The Pitch: Prepare The Spare

A while back I bummed around on YouTube and watched this clip from Mobile Suit Gundam.

And then I watched this clip from Episode 2 of The Vision of Escaflowne. (Poor Balgus.)

And then I read Ben Cheah's post on isekai, which you can find at PulpRev https://www.pulprev.com/2019/04/isekai-is-not-japanese-europe-in-video.htmlhere. I got out my notebook because I remembered that I had an idea on how to do this that hadn't been done, or done well, in some time. I wrote this down after watching those two clips and another from Final Fantasy XV.

This is the pitch.

A magical kingdom is under attack by an evil empire. The king dies. The princes are all dead save for one, the youngest, who suffered an apparent death but actually survived and is secretly hospitalized. He's stuck into a sensory deprivation tank and hooked into a VR simulation to speed up his recovery. One of the king's chief retainers has to retrieve the prince from the facility before it's found and destroyed.

The prince comes out when he's shown that the man who betrayed him, the man who was both his friend and his rival, is behind not only the attacks but personally slaughtered his family and threatens to subjugate his people to the empire's yoke. But he can't fight the man right away; he has to rally the remnants together, resolve threats to his position and authority, and then he can renew the war against the empire in order to get his revenge.

The VR sim is the key, as it's actually something of an MMORPG; the medical establishment uses it to facilitate communications across borders and language barriers. The prince and others have to use it to avoid Imperial entanglements, and the sim world is more like our everyday life than the fantastic world they actually live in. That's a realm full of intrigue to be had.

So we have Garma coming back from near-death to get Char, having to play guerilla war online and in meatspace to do it like Van had to do, and he has to be like Neo here and there. Add giant robots, laser swords, and some romance to suit and we've got something to work with.

The Business: It's Not Just The West With Useless Establishments

My colleague Cheah Kit Sun wrote a great post about the state of mainstream literature in his country of Singapore. It's up at the PulpRev blog and you should read it, assuming that you haven't already. (You should also follow him on Twitter.)

I'm pointing this out because Cheah's putting light on a situation many of us think to be confined to the West: gatekeeping in the institutions of literature working contrary to the interests of a healthy national literary culture. That Singapore's gatekeeping isn't the same as that of the New York City-London axis doesn't mean that it isn't gatekeeping or that it's done for bad ends, though I would not be surprised if the Wokeness meme disease wasn't trying to worm its way in like the zombie virus it is.

The conclusion Cheah makes holds for a lot of us with similarly useless establishments. We didn't choose the Pulp Way. It chose us. The symbolism of such a revelation coming on Good Friday, that synchronicity, shouldn't be ignored. Good luck, Godspeed, and may all your stories be worthy of succeeding the Pulps of old.

The Business: When Your Teaser Betrays You

One thing that the teaser for the final Reylo Mouse Wars film makes clear is that we who are out to Fork & Replace Mouse Wars can clearly beat them on the writing front.

Holy shit, that has "Bad Writing" all over it.

The setup with Rey backflipping atop a TIE Silencer, implied to be flown by Kylo, and the ending with a piece of the second Death Star on a planet with the implication that some remnant of Skeevy Sheev dwells within like Yet Another Sith Specter are two giant red flags that this film doesn't take storytelling to entertain an audience first and foremost; it is going to be a secondary concern.

What is the primary concern? Count on the Muh Rey Sue arc reaching its conclusion, with her somehow being retro-actively spliced into the Skywalker line and--as the only Jedi--tasked with making a new Jedi tradition to do what, again inexplicably, neither Luke nor the Prequel Jedi could accomplish. Count on Rey taming Kylo despite him being Emperor in all but name purely because of what she is and not by any effort on her part. Count on Leia, Lando, and the rest being wasted on things that ultimately don't matter. Count on the story being nihilistic and pointless, even if Rey wins and saves the day.

Count on the Star Wars Galaxy, by the end of the film, being one where only Rey matters. As she will embody the whole of the Force, since Kylo's odds on surviving to the credits are slim to none, "The Force Is Female" will indeed be the case for Mouse Wars. Expect Finn and Poe to die or otherwise get permanently sidelined by the end, along with Lando, with only Chewbacca still being up and able due to being a glorified morality pet by Mouse Wars reckoning. In short, this isn't a sincere apology; it's insincere bullshit that's still meant to push an agenda--it's still propaganda--but they're going to lay on the Mea Culpa thick between now and December to sucker people into seeing it.

All they had to do, instead, was write an honest Space Opera. You can still have a heroine lead, and she can still be an action girl, without making propaganda; we had plenty of that in the pulps. (We also had action girl villainesses then, and they weren't mouthpieces either.) But no, the ideologues running Mouse Wars can't have that so here we are- and, being incompetent, they telegraph their intentions without being aware of it. Don't expect better from the trailers to come; expect more tells warning you away. The Mouse doesn't respect you; jump away from Coruscant.

"Literary Merit" Is Bullshit

The embarrassment of tradpub Science Fiction authors, as a class, for their field is revealing when talking about what they consider "early SF". Jim Fear nails it, taken from his Twitter posts of yesterday.

Frankenstein only gets grandfathered into Scifi because it's a philosophy book dressed up as fiction and it's taken seriously by the Literati, which is what Scifi wishes it was because it thinks boring shit like The Scarlet Letter is "grown up".

Scifi Authors are just trying to graft Mary Shelley into their thing because she's taken seriously by Literary Fiction Teachers and the Scifi Authors really, *really* wish that LitFic-senpai didn't think of them like a filthy fucking tramp who dresses like a whore.

Noticing that tendency was a tell of a certain too-common male psychology pattern, I took that ball and ran with it.

That's because they're fucktard cowards who don't get that wealth = power. Either you use the wealth to buy the power, or you use your power to get the wealth; the routes vary, but the destination is the same.

These fuckers are scared to take EITHER route.

Instead they simper like the gamma faggots they are, trying to ride coattails to the destination whereupon they somehow assume both Because Vrry Smrt and get all the winning forever like some retarded Hollywood movie.

That's what all this Muh Literary Merit bullshit really is: childish simpering because they either can't or won't do what is required to succeed as writers of fiction, namely to entertain the fucking audience as best you can. That's why the pulps were, and remain, superior SF.

The fundamental lie is this: the refusal to accept Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars not only as Science Fiction, but as the seminal example of it.

The original cover to A Princess Of Mars.

Exposing this bullshit is part-and-parcel to the reclaimation of the field from the frauds that stole it nearly a century ago. It's Fear Of A Pulp Planet, and they desperately hope that it cannot be stopped. Sure, and the Death Star was invincible. We all know how that ended, don't we?

Fiction is about entertainment, first and foremost. The quality of entertainment, in an honest market, is proven by continuing sales year over year. The old pulps still sell like hotcakes and continues to influence authors around the world. SJW garbage rots on the shelves, when it gets there at all. The real Science Fiction, therefore, comes from the pulps- even later darlings like Dune have that influence and it shows. Appealing to lit-snobs is a pointless waste of time, especially since they haven't mattered for about as long as the commie faggots who destroyed the pulps--in part to get their approval, being fellow travelers--have held the field.