"Empire" and the second Civil War. AWESOME!!111!

In case you guys have missed it, a new novel called "Empire" details the coming civil war between America-hating liberals and Patriotic conservatives.
Sadly No has details and many excerpts.

http://sadlyno.com/archives/4459.html

Here's a taste.......
Terrorists are about bomb the White House with rocket launchers and A PROTRACTOR!!!!!!!


"They drove among the tourist cars until they came to Independence Avenue itself, which was completely blocked going toward the bridge, and had no traffic coming the other way.

They stopped the car and ran for it. Not that far along the bridge — but too far, if the terrorists had already made it out of the water long enough to have traffic blocked.

When Reuben and Coleman got onto the bridge, they saw two rocket launchers being set up simultaneously, while a guy with a protractor — a simple junior-high protractor! — was standing at a particular fence post and now was indicating where the launchers should be aiming."


This is a great example of right-wing paranoia and utter suckitude. It's going to RAWK!!!!

are going to fall for this one hook, line and STINKER.

I guess if you're into unconscious humor, this might be the book for you. I just think it's sad that there are people stupid enough to write this shit and stupider people who will believe it.

wow, that's really bad.

any Ed Wood Jr. production in its campy badness!

If there has to be a civil war, the peacemakers will be the first shot, not the aggressors.

There was a book a while back in which the story had a right winger kill another and made it look like a liberal did it to start a political civil war. A Charles Manson style set up.

I dream of creating a computer program that detects and tags bad writing by matching sentence structures and word combinations with relentlessly bad texts.

So far, the only book bad enough to use that I've found is Greg Kihn's novel. (No, I'm not kidding, he wrote a novel.) But this one looks like an excellent candidate...

on edit: Make that FOUR NOVELS AND A BOOK OF STORIES! By the man that brought us "Our love's in jeopardy, Baby, oooooooooooooh"

http://www.gregkihn.com/books/

it gets better (worse?) Much projection and paranoia going on in this book. This is the third and so-far highest profile form of this right-wing fantasy/nightmare that I've encountered. I actually worked on a television pilot (failed) called "House Divided" that dealt with red staters starting a civil war over taxes being raised to pay off our war debt. It was much worse than you could imagine.

I had just heard about it last week over on the Jericho Message boards at the "Television Without Pity" website. We were anticipating lots of good snark opportunities.

No one could identify themselves politically, so there were alot of veiled references to "those people in New York who run the banks" and "those people who don't pay taxes but get supported by those of us who do." The final straw is when the ATF shoots the main character's kid and leaves his corpse on the front lawn.(?!!??!!)
So Kansas leaves the union.

on any of L Ron Hubard's "novels".

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

"I bet they're already 'advising' Americans that this is where our military 'aggression' inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."

"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."

"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."

"You're forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.


I know what I want for Christmas!

proper sentence construction and punctuation!!1!!! I "LOVE" it!

I see that an editor removed all the exclamation marks, though. Darn. Bet there were thousands.

Seriously, this is a case of "Put the keyboard down and slowly back away."

I suppose the writer should be commended for the effort but, my God the end result is dreadful. And what's worse is he probably has no idea.

I'd like to do a nature-type experiment - put this book down on the coffee table in the lounge in the Department of English at some University, hide behind a potted plant and see what happens.

But by the time he said that, Reuben was already firing at the lefthand launcher. Which their bullets knocked over.

Which isn’t a proper sentence.

:spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray::spray:

Oh my. How can you even satirize it? It has its own satire ready-made and embedded.

Stunning. I stopped reading his books years ago, but I never expected this.

Some of his politics showed through, but apparently since then he's become a rightwing chest-beater.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

I was an adolescent when I read EG. :-)

I continued to read him with steadily-decreasing interest and then just couldn't get past the first couple of the Alvin Maker stories. Blech.

One thing I recall from EG, however, that still strikes me as intriguing, was the way Ender and Valentine used posts on something like the Internets (IIRC)to become very influential.

In another posting on this thread, I had given that author a sort of 'passing grade'. But he gets an EFF from me now.

pnorman

.

Now, he's gone the Terry Goodkind route: kill all the left-leaning folks in his books in the name of "righteousness" and watch
his lapdog audience eat it up.

He's written some good books and one or two great ones -but this is just sad.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

Read here how the current situation in Iraq is ALL the fault of the Democrats!

www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-11-26-1.html

From your link:

"So what, exactly, is our new Congress composed of? Certainly it will be the Democratic Party that organizes both houses this winter, and makes committee assignments, and sets out to harass the White House as much as possible, to punish George W. Bush for being a better President than America had any right to have at this crucial time in our history."

This dude falls into the post 9/11, pants wetting, thumb sucking, fetal position, "Tell me what to do 'O Lord and Master Bush" catagory doesn't he?

Any time someone says that Bush is a better President than America deserved on 9/11, they get kicked in the shins thirteen times.

I've heard that phrase often enough to want to start kicking people like mad.

Or so I thought, 15 years ago or so.

If you want a really big dose of "conservatives vs evil liberals", try Tom Kratman's "A State of Disobedience", which is also about a second US Civil War. This one is between the US and Texas. The first couple of pages lets us know that the villainous liberal President of the United States is a murderous man-hating lesbian who appointed her lover to head the Joint Chiefs. You can find the first few chapters of the book for free at the Baen Books website. That's not a direct link, btw. I refuse to go out of my way to give that man traffic. Though Baen is fantastic for putting up a great bunch of SF and fantasy novels on line, unabridged, for free.

Why John Ringo has anything to do with that man I don't know. Ringo -may- be conservative, but the enemies in his books aren't necessarily -evil-, per se, and act the way they do for a reason. Whereas in Kratman's world if you aren't on his side you are obviously EVIL, or stupid(or both), no explanation or motive needed. When I read a book they had collaborated on, I was willing to bet who had added in what parts. Intelligent aliens that are biologically compelled to invade a planet and slaughter every living thing - Ringo. Intelligent alien that goes out of its way to make a cape out of human skin? Kratman.

There were just too many (stupid) references to current political events to ignore. Like in "The Emerald Sea," where he tried to rationalize Rummy's "known unknown" comments, or had the guy teaching military history and referring to the Second Iraq War as a stroke of strategic brilliance. Some of the libertarian economic values sported by all the Heroes I could tolerate -- while I don't agree with them all, at least they were coherent, logical positions.

"Texas on the Rocks" and "The Ayes of Texas," both of which I read when I was in middle school, and both of which I thought were dumb even then.

A customer review from Amazon:

Very characteristic of a certain US right wing worldview (what's referred to on the AltHist forums as a "RWD" or Republican Wet Dream). The lone Republical/Conservative/Texan must save the world from the liberal folly.......

The author clearly lacks any knowledge of (and has failed to carry out basic research on) military tactics/strategy/logistics, basic physics, naval architecture... well pretty much every other topic. Being written in the eighties is no excuse; even then the concepts he uses were known to be rubbish.

As for his worldview it's equally bad; decadent Europe (and Africa/Asia/ME) has been conquered by the nasty Russians and it's up to the Texans to save the day. He also shows a utter lack of understanding of economic, sociology, physics et cetera.

It's a pity trees died for this nonsense.

:spray:

Soft Bigotry of NO Expectations... :rofl:

maybe this will start a literary Renaissance fro RW eliminationist porn

:rofl:

Reviewer: Michael C. Sutcliffe (Lindenhurst, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Hilarious, but unintentionally so.

Apparently Orson has been spending his time getting high and watching GI JOE.

That is all this book is with the Eeeevil Libruls getting to playing the part of COBRA.

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Orson-Scott-Card/dp/0765316110/sr=8-1/qid=1165012316/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-5321458-2859341?ie=UTF8&s=books

section: "Republican Revenge Fantasy"
http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/TheBearAndTheDragon
pants-wetting neo-Nazis, festering beneath the surface of our Republic

They are both hilarious - though only the latter tries to be. And there's even a lone Republican trying to bash Democrats, and getting eaten for lunch!

That writing is so bad, on all levels, I'm astounded. I have read one Orson Scott Card book, a long time ago, and though it wasn't good enough to make me pick up another, it can't have been anywhere near as bad as this. He's written loads of novels, but it's not just the plot that's laughable in this, the basic English is - for instance:

"They stopped the car and ran for it. Not that far along the bridge — but too far, if the terrorists had already made it out of the water long enough to have traffic blocked."

I couldn't work out why they didn't run very far along the bridge, if they were trying to get somewhere; and how could that then be 'too far'? The terrorists were on the side of the bridge they were running from, and they'd gone past them, perhaps? Then how did they realise they'd gone the wrong way? After reading the paragraph for the 4th time, I realised he meant "They didn't have to run that far along the bridge - but too far ...". He's shortened the sentence, perhaps as if it's an internal thought - "not that far to go, puff, puff". But there's no punctuation to indicate this, and what he wrote was very ambiguous. He's using the third person to describe the action, so there's no reason to imagine an internal dialogue for one of them.

Then there's this bit:



(They're all relatives of 'Guy' from Galaxy Quest, I guess :D). When I first read that, I couldn't work out why "guy with sign" was firing at his buddies. Then I realised that while the first 'them' refers to the 'launcher guys' from the previous sentence, the next 'them' refers to our heroes Reuben and Coleman, who haven't been mentioned for 7 sentences - and those sentences offer as alternatives for 'them': drivers, military vehicles, 'these guys' (of course), and 'Jews and Jewish sympathizers'. "Oh, yes — and schoolchildren" (that's actually a sentence from the passage). It's simply appalling writing. How can an experienced professional author produce it? It should have been drummed out of him in junior high - along with the idea that protractors measure microns.

I hope the plot will give some idea later of why a terrorist is just pinning down our heroes, instead of killing them. But I doubt it - as the comments point out, Card has a man in a wetsuit holding up a sign that stops traffic in Washington, to allow his buddies to set up a couple of rocket launchers, but it seems no-one has seen this as unusual, apart from our heroes. He doesn't tell us what the magic words on the sign are to induce such apathy. Perhaps he's afraid that they will send the reader into a coma, just as they appear to with the drivers.

http://sadlyno.com/archives/4459.html

and also includes links to very interesting pieces about Card:

Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/193926/689

and, via that site, a meticulous and brilliant analysis of his only really great book, Ender's Game, that becomes even more fascinating in light of what SN! calls his most recent "opus retardus": http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm, "Creating the Innocent Killer:Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality." A long read, but for anyone who read EG, well worth it.

That way everyone would be confused for an instant, and then get reassured and go on about their business. However, the heroes, being more attentive than the rest of the populace, would realize that he was indeed wearing a wetsuit, and know that the sign was a lie to Confuse Real Americans In A Liberal Way. They then knew the threat and stopped the Evil Liberals.

Makes about as much sense as the other crap I've seen quoted from this book...

talented enough to lick Harlan Ellison's nutbag, let alone write a book. I bought a used copy of his adaption of "The Abyss" but have never read it. It's busy keeping my table level.

sober

I enjoyed it,and most recently got the Audible.com spoken word version. Interested by this posting, I Googled and got this: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72093-0.html

He comes across as well-intentioned, but politically naive. I have little interest in gaming, and I don't think I'll even bother with that one. But I won't hold him responsible for what those wackos read into it.

Here's another related one for those DUers here with a taste for gaming --- SHATTERED UNION: http://www.2kgames.com/shatteredunion/ (Be sure to watch the ShockWave prview)

pnorman

are really fucking stupid. Making the claim that the Jedi have no respect for civilian authority really shows that he has no understanding of the Star Wars universe, and the time that led up to the fall of the Republic (I guess he doesn't care about the fact that Palpatine started the Clone Wars, and that his decleration of Empire was a much greater betrayal of civilian authority than anything the Jedi could ever have done).