Review: The Devil’s Dictum by Frederick Gero Heimbach

The Devil’s Dictum by Frederick Gero Heimbach (2015)

I enjoy books that defy easy categorization, that don’t “slot in” to a genre and revisit tropes that the experienced reader has seen before. The Devil’s Dictum doesn’t do that, oh no. This is one of the most unusual, original and creative books I’ve read in a long, long time.

The Amazon description refers to “original and mind-blowing alternate history,” but I don’t know if that’s even big and expansive enough: This is a world where Hitler is the President of the United States (for a while, anyway), where the “Pilgrims” were driven away from Plymouth Rock and established Haiti as their nation, where pirates and Satanists are the “Founding Fathers.” I wouldn’t exactly call it alternative history, to me it was a fantastic, strange alternative Universe, that shouldn’t even work, but does, through the author’s intimate knowledge of the human heart and its foibles, and I suppose, sheer force of authorial will.

The Devil’s Dictum is listed under Steampunk Fiction, Steampunk Science Fiction and “Colonization Science Fiction” as its genres, but that’s way too confining and doesn’t do it full justice. I think new categories should probably been invented for this book: Comedic Dystopian Steampunk Political Satire, perhaps. Like I said, it defies easy categorization, and I loved that.

Since the above doesn’t completely highlight the sheer audacity of this work, a brief plot summary is needed: In a 1946 United States that truly is a nation of immigrants because it has no women, and thus no babies, the Special Master to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (a de facto dictator) is essentially an assassin and enforcer, The House of Representatives is locked inside of its chamber in total darkness and insanity, and the Elite of the Nation’s Capital get around by raven taxi, that is, taxis lifted into the air by squads of literal ravens.

I don’t know how many writers could conceive of any of this, much less pull it off, but Heimbach makes it work, to the extent that after a few pages my disbelief was quite suspended, thank you, and the internal logic of the strange world these people live in became–logical and believable.

I’m not going to describe in detail the events that ensue, but they all fit together nicely, in the end.

And indeed, in the end I think of this book especially as a brilliant satire, of our politicians and elites and of pretense and Will to Power. Brilliant in many ways, in its vivid descriptive language, the characters that exhibit various degrees of evil but also the feelings and urges of all human beings, and in the satisfying way it all comes out in the end.

If you had described the situation and the circumstances and the world of The Devil’s Dictum to me beforehand, I would have doubted that the author could pull such a thing off.

Yet, he did. Highly recommended.

(Addendum: Heimbach recently published a new book, Ronald Reagan’s Brilliant Bullet, which I certainly plan to read. “The setting is the Cold War and Ronald Reagan has a shiny new toy to play with: a rocket powered suit. He’ll need it to battle the terrifying monstrosity Leonid Brezhnev is building on a secret base in Siberia.” What’s not to like?)

Review: The Dream of the Iron Dragon by Robert Kroese

The Dream of the Iron Dragon (Saga of the Iron Dragon, Volume 1) by Robert Kroese

The essence of a good book, a good story, is the right mix of the familiar and the surprising. Robert Heinlein was a master of this: Boy Scouts on Ganymede, the Chamber of Commerce on the Moon, that sort of thing.

Robert Kroese also seems to be a master of it:

In the 23rd century, humanity has been hunted to the verge of extinction by an alien race. When an exploratory ship accidentally travels back in time to Viking-age Scandinavia, the human race is given a second chance.

We have interstellar travel (through wormholes), war with an alien race, time travel and…Vikings.

While the first is familiar from various books and films going back 80 years or more, and the next two going back all the way to H. G. Wells, Kroese manages to bring a fresh perspective and make his universe both logical and plausible. It turns out that while both humans and their rival race, the Cho-ta’an, can use the wormholes for interstellar travel, nobody understands exactly how they work. Like all good science fiction, after a certain point in the book the reader doesn’t think about these things any more, just enjoys the events and story, because the universe of the book is plausible and accepted in his or her mind.

The Vikings are…real. The author has obviously done a lot of work and study to get the details of his Vikings right (they’re Norwegian, by the way, and really don’t like the Danes). Viking weapons, tactics, ships, social organization and customs all seem solid, and fit together to make a holistic picture of the society the 23rd century spacers find themselves dropped into.

So the plot and setting are well done, but wait, there’s more! Something I noticed when I read Kroese’s Schrödinger’s Gat a couple of years ago was his mastery of character, the human details and short, vivid bits of dialogue that make his characters memorable and real. This is on display again in The Dream of the Iron Dragon and is a big part of why I like this book so much–the people in it. That includes the ship’s crew, the Vikings and also the Cho-ta’an, the “aliens” who appear in person extensively and who Kroese makes into believable “people,” too.

The Dream of the Iron Dragon reminds me of  Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, which those with some knowledge of classic science fiction will recognize as high praise. But Kroese’s work is not derivative in any way, instead it’s original, well-written and it satisfies.

I’m happy that it’s Part One of a series; I’ve already purchased The Dawn of the Iron Dragon and I’m certain I’ll be buying and reading The Voyage of the Iron Dragon.

Highly recommended.

(I discovered Robert Kroese through Twitter (@robkroese) and he’s got more than 20 titles out–I have a feeling I’ll be enjoying a lot more of them in the future).

Repost: Occam and Me on JFK and 9/11

(My first piece ever at that grand old group blog The Mitrailleuse, November 2014. With an intellectual background like the one below, no wonder I wrote a novel titled Sanity…)

The first reference to Occam’s Razor I ever saw, age 12, was in Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, which sent me to the encyclopedia (and yes, I’m that old), because who could read the mysterious words “Occam’s Razor” and not be dying to know what it was?

I began reading about the assassination of President  Kennedy when I was 14, my interest sparked by Josiah Thompson‘s book Six Seconds in Dallas, which I found through the proven technique of a random walk through the public library stacks, scanning spines for anything that caught my eye and grabbing it. Who knows why or how these fascinations begin, but by the time I finished Thompson’s well-written and reasonable book I was hooked, leaning toward the “second gun” theory, and on the prowl for more of the seemingly endless supply of fact (and especially, fancy) on the events of November 22, 1963.

(I’m republishing some essays that first appeared in The Mitrailleuse several years ago–this one from January, 2016. It’s funny that at that time I was working up a non-fiction book titled “Sanity.” Two years later I published the novel, Sanity. Some things work better as fiction.

I’d just gotten into Scott Adams’s work outside of Dilbert in October 2015. I liked his work very much, thought some of it was genius, but his insistence that Trump would be the President seemed preposterous. At the time…)

It’s interesting that before he became the first human to die live on the Web, Tim Leary changed his tune (and the title of one of his books) from Exo-Psychology to Info-Psychology.

Leary acknowledged that his one-time obsession with space exploration and the future of humanity off-planet was at least partly the result of his time in jail in the 1960s and 70s and the natural tendency of the mind to want to free itself by flying high above the prison grounds. For an old dude, he seems to have rapidly grasped the possibilities of the Web and some of the changes to our lives that digital world would bring. He apparently continued to consume plenty of drugs up until the end. The funny thing, to me, is that there’s no indication that in all his years of psychonauting he ever deeply explored the free, easily available and abundant resource that’s provided to us every night: The Dreamscape.

In the month or so I’ve been away from most web activity I spent two weeks on a family vacation and all my spare time studying Self-Directed Neuroplasticity, Lucid Dreaming, and Scott Adams on persuasion and hypnosis. I’m working on my own book, that was working-titled Sanity but is now Essays on Sanity because it’s not going to be that big. Since it is going to be a lot more weighty than the typical 96-page Amazon self-published special, I expect to finish with it in April.

Don’t worry, when it’s available I’ll be going around to flog it mercilessly, so you won’t miss out.

My personal strength (or shtick) is really synthesis, not deep and original thought; so here are a few connections amongst the above smattering of subjects. It appears, looking at the people around me every day and the people I read about in the papers, that most not only don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing; most of the time they aren’t really conscious, by McPhee’s definition in his lucid dreaming book. They’re not seeing that they’re seeing, hearing that they’re hearing. Most of all, they don’t know that they know. And by sleeping through their dreams and not remembering anything of them, they’re missing the best chance to be in contact with the unconscious part and get a glimpse of what’s really going on in the (90 percent?) of themselves that they’re not consciously aware of.

You Are Not Your Brain, which I began reading first, emphasizes the same principal, differently. The constant stream of “thoughts” that most of us experience, most of the time, are not you, that is, not your consciousness. You need not controlled by them, nor by the bodily sensations that they drive and that can drive you to take various, ineffective and even harmful measures to alleviate. Instead, it’s possible to refocus and redirect when we have these uncomfortable sensations, and eventually consciously rewire the brain (Self-Directed Neuroplasticity) so that we feel them less and they drive us less.

I started reading Scott Adams’ blog just a few weeks ago; people are starting to notice that he was one of the few who stated, back in August, that Donald Trump would win the general election, because Trump is a “Master Persuader.”

Scott is also a trained hypnotist of the Ericksonian school, which once again is coming at the same Big Idea, from a different angle: Are you running your brain, or are you just a herd animal full of Mind Parasites planted by Mommy, your first grade teacher Ms. Progressive, and your very expensive education at Uni? Are you a Persuader, or Persuaded? We’re all both, of course, but it’s nice to know what’s happening rather than being pulled about like a sleepwalker.

Ever driven down the highway for several minutes thinking about “stuff,” internally focused, and “woke up” to find you can’t remember the last five miles? That’s hypnosis baby, as much or more as some guy on stage in Vegas getting people to take off their clothes. No, definitely MORE.

Sanity is soundness. Sanity is more time being conscious and being more in touch with your unconscious. Sanity is being awake when you’re awake and more aware of valuable experiences when you’re asleep.

None of this, on the surface, may seem to be related to my interest in Neoreaction or to “politics” as such, but as one dives into this material, one realizes.

There’s a hell of a lot more to “becoming worthy” than lifting.

Review: [Think] Like a Mind Reader by Jonathan Pritchard

[Think] Like a Mind Reader by Jonathan Pritchard (2017, paperback only)

A while back a smart friend and I were discussing the characteristics of a good self-help or self-improvement book. There’s a limited amount of “new” information that can be transmitted by now, mostly based on “new” scientific studies, which nearly always confirm the basic premises first espoused by Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, or…Aristotle. So to be good, to be really useful, a book needs a new synthesis. By coming at, combining, mostly old, sound materials in a new way, a way that stimulates action, a book can make itself valuable.

Jonathan Pritchard has succeeded in making [Think] Like a Mind Reader a valuable book. His new approach is coming at it as a “mind reader,” a mentalist. In practice, he was able to take his skills beyond the his stage show (though he still does that) and leverage them into a consulting business and corporate training.

His new synthesis here isn’t about mind reading techniques. It’s about deepening understanding of thought, and our understanding of limits. Most of the limits there are, we place upon ourselves. As he points out in the introduction, after a childhood of strictures and “no-nos” and being taught to suppress our “badness,”  “[W]e learn there are thoughts we are not allowed to think.”

As I went through the first few sections of the book, I was nodding in agreement, but also, for an old dog like me, there was a certain familiarity–enthusiasm, interest, positive thinking, logic…but gradually, I sensed a fresh approach. There is some “mind reading” technique material, but more than anything mind reading takes focus, an intense awareness of the moment. Thinking like a mind reader takes, first, desire, a giving of oneself rather than an “extraction” of information.

This is what the author brings to the table that’s different than most. There are a lot of great self-improvement books available. I’ve studied many of them, and even taken action on some of their ideas. Anthony Robbins’s Unlimited Power was one that I picked up at the right time in my life, for the right reasons, that made a big difference. Strangely enough, the actions have produced the results.

[Think] Like a Mind Reader is a book that can make a difference. If you’re a younger person with less experience there may be a lot that’s new here, but anyone of any age may find a gem in the book that makes a difference in their life. The material is presented in a breezy, entertaining style that should hold your interest, anyway.

I first encountered Jonathan Pritchard on Twitter (the_pritchard). That platform has introduced me to many fascinating people and their books and writings. Now I’m looking at Pritchard’s book on Wing Chun Kung Fu and thinking about trying it out.

Inadvertent Hot-Tubbing With Hot Stewardesses: A Tale

As a public service in these stressful times I'd like to offer, as a palate cleanser, the most embarrassing moment of my life.

10ish years ago, my ex bf and I visited a spa in Germany. It's swimsuits in the pool but you have to be naked in the sauna. 

Btw I speak no German.  1/

— Anbara Salam (@anbara_salam) March 16, 2020

I’m all for palate cleansers, so I hereby offer the world this story.

Many years ago, I’m traveling on business and staying at a nice hotel, a cut above where I usually stay in this particular city.

After an evening workout, I shower and am toweling off when I notice a door with a sign that says “Spa.” I open it and there’s a bubbling hot tub, empty. Without much thought, I walk over, get in and relax. I’m used to my athletic club, which has separate facilities for men and women, and this is a nice hotel, right?

I’m just starting to really zen out, floating in that hypnagogic state the hot water and bubbles induce, when I hear a noise behind me, a door opening. I hadn’t really noticed that door.

Three women come in, beautiful women. In bikinis.

They settle in next to each other on the other side of the tub. I play it cool, the bubbles thankfully conceal everything, so to speak. For the first time, I notice a small sign on the wall: “Swim suits required in spa.” Seriously, had not noticed it before.

The three hotties start speaking German, I gather that they’re Lufthansa flight attendants. I know a few words of German. They’re mostly talking about guys. I close my eyes and sink down until my chin is touching the water. I’ll wait them out.

There is no alternative.

They gabble and giggle on and on. I start to get hot. I would definitely be getting out now if they weren’t there. Finally there’s some splashing. I open my eyes to a slit and see three lovely pairs of German buttocks exit the hot tub. They come around behind me and I prepare to spring up and out and into the men’s locker room as soon as possible.

The door doesn’t completely close. There are footsteps coming from behind.

Two beautiful Japanese women come into sight, yeah, I can tell Japanese from Chinese and Korean, okay? One of them, thankfully, goes to the bubbler timing dial and turns it back to 60 minutes. They get in. Unlike the Germans, they look at me and smile. I smile back, nod. I know Japanese like it hot, and like staying in the hot water for a long time…

I remember a Kung Fu episode where David Carradine survives like a week in some kind of prison hot box. I close my eyes and imagine coolness, cool, cool water, iced drinks, glaciers…the Japanese women are JAL stews, I gather. They speak to each other softly. After a long ten minutes or so, one of them says something that I gather translates into, “Look at the time, we gotta go!” I open my eyes just in time to see two lovely Japanese asses leaving the spa. When I hear the door click shut it takes me approximately .5 seconds to get back in the men’s locker room. I’m bright red, and my hands and feet really do look like prunes. There’s no one else around, and I grab a fresh towel and sit on a bench, and laugh. And laugh some more.

After this, I always read the signs.

The End.

 

 

The Women in My Books

A few readers have commented that there are sure a lot “superwomen” in my two books, Sanity and Reality. To me, this is a matter of statistics.

Imagine the best female athlete in your high school that was also big, 5’10 to 6’2 maybe. May have been a volleyball player, track and field, softball. Fast and strong. Depending on how big your school was, she may have been, let’s say, a “1 in 1,000.” She trains some martial art or another, for fun, and by 18 is good, black-belt level as a floor. She also has an IQ 145-150.

Now, she may be “high-T” for testosterone, but maybe not, too. Some women of this description that I have known were more feminine in the facial features than others, with corresponding body fat differentials. But a certain percentage are simply, beautiful women. Of course, the n-value is small. Two of the four or five in my lifetime.

(By the way, the others, the more “masculine,” often have attractive faces and bodies and personalities, as well. It’s all ranges, man).

There are three women that fit this description in my books, (although one is only 5’2). They would probably make it through, say, Army parachute school or male Marine boot camp. I don’t really think they’d make through the SEAL course or Army Ranger school. Such women do exist, and they are perhaps 1 in 100,000 or 1,000,000.

I don’t believe it too far of a stretch to think that such a woman might also have a strong sex drive and enjoy sex a great deal. Or even be a kind of sex magick goddess (the 5’2 one).

Well, okay that last is a stretch too far, but only there did we really veer into fiction. I’ll just say: Maureen Calhoun and Emma (LNU) do exist in the “real world,” embody qualities and actions that I’ve seen and heard and done. These traits were never, perhaps, combined in quite this way, but if not to create unique new beings (“characters”) and have them speak convincingly to each other, what the hell is an author good for?

 

 

A Good Dose of Reality

My novel Reality has been out on Kindle for a week, and I’ll have the print version posted by tonight. I’m happy to note how many people asked for a hard copy.

The book is a “follow-up” to Sanity–not exactly a sequel, but given the fragmented style of the whole enterprise, I’d say it fits together with the first book like one of those puzzles where various odd shaped pieces of wood combine, with some difficulty, to form a sphere.

The background of the ideas that set this whole thing off is here, from April 2018:

Anyway…as described here I read a tweet where someone asked “Who is going to be the Tom Wolfe of the Dark Enlightenment/Red Pill?” and I’ve been searching for it for awhile to give credit where credit is due, but I think I finally figured out why it couldn’t be found, because the account has been suspended. @TitusAvenged RIP:

Just promised to do this. Been preparing for it all my life, or since I found out Mommy was lying when said girls like “nice boys,” anyway. https://t.co/TH5E5Lf1mZ

— neovictorian23 (@neovictorian23) January 25, 2017

So, it took a year to write a little bitty 68,000 word novel. How did it actually get done? I had some memory tickling me, of Isaac Asimov’s Murder at the ABA, A Puzzle in Four Days and 60 Scenes. I’ve always dreamed about writing something in the style of Illuminatus!, a whole book where the time line is shattered and then scattered, over and over (I think a guy named Joyce got there first). So no, I don’t have an outline. I’m going to write 60 scenes and they’re going to be temporally shuffled, and they’re going to be DE/RP and they’re going to be entertaining as hell.

You’ll have to judge for yourself, how it all turned out.

Book News: Sanity and Reality

My new novel Reality will be released in one week, on January 15. As of today, my previous book Sanity is available in the Kindle edition for $0.99.

Reality is not exactly a “sequel” to Sanity. As those of you who read the first book know, it’s not a straightforward exposition of events, which are offered up in “non-linear time sequence,” with years of unknowns in between.

Reality fills in some things, but…there are still large gaps of years in which we don’t know what happened. However, the relationship between Cal Adler and Lisa Hart is moved forward. A bit.

Here is a taste of Reality:

5. 12 years ago, San Francisco International Airport, California, March 31 4:11 pm

I halt a good 50 yards down the terminal from the counter of the German airline that has the 7:15 flight to Copenhagen and slide left until I’m in the partial cover of the partition that marks the end of the section. I’m traveling light—three days of clean clothes, one dress shirt and tie, one pair of black leather loafers in the small carryon suitcase and a pair of hiking boots on my feet. If we have anything more formal to do we’ll just have to buy me a suit.

I like not knowing what this is about, what’s going to happen; “to retrieve something of great value.” I’m going to try and identify whoever I’m meeting before they see me, though I know that’s probably impossible. They must know who I am, what I look like, and I know nothing. Also, I’m six-five and easy to spot from a distance.

There aren’t a lot of people in my field of view, and instead of focusing on anyone or anything I let my vision blur a little and take in the whole, the gestalt of the scene, the two dark blue uniforms behind the ticket counter, the short line of people waiting with their suitcases next to their feet. In the open area behind the queue ropes, to the right, there are 4, 5, 6 shapes walking quickly, airport gait, toward me on their way to security.

There’s a figure, just one, in my ganzfeld that’s not doing airport things—standing in the far corner of the terminal, beyond the ticket counter and next to the exit doors. I let my vision sharpen again, until he comes clear, and although at this distance he looks the size of a toy soldier across a room I can see him looking straight at me.

I chuckle at that, the element of surprise lost but it was fun playing, and come out into the open, wheeling the suitcase behind me. I don’t look at him or head directly toward him, of course, but quarter away right, toward a line of seats along the back wall facing the ticket counters. They’re completely empty and I grab one in the middle, open my backpack and take out a copy of Buchan’s The Power House that I picked up for a quarter at the Palo Alto used bookstore. I figure it will be a few minutes before the contact man comes, so I forget about him and start in reading. And the first thing I read is:

I suppose that the explanation is that the world is full of clues to everything, and that if a man’s mind is sharp-set on any quest, he happens to notice and take advantage of what otherwise he would miss.

I read another page and glance up, and he’s just walking past, not looking at me, a medium height black man wearing black rimmed scholarly eyeglasses and an untucked light blue dress shirt that does a poor job of concealing his massive chest and shoulders. He’s got a gray windbreaker draped over his right arm. He sits to my left with one empty chair between and tosses the windbreaker on it, looks at his watch, and looking straight ahead at the ticket counter says, “The package is under the coat. I’m going to forget it when I get up in a minute, then come back for it. I’ll drop it in your lap and no one will be able to see it on the surveillance cameras.”

He sounds like a Brit, Oxford accent, and I’m surprised for just a second, then he turns slightly, looks me in the eye and smiles.

“I’ve known Jim White for a long time. He’s a bit of a trickster. Better button up your arsehole, young man.” I’m a little startled by this and he laughs softly at my expression.

“Go to the men’s and open the envelope in a stall. Don’t worry, it won’t self-destruct.” He laughs again, genuinely amused, gets up and moves off to the left. I pick up Buchan and get back to reading. After another page and a half, I catch a flash of blue in the corner of my eye.

“Pardon me,” he says, picks up the jacket and a thick envelope, the same color as the jacket, falls into my lap. I read for another 30 seconds, close the book on it and put it back in the pack.

Book Review: A Moon Full of Stars by Jon Mollison

A Moon Full of Stars (2017)

Good works of art always contain some combination of the expected, and the surprising. Too little of one or the other and the work becomes boring, or incoherent.

One of the charms of Jon Mollison’s novel A Moon Full of Stars is the use of some familiar post-apocalyptic science fiction tropes in the opening, followed by some unexpected twists that show the reader things were not as they seemed. When marauders raid a small, peaceful farming village, two of the young men, Rome and Warsaw, are out hunting and avoid capture–and events are set in motion that will radically change the future history of Earth, and the Moon.

This is the kind of book where much more description of the plot would certainly spoil the surprises, so I’ll leave it at that; but I especially enjoyed the mental power or “psi” aspects of the book, something that I weave into my own fiction.

The fighting/combat scenes are well-done, and the descriptions of “mental combat” are, too. As an admirer of the great E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series I felt like the author hit just the right notes here.

A Moon Full of Stars is fun, and it satisfies. It contains a few typos which detracted from my reading not at all. It takes a place of honor in the “PulpRev” movement (note: Mollison is included in this PulpRev Sampler) and I heartily recommend it to readers who like action, adventure and pleasant surprises.