The Wars to Come

OK, I’m going to do something I never do.

I’m going to publish an excerpt from a work in progress, i.e., the novel I am working on currently, or that I have been trying to currently work on for years but have been repeatedly distracted from working on, for years, by (a) the rollout of a new form of totalitarianism under the guise of an “apocalyptic pandemic,” (b) getting prosecuted by the German authorities for criticizing the new totalitarianism, and (c) explaining the most insidious mindfuck in the history of insidious mindfucks to the victims of the insidious mindfuck while they are being actively insidiously mindfucked, which, you can probably imagine how that has been going.

It has not been going particularly well.

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m going to do two things I never do.

The first thing is publishing that excerpt from my novel-in-progress, which I will do forthwith. The second thing is admitting defeat.

Yes, that’s right, admitting defeat. There are times when it’s best to admit defeat in order to live to fight another day. A good time to do that is when you find yourself fighting alone, or among a negligible minority, against an overwhelmingly superior force, or two overwhelmingly superior forces, or one overwhelmingly superior force masquerading as two overwhelmingly superior forces.

Which is what is going on at the moment.

Also, martial strategy aside, I don’t have the strength to do this again. I’m still worn out from trying to get through to the Covidian Cult for the last five years. I’m not in any shape to repeat that experience with the Musk Cult for the next four years.

And that is clearly where things are headed.

From 2020 to 2024, I was defamed, demonized, harassed, censored, and eventually prosecuted for challenging the official “Covid” narrative. For the past few weeks, since Trump took office, it has been déjà vu all over again. Friends and colleagues I thought I knew going full-blown totalitarian online. The swarm of angry cultists in my replies. The torrent of hate mail. The physical threats. The robotic repetition of propaganda and lies. The gaslighting. And so on. The only significant difference has been the anti-Semitism and bigotry. Apart from that, it has been the same mindless authoritarian fervor.

I don’t have the physical or emotional wherewithal to spend the next four years as I spent the last four. I am not going to stop publishing my columns or anything. I am going to keep documenting the evolution of our current global-capitalist world into the technocratic totalitarian dystopia I tried to capture in Zone 23, and am trying to capture in my second novel. But I am going to focus more on my fiction and less on trying to get through to people … to get them to recognize where we are headed.

It didn’t work with the Covidian cultists, and it’s not going to work with the MAGA and Musk cultists. It was arrogant and stupid of me to imagine that it could.

So, my apologies, both to my liberal former friends who went Covidian cultist and my conservative and libertarian former friends who have now gone MAGA/Musk cultist.

I wish you all good fortune in the wars to come.

In the meantime, for any of you who are into the dystopian fiction thing, I wanted to publish this excerpt from Fishman’s War, which isn’t a prequel to Zone 23, but which takes place almost three-hundred years earlier in the same dystopian fictional world.

Oh, and, speaking of Zone 23, a new polished-up edition will be out this Summer. It’s being published by Arcade Publishing and is available for pre-order now. They would kill me if I didn’t post a picture of the cover.

OK, here’s that excerpt. I chose this one because I have been reflecting on the state of the publishing industry, and the broader culture industry, and the censorship and self-censorship that does or doesn’t take place therein, and planning to publish a column on that subject soon, and I remembered this passage from my draft, which I thought any aspiring writers out there might appreciate, regardless of which cult they are or aren’t members of.

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An excerpt from Fishman’s War

Ezra Greystoke Orton, III, for as long as Xavier Fishman had known him, had been driven by an obsessive desire to someday win the approval of the literary establishment that he utterly despised. The fact that such a “literary establishment” did not, as of the time of our story, exist, did not in any way weaken the intensity of Ezra’s utter hatred of it, or that of his all-consuming desire to someday win the approval of one or more of its members, who were ruining his life. Ezra’s nearly all-consuming desire to earn the approval of these total charlatans he had long ago lost any shred of respect for but who wielded the power to deprive him of the recognition and associated earnings that he felt he pretty obviously deserved was complicated to some degree by his crippling, almost inexpressible fear that he was completely devoid of literary talent, which fear he confessed to Fishman, repeatedly, whenever he was high on 3H-C, or MEO-DMT-37, or synthetic muscimol, or just drinking heavily.

His major problem, he explained to Fishman, was subtlety. As in he could not do it. He failed to do it. He got what it was. He recognized subtlety when he saw it, and he admired it, and coveted it, but he could not produce it. Erza’s prose pounded across the page like a herd of panicked alliterative pachyderms. He appeared to have absolutely no control over where his ponderous and gratuitously florid torrent of stream-of-consciousness nonsense was going or why it was ponderously going there. Superfluous adverbials suffocated whatever the hell it was he was trying to say. On top of which, his characters sucked. As in they were more or less devoid of subtlety and lacking anything remotely resembling an actual human characteristic that anyone could identify or sympathize with. Ezra confessed all this to Fishman, over and over, when he was stoned on muscimol, or MEO-DMT-37, or TMPEA-22, or if he had had more than two alcoholic drinks. Ezra had no tolerance for drugs and alcohol, both of which he indulged in constantly, unless he was officially “on the wagon again,” which, fortunately, he had been for the last two weeks.

Fishman and Ezra went way back, as far back as Fishman went back with anyone. They had met in Conway University’s Master of Fine Arts in Literary and Belletristic Content Online Program, which had destroyed Fishman’s will and ability to write. Conway was not an elite University. All of its courses were conducted online. Tuition was paid in advance with a credit card. Most of the professors were AI sims, or the authors of books that had won awards from prestigious literary and belletristic foundations that Fishman and Ezra had never heard of, most of whose websites were no longer functional. Fishman and Ezra found out that they were neighbors, met for drinks at the Mau Mau Milkbar, back when Lola was still tending bar, and had been more or less inseparable ever since. Theirs was the perfect writers’ friendship. Fishman couldn’t finish anything and everything Ezra wrote was horrible. Ezra’s seething envy of Fishman’s obviously superior literary talent was soothed by the knowledge that Fishman would never finish anything that could ever be published. Fishman’s envy of Ezra’s prolificacy and ever-expanding bibliography was soothed by the knowledge that Ezra would never produce anything of any literary worth. This balance of envy and contempt for each other, along with their mutual deep-seated feelings of artistic inadequacy and personal failure, united them in their seething envy and hatred of authors like Adé McQueen, who had just won the 2323 Global Literary and Belletristic Content Award for their debut novella, Remembering Things Forgotten, a pretentiously literary fictional account of the coming of age of a multiracial, gender-fluid, dyslexic person forced to face and overcome their own internalized identity-devaluing pattern of self-microaggressive behavior. Fishman and Ezra had read the unreadable excerpt that came before the paywall and had correctly guessed the MFA program that McQueen had recently graduated from. They did this in the privacy of Fishman’s apartment, late at night, with their Viewers switched off, while Lola sat on the floor in the bathroom surfing the conspiratorial subweb, or whatever she was actually doing in there. She had helped them set up “untraceable” aliases which they conspired to use but never used to post snide comments about Adé McQueen on little literary platforms that rumor had it “industry people” occasionally visited. They never worked up the courage to go through with it. Instead, they switched their Viewers off, because you never knew who might be listening, and got shit-faced, and tore Adé McQueen a new one, whispering, so that Mrs. DeCarlo couldn’t hear them. Ridiculing an author like Adé McQueen, or Daryl Franz, or Sophie Wang-Atchison, or any of the other rising literary stars whose parents had spent GD 700,000 to put them through one of the handful of prestigious MFA programs that the handful of agents that the prestigious imprints of the three major global publishing conglomerates did business with visited (i.e., the agents visited the MFA programs) to scout for emerging literary talent was tantamount to professional suicide. Your aspiring artist life would be over. Yes, you could still get published by one of the millions of boutique literary journals that no one except the writers they published ever actually read or even knew existed,¹ but you could forget about ever getting signed by an agent and getting your debut novel published by one of the imprints of the “big three houses,” which is what Fishman and Ezra and every other aspiring author were desperately aspiring to. The odds of that ever happening (i.e., getting signed and published by a “big three” house) were worse than astronomical, of course. If you hadn’t graduated from one of those prestigious MFA programs, which Fishman and Ezra hadn’t, and thus hadn’t received and absorbed the tutelage of whichever former rising literary star ruled over the program with an iron fist and designated one or two rising stars per graduating class to recommend to those agents, your only hope of ever breaking through into “the literary mainstream” was meeting, and befriending, and lauding the work of, and, basically, shamelessly sucking up to one of those MFA graduates, who might one day recommend you to their agent. Once that happened, which it never did, you would submit a ten-page sample of your work to one of the agent’s sensitivity readers, who would scrutinize it for any evidence of potentially offensive or insensitive content, or unconscious or internalized bias, and patterns of harmful representation, or tendency or inclination toward same. If you somehow passed the sensitivity screening, you would receive a Text from the agent's assistant thanking you for submitting your work, which had been read, and rejected, but which the agent wished you luck in securing representation for elsewhere.

1 i.e. the type of journals that published Ezra’s writing.

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