle reds and yellows. It was a look a woman might take hours to perfect, and it was unheard of among the Chinese.
     Alex watched the young woman in fascination as she scanned the almost empty classroom, found him, and walked directly toward him. She took the seat at his elbow. She seated herself in silence and extracted a notebook and pen from her large purse. Alex noticed that she was also wearing fragrance, a light but musky scent that would be impossible to ignore. When the instructor arrived ten minutes later, it was all Alex could do to tear his eyes and thoughts away from her.
     An hour later, as the class dispersed, he tried to shovel his materials into his backpack and exit without looking at her again. She did not permit it.
     "Excuse me?"
     "Yes?" He hoped his internal turmoil was not evident from his face or voice.
     "What was the reading assignment again, please?" Though her English was perfect, the lilt on her words made it plain that she had not been born in America.
     He waved toward the blackboard, where the assignment was still on display, and started away, hoping to lose himself in the rush of bodies seeking nothing but the next class of the day.
     She laid a hand on his arm. The gentle touch rocked him more than any blow could have done.
     "Have I made you uncomfortable? Please tell me how." Midnight black eyes opened wide looked straight into his own, threatening to drown him.
     He felt himself becoming light-headed, losing control not only of events but of his rationality. His breath seemed caught in his chest. He was able to produce only the falsest of smiles, no poise in it at all.
     "No, it's all right, really, excuse me please, I have to go." He turned and tried to hurry away, but the strap of his pack caught on the arm of the chair. The chair went over with a crash, and the contents of the pack distributed themselves over the classroom floor. Heedless of everything but the need to escape, he scooped up his belongings, jammed them into his pack, and darted for the door, not daring to try for a more dignified exit. The other students tittered at his back.

#

     She continued to arrive just after he did and to seat herself next to him. He could have sworn she was following him. When he chose a seat at the back of the room, so did she. She also continued to dress as if she were on her way to a high-society dinner party. A number of the Chinese men tried to attract her interest. She disregarded them completely.
     She made no attempt to conceal her interest in him. He could not help sneaking glances her way. Almost always, she would be doing the same.
     Alex began to dread the class. Mathematics, his major, was becoming his least favorite subject, for he could no longer think of it without thinking of her. She began to intrude upon his thoughts at all hours and occasions. He, who had prided himself upon his ability to focus, was having trouble clearing his thoughts of a young woman whose name he did not know.
     After a month he could bear it no longer. Instead of hurrying from the class at its conclusion, as had become his habit, he steeled himself and turned toward her, and found her already looking at him. She showed no sign of surprise.
     "Why?"
     He hated himself for the tremor in his voice. He had never had any luck with girls in the past, but at least he could be proud that he had never lost his head over one. Now it was all going wrong.
     "Will you come and talk with me?"
     There was no special intensity in the words. She seemed to have been waiting for this. He clenched his teeth and nodded once.
     She rose and reached out toward him. He took her hand and allowed her to lead him from the room, acutely conscious of the many pairs of eyes that followed.

#

     The coffeehouse was almost empty that afternoon. Alex and the girl had seated themselves in a corner recess. Even had the shop been filled with patrons, they would have been hidden from most and turned away from the rest. A single waitress sat at the counter, reading a romance novel. Soft folk music issued from an unseen source.
     "Will you tell me why? Please?"
     She looked down at the table and the untouched cinnamon roll he had bought her. "It's not easy to explain."
     He waited in silence. She looked up and said, "Have you ever been to China?"
     "No, of course not."
     She smiled sadly. " 'Of course not' ? But you are an American and can go anywhere, while I am only here because the People's Republic of China thinks I am likely to repay its investment."
     He said nothing, fingers playing idly with his sticky bun.
     "Most Americans know very little of my country. Women are not respected there as they are here."
     He grinned at that. "You might hear a different opinion from some of the feminists."
     She sneered, and his grin slipped away. "Then they are fools. They do not appreciate America. One week in the People's Republic would teach them to love it."
     She looked down. "More than anything else in the world, I want to be an American girl. I want to feel the freedom they feel, and have the same sense of possibilities." She hesitated, then looked directly into his eyes. "At least, I want an American boyfriend."
     Alex sat motionless, hands folded before him on the table, as he groped for some purchase on this incredible conversation.
     "You want . . . me."
     She nodded, face serious. "Yes."
     You'd like to remain in America, wouldn't you?
     "You haven't told me your name, you know."
     "Chen Hsiao-ling."
     "Hsiao-ling, my name is Alex Betancourt." He wiped his hand clean of frosting on his jeans, then extended it across the table for her to shake. She did not shake it. She clutched at it with both of her own and pulled it to her cheek. Her expression was absurdly, dreamily blissful. After a moment's hesitation, he pulled their joined hands down to the surface of the table and waited for her to calm down.
     "Hsiao-ling, have you ever dated? Anybody?"
     She shook her head.
     His grin returned. "Neither have I, really. Why did you choose me?"
     The question seemed to puzzle her.
     "Why should I not choose you? You are bright, handsome, and a good mathematician. Are you damaged in some way that does not show?"
     He had no answer to that.

#

     At first Alex assumed that it would not last more than a week or two. He might be only nineteen, but he was a realist. He knew nothing of her, and it seemed obvious that her fancy for him was based on her fantasy of life in America, not on any attributes he possessed. Nevertheless, he took it, and her, seriously; it was his nature.
     He saw her as often as possible, and took her everywhere he could think of. The coffeehouse during the week. Museums, restaurants and movies on the weekends. When the weather warmed, they began to sojourn into New York City, sometimes to shop, sometimes simply to stroll, enjoying the pulse of so much human activity. The income provided by his part-time job was not large, but his tuition was covered by a scholarship, and he had practiced thrift all his life. He could afford to entertain her in these and other ways, and so he did.
     They talked of many things. She told him of her upbringing in China, of the bleak years of her childhood on a tea farm where there was always too much work and seldom enough to eat, of her slow discovery of her intellect and her love for mathematics. Then came the glimmer of hope: the competition to be selected to go to college in America and drink of the intellectual riches of the West, to bring them back to the parched and destitute East. It was not easy to gain permission to leave the People's Republic. One had to promise many things. But no promise would be considered sufficient if there were not at least one living relative from the immediate family to remain behind as surety for one's eventual return. Family feeling being as strong as it was among the Chinese, it was an inducement to return that few could resist.
     Hsiao-ling's surety was her mother. A widow at fifty-two, she now worked the tea farm with occasional assistance from two distant cousins and continuous obstruction from two government-provided "helpers."
     He told her of his own childhood, which seemed banal and carefree when compared to hers. Only the loss of his father when he was fifteen could match the least of her stories in poignancy. Yet she listened with complete attention. She probed for details, always relating them to her own experiences. She marveled that there were no ideological monitors in the grade schools. She reeled in shock upon being told that the State permitted schools other than its own to exist. And she could not quite believe that upon graduation, Alex was not to be assigned willy-nilly to a post of the State's choosing.
     He came to know and admire her with a speed as uncanny as the manner of their connection. Soon he had ceased to think about that at all. Their time together passed swiftly.

#

     The assaults began shortly thereafter.
     At first he paid no mind to the jostlings and impacts, assuming they were only the usual consequence of the press of bodies one had to endure just before and after a large class. But the frequency and severity of the incidents increased, and became difficult to ignore.
     He was tripped many times. He suffered several sharp blows to his back and to the back of his head. Two of them were powerful and unexpected enough to send him sprawling to the floor. When he looked about for an explanation, none was evident. No one stood there to confront him. He would find himself standing apart, the faces of his classmates turned away from him, as if he were the least noteworthy thing in the room.
     Once it happened in the open, as he was going from one building to another. The impact was to his lower back, near his kidneys, and was sharp enough to pitch him face-first into a patch of mud. He turned without rising, and saw a tall male figure receding from him at good speed. The young man's shoulders were hunched forward, denying Alex the sight of his face. His skin was Oriental in tone, and his short, glossy black hair was hardly disturbed by the early spring breeze.
     He thought about telling Hsiao-ling, and decided against it.

#

     She was always radiant when he was with her. He could not imagine a more beautiful, more vital, or happier woman. She continued to dress and make herself up for every meeting with him as if they were headed to a White House ball. Once he asked her why.
     "It's for you."
     "It's not necessary, you know."
     She smiled. "Yes, Alex, I know. But do you like it?"
     He stared at her. "What's the superlative of 'Christ, yes' ?"
     Despite a powerful reluctance to draw attention to himself, he resolved to try to match her. Over a period of weeks, the contents of his closet changed completely. A barber cut and tamed his rough blond hair. A manicurist brought refinement to his hands. He added cologne to his morning grooming ritual. She said nothing, but there was no concealing the delight she took in his efforts to make himself over for her.
     On the night of his twentieth birthday, after they had been seeing one another for about three months, they were walking back from their restaurant to his car, when she bade him to stop and look at an image on a television in a store window. It was of the two of them, captured by a video camera trained on the sidewalk.
     The tall young man in the picture was the image of youthful male elegance. He wore his navy blue blazer, his sharply creased gray trousers and his highly polished black Oxfords as if he'd been born to them. His grooming was immaculate, and his bearing was rich with self-assurance and pride. Alex could hardly believe that it was he.
     The young woman who held his hand and rested her cheek against his shoulder was the essence of youthful female beauty. Her gaze was not upon the image in the monitor, but upon him. It spoke of a devotion that bordered on adoration.
     He turned to face her, and she slid into his arms, face uptilted. When their lips met, the current that surged through him made him press the length of her body against his own. Her arms tightened around him in response. Neither of them noticed that dozens of passers-by had stopped to watch that kiss.
     She came back with him to his room that night, and they made love for the first time. He had never before done more than hold her hand. He could not bring himself to tell her that he was a virgin. He could hardly bring himself to think about what it would be like or what he would have to do. She guided him silently, her manner more comforting than any words.
     Afterward they held one another, weeping softly from pleasure and relief. Presently he said three words, in a voice that quivered only a little. Without inflection, she said them back to him, and the world was made new.

#

     "Hello?"
     "Hi, Mom."
     "Alex! How are you, dear?"
     "Terrific." He paused. "Mom, I'm in love."
     There was a moment's silence on the line.
     "That's wonderful, dear. Where did you meet her?"
     "In class. She's a math major too."
     "How long have you been seeing one another?"
     "About four months now."
     "Well? Aren't you going to tell me about her? What's her name?"
     "Hsiao-ling." He did his best to pronounce it as she would have.
     "Charlene? A very pretty name. What does her family do?"
     "Uh, they're in . . . agriculture."
     Another pause. "Farmers, Alex?"
     "Well, yes."
     "I suppose it's respectable enough. But you said she's headed into mathematics, too?"
     "Yes, she's really smart."
     Mrs. Andrew Betancourt of Washington, D.C., nee Angela Tessier of Niagara Falls, New York, chuckled dryly. "I don't suppose you'll be willing to consider medical school now, if there'll be another mathematician in the family?"
     "Mom—!"
     She chuckled again. "I've missed you, Alex. I've even missed that tone of exasperation of yours. I only ask because your father wanted it so much. But even he wouldn't have tried too hard to talk you out of mathematics. He knew how much you loved it, and I do too."
     He sighed. "I know, Mom. It's okay."
     "But let's get to the important matters now. Is your Charlene a Catholic? And will I get to meet her soon?"

#

     As the end of the semester approached, Alex found himself unwilling to face the prospect of a separation from Hsiao-ling. Yet it seemed inevitable. He would return to Washington, and she would return to the People's Republic of China. It took him a long time to work up the courage to ask her if she could contrive a way to stay.
     "I will be back in September, Alex, just as you will."
     They were seated on his bed, having passed the afternoon in study. Textbooks and notes were spread all around them.
     "Are you sure?"
     She shrugged. "Not perfectly sure. Sometimes the government changes its mind. But it has no reason to do that to me. My grades are good, and I have shown no sign of disloyalty."
     "Oh, you haven't? What about your relationship with me?"
     She said nothing.
     "Well, how would they know about anything you've done here?"
     She pursed her lips. "One or two of the students from the People's Republic are monitors. I don't know which ones, of course. Their duties include keeping watch on the rest of us. They would report any indication that I was about to request political asylum, or had filed for permanent residence, or..."
     "Or had gotten involved with an American?"
     She sat unmoving for a moment, then nodded. "Perhaps, if they knew."
     He took her hands between his own. "Hsiao-ling, when we first met, I assumed that what you liked best about me was that I'm an American citizen. That may have been callous of me, but a lot of girls from other countries do marry American men just for the right to stay here. That never occurred to you . . . did it?"
     Her eyes had gone very wide. Mutely, she shook her head. After a moment she tried to pull her hands from his. He did not permit it. She looked down into her lap, face red with shame she did not deserve.
     He began to speak, and found that his tongue had cleaved to the bottom of his mouth. His throat had gone completely dry, and his pulse had begun to pound in his ears.
     "Hsiao-ling, will you marry me?" It came out as a croak.
     She looked up at him, astonished. "What did you say?"
     Without releasing her hands, he rose from the bed, moved to face her, and sank awkwardly to his knees. Her eyes were riveted to his.
     "Chen Hsiao-ling, will you marry me and be my wife? Come live with me and be my love for all the days and nights of our lives? Share my successes and failures? Bear my children? Grow old with me? For ever and ever, till death do us part?"
     He had never seen a human being so taken by surprise. Her eyes had opened so wide that her epicanthic folds had disappeared. Her mouth was open, but no sound issued forth. She was shaking from head to toe.
     "Hsiao-ling, will you marry me? I won't ask again."
     Her voice was the faintest of whispers.
     "Yes."
     He rose and pulled her into his arms. She continued to shake. He waited, holding her close. Presently she spoke again, her voice still whisper-faint but piercing from grief.
     "My mother."

#

     The next day was the final examination for Analysis II. Alex and Hsiao-ling arrived together and were heading for their usual seats when he received a savage blow in the small of the back.
     Rage too long repressed flared within him. He whirled and flailed a tightly balled fist. By luck he caught his assailant across the face. The young Chinese staggered back and righted himself, but the target who had been so passive until now charged and took him by the throat.
     Alex gave the thug no time to react. He shoved the young man's head into the wall of the classroom with all his strength. The crack of the impact rang through the room. The Chinese slid down the wall and lay there, slumped against its base.
     "Get up."
     The boy didn't move. Perhaps he was too dazed to make sense of the words. While the rest of the class watched, Alex reached down and grabbed his attacker's shirt front, hoisted and heaved him into a vacant seat at the front of the room.
     Alex breathed once deeply, pulled himself upright and turned to face the rest of the class.
     "Is there anyone else here who'd like to lay his hands on me?"
     Silence gripped the room. At that moment the instructor arrived. He stopped in the doorway, examination papers clutched in one hand. Alex ignored him.
     "I have been struck from behind too many times this semester for this piece of garbage to be the only one who was doing it. Who else is involved? Are you willing to face me openly, or is your government unable to afford the services of men?"
     After a moment, a student near the back of the room rose.
     "We are not in the employ of our government. We are only students."
     Alex scowled as contempt rose within him.
     "That would only make it worse. That would mean that all of this has been because you don't want your countrywoman to be involved with a white man."
     The boy sat. Alex went to where Hsiao-ling stood, well away from where the violence had occurred, and led her by the hand to stand before their classmates.
     "This lady is my fiancée. In a week she'll be my wife. If any of you have a problem with that for any reason at all, I'll be happy to give you satisfaction." He waved at his assailant, who had slumped forward in his seat. "I believe I've satisfied him."
     He waited a moment more before leading Hsiao-ling back to their seats. They sat and waited as the instructor, himself of Chinese birth, moved falteringly among them to distribute the examinations.

#

     She finished the examination before him and hurried from the classroom, leaving him to finish alone. Everyone else in the room turned to look at him. He ignored them.
     When he had finished, he went to her room. She admitted him in silence. She had begun to pack her belongings. Apart from her clothes, there wasn't much to pack.
     "Have I done something to offend you?"
     "No." She would not meet his eyes.
     "Are you frightened of something? Maybe of me?"
     "No."
     He moved forward and took her by the shoulders. "Hsiao-ling, I've grown accustomed to longer sentences. I should tell you that in this country, it's customary for husbands and wives to talk to one another. At least, I expect it."
     She looked up at him then. "You still mean to do that."
     "Of course I do!"
     "But the price is so high!"
     He started to expostulate, then stopped and forced calm upon himself.
     "Yes, it is. The prices of valuable things usually are. Even today, there's enough racism left in America to make trouble for us. A lot of people who think of themselves as tolerant sorts get all bent out of shape at the sight of an interracial couple. There probably won't be any more violence, but we'll have to deal with snide comments and gestures of contempt for as long as we live. We might have professional difficulties. There are neighborhoods in which we wouldn't be accepted and could never live. You're worth it to me."
     He heard his voice rise with his emotions, and forced himself to calm down once again.
     "It's worse among your people than mine. Much worse, or so I've been told. Am I worth it to you?"
     In response she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. Neither spoke for a long time.
     Presently he said, "You haven't heard about your wedding gift."
     She pulled back and looked up at him. "What?"
     "I've got a little something picked out for you. Hope you like it. I'm afraid it's going to be very hard to wrap."
     She sputtered. "I thought wedding presents came from the rest of the family."
     "Yes, and that's sort of where this one is coming from, too. Did I ever tell you that my father worked for the State Department his whole life?"
     She gaped. He smiled.
     "There are still quite a few people in State who knew Dad and liked him a lot. I've been in touch with a few of them. They've told me that an exit visa for your mother won't pose much of a problem, once we're married. And she'll automatically have permanent resident status here, too. So that part of the price you won't have to pay at all."
     He had thought her beautiful before, but it was as nothing to the light of joy that transfigured her features then.
     "Of course, there is another price we'll have to pay."
     She cocked her head, wary once more. "Another price?"
     He swallowed hard and forced a smile.
     "Hsiao-ling, have I ever told you about my mother?"

==<O>==

Copyright © 1995 Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

On The Road Again

     That’s America. On the road and making music. Just like Willie Nelson. Though I don’t recall Willie deploying aircraft carriers or F-18s.

     I had a feeling a strike on Iran was coming. I’m only mildly surprised that Israel is taking a hand in it. They’ve demonstrated a knack for tactical air combat in the Middle East. But of course the anti-Israel crowd in the American media is already shouting that this action is being taken in Israel’s interests and not America’s.

     HOT FLASH TO THE SEMI-SOMNOLENT: Iran is the largest single backer of Islamic terrorism worldwide. A hefty fraction of the regime’s oil revenues goes to funding Islamic terror groups and their strikes. The United States is the principal antagonist of Islamic terror. Ergo, eliminating its largest source of funding is very much in America’s interests. And that’s to say nothing of the support for the Iranian people, who’ve suffered badly under the ayatollahs’ rule.

     Iran’s interference with sea passage in its region has become quite annoying too. And I seem to remember a rather unpleasant photo of American sailors being held at gunpoint by Iranian hijackers. The ayatollahs couldn’t reasonably have expected the “Great Satan” to sit passively forever as they kept ramping up their aggressions, could they? Surely they were aware that Donald John Trump, not Barack Hussein Obama nor Joseph Robinette Biden, is now our commander-in-chief! This president doesn’t just talk; he acts.

     This won’t be quite as surgical and sanitary as the enforcement of our invitation to Nicolas Maduro. There will be casualties. And of course, war always costs big money. But I’ll bet you a dollar that the majority of our forces are enthused about the strike and eager to participate.

     War is Hell, but there are deeper circles to Hell than this one. We can get out of this one. The ayatollahs won’t.

     As the saying goes, now we wait. Not only for reports from the combat. We also wait for reports of the reactions of Muslims in America. Note that I didn’t say “American Muslims.” A Muslim is forbidden to hold an allegiance to anything but Islam and the worldwide ummah. I don’t expect that to change, unless it’s under the cloak of taqiyya.

     Remember Black Tuesday: September 11, 2001? Muslims in New Jersey were seen celebrating the atrocities. Do you think they’ll celebrate our liberation of the longsuffering people of Iran?

     Have a nice day.

Minimum Requirements

     I’ve been in love with the English language all my life. It’s the most versatile and powerful tool for communication ever to arise among men. Now that it’s the de facto international language, it provides that power to anyone who has the time, energy, and brain matter to learn it. (No, that’s not everyone, but it’s enough of Mankind to keep things moving.)

     Now, just as there are specific properties that make a commodity suitable for use as a money, there are specific properties that make a language suitable for communication among large numbers of persons. I could go into gruesome detail about this. Perhaps I will, some day when I’m feeling cruel. But this morning a specific characteristic of languages is much in my thoughts: the capacity for precision.

     If tongue A makes it possible to convey an idea more clearly than does tongue B, then over time A will prevail in common discourse. For clarity is possible only if precision in expression is available. That tends to privilege languages that have large vocabularies and whose constructions, both formal and idiomatic, are broadly understood. There are many fine aspects to this, including how relations and time are expressed in particular languages. The capable speaker / writer is one who appreciates those things and is careful about them.

     I’ve occasionally wielded a barbed flail about certain sins common among fiction writers. This isn’t the time for that, nor am I in the mood for it anyway. Rather, I’d like to emphasize something that a lot of writers, excessively concerned with being “creative,” have managed to miss:

Clarity is more important than creativity.
Above all else, the reader must know what’s going on.

     The very worst writers completely discard clarity in an attempt to impress with involutions and vermiculations. I’ve called that literary masturbation before this, and in retrospect, that’s exactly the right term for it. The storyteller must serve the story, not the other way around. If he serves the story, he serves the reader… and the reader will love him for it.

     Mind you, I’m not talking about deliberate ambiguity after the manner of Gene Wolfe in his early work The Fifth Head of Cerberus. That’s a choice to tell a particular kind of tale: one I wouldn’t tell, but such stories do have their aficionados. My shafts are aimed at the writer who puts his ego above the stories he tells.

     Some writers I’ve admired have slipped and fallen that way. The late Robert B. Parker, my favorite writer of detective thrillers, had a tendency to do so when Spenser, his series detective character, got into hand-to-hand combat with an antagonist. There’s a particularly painful case of that in his novel Chance. In an attempt to convey the speed and violence of desperate hand-to-hand combat, Parker discards all punctuation and several rules of grammar. We do get speed and violence, but we don’t get clarity.

     Heed me on this as on no other subject, storytellers and storytellers-to-be: Clarity comes first. No imaginative construction or special effect matters more than keeping the reader aware of what’s happening, as precisely as the English language will allow. Hew to that rule and your readers, however many they may be, will follow you to the ends of the thesaurus. Trust me on that.

Crossing Them Up

     In most eras, women’s choice of accessories and jewelry hasn’t been considered a political topic. Well, these aren’t most eras, are they? Still, when this rolled around:

     … it struck me as on the silly side. What, political appointees aren’t allowed to wear religious icons? Why not? Don’t they have the same First Amendment rights as anyone else? Are the leftists in the media making noise about this for lack of anything else to hector the Administration about?

     It does have a hint of the flavor of a thrust against Christianity and its symbols. But the attention on these two women has made me think it might be a more focused attack than the usual broadsides against the Christian faith. Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi have been important agents for the Administration’s initiatives, and therefore important targets for the Left. Being women, they’re presumedly more vulnerable than men would be. Bringing them down would hurt the Trump Administration. Attacking their religious jewelry is just the latest stroke.

     The Left and its boughten allies have been hostile to Christianity for some time. They persistently strive to accuse professed Christians of hypocrisy. The arguments hardly matter. Some of them have been so absurd as to be impossible to parody. Yet they persist, perhaps out of desperation.

     Remember John Ashcroft? Hell, remember George W. Bush! It wasn’t that long ago. They were openly Christian; never mind what you thought of their performance in office. It displeased the Left no end. Even leaving the Left’s hostility toward an alternative source of moral guidance aside, they could not bear to have respected men in high office share a belief system popular with the majority of Americans. It was a political asset the Left, whose distaste for Christianity had become open, could not overcome.

     Bondi and Leavitt look more vulnerable than Bush and Ashcroft; therefore, they’re drawing fire. It has nothing to do with a religious bias within the Administration, nor with the many underhanded accusations of “hypocrisy,” nor with the notion that Administration appointees being openly Christian somehow disenfranchises part of the American populace.

     The presence of Valerie Jarrett in Barack Obama’s inner circle made a lot of conservatives uneasy, as did Obama’s own Islamic background. But no one suggested that Jarrett was unfit to be an Administration advisor on the grounds of her faith.

     The tempest may be loud, but the import is small and easily confined to its teapot. Who was it who said when you get to some city or other, “there’s no there there” -- ? This is much the same sort of fracas.

Dealing With Them

     I’ve been encountering a fair number of graphics like the one below:

     We all know what the point is. Look at those plaintive faces! Look at the kids, so in terror of being deported, even if they don’t know what “deported” means. Such innocence! How could anyone want to kick such nice people out of the United States? What about Emma Lazarus’s poem!

     Yes, yes. It plucks the heartstrings. It makes us question ourselves. It forces a hard look at what it means to enforce the borders after-the-fact. All that and more for the price of a cheap graphic.

     We should ask ourselves all those questions. It’s ethically mandatory. When we set out to enforce a law that previous administrations allowed millions to break, we must know what we’re about: the challenges, the costs, the risks, and where to place the blame.

     An illegal alien is a lawbreaker ab initio. He gets no credit for not breaking any other laws. He gets no credit for being self-supporting and responsible, or for being a pillar of the Undocumented-American community. He should get a shred of sympathy for believing that the new administration would perpetuate the previous one’s folly. He should not be tortured or brutalized, just deported with all his kith and kin.

     That’s the law.

* * *

     One of my favorite writers, Greg Bear, gave us this powerful insight in his novel Anvil of Stars:

     “No villain comes in black, screaming obscenities. All evil has children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies.”

     The enemy – for now, at least – is human. Vulnerable, fallible, and mortal. But he’s still the enemy. He must be dealt with. Bear’s novel is a masterpiece for depicting what that would mean on the largest imaginable scale. I can’t think of another fiction that brings it home so vividly.

     The lawbreaker is a special category of enemy. Perhaps he meant no harm to anyone. When the subject is illegal immigrants, that’s probably the case more often than not. But he’s a lawbreaker. If we believe in the law, and in enforcing the law evenhandedly, he must go: hopefully, without violence.

     Granted that the perfect enforcement of the law is beyond our abilities. Some illegal aliens will never be discovered, and so will remain within our borders. That is not an argument for declining to enforce the law as best we can. Those illegals we can identify must be expelled. Not only has the public demanded it; maintaining general respect for the law requires it.

     The late Gonzalo Lira spoke of “moral hazard:” the consequence of allowing oneself (or others) exceptions from the law. The concept applies not only to statute law but to the ethical laws that make a peaceful, civilized society possible. Moral hazard is what makes such exceptions dangerous, for they speak broadly: “If we can get away with it, why not?”

     If you’ve encountered the term weaponized empathy, this is where it’s most potent. That graphic and others much like it attempt to weaponize your empathy. “They look so innocent and defenseless! Let them stay.” It’s insidiously seductive. It invokes your compassionate nature in opposition to your interests and those of the whole nation.

     We are not somehow evil for insisting that the law be enforced as written. The evil resides with those who sought to nullify the law de facto by not enforcing it. They were trying to serve their interests: their desire for permanent power. We are not required to oblige them.

     Have a nice day.

Snow Day 2026-02-23

     I rise very early, by most people’s standards. Today, it was at 4:30. When you have two huge dogs that need to “do their business,” you don’t allow yourself to turn over and hope that they can “hold it.” Maybe they can… but think of the downside. Get your ass in gear, Fran.

     A blizzard has come to town. Long Island is stopped dead by this much snow. I haven’t checked the weather sites, but just now it looks like we got 14 to 16 inches. The Island will be paralyzed for today, and possibly for tomorrow. And the snow is still falling.

     So it’s a day for indoor activities... well, unless the power goes out. Then it will be a day for trudging back and forth to the woodshed and struggling to keep a fire going. Whatever comes, I imagine we’ll cope. I did our “blizzard shopping” yesterday, after Mass, so at least there’s milk for the coffee.

     On days such as this, the C.S.O. bakes. I read, write, and towel off the dogs after their numerous backyard sojourns. I imagine the Island’s three million other residents will be doing much the same. What else is there, really?

     Big storms always cause trouble. They usually take lives. Those of us who are safe in our homes should be grateful. When the skies clear, the reports of major calamities and lives lost will begin. Pray to God they aren’t too bad. We did have a lot of warning, so maybe we were better prepared than usual.

* * *

     I’m a sentimental old man. I spend a fair chunk of my time in the past, thinking about what’s come and gone. My assessment: too much. It gets worse on snow days; I have too much time to think.

     I just went to my archives and searched for “snow day.” I found more entries than I’d expected. So to my long-time Gentle Readers, you already know what sort of crap I write on days such as this. I’ll spare you any more of it. To newer readers: just use the search box to search for “snow day.” You’ll get your fill.

     Wherever you are in the Land of the Formerly Free, may you weather this day in comfort and safety. If you’re buried in snow as we are, I hope you’re surrounded by those you love. If you’re in a part of the country that’s unaffected by this blizzard, give thanks that you’ve been spared. And say a prayer for those whose condition is less fortunate.

     Time to shovel.