Hello, Substack! I’ve read several essays, and think this platform might fit what I want to do. So, I joined. I am not yet sure how prolific a writer I’ll be on this platform. Currently, I have a limited goal: I want to sing the praises of excellent works of imaginative literature, and I want to decry the abuse done to good stories by woke authors and their publishers.
Imaginative literature captured my heart early. My mom taught me to read, and when I finished my first paragraph, she handed me a box set of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. We visited the library each week, and I read through Montgomery County’s YA section, and eventually discovered the Sci-fi/Fantasy section in the upstairs shelves. I read serious book as well, but I freely confess that I do not have highbrow tastes - I prefer Asimov and Heinlein to Austen or David Foster Wallace.
My shelves contain volumes I consider old friends, books I return to year after year. These books have opened my imagination, taught me truths about human nature, and sent me to sleep primed to dream of wonder, beauty, and goodness. That’s not say that these books are all happy; I lean towards darker fantasy. But the books that draw my eye to their spines are all good.
Flannery O’Conner’s short story title “A Good Man is Hard to Find” describes my problem: a good book has become harder to find. The problems are apparent, and systemic: as colleges and universities catechize aspiring writers in the tenets of race, gender, class, and sexual minority oppression, such writers are trained not in the elements of good storytelling, but to use the human drive for stories to forward the revolution. Good stories become casualties in this war. Publishers are complicit: it’s as if Tor, St. Martin’s Press, and Sourcebooks Fire are engaged in a contest to prove their wokeness.
If books shaped by the desire to include the transgender, the homosexual, the bisexual and so on as normative were classified as a subset of erotica, or perhaps shelved in Barnes and Nobles as “Identity-Politics-Driven-Stories,” I suspect I would have less trouble. But they are not. Instead, they dominate the newly published mainstream science-fiction and fantasy shelves.
The heart of science-fiction and fantasy, as genres, lies in the engagement of ideas. Authors place their ideas within a compelling world, and through their characters ask readers to consider what the world would look like if certain parts of reality were different. Imaginative literature is mimetic in the Aristotelian sense. Aristotle contended in The Poetics that the point of poetry and drama is to reflect truth back to the audience. In doing so, the audience sees truth more clearly. Good literature shows the reader the world and how to live in it well through the story. The best writers, people like Tolkien, Card, Sanderson, create this effect subconsciously. They do not begin with a proposition—”This book should affirm X and deny Y”—like an argumentative essay or a philosophical monograph. Instead, they start with a story. Lewis began Narnia with an image. The picture of a girl, a lamppost, and a faun popped into his head, and then he had to create the world in which that image would fit. Within that framework, Lewis proceeded to write seven novels which, first and foremost, are excellent stories. Secondly, they invite the reader to consider many truths about reality. Done in the right way, imaginative literature conveys truth through the story.
The 21st century is a bad era for truth; we have too many voices trumpeting the idiotic idea that humans can make reality fit our desires. We cannot. The refusal to obey the rules of reality in writing fiction cause authors to abuse their stories. This newsletter seeks to praise good books, mostly published a few years back, and identify bad books, mostly published more recently. The positive reviews will always be free - my goal is to enable readers to find and enjoy excellent stories. The negative reviews will be subscriber-only content. This is an experiment - does anyone want to know if books are good or bad? I’m not sure, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
So, if you love stories that involve excellent world building, strong characters, plot, and prose, or if you’re concerned about the creep of pornography into the literary genre of imaginative fiction and the ways identity politics harms otherwise good stories, subscribe!
I have an initial plan for this newsletter (but it might change). I plan to write positive reviews of the following books:
Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch
The Worthing Saga, by Orson Scott Card
Belgarath the Sorcerer, and Polgara the Sorceress, by David and Leigh Eddings
Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
The Burning White, by Brent Weeks
The Winternight Trilogy, by Katherine Arden
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher
These books feel like old friends; they are the ones I come back to time and again. I’m excited to share what I love about these stories.
I currently have two series (both trilogies) which I plan to review negatively. Claire Legrand’s Empyrium (Furyborn, Kingsbane, and Lightbringer) and Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicle (Nevernight, Godsgrave, and DarkDawn) both have promising worlds and plot, but suffer from pornographic scenes and a pathological need to include hetero, homo, and bisexuality in even amounts.
This newsletter hopes to celebrate what is good, what is noble, and what is true. At the same time, I want to note that, as Chesterton wrote in The Ballad of the White Horse that “the sky is growing darker.” As the sky grows darker, light, beauty, and truth all become more apparent. So - if you love good stories, come along for the adventure.