Today at 1:00 PM Pacific Time, at THIS LINK, I’ll be one of three authors in the NovoPulp Volume III Launch Party Google Hangout.
I’ll read some pages from my SF story about the same topic that’s in my Psychological Suspense series, The Agents of the Nevermind — social engineering by Intelligence agents.
If you’re interested, you can watch and ask questions of any of us.
My psychological suspense series, The Agents of the Nevermind, to be published beginning in January (Insubordinate Books) consists of independent, stand-alone books, with the theme of resisting social engineering. In this series, the social engineers are the Agents.
Social engineering is a perfect topic to pair with psychological suspense, as that genre involves characters struggling to wade through terrible manipulation of their thoughts and emotions as they try to navigate the illusions they suffer from. While sometimes they are deluded because of naturally occurring amnesia from brain damage, for example, usually another force is deliberately immersing them in a false reality.
Social engineering is a ubiquitous practice in governments as a means of controlling the populace for an agenda. Counterintelligence is designed for that purpose. For example, if the military wants to hide advanced technology so their enemies don’t have a chance to prepare for it, or if they want to cover up covert testing on civilians or animals, they can create the belief that aliens are doing those things. Never mind that many materials used are easily identifiable as earthly, some even stamped with brand names.
If they want to create a gullible public willing to take the blame for creating their own reality rather than calling out perpetrators, whom they forgive because they were only playing the bad guy role they chose before incarnating, counterintelligence can orchestrate the New Age. British spies created its core, Theosophy, which, among other things, allowed their subversion of India in the 1700s, as they could produce enough opium to ruin China.
If they want to go to war with a country to take their resources and drugs and stop them from going off the dollar standard, they set off a fake terrorist attack inside their own borders and blame the other country, so people will support ruining them.
People are easily duped unless they are taught the rewards and methods of questioning everything, ideally from an early age. Countless people are waiting to gaslight whole populations and then train the ones who are successfully deluded into demonizing the people who catch on.
Psychological suspense can capture what it’s like for the characters to go through such traumas, and that encourages the readers to suspect people in their lives and study the kinds of tricks they use. Readers can vicariously go through the process of uncovering the truth, and helping others to escape the clutches of psychological manipulation.
I write in my blog, The Engineering of Society, about this topic. I hope that people who read the blog will also find the fiction interesting and vice versa. I like my antagonists to be worthwhile characters to scare people with. Tension and fear can have some tangible benefit in that case besides just adrenal over-stimulation for its own sake.
It makes sense that for a novel to have the widest universal appeal, it must offend the smallest number of people, not make people turn away from it because their politics or religion are different, their opinions about what scientific choices our culture are following are good, and which bad, about controversial subjects. It can’t be revolutionary, question societal norms, imply anything about government, trends, lifestyle, preferences. And somehow, a lot of books do manage to approximate that impossible “ideal” by strict avoidance of anything that could temp the authors to express individual thought.
But is it truly possible? What seems like a neutral book would only seem to a certain population, because they share world-views. If the book were translated and given to a shaman in an obscure primitive country, for example, the world view would seem very bizarre to him, and would not fit how he interpreted reality. Really, what book publishers are looking for when they require authors to avoid taking a stance on anything is that they want them to fit the status quo.
Here is a quote from Kindle Scout guidelines.
“To give your book the best chance of passing review and qualifying for all featured Amazon marketing, you should design a great cover while avoiding the use of:
– Representations of violence, including weapons, blood, or graphic gore
– Iconography, paraphernalia, or imagery that represents a distinct world view, point of view, or political stance
– Partial nudity or provocative imagery that is suggestive of sex or violence”
Authors, characters, books, and themes should have no distinct world view. No point of view. Think about that for a minute. Is that not a somewhat shocking and extreme concept? I’d be curious to hear what you think about that, not just for Kindle Scout. I have no beef with them, am just using them as an example of something much larger in the publishing industry.
Is not taking a stance, making a subtle recommendation through the action, drawing attention through the events to policies that could change, or should be more thoroughly implemented, showing how certain beliefs and practices would play out in narrative a great opportunity for authors? Isn’t that what a lot of people consider the mark of a great book, and the deepest role of an author in the context of cultural progress? Getting people to think?
True, the quote from Kindle Scout is only referring to the cover, but it has to apply also to the text itself, at least to some degree, and I feel it’s a common consideration. What does it mean in Literary Fiction to have no world view? To be a Progressive. To share the same political orientation as most others do within that niche, to be an atheist Liberal. Nothing wrong with that in the least.
But it’s just not — no world view. It just dismisses other world views as not something to consider. Maybe to be popular in that niche, the books shouldn’t have a protagonist whose atheism makes people think, or who confronts a religious person about his beliefs in a way that implies the author shares those ideas. Maybe Republicans, Greens, or Libertarians should not be protagonists. The protagonists’ personal qualities should make people assume they are Democrats, because that’s what the majority of the readers (which means other writers) are in the Literary Small Press enclave.
Vaccines should always be accepted, along with any other Big Pharma drugs, hippies should always be stereotypes, guns are bad, m’kay, anything CNN says happened happened, conspiracies don’t exist, getting drunk is great, all history text books are right, even when they contradict themselves, got it, buster?
But what about Genre? For Kindle Scout, that’s apparently just as much about fitting in and not causing a stir as the Literary books. There is really more leeway there in publishing in general, because there are more readers. If the book has an unpopular political take on the world, there are still more buyers for it with a subset of the population than any Literary book would have, no matter how it fit the dominant paradigm. But the Top 5 of course, would not put it out. That’s one wonderful thing that the self-publishing revolution in Genre books has accomplished — the allowability of personal or unsanctioned viewpoints. In other words, freedom of speech.
Kindle Scout talks about how to make the cover, and isn’t asking for professionally made ones. Where do authors go for that? Many use free photos, and even more use companies that go through pre-made images. Many professional designers also use the images offered out there rather than commissioning new ones. What are the choices?
Take a look at what’s available. Everyone is white. They all have conservative hair, other than the evil-doers. The women are thin and shorter than the men, with medium sized to small breasts and butts, unless they are sexpots, and then they have large breasts and butts. No minorities other than a few African Americans, but no Asians, no mixed, no Filipinos. Looking for an image of a Hispanic executive in stock photos? Good luck with that.
Do any women on the covers have a little pudge, dress down, wear glasses, have frizzy hair, or freckles? If they do, are they going to get the guy? Only if they are secondary characters there to add humor. Are any of people in stock photos unusually tall or short, are beautiful, exciting people in wheelchairs or with white canes? Do any of the male protagonists in the photos have hairy backs, uneven bald spots, moles, narrow shoulders and pale skin? If they do, take a guess at what kinds of roles they play and which they are excluded from. Are they ever shorter or thinner or younger than the women they’re with, unless that’s the point of the book?
There is a strong world view about who matters, who is acceptable for what roles in fiction, who we pay attention to as the protagonist and who is relegated to being in the subplot, largely because of money. The largest buyers for the stock photos have to be represented almost entirely, and advertisers target them. But my point here goes beyond the need for diversification. I’m really looking at an existential thing. “No distinct point of view.”
Seriously, what does that even mean? I would love to hear what people think. “No distinct world view.” Where would that leave Philip K. Dick? Where would that leave anyone? You, me? I mean, a robot, or a mind controlled slave, sure, they can have pretty indistinct world views. But people? How can that be, and what does that statement do to the psyche of authors who want to submit their books there, or to other publishers, most of which have similar criteria, just don’t spell it out. I’m glad Scout actually came out and said it.
We must all have the same world view that doesn’t make waves, or express individual passions and eccentricities, much less thoughts that a large minority of the dominant country have. The world view we share must not be stated directly to be up for dissection but only be understated, implied, so people don’t even realize it’s there, and accept it as reality.
This doesn’t affect only writers, but it affects how all the readers think too, and even people who don’t read fiction, who only see the book covers in the stands. This is social engineering on a macro scale, more effect than direct communication, but through the subconscious acceptance that the images we see on popular book covers represent “no world view.” And that, my friend, is a fiction.
“Remember when the death of award-winning journalist, Claire Daleen was in the news a couple years ago? She was found decapitated, with her ears cut off. And then – nothing. There was case that just got started two years ago but was thrown out of court. There were lots of deaths at that time, but only a few rumors online about how they were all related to the court case. Then, the journalists who put those pieces up died too, and all references were scrubbed from the net.
I couldn’t let it go.
I had a suspicion.”
For now, the link is Bareknuckle Poets.
The title is Place Theory, which is based on science.
Though my novel, Unside, is Science Fiction, it has some Literary elements, such as innovative structure, which I feel should still leave it accessible for genre readers. What this means is that the Plot Reversals are are so sharp, they turn in on themselves.
A Plot Reversal is a core element of plot which keeps any successful book from proceeding linearly and being boring. The protagonist’s encounter with the antagonist shows him some new insight and he reassesses and veers off in a different direction.
In Unside, these reassessments are drastic because of the nature of the illusions and deceptions the protagonist is under, as he learns things are not at all what they seem. I chose this structure partly to mimic the intensity I experience, and others like me, when we look deeply into the reality of our society. It becomes full of thrills and chills, more and more euphoric, perhaps grimly euphoric.
CounterIntelligence’s job is to fool the public, and this does not just apply to foreign countries but domestic citizens as well. For example, to protect the secrecy of military advanced technology, they created the hoax that aliens were interacting with us, to throw people off the scent in other countries, but of course, we had to believe it here too. Unside obliquely references this history at some point in the novel. As people who believed in such hoaxes try to look into them, they find layers and layers of deceit by Counter Intelligence agents who pretend to be involved. This particular hoax began in the 1940s and and is well documented.
Kenneth Arnold was a CIA disinfo agent and invented his story about a UFO for them; similarly, the Maury Island story from 1946 was is disinformation; Fred Crisman was a CIA disinformationist. The CIA promoting the lie of alien vehicles in 1952 in the mainstream press using assets like Henry Luce and Roswell was perhaps the most famous cover-story to make people look away from the reality toward the hoax that aliens had landed.
While many sitings remain mysterious and unidentified and strange things do occur, in general, UFOs have been shown to be military, based on Paperclip technology, and various countries’ Intelligence agencies fabricate hoaxes to cover up their military secrets, which only makes sense for them to do strategically. It does mess with people’s heads, though.
CounterIntelligence agents took on different roles to look like they were hiding it, were contactees, were disagreeing with other contactees over which aliens were good and which bad, etc. to make a maze for people trying to get at the truth. So, in situations like this, people who penetrate those illusions find themselves aghast which each new layer they uncover, being fooled with each layer until finally seeing past them all.
The experience of reading this novel should mimic that, as the reader realizes more deeply how the characters are being tricked. As the story progresses, it becomes more obviously Science Fiction the more the layers are revealed. That sense of realizing the deceits in our culture is tingling, scintillating, a rush, and I wanted to create that sensation in the reader with each new turn that spins the narrative around to took at itself from a completely different angle, on a deeper level.
I also chose the spiral structure to mimic the closed time-like curves, and the Lens-Thirring Effect that creates Frame Dragging. Various scientists and pseudo-scientists have proposed the energy from that — the friction created by the spinning of a body such as the Earth — can be milked as a power source, and that possibility is considered in this novel. It is not only considered in the macro sense, but also in the micro sense, in a whimsical way, and also in a sinister sense that involves the reader himself, his own experience of the spiral structure’s mind-blowing Plot Reversals being a kind of Lens-Thirring Effect in itself.
The Table of Contents reflects this spiral effect, not in its shape on the page, but numerically. As the characters begin again and encounter the realm of The Fool, it begins again, at 0. By the end, it has broken down into fractions, imaginary numbers, etc. This is the main cerebral, playful Experimental element of the novel, something to entertain my Innovative Literary Fiction audience.
In another sense, the plot is traditional, just very dramatic, as the tension arcs over the course of its 80,000 pages. I have studied and taught and edited traditional structure and know it very well. I like to venture beyond predictable formula at times, however, if there is a good reason for it, and I encourage other authors to do so too when it’s feasible and entertaining.
When I was growing up, I read Literary Fiction. I had a William Faulkner shrine in my room. I listened to, sang, and performed classical music. I wasn’t very impressed by pop culture. I liked avant-garde, innovations in plot structure that involved looking at the story from more than one perspective, metaphysical concepts and explorations outside the norm. I was thrilled in High School by the film with Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe dancing deliberately out of synch to John Cage’s industrial noise around Marcel Duchamp’s Big Glass sculpture.
As I continued, I read about Phenomenology and Postmodernism, applying them to Nouveau Roman authors like Robbe-Grillet. I loved reading every book containing Literary Criticism of another French New Novelist, Claude Simon’s method of cutting up the flow and reassembling it. The spaces between stories that freed them from the glue of linearity and being approached in only one way was inspiring to me. I got excited by metafiction like Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, complexity like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, breaks in continuity like Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.
I wanted to add my voice in a lasting way to the advancing dialogue of Literature, explore new ways to blow up plot conventions, character defaults. I wrote about forbidden topics and rebelled against traditions of characters always being young and beautiful, white and employed. I wrote a lot of realism, but it never supported the dominant paradigm that leads to wars under false pretenses, superficial commercialism, and sneaky social engineering. The very structure common to fiction relies on the over-stimulation of the adrenal glands, creating addiction, weakness, irritability, burn-out, desensitization, and the need for other stimulants. I proposed a style called Lucid Fiction, which many authors told me they enthusiastically embraced, which varies from the safety of the default.
I created the website, Everything Experimental Writing, which often over the years receives over 1000 hits a day. It always receives several thousands, even though I don’t update it often any more. I published a lot of brave authors in Exclusive Magazine. I was not in circumstances when I did the first issue that allowed me to get much sleep, so the quality of presentation is embarrassing. But the work is good, and each author was required to write about his or her reasons, methods, and goals for venturing outside the norm. I performed at the &Now Festival of New Writing in San Diego, and read with some of the top experimental fiction figures in Chicago at the Ballroom of the Chicago Art Institute. I teach experimental fiction writing with UCLA X Writing Program, Writers College, and my own academy. I’ve had my non-traditional fiction, and poetry published very widely in journals, anthologies, and books. Another one is coming out from ELJ in December, an illustrated Slipstream novella.
Formula wasn’t my thing. I had no idea why anyone would like that. But I did enjoy quite a bit of genre, and off-genre work all along, such as Weird Fiction, and novels by John Crowley and Robert Holdstock. I liked my mysteries with a touch of Paul Auster, my politics sprinkled with Philip K. Dick. I was well aware that the major SF authors like Heinlein and others putting out the alien hoax were promoting CounterIntelligence’s agenda. I had no desire to write commercial fiction.
But then, many years ago, as I prepared to go back into teaching writing at the university level, I started ruthlessly studying all the tropes, techniques and trends of all the different genres. And I eventually started writing in them more often, partly to have the experience for teaching about the process, and to show I could be a good role model for it. The more Speculative, Thriller, Mystery, and other genres I read, finding some that push against society’s rules, the more I liked them, and came to actually sort of lose my taste for Literary, and Avant-garde. I’d wanted to semi-lose my taste temporarily so I could understand the world-view of Genre folks, to write and teach it well. I didn’t realize how effective that mind-flip would be.
I still was a Literary lady, though, and I enjoy Interstitial genres, like Slipstream, Magical Realism, New Wave Fabulism, Neo-Noir, and Weird, fascinating ways to explore past the growing trend for Literary to be strict realism. I think realism in Literary fiction is great, especially as long as people are willing to really look at some of the most important issues in the world straight-on — but I don’t really find people doing that to speak of at all.
I realized the real-world topics I was most interested in tended to be outside the scope of most Literary world folks’ research. I’ve had a couple hundred stories in journals and anthologies, but the ones I am most passionate about, the more politically engaged ones, have become the only hard ones to place. As the prose quality seems similar, that pattern suggests to me that perhaps it’s the controversial subject matter that has makes it less quickly picked up. I think I’ve been sending it to the wrong genre.
I see much less engaged Literary fiction than I did in the past, and fewer magazines that publish it. I’d hoped people into innovative structures and new perspectives in fiction would also be driven to take the time to look behind mass media and alternative media propaganda. But work that is outside the two-party system and questions what the state-sanctioned “authorities” say is no longer represented in Literary fiction. I knew controversial material would be hard for the Big Five to publish, as they are supported by the Corporatocracy that promotes the illusions through the Mockingbird media. (Mockingbird Program is the official CIA control of media.)
I came to realize that the scope of Literary fiction is more personal than political, about topics on a smaller scale, and it’s also driven by the authors’ social media. Authors on social media have to keep information that doesn’t fit in with propaganda off places like Facebook if they they want to be accepted by other Literary authors, editors, publishers, students, fellowship granters, and readers. And without Facebook sharing and camaraderie, publications are rarely read. Authors tend to read stories others share partly out of shared interests and affection, but also for networking, raising status, hopes of being read themselves. They can’t take a chance on any risky ideas, no matter how fact-based and well-documented the source material. I love and respect the Innovative Literary fiction crowd, and I still read their work. And I still have some of my Literary writing coming out in journals and anthologies, as well as a novella forthcoming from ELJ. Most of that is Interstitial, neither straightforward realism, nor full-on avant-garde.
Some of my Interstitial fiction, while it has a Literary tone to some degree, is also labeled Speculative, whether it’s Horror on the Weird side, Paranormal Fantasy that deals with auras, telepathy, and egregores (like tulpas,) or SF that is often cross-genre. Those pieces are what I bring to this blog. In the past, I found getting my poetry published too easy after nearly a hundred of them in print, so I started from scratch with Literary fiction. I found that too easy, and now I’ve started over with Genre, and have been enjoying some success, including monetarily, in a field in which most people dislike Literary; my background in that style only works against me when submitting.
I now eagerly seek out Genre almost exclusively in novels, enthusiastically checking the free two-foot library a few blocks away for it all the time. I’ve stopped writing strictly Literary other than when reading submission calls I can’t help but comply with. I heartily enjoy writing many genres, not just politically oriented work, or making a social point, but for the love of it, for entertaining readers, participating in the world of Genre fiction that I’ve come to admire so very much, more and more over the years. I have written Genre fiction enough recently that I have plenty new material for two large collections of new Genre fiction, if I happen to chose to submit them. One is Neo-Noir and the other is Speculative.
I really like helping Literary folks see the value of Genre, and vice versa, and softening the leeriness between the two camps. I like helping people find the interstices and understand the definitions and histories of obscure terms like Magical Realism, which I consider to be highly engaged politically according to its true nature. I find SF, Horror/Weird, Paranormal Fantasy, Mystery, I’m bridging a lot of styles of writing, and I hope, collecting readership across a wide spectrum. I suspect when my more controversial Genre material comes out, I may possibly lose some of the Literary fans and associates, and that breaks my heart. I love and support them in spite of differences in perspective. They are my clan.
I now particularly value gaining new tribe members among Genre folks who are interested in Conspiracy Thrillers and political SF and the cross pollination of those styles. It’s a tricky place to be in, changing who I am, coming out as someone who has been an activist, sometimes putting my life, career, and degrees on the line for dangerous physical actions. I realize the facts I deal in have been sequestered from a lot of people by the clever psychological manipulation techniques as taught by Edward Bernays and others. Many people just don’t know the facts are there, hiding under pretense. And they’ve been taught not to look. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me and see my way as the only way. I just am sad that many don’t look at the facts to see if they agree or not, because of the effectiveness of social programming, and the common human trait of believing the first thing they hear from an “authority,” particularly if their emotions are triggered by masterful methods.
While I know the majority of genre readers and writers are also unaware of the machinations behind the political scenes, such as the covert reasons for wars and the ways to make people support the wars and hate the newly chosen enemies which have been set up by the CIA, I see tremendously more brave political engagement and statements about the world at large in Genre fiction than Literary. So, so much more. My own novel and some of my novellas and novelettes involve patsies, false flags, covert testings, an unsavory medical establishment, CounterIntelligence hoaxes, governmental black magic, mind control, corporate corruption, surveillance, etc.
I’ve written my lengthy narratives, including my novel Unside, on the edge of Genre and Literary, crossing territories left and right, which is an uncomfortable place to be when preparing to categorize and market. Very little of that mixture happens in fiction. I have a tendency to sabotage myself that way, by including the beauty of fresh language and believing people are ready to abandon genre limitations and predictability. The characters include homosexual males, but it’s not a “gay novel.” Characters are middle aged, comfy, or eccentric, and love happens between an older woman and younger man. The book changes apparent genres as layers of illusion are stripped off and we see the virtual reality underneath, and the conspiracy underneath that. Its table of contents takes Innovative Literary risks, as it’s conceptually spiral, to fit the subject matter. It’s based on science and questions current pseudo-science, but is not hard-edged. It follows more than one protagonist. It has the themes of Cyberpunk without the stylized youth-culture fashion. It’s Paranormal SF without having vampires, or zombies. It was to be put out by a publisher for three years but then the publisher took a turn in a different direction, and in the meantime, self-publishing has become more lucrative than traditional for most authors. Hmm…
But obviously, most people really do want those formulas. And so, moving forward, I’m training myself to like predictability, understand the appeal, and write that way. In the process, I have to become in some ways more formulaic in my thinking, my tastes, my ways of relating to other people and presenting myself. I’m trying to get and accept why people like movies with explosions and chases, obsessive knife-fights, inevitably young fabulous-looking characters, black-and-white thinking, last minute saves, adrenal-pumping fear, simplification, unrealistic plots, sensationalism, and avoidance of accurate truths that could cause repercussions if the work becomes well-known. I am not a fan of adrenalin addictive movies and books, as that’s unhealthy. But I’m embracing it anyway. I watch a lot of action movies lately on YouTube rather than avant-garde foreign films by directors like Sergei Paradjanov, who was sent to Siberia twice for making surreal movies, because only realism fit the Communist party line.
I get thrilled every time I find more books by authors who take a chance on political insights that don’t glorify the CIA, act like the police are always the good guys, or act like the FBI would never set someone up for nefarious purposes. I commend these brave authors. It’s a Neo-Noir sensibility that sees the corruption in the government all the way to the top. They often have to couch it safely in the future, with SF. I like that awareness of the Dystopianism our transhumanism is taking us to. They write in the formula enough that large numbers of people get to hear their words, even while breaking the rules of who can be the bad guy. I’m very grateful to them. The book I’m currently most looking forward to reading is Sibel Edmond’s novel, The Lone Gladio, which combines the formula with its own reversal, for the sake of truth.
I enjoy reading and writing playful, whimsical, unpredictable Genre, gleefully scary stuff, and dealing with paranormal topics that I find relevant. I’ve totally become a Genre Babe! Besides the fun stuff, I also am compelled to write controversially serious work. Now, I’m working toward material like that which I’d like to hope a lot of people would buy. I not only want to get lots of readers thinking of new possibilities of how our world might work, and to entertain the people who see through the veils of illusion, but to support myself financially even more with fiction. I become whom I must become, even if that means getting a little formulaic around the edges.
For the sake of being commercially viable and safe, much crime fiction ignores truths that are controversial, dangerous, pandering instead to a brainwashed populace. Major publishers understandably have to consider what kinds of friends and enemies in high places their book’s messages make them. But some authors do take that chance of rocking the boat, and I’d like to see more people take risks to produce authentic, culturally meaningful Thriller/Suspense/Mystery unafraid of referencing the fictionalized news in our Cover-up Culture. I, myself, like to write crime fiction that brings attention to people destroyed by, or fighting, the system brutalizes innocent people by distorting reality.
Should we ignore the real crimes against the human psyche by corrupt law professionals, the creation of patsies, COINTELPRO style undermining of the lives of activists, manipulation of citizens through disinformation in the news and CounterIntelligence-created cults? Should we turn a blind eye to the military taking over countries for a sneaky agenda, the ruthlessness of hidden interconnectedness including pest control/waste management – food/poison manufacture — evangelists/government — Theosophy/UN — and so on?
I find crime fiction that props up the corrupt paradigm to be boring, predictable, and old hat. I get excited when I read, or watch movies, that rebel against fakery. Most popular authors seem to present the police or Intelligence agents as being always the good guys, or they single out rogue members of a supposedly great agency. However, many readers are hungry for smart revelations and useful information; when narratives get them to think, and point them cautiously in the direction of true societal crime on a large scale, it’s a service instead of distracting entertainment that reinforces demeaning propaganda.
I prefer to write about crimes which are not simply personal but which are common social problems, such as the FBI creating terrorists by suggesting and funding people otherwise not inclined or capable of committing major crimes.
Substantial numbers of newscasters are paid by the CIA or bribed and backmailed to create the fiction warmongers want people to believe, such as Udo Ulfkotte bravely admits. I like fiction that doesn’t shy away from revealing the lies beneath the brainwashing of our society.
I suspect the majority of Literary readers/writers are not particularly passionate or educated about true crime topics. They would be required to question what authorities paid by CounterIntelligence present the masses for the purpose of creating divisiveness. They have other things on their minds, and that’s fine. But that’s one reason I love Genre, which has the potential to reach more readers with hard-hitting message. It’s often written by insiders, and people with extensive experience outside academia, who don’t need to avoid upsetting university superiors.
Authors who take the time to pull away layers of the deceits created by governments don’t find the same fan-base for those controversial topics in Literary Fiction as they do in Genre. There are few Literary magazines to even submit such stories to for consideration. But Political Thrillers and SF readers are more amenable to authors who take an interest in solid facts and world issues. The readers tend to be more action-based, interested in what corporations do, political intrigue, conspiracies, the direction advanced technology is taking our society, murder and mayhem, legalities, mysteries, danger. SF has the option of writing about topics that might otherwise cause the authors problems by using the future and alternate worlds as metaphors to address sensitive issues.
The real crime fiction is that created by bankers, governments, the military, and corporations, using “news” to create a false sense of reality that the majority of people are hoodwinked by. When fiction writers echo that illusion, they are — willing, or unwilling — co-conspirators in dumbing down our culture. When authors are brave enough to look beyond the naivite of the two party system, and write about what’s behind the machinations of the propaganda machine — hats off!
Some brave Thrillers:
The Deal (movie)
Lexicon by Max Barry
Dime Bomb by J. Arthur
Dark Alliance by Gary Web — movie Kill the Messenger
Some insightful SF:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Culture by Iain M. Banks
Iron Heel by Jack London
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
Mind Control busting YA:
Control Group by Patrick Jones
Candor by Pam Bachorz
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Crime Fiction
The mystery of the shining children by Cale Carlson
Morning, Come Quickly by Wanda Karriker
Though the American Psychological Association reported in 2008 that the Zero-Tolerance policies set into motion in 1994 do not contribute to making schools safer, in 2013, children began being suspended and arrested for imaginary guns. Some of the offences included pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher, playing cops and robbers with a paper gun, throwing an imaginary grenade while pretending to be a soldier, owning a pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles, writing about killing a dinosaur using a gun, threatening other kids with a toy gun of rolled-up paper, drawing a picture of a gun when the teacher said to look up at the clouds and draw what they saw, twirling a pencil in class, chewing a strawberry Pop Tart into the shape of a gun, molding a pastry into what a teacher decided looked like a gun, and talking about toy guns to classmates.
SF story, Origami Mafia Unfolds, as News from the Future, at The Subtopian.
Tantra Bensko's Genre Fiction 