Q: I’m pretty sure that, as you are using it, “sex is the only form of pleasure that involves romance” is tautological. It appears that you mean sex is set apart because it is the only end result of a courtship whose end goal is a sexually exclusive relationship. Is that right?

A: Sorry if I was unclear, but a degree of unclearness is to be expected when talking to a man whose axioms differ from one’s own so sharply. Our foundational assumptions differ.

You and I were talking about what makes the pleasure of sex and the sex-drive different from other human appetites, for example, what makes horniness different from hunger, or sexual love different from friendship.

My answer was “Romance”.

One does not have a romantic relationship with a ham sandwich: the food is an instrument for sustaining the body, and the pleasure is a side-effect. The appetite for food is self-centered. One does not wish good on the swine before he is rendered into pork.

The next question is how romance differs from friendship. One might as well ask how poetry differs from music. Romance is more intimate and, in its higher forms, less selfish. Romance is exclusive and friendship is inclusive. When three friends are together having a good time, their thoughts naturally turn to inviting a fourth mutual friend to share the joy. When a man is kissing a woman, it would be odd, to say the least, for her thoughts to turn to inviting his other paramours into the embrace: it would at least divide his devotion from a two-armed to a one-handed sort of devotion, if you take my meaning.

While people can be jealous of friends who occupy another friend’s time, we do not hear tales of Othello killing Desdemona because of a broken friendship, but because of an erotic jealousy.

The Greek have two different words for the concepts: eros and philos. Those two concepts are not interchangeable, even if, in English, we use the same word for both.

Q: I’m certain you’re wrong that sex is the only form of kindness which involves self-abnegation; one of the most powerful images in the Gospels is of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

A: Not to be picky, but I did not say sex was a form of “kindness.” It is an insult to sex to call it this, a madness. I would certainly puke before I would say such a thing. I am a romantic, as all men of reason must be.

I said sex was a form of pleasure that involves self-abnegation. Jesus did not wash his disciple’s feet as an act to give himself pleasure: he was not a foot-fetishist. Indeed, it was the displeasure of the act, the humiliation involved, which showed His divine love.

I was distinguishing the pleasure of sex from the pleasure of food and drink, which is self-centered. When sex is self-centered, it is cheap and an insult to the lady involved. Sex has the possibility of being something more, something divine.

Q: And when you say that sex is “the only form that promises so much and can be so painful and permanently harmful when that promise is broken”, you sound as if you have never had a friendship of any significant depth.

A: I am not sure what to make of this comment. Can you really not tell the difference between a married couple and a couple of comrades? I am not asking you whether you hold your friendships in higher esteem than your marriage: I am merely asking whether you note the relationships are not the same.

Q: Sex is not necessary for a couple to share responsibility for the life of a baby, unless you believe that my sister-in-law doesn’t really care about her adoptive son.

A: Non sequitur. The biological mother of the baby had a duty to raise the child which your sister has taken over from her. Nothing I said implies that the sister does not or should not perform the duties that she adopted.

Q: Sex is necessary for birth (for now), but no one-to-one relationship exists between sex and child-bearing.

A: Non sequitur. I said that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between sexual reproduction and sexual reproduction. I did not say, nor is it necessary for my argument to assume, that the relationship is one-to-one. We are not a race that reproduces each time we copulate.

Q: Sexual desire only outweighs the desire for food, clothing, oxygen when those other things are reasonably abundant–I’m sure you’ve heard of concentration camp internees who hid pictures of meals in their bedclothes. People will undertake risky behavior for sex, but that tells us just that sex is a strong desire and that humans aren’t good at judging risk.

A: Non sequitur. My argument was not that sexual desire “outweighs” the desire for other things, but that it was both a fundamental drive, and a drive of a different nature. In order to be good for human life, and good for the social order, the sex drive ought to be channeled into productive rather than destructive avenues. When the sex drive is channeled into monogamy, this is good for everyone involved: the only losers are philanderers, who would be equally as happy or unhappy in a sexual anarchy.  

Q: Much of your argumentation in this section is that people should keep promises about sex. I agree that people should keep their promises, the ones around sex as much as any other. I have seen relationships where sex trumps everything else–if the wife wants to run off for an hour to have sex with someone, that is more important than any appointment she might have with the husband; that’s bad in ways that have nothing to do with the specialness of sex.

A: I respectfully disagree. If my business partner is late for a golf game because he forgot our date, that is different both in kind and in degree than if my wife is late for breakfast because she is copulating with the milkman.

Q: The more you care for someone, the more you are willing to be bound in promise, obligation, and benefit to them. This opens one up to betrayal, and people kill and kill themselves over betrayals of all kinds.

A: At this point, I am defeated. If you cannot tell, or if, more likely, you pretend you cannot tell, the difference between the romance between man and wife versus other human relationships, what more can I say? Should I use some obscure thing to explain a thing that is perfectly obvious? Eros is not philos. A living body is not a dead one. Music is not poetry. Butter is a not bearfat.

Q: Where I differ from you is believing that there’s some sort of hierarchy of promises with heterosexual exclusivity always and only the greatest promise, and that sexual kindness can only be rightly exercised within the context of that promise.

A: No, I fear we differ in far more fundamental respects. I cannot bring myself to believe that any man has so little regard for himself, for his wife, for his family, for his self-worth, for his manliness, to dismiss the intimate relation with his true love as “sexual kindness.” Even the word makes a wholesome man cringe. Have you never been in love?

Q: (quoting me) “Why should a girl take a risk of falling in love with a man who will not commit? Why should she take the risk of assuming he will be faithful if he will not vow faithfulness? Why should she risk pregnancy?” Why should a girl expect to fall in love with a man, or commit to him, just because she wants to have toe-curling good sex?

A: Because life is love, and sex without love is abuse.

One might as well ask why life is better than death. I do not understand the question or how any honest man can ask it.

You speak as if women are eager to be used and abused. You speak as if it is merely a tyranny of interfering males which armtwists the carefree nymphs of Happy Whoreland to ask for commitment.

What really is going on is this: men are naturally cads, and woman are naturally monogamous. Men are suited by biology to walk away from a woman he has possessed, and women are not suited by biology to walk away from a man to whom she has surrendered. She certainly cannot walk away from any new life growing in her womb.

What is really going on is that women tend to seek committed relationships. Those that do not seek such relationships come to dismiss sex as unimportant, and they grow callous and unromantic and disillusioned.

Since the surrender of a woman to her beloved involves, physically and psychologically, her total self, to treat sex with her as casual is to treat her as a casual thing, which means, a thing of little esteem, no more meaningful than a sandwich. A person cannot live her life thinking of herself as temporary, or replaceable, or disposable, and have high self-esteem.

Q: Why should she want him to be bound down to a vow of faithfulness if she doesn’t want it?

A: You don’t actually know any women from the planet Earth, do you? You are asking, in effect, why a woman should want to be loved and cherished and worshipped and adored as a wife, rather than treated like a whore, a merely walking meatbag where her love-of-the-hour can deposit his excess semen.

You are asking, in effect, what makes true love different from mere mutual masturbation.

Q: Why should she risk pregnancy when completely reliable birth control is available to most women at a negligible cost?

A: Ah. Now we come to it. You don’t like babies, do you?

No, there is no completely reliable form of birth control. The best still involves a risk of pregnancy. In a stable, committed relationship, backed by a vow, a new life is a joy and a wonder. In a friendless, temporary, selfish relationship of the type you (whether you know it or not) are advocating, the new life is a meat bag to be killed off or other disposed of as quickly as possible.

Here is the core of our disagreement. You live in a fantasy world, a world of sexual fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless, where actions do not have consequences, where acts do not have a context, and women do not have emotions. In the real world, sexual reproduction and sexual reproduction are related as cause-and-effect, but also related as categories. Even a sterile woman is cheapened if her lovemaking is treated as a commodity rather than a sacrament.

The evil of your fantasy world is that it has real world consequences. Among Blacks, 7 out of 10 children are raised by a single parent; among Whites, the rate is 4 out of 10 and on the rise. Half the marriages in the US end in divorce.

Contemplate that statistic for a second. Most of the social pathologies of the age can be traced back to fatherless childrearing: juvenile delinquency, truancy, wrecked homes, wrecked schools, youth gangs, high crime, the welfare state. The chance of these fatherless babies from Sexual Liberation Land turning into productive citizens, real men who built up a community rather than eaters who tear down a community, is remarkably low. Why should she want him to be bound down to a vow of faithfulness if she doesn’t want it? Why indeed.

Will your marriage end in divorce? By your philosophy, you should not be surprised or alarmed if it does. Neither you nor your wife take it seriously, and when it gets to be a burden, your philosophy, your system of values, will tell you to abandon it.

Q: Your approach to the issue is filled with question-begging: you take as axiomatic that sex should only be in a context of committed, permanent relationships, and anything which encourages sex outside of that context is “illogical” because it violates those axioms.

A: No, rather those are conclusions. My axioms are (1) it is a fact of reality that homo sapiens are mammals whose young are weak and helpless at birth and (2) it is a fact of reality that the sex act is related to sexual reproduction (3) a rational creature’s appetites and passions should be harmonized with the facts of reality.

I hold it to be illogical to pretend that acts do not have consequences, or to pretend that sex is or should be meaningless aside from its pleasure-value, or to pretend that sexual reproduction has only an accidental rather than essential relationship to sexual reproduction. I hold it to be false-to-facts to pretend that human psychology is infinitely plastic, or that we can change our basic natures by an act of will. I hold it to be mentally retarded for a grown up not to know where babies come from, or morally retarded not to care.

Q: It’s worth pointing out that your questions, as stated, express the view that that sex is something that women give to men, with emotional risk only for the women. There’s no indication that homosexuals exist at all. If you didn’t intend those assumptions, you should look at your questions more carefully.

A: Ah. You give away more about yourself than you intend by saying these things. I think men and women are not interchangeable. Their natures are different. Women are more vulnerable. I have seen women slap man and men slap women. It is not the same. Also, men cannot get pregnant.

You are also correct that I do not regard homosexual love as anything but a life-destroying tragedy, a mockery of true love. By the same token, I do not regard incest, paedophilia, necrophilia, or bestiality as equal in worth and wholesomeness to true love. It is a passion not rightly ordered according to reason.

Q: I don’t accept your axioms–which, being axioms, you do not actually defend, but merely assert and re-assert–I am somehow “false to facts”, “illogical”, and outside “the dictates of reason”. You have yet to indicate to me any reason why I should accept your interpretation of the “facts” in preferences to my own happy twenty years of marriage in which I have made an explicit renunciation of sexual exclusivity.

A: Any reason? You cannot think of one reason, even in theory, why you should be loyal and faithful to your wife?

What will your marriage rest upon when the going gets tough?

What becomes of your marriage if one of your casual flings outside of wedlock turns into a serious romance?

What happens if you fall in love with the girl at the taco stand? What happens if your wife gets pregnant by another man, and he wants to raise his child?

Let me put all sarcasm and disagreement to one side for a moment, to ask you a question from my heart: can you think of any good reason, aside from your own selfish thoughtlessness, to be unfaithful toward your wife?

The burden of proof is not on me to justify morality; the burden is on you to find a convincing exculpation for your betrayal of a woman who should mean everything to you.

What reason is there for unchastity, aside from a mere pursuit of base pleasure?

Why is it that other men can control their desire for pleasure, and you cannot?

Q: Now, back to your original question: I’ve already said that a mother-in-law who encourages her son-in-law to break promises to her daughter is doing a poor thing, probably even an evil thing. I don’t know if it’s “nuts”, but it’s certainly a bad idea, and again I’m sorry not to have communicated that more clearly.

A: We are not talking about the breach of a contract. We are talking about adultery. Not to be too legalistic, but “Criminal conversation is adultery.” Scott v. Kiker, 59 N.C. App. 458, 461, 297 S.E.2d 142, 145 (1982). The elements of the tort are (1) actual marriage between the spouses and (2) sexual intercourse between defendant and the plaintiff’s spouse during the marriage. Johnson, 148 N.C. App. at 200-01, 557 S.E.2d at 190.

The consent of the spouse, in the eyes of the law, does not excuse adultery. It is not a crime based on a broken promise: in real life, your wife CANNOT give you permission to have sex outside of marriage. She can divorce, but she cannot legally changed the terms of the marriage oath. It is not a contract.

Q: And I also don’t think that a mother-in-law who encourages her son-in-law to have sex outside of marriage is necessarily doing something evil, as long as she is not encouraging her son-in-law to lie to her daughter, for the reasons I outlined in my earlier response.

A: You have reached a conclusion that is beyond parody.

A sane mother would not encourage her son-in-law to cheat on her daughter, even with the daughter’s full and open consent, because a mother should seek her daughter’s good.

Look, Mr. Fantasy, it is one thing to pretend that no harm comes from cheating on your wife. It is another thing to pretend that your wife likes it, or at least, does not mind. Maybe your wife actually does not: I will take you at your word. But to pretend that her mother has no grounds to object to her own daughter being treated as expendable is a vile lie.

A mother wants her daughters to be cherished as she cherishes them; she wants her daughters to be loved as she loves them. Any mother who wants less than this is falling short of her duties as a mother.

I know a mother with such a broken relationship with her daughter that the two will not even speak to each other; and yet even that mother would not wish such an evil on her daughter.

You are nuts. Or, rather, you are a sane man who has been convinced to follow a philosophy that is nuts. The problem is that ideas have consequences: one cannot approve of philandering without disapproving of chastity; and one cannot disapprove of chastity without coming to disapprove, sooner or later, of innocence; and one cannot disapprove of innocence, without, sooner or later, coming to disapprove of children, motherhood, patriotism, wholesomeness, beauty in art and logic in philosophy, and eventually all the other good and natural things in life.

I am not saying Science Fiction is a copy of religion anything like that. I am not saying persons of one particular religion or another, or none, have some special claim to understand science fiction. I am not really talking about science fiction at all. I am talking about art. Art requires a vision of something beyond the world, a mystery, an awe, in order to be inspiring.

It is the way the human mind is constructed: we understand what we see by means of what we do not understand and cannot see. A science fiction fan, for example, can look at the modern world with greater savor than his muggle friend, because he sees the present as if he were looking back at it from the future: he sees the world as if he were a Martian seeing it for the first time. He does not see the future, and does not see the Martian: these are the unseen. He sees the same cars and people we do, but to him they are ground-cars from the Days of the Highway Deaths, and the humans are Earthmen, oddly walking on their hind paws.

Secular Humanism is dying because the world it did not see, the Socialist Utopia of the Progressives, the clean world run by the Council of Scientists, the Brave New World of Free Sex and No Monogamy, has turned out to be pipe-dreams. Instead of utopia, the socialists of Germany and Russia piled up more corpses and the socialists of England and France piled up national debt. Science is simply the enemy in most of the popular political causes of the modern Progressives–everything from DDT to aerosol spray cans to nuclear power–and the sad fact is that the clean underground roman-toga-wearing world of THINGS TO COME cannot come about if we turn the clock back on technology, burn wood for fuel and ride horses for transport. The Brave New World of Free Sex never made any realistic promises; it was just a sexual fantasy, so to speak. Nothing has failed so completely and so throughly in history as the cause of socialism.

Not all Secular Humanitarians are pure quill socialists; in fact, only a very few. But without the vision, without the world they cannot see, they have no goal and no guide. Progress implies a direction, an end-state. Change without a direction is merely change for the sake of change, and therefore chaos.

Humanist art is dead and humanism is dying because they have lost their vision of what the superhuman is supposed to be. Even a comic book vision of superhumanity is better than none at all. If you cannot ask yourself “What Would Jesus Do?” at least ask yourself “What Would Doc Savage Do?” or even “What Would Frodo Do?”

Eric is Mavors (Mars), his rival. Mavors is also a son of Hera and Zeus. This is the intelligent Roman version, not the cruel mankiller, Ares of the Greek. The mainspring of his rivalry with his brother is the love triangle with Cyprian (Venus).

Benedict is Dis (Hades, Pluto). As the elder brother of Zeus, he has a claim to the throne; but he has no interest in the throne himself. Like Benedict, no one could seriously oppose him if he chose to take the throne by main force. The Olympians fear he might press the legally weak claim of The Maiden (Kore, Prosperine) to the throne, which is based on her bastard descent from Zeus. This is a parallel to Corwin’s vision in Tir na Nogth that showed Benedict supporting Dara on the throne. Prosperine is Dara.

The Cabal of Fiona, Bleys and Brand is Athena, Dionysus, and Hermes: I chose them because they seemed the closest to being “the magicians in the family.”  Consequently, the figure in the “Brand” position starts out dead with an arrow in him, because at the end of COURTS OF CHAOS, he was shot by Caine and fell into the Abyss. Dionysus backs Mulciber, and so does Athena, at the moment.

Caine is Phoebe the Huntress, the person who shot the traitor. Sorry, Caine, but I had to change your sex to get you into the proper relation. Don’t worry, it happened to Teiresias also. Phoebe has a deal with Mavors, and she hates Mulciber with a passion: the outdoorsy huntress goddess does not like the god in charge of mordorian factories and dark satanic mills.

Zeus is in the Oberon position: the dead sovereign at the end of COURTS OF CHAOS.

The Lightning Bolt is the Jewel of Judgment. It is the one instrument that can defeat Chaos, but with Zeus dead, no one is sure how to use it. The Corwin character Mulciber, can forge the Lightning bolts, but apparently cannot wield them.

The person selected after the fall of Zeus, the guy in the Random position, is Eros the Archer. In my book, I assumed Random would be the worst king ever. No offense to Random fans–I needed the assumption to propel my plot. Psyche is Vielle, the woman he marries that seems to reform his bad manners. She did not come on stage in the book, but I look forward to writing her up some day.

Vesta is Llewella, but in my background Vesta is not merely the eldest sister, the firstborn of Saturn, she is considerably older than her next kin, Dis (Hades), and knows deep secrets from the dawn of time. She lives apart, and does not take place in the politics surrounding the succession struggle.

Demeter is Flora, merely because flowers are flowers. It did not come up in my book, but Demeter was in Mavors’ faction.

There was no one analogous to Hera or Poseidon. Poseidon in my book wanted Hades and him to get together and just shake the lots in the helmet again, and whomever the sky fell to, he would rule it. That is what they did the first time with their little brother, Zeus.

Phoebus Apollo does not want a throne at all, but wants to establish a democracy, with all public matters settled by debate in the agora, and voting. I do not recall anyone like this in the Zelazny books, but the idea crops up in Diceless Amber games I’ve seen often enough.

Julian is Pan, the King of the Wood, and he backed Mavors also. Again, this was something in my notes. There may have been a passing mention of him in the scene at the board of visitors and governors. Pan is not one of the Twelve, but he is not someone that can be ignored. Except I ignored him in my book, because he never came up. I may have called him Nemenstratus or Nemaean. I forget.

The Kami of Japan — and this just never came up, it was only in my notes — were in the position of the Remba people. Amaterasu was Moire. They are a pantheon allied closely with the Olympian pantheon. I suppose if I ever write the sequel, this would logically require Psyche to be Japanese. That might be cool. Psyche was always my favorite goddess in the classical pantheon.

Gerard is Heracles. He backs Mavors.

Saturn is Dworkin, the mad creator of the universe, locked up in a cave. Except in my book, the cave is Tartarus and the gryphon is Tisiphone of the Furies.

Boggin is … well, never mind who Boggin is. One day I’ll write the sequel, and you’ll be surprised.

As for the degree of the disaster to the West brought on by the Sexual Revolution, it is my theory that human society, whether we wish it or not, carries out the logical conclusions of the axioms of our morals. One axiom of the Sexual Revolution is that sex is casual; another is that self-control is a sign of psychological repression or societal oppression; another is that the sex drive is so important in the human scale of things that no social barriers should be allowed to stand in the way of its expression; another is that all rules for human behavior are merely “taboos”, arbitrary or sinister in origin, and deserving no loyalty. Originally, perhaps, the revolutionaries meant these arguments to be used to permit no-fault divorce; but it leads to the normalization of any deviance.

You see, if you argue that homosexuality should be tolerated because the homosexuals are genetically predisposed toward the practice, this is an argument that needs not go any further. On the other hand, if you argue that homosexuality should be tolerated because all morals rules are arbitrary taboos no one need respect nor obey, this argument lends itself with equal logic to the tolerations of all other sexual misconduct.

The first argument can draw a line at genetics: no one seriously makes the claim that there is a “Solomon” gene which should permit a man to have a thousand wives and concubines, or even a “Tom Jefferson” gene which should permit a man to buy and own a cute Sally Hemmings. The second argument cannot draw a line. If the rules against sodomy are mere bias, what are the rules against incest? What about Pasiphae’s love for the bull that fathered the Minotaur on her?

This inability to draw a line, if we were all Vulcans or Houyhnhmns, would leave us in a neutral and open-minded posture. Having no basis for rational decision, a purely rational creature does not incline to one side or the other. But we are humans.

Our nature is innately inclined toward our own ruthless egotistical appetites, what we more accurately might call “fallen nature.” The main appetite of the ego is self-justification and self-love. Consequently, when humans are unable to draw a line between good and evil, tasteful and tasteless, fair and foul, our ego tells us it is braver to take the stand on the part of what is evil and foul.

It is certainly more satisfying (in an arbitrary world) to defend the evil and ulgy, and drive what is good and fair away:  take a look at any modern art museum to see the visible evidence of this process in the world of aesthetic judgments. Once philosophy declared all aesthetic judgments to be arbitrary, we did not get a random mix of fair and foul, craftsmanlike and childish, we got modern art that is uniformly foul and childish, and seeks ever to become more so. Likewise in the realm of public debates about morals.

Once philosophy declared all aesthetic judgments to be arbitrary, we did not get a random mix of wholesome and perverted. We got a society whose laws and customs incline strongly to one party. Pornography is protected by the First Amendment, but saying homosexuality is unbiblical is hate-speach.

Moral relativism is never actually relativistic: no moral relativist actually says or actually believes that traditional notions of decency are true and good in the eyes of the beholder. The traditional notions are always the oppressor, no matter who believes what. According to the standard of so-called moral relativism, the perverts are always right, absolutely, from every point of view, in every frame of reference, no matter what.

It was with these thoughts in mind, that my eye fell upon this entry in Wikipedia. I am not familiar with the author, and make no claims about the accuracy of Wikipedia. But I offer it for what it is worth as a sign of the degree of the corruption of a morally relativistic society.

March Laumer’s Oz

March Laumer was one of the first authors to continue the Oz series after the Famous Forty. His books were written with the permission of Contemporary Books, who owned Reilly & Lee, the original publisher. His canon includes everything he knew of that was set in the land of Oz, including Volkov’s Russian Oz, the MGM movie, the Disney sequel, and many of Baum’s own books that most fans do not consider canonical.

Laumer also made several controversial changes to Oz. He married off several of the major characters, often to unlikely prospects. For example, the intelligent and mature sorceress Glinda was married to Button Bright, who had been a small and dim-witted child throughout Baum’s books. He also aged Dorothy to a teenager to make her a romantic prospect for several characters, made Ozma a lesbian based on her upbringing as a boy, and made the Shaggy Man an ephebophile based on his frequent travels with young girls.^[63]

Ephebolphilia is a polite term for sexual attraction to teenagers. I was reading ROAD TO OZ to my children last night. This is the book that introduced Button Bright and Shaggy Man. These characters are purely innocent, and purely delightful. They are fun. There is nothing in an Oz book that would offend the conscience of a child: Dorothy, for example, is never cruel or petty, or even rude.

I do not think I need to trace the psychological steps whereby a culture that scorns virginity comes to scorn childhood and especially to hate childhood innocence with the hatred of Moloch. The steps are obvious. One cannot excuse guilty self-indulgence without coming inevitably to loath innocence, and then to hate it.

“You read a work of fiction and claim you were “lied to”? How is this possible?””

I submit that there are two types of fiction: fables told to entertain, and fables told to instruct or persuade. Aesop’s fables clearly have a persuasive purpose; so do parables; so do stories with an agenda or program that they, openly or covertly, attempt to persuade the reader to adopt. It would be foolish to pretend that ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand or AMBER SPYGLASS by Phillip Pullman or MEN LIKE GODS by HG Wells do not have a rhetorical purpose. They are an attempt, not merely to entertain the reader, but to change his mind.

Fiction can be used to put across a philosophy and a view of life that is fundamentally false-to-facts. When used to put across a set of false observations about life and the universe, it is a lie.

If Heinlein says, for example, that rape-victims invite rape (which he does), and I read him when I am young and naive (which I did) I believe him (which I did not, not on that point), and if I furthermore meet a real rape victim in life (which I have) his fictional fable has tempted me to be unsympathetic with her suffering. If I took seriously the point behind his fable, if he succeeds in changing my mind when he tries to change my mind, then I have become slightly less than a human being by this: I will say and do all the wrong things, and some of what I might say is horrible. Heinlein did not force me to say those things, it is true. Heinlein, in effect, has spread a libel and invited me to join him.

Fiction can say false things about the honesty and purpose of religion, of government, of the relation between the sexes, of right and wrong. A reader who is both naive and smug can be lured quite easily into a number of false conclusions.

“Did Heinlen [sic] control your brain? “Was he the a Puppet Master?”

I am not claiming Heinlein is responsible for my naivety: but I am claiming he is responsible for his words and their repercussions.

It is bad to lie to children. I was a child. He lied to me then, and in a fashion calculated to flatter my moral vanity. Ergo, he did a bad thing. I hope that is clear enough.  

Lying is wrong because it is lying, not because it is mind-control. When someone lies to you, you have a right to object. In this case, I think Heinlein was merely negligent, not deliberately lying: he was saying what he thought was the case. But what he thought was so patently stupid, that I call it thoughtless for him to have set about to persuade naive youth otherwise.

(Obviously, if lying were wrong when and only when accompanied by psychic super-hypnosis, lying would never be wrong, since there is no such thing as psychic super-hypnosis.)

 “In addition to being a (gasp!) nudist?”

I am not sure what his being a nudist has to do with this conversation. I don’t know whether Heinlein was a nudist or not: I assume he put nude playboy girls in his writings because he was writing to appeal to teenage boys. Nudity also symbolizesan Edenic innocence, and so it is a favorite way for writers to indicate the superiority of their proposed Utopia.

“Why would you assume he was preaching a doctrine?”

 
There are three reasons to support the conclusion: 1. the book admits of no other interpretation; it is overwhelmingly obvious 2. the author has expressly said that was his intent 3. his other works express the same viewpoint and propagate it.

“And did you start eating your friends as a gesture of respect as a result?”

No, but the libertarian moral-relativism he deliberately (and successfully) persuaded me to adopt, left me without an ability to say what cannibalism was wrong, or polygamy, or incest. His stated aim was to undermine monogamy and monotheism. One way to do this is to feign total innocence when confronted by total wickedness: to ask (with wide-eyed naivety) why cannibalism or incest is wrong, and, if the answer requires any value judgment, to dismiss the value judgment as arbitrary, ergo of no moral weight.

Once one has no confidence in the reasoning about what is morally obvious, those things that are morally obscure become cloudy as well. For many years, I saw nothing wrong with perversion, fornication, polygamy, open adultery, and so on. That was Heinlein’s rhetorical purpose.

Heinlein did not get me to be a cannibal, but he did persuade me to throw away the moral code I used to say cannibalism is wrong. Of course he did not give a tinker’s damn about cannibalism: it was my judgment, my sense of reason, my sense of proportion, that he wanted me to scuttle. 

I submit that the one leads to the other: a moral standard that is neutral on the question of cannibalism is perforce neutral on every lesser standard. I challenge you or anyone to prove me wrong. To prove me wrong, all you need do is give me an argument, starting from a Heinlein axiom that all men should be free to do whatsoever they will, provided it does no violence to another, to show clearly, and without any arbitrary value judgments, why cannibalism of a willing victim is wrong, or incest with a willing daughter, or any other victimless crime.

If you cannot do it, then you have been deceived, and harmed, by the same school of thought that deceived and harmed me: and it is this school of which Heinlein, at least in science fiction circles, was the foremost advocate.

There might be other writers who persuaded other men of this lie, but Heinlein was the one who persuaded me: therefore I have a right to call him a liar.

“My point was that its possible to have read the book, and even enjoyed it, without it being the Necronomicon of the Modern Age.”

If that was your point, I might suggest that you write down your point, avoiding overstatements.

I am sure that there are people who can read John Norman’s TARNSMAN OF GOR books without becoming bondage fetishists as well. That is not the basis of my objection. When Heinlein says women are to blame when they are raped, or John Norman says women actually enjoy being raped, these authors are saying something that is false, and which men their age are under a duty to know is false.

I would say that STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND was part and parcel of the Sexual Revolution, which was an unparalleled disaster for Western Civilization. The degree of its contribution might have been small, even miniscule. I had a coworker who enjoyed spreading the Blood Libel about the Jews. He was not Hitler or Torquemada or even Osama: but what he did do to make the world worse for Jews, even in a small way, was his doing. STRANGER is like him: one more smokestack, even if small, chugging pollution in to the moral atmosphere of the age. If I point at a small smokestack, and say, “It Stinks” it is no counterargument to say that the smokestack did not smother all life on Earth. No one said it did.

Sexual permissiveness almost destroyed my life; mere dumb luck saved me. Some of my friends were less lucky because they were “more lucky”, and it did destroy their lives, or the lives of their children. This includes a relative of mine who killed himself. Do you think we are discussing some abstract topic with no real-world implications? Ideas have consequences. The cheerleaders of the Sexual Revolution told him to leave his wife and small children in order to consummate a relationship with another man. The pursuit of sterile sexual gratification turned out not to be gratifying.

This includes girls once protected by the rules and expectations of society now exposed to the filthy predations of men (including, in one case, the girl’s stepfather) because the moral atmosphere of the age places all the burden for refusing sexual contact on the women, while at the same time robbing them of any moral authority to refuse.

If sex is something no more casual than a handshake, then a woman who refuses to shake hands is being rude, and the predatory male raised in the ‘Sexual Liberated” moral environment has been told no reason why he should not be offended by her standoffishness.

The same cheerleaders of the sexual revolution who tell women just to say “No” also tell men not to take “No” for an answer. Had these same boys been raised to believe that you must offer a wedding ring before asking for sexual intimacy, they would automatically assume that “No” was the answer because “Yes” would not be allowed by law or custom.

THE SHADOW by Maxwell Grant

My favorites are DEATH TOWER, GREY FIST, THE ROMANOV JEWELLS, THE SHADOW’S SHADOW, or anything with Shiwan Khan in it.

These are pulp, pure pulp. The sentences are short. The writing is quick. It moves. The writing moves the reader quickly from point to point. No time is wasted! Even descriptions are short. Character development? Hah! The Shadow does not need character development! The Shadow needs to shoot! Villains quail at the sight of his steely eyes. His hands are firm and steady on his trusty .45’s. With a sharp report of sound, those grim, twin messengers of leaden death speed from the smoking barrels! No one has seen the face of the Shadow and lived! The Shadow knows!

Not really science fiction, although one does meet the occasional murder-robot, hypnotist, or super-scientific weapon gadget. Unlike the movie version, this Shadow could not cloud men’s minds: he was a stealthy operator who used black clothing or disguises to blend into the background. Since Grant was interested in stage magic, seeing him describe how The Shadow gets around can be fascinating. For example, the writing can keep you on the edge of your seat just by having The Shadow trying to escape one section of town while the armies of gangland are gunning for him.

He is not a character like one you will meet in real life, unless you are in the Marine Corps. The Shadow is as smart and bold and fearless and tough as any Gray Lensman.

One word of Caution!: Not for the faint of heart! Old Maids of the time they were written would disapprove the violence. Nowadays, the level of violence is quite tame. But our Old Maids object to calling Men from China “Chinamen” (even though, for some reason, they do not object to calling Men from France, “Frenchmen” Go figure.) These books were written to the common-man sensibilities of the 1930’s, and the past is another country.

GALACTIC PATROL by Doc EE Smith.

These books are also pulp; Space Opera at its best. I would say that there is almost no literary quality of any kind whatsoever in these books, and thank God, because attempts to be pretentious and literary (see, for example, Jerry Cornelius by Mike Moorcock) are like the seed that falleth on stony ground, which hath no roots, and is gone in one season.

On the other hand, Space Opera lasts forever. Doc Smith’s writing is the culmination and sublimation of a gadget story, crime story, wonder tale, planetary adventure, pirate yarn, Apocalypse-squared, war story, ax, maul, mace, canopener, and lumberman’s pickaroon.

The writing style is lurid with the starkly inconceivable, utterly unutterable, astronomically ether-wrenching torrent of adjectives of such refractory power, scope, penetration, and fulsomeness, that no material body of any kind can withstand its titanic energy for even a tiniest microsecond of time, but must, at the inconceivable speeds of interialess verbiage, cease utterly to exist forthwith and in fee simple!

Very easy to turn the pages in this book. The forces of Boskone are gunning for the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned superpolicemen of the Galactic Patrol.

If you read and like this story, please write to Rare Earth Books, and tell them that the introduction by John Clute is an insult to the memory of Doc EE Smith.

FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov

For a book where nothing happens, this is a fascinating read. Asimov has a light-handed, easy, journalistic style that makes it easy to go to the next paragraph, and easy to turn the page. There is no real plot and no characterization to speak of. What there is, as there is in all good Science Fiction, is an idea. In this case, the idea is this: what if the laws of History could be deduced by science? What there is, as there is in all good Science Fiction, is a memorable setting: the Roman Empire in Space, and its downfall is vast beyond imagining. Who can forget Trantor, the world covered entirely by a city?

Only the original trilogy is worth reading.

A PRINCESS OF MARS by Eagar Rice Burroughs

Say what you will about Burroughs, he knew how to keep a reader hooked. This book is not written in a modern style—indeed, it is the last of the Victorian “Lost Race” romances, as much as it is the first of the Space Operas. But it is easy for the reader’s eye to travel down the page. The first line of the first book is a line of haunting mystery: John Carter does not know how old he is: he is, perhaps, immortal. And yet nothing is made of this: it is merely there for atmosphere. The Mars described is ridiculous, even by the scientific knowledge of the day. Characterization there is little or none: but plot! Plot he has got, quite a lot! You cannot swing a nine-legged cat on Mars without hitting another lost race of green or red or white or black or purple men, smiting a beautiful half-naked princess kidnapped by ruthless villains, or smacking an air-boat shot down by the radium guns of Green Martians crash-landing in a deserted city.

THE WORLD OF NULL-A; PLAYERS OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt.

This author is not likely to be remembered for his prose styling. His characters are the stock characters of pulp and adventure tales: Lensmen-grade supermen. Nonetheless he is my favorite author of all time. Why? He is the master of pacing, of breathless prose.

All science fiction boils down to one thing: the ability to make the reader feel he has just taken a perfectly logical step, and stepped into a land of wonder or horror. Science fiction, in its simplest essence, is that feeling of disorientation. In real life, when Einstein announced there was no Newtonian absolutes of time and space, the world felt like it stepped off the edge of an intellectual cliff. When the Manhattan Project split the atom, history felt like it stepped off the edge of a cliff.

A.E. van Vogt is simply the master of that off-the-cliff sensation. Practically every sentence requires a leap of the imagination on the part of the reader. Like a Chinese puzzle box whose puzzle changes when you move a single painted panel, one sentence in a Van Vogt story can change the whole structure of everything you thought you knew.

Some complain that his notions lack scientific plausibility. Let them complain. Science fiction is bigger than merely a literature for engineers. Science fiction is about how the human spirit adapts to changing conditions. It is about how men do not go mad or blow up their world merely because they find no Newtonian absolutes, and have the hellfire of the atom at their beck and call. Science fiction, ultimately, is about intelligence, about competence at problem-solving. There are many writers better on many levels than A.E. van Vogt. But his man is my idol: because he could imagine what ultimate intelligence might be like, infinite competence.

It is very easy to keep turning the pages in a Van Vogt novel, because whatever happens next will leave the reader astonished. This author is also the master of the plot-hook: within the first page, usually within the first line, the starter’s gun has gone off, and the plot is moving along as a blinding sprint. The reader had better keeps his legs under him, if he expects to keep up.

DINOSAUR BEACH by Keith Laumer

Laumer is a writer who is, in terms of voice and characterization, stronger than the other writers I list here.

He is only on the list of ‘Books I could Not Put Down’ because his mastery of the fast-paced staccato prose style would make it unfair to leave him off. He has none of the weaknesses I mention in the other writers here. His prose is not purple like Doc Smith’s, nor delerious like A.E. van Vogt’s, nor are his characters stiff and bloodless like Isaac Asimov’s, nor does he write undisguised propaganda like Bob Heinlein.

He is not as well known or well remembered as these other writers. I have no explanation for this: I can only assume Fame is Deaf as well as blind

His strongest point is his clean, witty, masculine, direct, muscular prose style. He has the poetic grace of a Raymond Chandler, the dry wit of a Dashiell Hammett, and the action simply gallops along.

The best fight scenes in SF appear in the books of Keith Laumer, and he also has the most battered, most severely wounded heroes in scientifictiondom, men who will never give up, cracking jokes even as they pass out.

I list DINOSAUR BEACH because it is the first, last and only time travel or time paradox story you need ever read. It sums up all the previous time travel stories, and overshadows all the time travel stories that come after.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein.

This book is hateful on almost every level. The story is about a Man from Mars who comes to Earth, and, understanding nothing of how real human beings act, proceeds to lecture us on How To Be Good. (Because he is from a superior culture to ours, doncha know.) Boy, I just love being talked down to, don’t you?

Being good consists of doing those things we earthlings call evil: killing men in jail without a trial, because you believe in reincarnation, and it is Wrong to lock up men (they should be free! Free like Elsa the Lioness!); killing television evangelists, because perhaps they are hypocrites; whoring around with a bunch of playboy bunnies, because monogamy is Wrong, but perversion is Wholesome and Good; strutting around calling yourself God is Good, because monotheism is Wrong, but being a smug self-satisfied asshole is Righteousness. Being an arrogant Rich Bastard is Good and being an ordinary working-class Joe is contemptible: Right is Wrong and Wrong is Right. You are a Chump.

And, by the way, religion is a cheap Barnum and Bailey con-game for morons. Er, even though there actually are angels who wear halos in this universe. Angels, but no God, because God is our lovely self-actualized self-seeking, yummy self. Yes! It actually is all about me! Yesss, my preciousss.

“Well, Mr. Heinlein! I am interested in your product. Tell me more! How do I become a God, so that I can be rich and copulate with three playboy bunnies not my wife?”

“Sure, John. It is easy to be God! You do not need to do any act of love or charity to awaken to your True Godliness!”

“What a bargain!”

“Nope: all you need to do to be God, is be a loudmouthed, selfish asshole!”

“Gee Whiz, Mr. Heinlein, I got that one in the bag! (and here I thought there would be a written test or something).”

“And as the only self-aware God on the planet, you are immune from ordinary rules of morality, so you too can go about killing people at random and copulating with playboy bunnies!”

“Wow! What a theologically unassailable position! Gee, thanks, Mr. Heinlein! I’ll drop my trousers right away!”

“And you get to eat human flesh!”

“Do I get to kill anyone other than television evangelists and prisoners in jail?”

“Sure! You get to murder policemen! Kill the dirty pigs! They don’t leave widows!”

Think I am exaggerating? Go back and reread the book. These themes appear in nearly every scene, but I will select merely one as an example: there is a scene where working class Joe, an electrician who works for the Rich Curmudgeon expresses an objection to eating at the same table with a cannibal.  Arrogant Rich Bastard fires him on the spot, dons his miter and surplice of Holier-Than-Thou Sanctimony and bitch-slaps the working class Joe for daring, for DARING, to have any sort of moral values that disapprove of cannibalism. Working Class Joe not only has to apologize, he has to suffer a Two Minute Sensitivity Training before he is ideologically pure enough to be admitted back into work. You see, eating human flesh is not wrong—oh no, only the chumps and bourgeoisie prigs would judge cannibalism to be a diminution of the dignity of the human species—but disapproving of eating human flesh is so culturally insensitive, so non-relativistic, so darn judgmental, that we must browbeat, scorn, and take away the livelihood of anyone who runs afoul of that commandment.

And we cannot hire anyone who disagrees with us. No; we are Ideologically Pure. The Elect shall not mingle with the Damned.

So much for the theme. The characterization is the same characters we have met again and again in every Heinlein book: crusty old curmudgeon, eager young man, bed-hopping pleasure girls, Babbitt, Tartuffe, crooked cop, crooked politician. None of them are well drawn, none of them have any growth or character arc: they are merely caricatures. The closest thing to a character arc is the Jill Boardman and Ben Caxton, who start out as middle-class prudes, and end up as orgy-digging swingers: but even this is not character-driven, it is like watching the stupid housewife on a commercial for floorwax learn how smart housewife can keep her floors Gleamkwik Clean! with Gleamkwik! It is an ad.

So much for characterization. The plot wanders and veers like a drunken sailor on shore leave: first it is a cops-and-robbers sort of thing, with the Martian being saved from the Big Bad Government; then it is a Gulliver’s Traveler sort of thing, except with Earth being the strange island being visited; then it is a satire against religion; then it is the Gospel of Mark, except that we are, for some reason, supposed to feel sorry for Mike the Martian when he get stoned to death (let us pause for a moment to savor that sheer story-telling hubris of that. How many people do you know personally who have died by stoning?), even though, in this theology, there is no atoning sacrifice, because there is no original sin.

As a plot wrap-up, even as a satire, this ending makes no sense. It is simply out of character. Mike is not only NOT suffering and dying for the sake of those who kill him, as his literary and theological archetype did, he is actually troubled by the idea that the Chumps and Working Class Joes (that is you and me, folks) might survive and reproduce.

If you recall, the last bit of dialog between Mike the Martian and Wise Old Man Jubal is when Mike is worried that Darwin’s glorious Plan for culling the under-people might be thwarted if Mike starts a Church that teaches the Chumps how to be Nietzsche-style supermen. Jubal tells him not to worry! The Chumps cannot be admitted to the Church of Me, because (ah ha!) we are too stupid! Chumps can never be Supermen! Darwin’s glorious plan for the emergence of the Superman will be complete because all the Squares and Monotheists and Stupid People will die off! The rich and powerful will inherit the earth! What an uplifting, enlightened vision that is! I picture a boot trampling a human face forever.

The only problem is that Mike’s martyrdom at the end of the book cannot be reconciled with his withering contempt for the Yahoos. A writer cannot tack the ending of the Gospel of Mark onto the tail of Gulliver’s Travels. As a work of art (not to mention a work of propaganda) it simply makes no sense.

Oh, and Mike dies while uttering adoring prayers to a worm. Gee, this guy is practically the Buddha. All life is beautiful! All that groks is God! Wow, man, that’s like sooooo deep. Heavy, man. Groovy.

So, I hated this book. I hated it with a hatred so complete, that, compared to my hate, the hatred you earthmen can muster is merely a tepid dislike. There is not even the vaguest attempt to show life from more than one angle: it is straight agit-prop for the author’s Party-line. There is no balance, no depth, no humanity. Even Howard Alan Treesong, the Demon Prince, is portrayed with more three-dimensionality and sympathy than any Heinlein bad guy here: because the bad guys are all yammerheads. Then why am I listing STRANGER on my list of books I could not put down?

Because it is witty. Because the characters (such as they are) are easy to like, and the dialog is easy to read, and the whole thing goes down smooth without anything to chew over, nothing to jar the suspension of disbelief, no distractions to bump you out of the story. The book is funny, and it strokes the ego of the readers like an owner’s hand petting a purring Persian cat.

Were it not for the wit of the dialog, the dry humor, the Swiftian satire, there would be no book. Despite all my complaints about the theme, plot, character, and moral, this book is expertly crafted on the page-by-page level. You cannot put it down.

I have more page-turning books that I could not put down, but that is enough for now.