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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Bunch O Stuffcast is up!
The podcast episode of this Heinlein Marathon review is up! Check it out!
Heinlein Marathon: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Introduction and Initial Thoughts
This is it, probably the most divisive of Heinein’s entire catalog and it took me nine goddamned months to read it requiring three restarts and a commitment to completing this book that bordered on madness. I did not enjoy this book. In fact, as for Heinlein goes I did not enjoy any of this book at all. Part of that, I think, is that all of his big ideas in TMIAHM I’ve read in other books. Maybe I would be more enthusiastic for this book had I read them in publication order or something. I don’t know. We’ll get into the specifics later in this review. But, for a quick intro, this is Heinlein’s most political book in which he writes through the emancipation of the Moon from Earth’s control with all of the Libertarian rosy glasses of a world with no rules. Except— There are rules, it’s a government and governments need rules, at least some. But, like Ayn Rand (who Heinlein was very complimentary of) the delusions of starting a state based on the principle of rational self interest and the smartest people have the most power because they wouldn’t be the smartest people if they didn’t have the most power. See? Easy-peasy. Anyway, this is more a conversation for the Heinlein’s Government Stuff heading below, and that is where it will be. This one has all the hallmarks of Heinlein, technically inclined iconoclastic main character, old wise character, pretty girl who is also smart, insanely complicated polyamorous family arrangements, distrust of established government types including representative democracy, way too many goddamned characters. All of this stuff is covered one way or the other in a shi…urprisingly large number of the stories I’ve already reviewed here at Crap. I understand why Heinlein has said that if you grok The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Stranger in a Strange Land then you grok him. I got this story, but I didn’t like it. One of the big take-aways for me from this story is realizing that Heinlein doesn’t really write villians. All of the antagonists in his stories are either systems themselves or people who represent those systems. There is no counter to the plot that is guided by the machinations of a real antagonist.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s update on other stuff before getting into the meat of this lunar Libertarian fever dream...
The second issue of BAM! Is out and available! go to www.bam-mag.com for the links to buy your copy. You know you want one (or both) of the issues and they are both linked at the website, paper and digital available. The magazine is selling pretty well with over 40 sales of issue 2, and with me about to open for submissions again, that’s a lot of secret word buyers! I at least hope they read the stories rather than just ferreting out the secret work like kids ignoring the cereal for the prize inside.
Yes. I am that old.
For the next Heinlein marathon book I may crack into Have Spacesuit Will Travel. Haven’t read that one since I was a little kid. Either way, I’ve got a tower of to-be-reads that I have to at least crack the spines on before grabbing another Heinlein. Either way, keep watching for the next one (all two of you who are human and the 18 that are porn bots…).
Podkayne of Mars - ⭐⭐
Starman Jones ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ⭐
Methuselah’s Children ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Double Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Starship Troopers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Friday ⭐
Tunnel in the Sky⭐⭐⭐⭐
Waldo ⭐⭐⭐
Sixth Column⭐⭐
Stranger in a Strange Land⭐⭐⭐
The Door into Summer⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ←You are Here!
I Will Fear No Evil
The Green Hill of Earth
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Revolt in 2100
Have Spacesuit Will Travel
Characters
Let me state for the record that this book, like The Cat Who Walks through Walls, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Friday, has way too many characters. So, in an effort to simplify for this review I’ll be listing the most important characters with the rest being mentioned by title.
Manuel/Mannie/Man - The main character. A computer programmer/repair person with six interchangeable artificial arms
Prof. de la Paz - The wise old man of this story
Wyoming/Wyoh Knott - The girl who, through her speeches, draws the attention of Manny (Also in The Cat Who Walks through Walls)
Mycroft/Mike/Dr. Adam Seline/Simon Jester - a giant networked computer that has become self aware and has his digital fingers in all of the subsystems of Luna. (Also in The Cat Who Walks through Walls)
Mimi - Manny’s oldest wife (she is in her 80s I think - but everyone on Luna lives to be into the 150s)
Ludmilla - A teen girl who marries into Manny’s family
The Stilyagi - Teenagers, usually in gang format
The Federated Nations - There are a lot of people in this, diplomats, presidents, etc… and they all have pages of speeches and arguments with Prof. de la Paz to read, and for my sanity I will just be referring to them all as The Federated Nations
Stuart LaJoi/Stu - An Earthman who has come to Luna and immediately through his actions runs afoul of the Stilyagi (it’ll make sense below… trust me)
Hazel - A kid who fights hard (Also in The Cat Who Walks through Walls)
Tish - a 14 year old girl
There are, no kidding, like a dozen and a half more characters in this thing but they matter a lot less than the bunch I’ve named so we’ll go from here. Unlike a lot of other Heinlein books this one doesn’t give the women a lot to do after their initial introduction, mostly playing the other side of expository conversations, or marveling at some of the straw man arguments that Prof. de la Paz uses to deconstruct government. Wyoh has the most agency in this story but after a great intro she is sort of pushed aside as a side character, though an important one, but a side character none the less. Okay, let’s wrangle this plot…
Plot Summary
Here’s the short version of the plot - The people who live on the moon are supplying grain to Earth. There is an Earthside famine (or something…), either way Luna and her subsidiary cities Lunar Hong Kong, Novalyn, Catapult Head, and a couple of domes and other tunnels etc… It’s big. I think the book says there are around 50,000 people on Luna all together. I am not going back to hunt for that information, but I think that is what I remember. Luna was founded two generations or so back, the story takes place in 2076 for whatever that is worth. Let me say that this week the US sent a capsule around the Moon. This was the first time since the 1970s that the US has sent anyone out beyond the International Space Station. In Heinlein’s future the Moon was already colonized by now. And, it was colonized as a prison. Not just any prison but a full on, “you ain’t never coming back” prison.
A few generations of people have been born on Luna, the “Loonies” as they are known, and have the run of the place. The whole enterprise is funded and operated by the Federated Nations through The F.N. Authority, essentially a prison management organization with a warden and guards etc… The Loonies spend their days growing tons and tons and tons of hydropnic grains and shipping them back to earth via a big magnetic catapult. This is where Catapult Head comes in as a place. Catapult Head is the city where all of the grain is collected, packed into special giant barrels, and fired into Earth’s orbit for collection or re-entry and safe retrieval. For some reason in this story India is the main country taking the grain from Luna. I have no idea, considering the VAST amount of land in India, why this would even be necessary but I guess you have to figure out how a bunch of prisoner/colonists are going to survive on the moon you have to give them food to work with. So, like I said, the Moon is a giant prison where nations of the whole Earth send prisoners. The successive few generations of humans born and raised in one of the Lunar cities can’t really go to Earth without a massive amounts of physical preparation. The Luna economy runs on two currencies, the Hong Kong Dollar which is pegged to currency on Earth and Authority Scrip pegged to Hong Kong Dollars. So, the economy on the moon is also a prison economy even for the people who aren’t incarcerated. Heinlein is using the moon as a stand in for Australia (for now) and for the 13 colonies (later) with the Federated Nations standing in for colonial Great Britain in this analogy. Beyond that there is some limited discussion about the independence of the countries that make up the Federated Nations but none stands out as a clear leader of the organization. When Mycroft, the big computer that controls all of the communications and other digital infrastructure of Luna need repair Authority contracts with Mannie. What no one but Mannie knows is that Mycroft is sentient. Going by the name Mike, he creates and tells jokes to “Man” and while they are generally not funny they do show that Mike has the ability to think creatively. On the way home after one session with Mike, who Mannie believes is faking occasional malfunctions solely to bring Mannie in for conversation, he stops by a political rally on the way back to the cave where his family dwelling is located. Speaking on stage is a red haired woman named Wyoming Knott. She rallies the large group of Loonies around the idea of throwing off the yoke of Authority and forcing Earth to deal with an independent Luna with free market capitalism. After her, and refuting her point, is Professor Bernado de la Paz, who not only wants Authority overthrown, but to take possession of the government for the Loonies and force the Earth to deal with them on their own and more prosperous terms. The rally is forcably broken up by the Peace Dragoons, ultimately the police/prison guards of Luna, during which Wyoming and Mannie flee together. This is our meet cute for these two. It doesn’t amount to much romantically as Wyoming, for all of the responsibilities put on her later in this book doesn’t get to do or say much in this narrative. TMIAHM follows the same style/format of all of Heinlein’s non-juvie works and structurally this book is nearly identical to both Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange land.
The other thing that I realized as I was reading this was Heinlein’s lack of a villain or even a real antagonist for, not only the characters in this book, but in almost all of the others ones. The antagonist is some ephemeral system - usually a government, or the Bugs, which are also portrayed almost as a system as well. Ultimately they are a faceless, nameless, bureaucracy with multiple legs and occasional laser weapons. I don’t know if this makes these stories better or worse, but it definitely makes them more interesting from an idea level. Maybe this lack of clear antagonism is what makes Heinlein and other hard science fiction so interesting. It doesn’t have to deal with combatting the machinations of a human, rather, the consequences of how they have become organized.
I think I like that. I don’t like it much here… but I like it as an abstract concept.
Back in the story we get to meet Mannie’s family which is way more complex and weird than I am going to spend any time on. Suffice it to say that if you understand that Heinlein’s characters are often in confusing polyamorous families, then you understand it here. I didn’t care about any of this because I have already experienced it in his writing. That said, I can imagine someone never reading Heinlein before reading this and being freaked out by the future take on marriage. Heinlein knew the concept was weird and even makes a point of making it a point in the narrative when they want to arrest Mannie for bigamy when he is down on Earth… But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Mannie introduced Mike to Wyoh, and not long after to Prof. de la Paz. The three of them start the process of fomenting a revolution. The rest of the story, in shortest form is - The cells that Mike, Mannie, and Wyoh start begin spreading through the Lunar cities. There is a strategy to keep everyone not really knowing what the other cells are doing or who is in them. This allows the main cell to act as a sort of overseer, steer potential spies for The Authority/Warden into misinformation, and complete a communications network that is very hard to disrupt or police as even if a cell is arrested they don’t really know much about any other cells. It’s a good strategy. Meanwhile Mike invents two new personalities, one is a populist politician named Dr. Adam Seline, and the other is a poet named Simon Jester. Through these two personalities he antagonizes the warden both by providing an uncapturable face of the coming revolution and a way to disseminate embarrassing propaganda about The Authority. The warden starts pushing back and the Federated Nations sends a platoon of Peace Dragoons up from Earth to re-establish order. They are easy to spot because they aren’t used to the 1/6th gravity of the moon. One of them rapes a loonie which triggers reactionary murder, other are “accidentally” spaced, and ultimately it is worse than tit-for-tat as this is very rapidly become a very bloody revolution. During this time Mannie and Mike start the process of building a new catapult in case the Authority shuts off or bombs the one at Catapult Head. Mannie and Prof venture to Earth as representatives immediately after they transmit a Declaration of Independence to Earth. On the planet they have several meetings that start out quizzical, then business oriented, then finally hostile and punitive at which time Mannie and Prof are snuck back to the Moon. A war takes place and after defending themselves and dropping thousands of tons of moon rocks onto Earth, the moon gets its independence. Several of the secondary characters die in the tube-to-tube fighting. Yay.
Heinlein’s Government Stuff
Brace yourselves… This is the big one for government stuff.
While Heinlein didn’t really espouse, at least not in his writing, the Ayn Randian the smartest people are the wealthiest because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be either philosophy, he does lean really hard into the independent people, protecting their own self interest, will always do best for the civilization because they don’t want to hurt themselves ultimately by hurting someone else.
This is all well and good. But, it is not realistic, and I am sure some of my Libertarian friends will argue with me, but civilization has NEVER existed with rational and enlightened self interest as a core principle. Societies can’t work that way. Humans are notoriously self serving and since the dawn of civilization have required rules and a decision making body to keep that society from falling in on itself. Don’t believe me? The Babylonians have The Code of Hammurabi, what is that, you may ask? It’s a big stele covered with rules for how their society works from stuff as simple as don’t take your neighbor’s stuff, to how many sheep you have to pay them if you flood their land when irrigating yours. Sounds relatively simple but as civilizations grew and more people lived in closer and closer proximity the need for more rules became more important as did a more overreaching governing body. Secular governments are very modern, but they take a lot of their foundational operating principles from the religious-based governments stretching back to Hammurabi. For those who aren’t aware the code of Hammurabi was reportedly given by Shamash to king Hammurabi. From this to the Egyptian Pharoes to Judaism’s Talmud to the old testament to Shintoism and who knows how many different religious traditions stretch back into the countries and regions and civilizations in Africa. These all came about because you needed a way to adjudicate disputes without stabbing people, regular how businesses operate so they weren’t obviously ripping people off or killing their competition with fire and big rocks… I mean, all of the stuff in society we take for granted now all stretch back to these early situations. Heinlein posited that government was mostly unnecessary save for maintaining a military, though, he ran for office himself, and proposed several rules to improve how voting works to ensure that voters are engaged enough to have a good grasp of what they are voting on, so as you read through him there are definitely some contradictory elements.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really explores the rational self interest and (mostly) unregulated capitalism that underpins modern Libertarian philosophy. In this book, for example, the non-convict Lunies are still under the same authoritarian government as the convicts. It makes perfect sense if not hits a little too on the nose for them to be called “Authority” but I guess it’s as good a name as any if your whole story is about rising against authority. Anyway, within that system there is a separate code of conduct that isn’t tied to the central government. Since the Lunar Authority still treats the place like a prison the non-prisoners have their own judges (whoever wants to adjudicate something) their own police (mobs) their own economy based on Authority scrip and Lunar Hong Kong Dollars—when they can get them. The rest of the economy, air, water, food, electricity, medicine etc… doesn’t get much ink in this book because those things add a lot of complexity to the idea that every person for themselves is the best way to structure a society.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Heinlein. He’s still my all time favorite writer and even books that I don’t like are better than a lot of other books I like more in the ideas, structure, characterization, etc… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read these with a critical eye. Moon was released in 66 before the counterculture really took off, so he was ahead of the anti-establishment vibe by a year or two. I think he may have sided with the anti-war movement not because of the military itself or the operations that the military participated in, but because of conscription. Anyway… I am getting away from the core here. The main governing body we deal with here is the Federated Nations, think the UN. The US, China, and India get most of the page time because their economy (the US) or their people power (China and India) give them outsized power in the Federation. These countries, especially the ones who interact with Prof and Mannie when they are on Earth, bring to the forefront Heinlein’s greatest criticism of centralized national governments. Namely, that all of them are inherently corrupt and will undermine their partners at every opportunity and use the military as an extension of their economy. I am short-discussing this because the entire middle half of the book is hearing or meeting after meeting or hearing where Heinlein sets up a straw man using the representative from some part of the Federated Nations as the construction company, and Prof as the wolf with the big lungs. At first the Federated Nations greet the idea of Lunar independence as a curiosity but not a serious proposition. Prof and Mannie present to some countries, the potential of an economic boom for specific countries who could support their own magnetic catapult. This would give them a way to trade independlty with the moon rather than having to abide by any trade treaties that Luna discusses with the Federated Nations. This rapidly devolves into threats, then a suggestion that Mannie take over as the leader of Luna and the FN will take some of Luna’s concerns more seriously with regard to the economy, the price of wheat and rice that Luna supplies, among other things. Once it is clear that none of this is going to sway Prof or Mannie, the pair flee before they can be arrested and held for ransom until Luna capitulates. Anyway the whole middle of this book is Mannie telling you about these meetings in the interim where he and Prof are recovering from their exhaustion on Earth. Heinlein hammers so much of this home over and over again that it gets irritating. All of Prof’s arguments can be distilled down to “liberty means we can sell grain and you have to sell us water and other supplies because that is in both of our economic best interests” but, ultimately, he doesn’t set up a reason in the book as to why the wheat and rice (and later vodka) from the moon is so important. When Mannie and Prof are back on Earth he doesn’t really give us their impressions on the world as they are learning over it. Like so many of Heinlein’s older characters Prof already “knows” all of the ills on Earth and if they would only adopt his thinking they would all be solved. The thing is we never really get the origin of whatever these problems are. Why does India need so much grain from the Moon? India is huge. This assumes some strange famine on Earth but it is never really brought up. I don’t know, it was irritating. It reminds me of so many of his other wise old man characters who insist that the only truly free market is completely unregulated trade where individual dickering for the best price is the purest form of business and government. And, I would argue that even the most ardent capitalist would argue the same.
Heinlein’s Weird Ability to Make the Eventual Mundane Before It Was Invented
There’s not much here, really. Maybe the idea of Mike the computer being a pretty clear description of a data terminal connected to central processing stuff that was an extension of the computer technology that they had in the mid 1960s. Maybe the fact that Mike is cross-linked into every system is more stuff we interact with all day but don’t really see the background of. You could probably argue that the best computer arrangement is client/server style like in old Token Ring LANs. Considering just about everything we use is software to which we connect from a standalone terminal to centralized data assets it’s pretty similar in concept.
What I Liked
This is a tough one because while I think the ideas here are interesting I don’t think Heinlein accomplishes what he attempted with this novel, in that I do not believe that anyone who reads this will immediately think that classical Libertarianism is some rational way to create a government. I think a lot of the rational questions raised by this book don’t get anywhere near a rational answer - namely people need rules and a governing hierarchy to keep us from devolving into cave people. Heinlein himself even says this in Podkayne of Mars where he declares that politics is the greatest invention of mankind because without it we’d be hitting each other over the head with sticks.
Now, this isn’t just a critique of the philosophy in this book, it’s more a look at a whole swath of ideas that Heinlein would explore in subsequent works - as noted, Podkayne of Mars, Job a Comedy of Justice, and to a much lesser extent in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. There are always elements in the books that I really gravitate to, scenes or chapters that really sing out and make me think and smile at the same time. In the case of this book it’s the trial where Stu is charged by the Stylagi with accosting a girl on the Moon. That whole segment is really well done and shows how Heinlein sees the strength in individuals when paired with ideas of institution. He has Manny, a regular nobody, acting as judge to a bunch of young teens who want to kill a guy for not understanding the rules on the Moon. It’s a great little piece and says a lot about how he sees the value of individual understanding and also individual compassion. It’s a really well done piece in here and it’s the one that would encourage me to recommend this to other readers who haven’t explored Heinlein much, or at all. He also draws good characters in here, at least in Mannie. He’s an interesting choice for main character in that he doesn’t really do anything. He just observes all of the big events (minus the battle at the end, and even then it’s muted) and provides our window into the big story elements without having to participate much in them.
I also like how Heinlein continues his exploration of polyamorous families in this book and, admittedly, subsequent ones. That said, once you’ve read a story where one of them is explored even a little you don’t get any more of it here, but Mimi is an interesting side character and Mannie’s explanation of why it’s like this on the Moon due to the significant ratio of men to women makes it rational and interesting to dissect.
Problematic Stuff
There’s the whole bit about 14 year old girls… He does this in Podkayne of Mars and generally gets a pass as he fudges her age some there, 14 Martian years are like 17 Earth Years or something like that, and here on the Moon humans age differently due to being cut off from Earth’s full gravity - or something - that makes young teen girls the most revered thing on the Moon. It’s, well… it was one of the stumbling points for me in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls as well and while to a large extent here it is relatively benign in the storytelling, you can see him testing the waters about making this more prominent in other, later, works.
Could this be a TV Show or Movie?
Absolutely. I am surprised it hasn’t already been adapted. This would be the kind of presitge TV that Netflix or Hulu or something should have already found a way to adapt. Would I watch it? Yep.
Conclusion
Definitely not my favorite of his works, but worth a read for his discussion of how this society can function without a centralized government. Though, admittedly that isn’t entirely fair, they do establish a central government at the end it just doesn’t have any real power to legislate, only to negotiate trade with the Federated Nations.
Star Rating
⭐⭐
Hey everyone, BAM! Issue 2 is out! EPub also available for less money...
Seven never-before-seen short stories by some of the best writers working today!
This is the Spring 2026 issue of BAM! featuring seven brand new original science fiction, crime, horror, and supernatural stories! Check out
Get yours now!
It's Coming...
Hey all, the new issue of BAM! will be before the end of the month! All of the stories are paid for, edits done, art secured, everything laid out. I am just waiting for the final proof copy before I make it fully available!
More articles about other stuff will be coming soon too. Doing BAM! has pretty much occupied every non-work hour since I launched so my own writing hasn't been too prolific since. That said, I have a dozen or so stories that I am still sending out into the market. After reading 300 submissions for this issue of BAM! I have a great appreciation for the talents of the writers who are also submitting to the same places that I am. The competition is FIERCE! Check out www.bam-mag.com for an ordering link soon!
A Little Update
Hi everyone (all 2 humans and 17 porn bots that follow me), it’s been a while since my last entry when BAM Magazine premiered in October 2025! Well, turns out that starting a magazine is A LOT of work, so much work that I haven’t had much time for anything else creative. I opened for submissions for one month, Oct 19-Nov 19.
Here are some fun facts -
Submissions received - 300
Slush readers - 1 (me)
Average story length - 5400 words
Time to read through the slush pile - 6 weeks (67500 words per week average… so one slender book worth of stories each week)
Stories that made it to round 2 - 56
Time to reread and determine Table of Contents based on that? - 3 weeks
Number of stories selected for March 2026 issue - 6
Authors from how many countries - 4
Women authors - 2 (possibly 3 based on non gender specific name)
Genres represented - 4 (Crime, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal Romance)
Editing time average - 6 hours per story
It’s been a lot of work and I absolutely love the stories that will appear in the next issue.
I’ve also done a lot of reading on the side as I’ve done this. I read “That Book is Dangerous” by Adam Sztela, a book about editing and censorship across the spectrum of political persuasion. Very good and thought provoking. I read a whole bunch of HP Lovecraft stories. I also have been SMASHING MY HEAD against The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the next Heinlein marathon entry. It’s difficult because I am not enjoying the book at all. I mean, I didn’t really like Friday, but this one is giving me The Cat Who Walks through Walls levels of dislike. So it’s slow going. It isn't that I don't like the writing, I am super in tune with Heinlein's style, but it's so S-L-O-W but none of the conversations that seem to be all of the story are very interesting. Still, I will press on! TAANSTAFL!
More about the Lovecraft stuff. I started to reread these because I watched the film adaptation of The Colour out of Space, which I LOVED and wanted to see how good the adaptation was after the fact. Even though I have tried hard not to watch adaptations like a school teacher reading a book report, I’ve found that if I go the other way and see the adaptation first before reading the source content I can usually appreciate the adaptation more than if I go the other way. I had the same experience with Poor Things by Alisdair Gray, saw the movie and really liked it, read the book and loved it even though the movie drifted considerably away from the book. Anyway, I picked up a new volume of stories as The Colour Out of Space wasn’t in the two that I already had and started reading through. I am not sure but I think The Thing on the Doorstep might be my favorite, at least so far, of this new read through.
My son was paying attention in the lead-up to Christmas and gave me a couple of amazing Manga of The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow over Innsmouth and they are gorgeous and wonderful.
He also gave me this insane copy of At the Mountains of Madness but it’s the original handwritten manuscript that Lovecraft wrote on the backs of letter and bills and stuff. Each page has his script on one side and the original whatever correspondence was on the other. It’s unreadable and crazy and really illustrates the manic nature of first drafts.
Crazy! I started doing TikTok videos to generate interest in BAM!, but I am going to drop that as it’s not worth the effort. TikTok also has some new owners that I don’t really jive with and I don’t want to give them my time. Finally, I’ll be a guest on the Local Threads podcast sometime later this year, the show tapes in February and should air in May or June on youtube. Check out the show, it’s a cool exploration of artists and entrepreneurs working locally in Massachusetts and the scenes they are in and trying to foster. Also, lots of cool thrift store shows as well. https://www.youtube.com/@Local-Threads-Podcast Okay, back to BAM! See you all soon!
RIP Ace Frehley and Some Perfect Rock Songs
When I was 6 or 7 years old my parents gifted me with a little red plastic record player and the first record album that was completly under my control. In the past I had to have a grown up put on records like The Jackson 5 or The Beatles in my little kids playroom. But once I had my little red record player and my own record I was in charge. That first record was Kiss: Rock and Roll Over. Not long after that my uncle gave us all of his older Monkees and Paul Rever and The Raiders records too. But I have always had a soft spot for Kiss and for hard rock because of Kiss.
Ace Frehley the lead guitarist of Kiss died after a fall in his studio caused a brain bleed. I’m at the age where a lot of the musicians I grew up enjoying are getting into their… upper sixties and seventies… and like, The Who, my all time favorite rock band, the mid 80s.
Roger Daltrey of The Who is 81 years old as I write this.
81?
81! Jesus…
Anyway, losing Ace has put me in a mood to go back and listen to some of the music that at different places in my life were really fun or played often, or soundtracked one summer or another between elementary and high school. To be fair over the last couple of years I’ve gone back to lesser known bands from when I was in my formative years and found some wonderful stuff that maybe, could have, maybe should have, done better for the bands that recorded them.
So, in honor of Ace Frehley here are some of the recent older hard rock songs that have been part of my recent frequent play count. As an older guy I see these songs differently than I did when they were regular radio fodder. Where I saw them as three minutes between other songs back then I see them as perfect pop/hard-rock songs. In no particular order -
Rick Derringer - Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo.
We lost Rick Derringer this year too. This was the only real hit of his though he wrote hits for other bands and produced a ton of records including a bunch of Edgar Winter records, the goofy-ass Hulk Hogan (ALSO dead this year…) song Real American. He also produced some of Weird Al’s records and a bunch of others. Rick also wrote, sang on, and played on the Edgar Winter hit Free Ride.
Here is Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo one of the perfect hard rock songs. This isn’t to say that Free Ride isn’t great, it is, but Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo is just at another level. The guitar riff in this is crunchy and instantly reconizable. Edgar Winter’s band backing this song just pushes it over the edge.
Elvin Bishop Band - Fooled Around and Fell in Love
I ignored this song. I remember it being on the radio a lot for a few months when I was a kid and usually heard it on the FM radio in the car. This wasn’t something my parents listened to so it was just available to me on the radio. I didn’t give this song a second’s though until it was used briefly in Guardians of the Galaxy. Then, one afternoon while poking around for pulp fiction novels at a local antiques/flea market place this song was playing over the store speakers and I knew pretty much every word and sung along quietly as I walked the store. So, I must have heard it plenty when I was a kid but it didn’t leave a visible mark, as it were. I didn’t give it much thought until, reflecting on this, I hunted down the song on youtube and found this live version from the TV Show Midnight Special. I remember this show being advertised when I was a kid but it was on too late for me to watch, not that I would have anyway at the time. I’ve gone on to pick up a handful of Elvin Bishop records since then and this is literally the only song in his catalog that sounds like this. The vocals, handed off to Micky Thomas who usually sang back up, suited the lyrics so well it carried this song up to #3 on the 1976 US charts. And live… Oh my god it’s great. Elvin Bishop is way more country funk than hard rock and this song is way more adult contemporary than anything else, but for some reason this all comes together into a perfect 4+ minutes. The rest of the album is good… mostly.
Montrose - Bad Motor Scooter
I knew of Ronny Montrose but for the life of me I have no idea why. I knew his name and that he was a guitar player for decades and I knew there was a band named Montrose and I never listened to them, ever, until just this year and what an eye opening experience that has been. My folks weren’t “hard rock” fans. My mom loved motown and disco, my dad loved records from when he was a kid, and also disco, so I listened to standard FM top 40 radio as a kid. I didn’t even know that hard rock stations existed. Anyway, Montrose was probably never played on WPRO so I am baffled by why I knew who they were. Sammy Hagar, who we will be coming up in this list as a solo artist, is the lead singer for Montrose. I learned that this summer. Like, the summer of 2025. I just picked up a great CD of The Very Best of Montrose and there are like 17 songs on it and all of them are really, really good. This one, probably their best known song (though not by me) is Bad Motor Scooter. This is a great hard rock song that has more edge than contemporaries like Foghat, but not as sharp as, like, Deep Purple. That said, this song hits every single good note for a perfect hard rock song. Fantastic bluesy guitar that drives the song, great lead vocals, and a tight, tight band. This is a live TV appearance from 1974. It’s so, so good.
Rainbow - Since You Been Gone
This song I knew when it was new. Rainbow’s Since You Been Gone was a staple in the early MTV years and I probably saw this video like 6 million times in between Adam and the Ants and 38 Special… But I haven’t thought about it for decades either. I have one of Rainbow’s later records, Right Between the Eyes, with Joe Lynn Turner as the lead singer. It’s a good record and sounds like early Foreigner. But, before that record Ritchie Blackmore made Down to Earth with the third lead singer, Graham Bonnet. I bring this song up because as I was watching old Ace Frehley videos of music and of interviews one of the things that the algorithm spooled up for me was Since You Been Gone. This. Song. Is. Perfect. The lyrics are singable, it has a driving bass and percussion line, and Graham Bonnet’s voice is absolutely flawless. The whole record is great but this song is untouchable. I would argue that this is the best Rainbow song in their whole discography. Here is the video that youtube gave me that led to this article.
Rainbow Version -
Graham Bonnet 2025 live version (how good does he sound?!)
Both Ace Frehley and Graham Bonnet played my town this summer and I didn’t go. I saw the sign at the venue, I looked at tickets, I even considered going, but ultimately didn’t. Now Ace is gone and that one shot I had was wasted. Next time Graham Bonnet comes I’ll go. Ace was 74. Graham Bonnet looks to be about 170 in this live version so we’ll see what happens.
Sammy Hagar - Heavy Metal
I saw Sammy Hagar when he was fronting Van Halen. I fell asleep. I was in high school when Van Halen deconstructed and reconstructed going from David Lee Roth as front man to Sammy Hagar. Whole new sound. More mature music. Less flamboyance. I was never a huge Van Halen fan in any of their incarnations. I found myself at their show in Worcester because my brother’s car broke down on the way and he had to ride back with the tow truck so I picked up his friends and his ticket and went. I knew this song, sort of, when it was kind of new. See, my mom took me and my younger brothers to what used to be called the Capitol Cinema (now the Ziterion) in New Bedford, Massachusetts to see the film Heavy Metal based on the very adult comic anthology magazine that she had started to purchase for me.
Heavy Metal was released in 1981. I was 11. I don’t remember THIS song from the film, clearly it didn’t have as much impact as Mob Rules by Black Sabbath or Through Being Cool by Devo, but that may be because the visuals that those songs accompany are SUPER memorable - well, for me anyway. I really remember Sammy Hagar for I Can’t Drive 55, a terrible, stupid song that is I think his only chart topper. It’s only not completely forgotten because it’s a novelty song. So when he joined Van Halen I thought “Great, the I can’t drive 55 guy… he stinks.” Except here’s the thing. He doesn’t. In fact, he’s fantastic. His work as the frontman of Montrose is great and if he’d been able to let loose as a solo guy the way he apparently wanted to we might have had more songs like Heavy Metal and fewer like I Can’t Drive 55. Heavy Metal has one of the best hooky guitar riffs I have ever heard. It’s instantly recognizable like the riff in Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo, and has a great change in tempo, the vocals are awesome as well. It’s just a perfect hard rock song.
Here is a great live version from 2021 or so.
And here is the album cut.
Sammy is 78 now. I wish I’d not fallen asleep back during the OU812 tour.
Ace Frehley - 10,000 Volts
I listened to this a bunch last year when Ace Frehley’s most recent album was released. It’s a great song and shows that even as an older rocker he was still able to create new music with the same spirit and soul as the stuff that made him famous in the early 1970s. He’s gone now but his music lives on.
Here is his last single 10,000 Volts from his last album 10,000 volts. I’m going to kick myself black and blue for skipping his show.
And this is a live version of his first solo single, Back in the New York Groove performed with Kiss.
The audience for this music is getting old and while I’ve shared these songs with my offspring the impact of these songs will will be lesser and lesser as time goes on until they are just memories.
And...
I've been reading lots and writing lots and editing lots. I have started the next Heinlein marathon book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. More importantly, I've released the first issue of BAM! Magazine and am soliciting stories for the second issue due in March 2026. Check out a copy here - Cheap reads! The Kindle version is even cheaper!
I've written a bunch of short stories over the last few months and am trying to get them in front of editors. So far no luck though. All of them are science fiction and it feels weirdly comforting to write in genre for a while. I've stepped away from it while writing Park Place and I guess it's taken a while for me to find my way back. Anyway, here I am.
Crap turned 12 today!
Stories With Punch!
Hi everyone, it's here! BAM! Magazine, for the seventeen or so of you (minus 15 porn bots) who follow, this is a new pulp fiction short story magazine I've created and published. It's small, only three stories in this inaugural issue, but it will grow as I solicit and accept more short stories. The first issue is available now! We leverage the printing and logistics of Amazon.com to make this available inexpensively! There is a paper and a Kindle version depending on how you want to read BAM! Not only is this a place where some of my writing will find a home, it is a paying market for other writers. Submissions will open soon! Watch the page, and here, for notification. Also check out some of the "original fiction writers" Tumblr pages for as I'll be announcing there as well. BAM! Together we can save short fiction! We've got a podcast and we'll have Tiktok soon! Information here or at our website, which Tumblr won't let me share...
Thoughts on Superman 2025
I write a lot of stories featuring Superheroes. I have two books out of short stories dedicated to them and have written several one-offs that explore what it might be like to be bestowed with abilities beyond those of normal people. As I am almost always writing something about Superheroes I tend to studiously avoid media with Superheroes in them. I don’t collect comics with any regularity, I don’t watch Superhero TV shows, I don’t generally watch Superhero movies unless there is a really compelling character. There are some exceptions to this, Captain Marvel (Shazam!) and Superman are two that will generally get my attention at least for the first of whatever movie series they are anchoring.
As a Superhero fiction writer I struggle with creating and maintaining characters that are effectively all-powerful because it makes for difficult storytelling. How do I put a character with no physical weaknesses in danger? Either they are omnipotent or they aren’t, know what I mean? Then I have to define lesser and greater omnipotence and before long I am creating a system that is very much like I’d need in a fantasy story and I don’t like fantasy stories. That said, my two favorite Superhero characters are pretty much omnipotent, Superman the last son of Krypton and Captain Marvel the world’s mightiest mortal.
I’ve written stories that obliquely feature or are inspired by the presentation of these two characters. In Mighty, George’s cape is exactly Captain Marvel’s cape and I tried to capture images of Captain Marvel as drawn by the amazing CC Beck in my narrative of his fighting the tornado.
In my story Jobber I created Crimson Splash as a third-tier type Superhero who interacts with a mix of thinly disguised Justice League and Avengers characters, one of which, “The Big Guy” is modeled on Superman. While The Big Guy is a secondary character, his existence is one of the drivers of Crimson Splash’s journey.
There have been ample deconstructions of Justice League, Superman, Batman, and even Captain Marvel that are generally called out as the best written comics of all time and those who set the tone for decades to come for how that character is presented in any format.
Superman
Superman has been deconstructed in several titles, stuff like Mark Waid’s Irredeemable where a Superman type character goes nuts and starts killing the other heroes on Earth, none of whom are as powerful as he. Grace Randolph’s Supurbia presents a Superman character who has captured his main enemy, Hella Heart, and made her his sex slave. Robert Kirkman’s Invicible presents another evil Superman character, and finally Alan Moore's Watchmen presents Doctor Manhattan who is both omnipotent and growing more and more distant from any connection to humanity and its people. Grant Morrison’s The Boys does this too with Homelander. Even DC comics got into the act with the Superman character in Injustice: Gods Among Us where a vengeful Superman rules earth after the Joker kills Lois Lane. Superman in the modern age is ripe for this kind of storytelling as comics have moved from entertainment for children to entertainment for more mature audiences. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the old George Reeves Superman shows from the 1950s, or the second two Superman films featuring Christopher Reeve. But Superman had to evolve through several stages to the point where he could be deconstructed. He was mostly unchanged through the early 1980s until the end of the Superman comics line where Alan Moore wrote out the final issues including possibly the best Superman comic of all time “For the Man Who Has Everything” in which Superman is poisoned by an alien plant that shows him his deepest desires, which is to be married on Krypton and to have never known of, or been sent to, Earth. It’s both beautiful and sad and transitions Superman from a character who defines super heroism into one that is trapped in super heroism such that his most subliminal desire is to be someone else who isn’t super.
Captain Marvel (Fawcett version and Lawsuit)
Captain Marvel is my favorite superhero of all time. He’s a ripoff of Superman created in the 1940s by publisher Fawcett Publications who wanted a “flying strongman to complete with Superman” and they got it via CC Beck. His one real difference at the superficial level is that Captain Marvel only half exists, swapping time/space with human boy Billy Batson after he utters the magic word “Shazam!” He has been dissected in possibly the best comic I’ve ever read, Miracleman by Alan Moore. Known as Marvelman in the UK where this book was published first after Fawcett Comics could not be imported because Captain Marvel was tied up in a really long plaigarism lawsuit from DC Comics that prevented Fawcett from publishing. (DC eventually acquired the Captain Marvel character and released new titles as "Shazam!" as Marvel Comics had capitalized on the gap in publication and created their own Captain Marvel.)
Marvelman written by Mick Anglo copied the lore of the Captain Marvel books with the same sort of family of Marvelman, Marvelman Jr. and Kid Marvelman. The stories were goofy just like the Captain Marvel stories were and geared to younger audiences. But in the British comics fandom Marvelman had a robust fan base for the few years it was offered. Alan Moore being one of those fans.
Alan Moore takes up the character of Marvelman in 1980 and writes original comics for a British magazine. These were then compiled and released after coloring by US company Eclipse Comics as Miracleman. In this book, Miracleman, released from a decades long swap with his human half, Mickey Moran, into a world that has no superheroes. What deconstructs here is that there is a fine line that the story crosses between the superhero tropes of the original Captain Marvel/Marvelman stories and reality all of which is determined by the villain of the story. It’s complex and fun and weird and scary.
Captain Marvel has some fun film depictions as well, a serial in the 1940s has Captain Marvel machine gunning soldiers to death…
It was a different time.
In the 1970s there was as weird Saturday Afternoon live action show where the Wizard Shazam who bestowed the powers of the gods onto Captain Marvel was replaced with a pantheon of the God’s themselves. These were a lot of Captain Marvel rescues people who made idiotic decisions and get-themselves-into-trouble storytelling that was really popular at the time. See also, Super Friends…
Shazam! spun off another character, a female version named Mighty Isis. They are fun and goofy and make the best of 1970s effects technology. I like them quite a bit as they are very similar in tone to the original CC Beck stories. The Shazam! film in 2019 starring Zachary Levy is a pretty good representation of the character as portraid in the New 52 era of comics with Captain Marvel being a scaled up Billy Batson bestowed with the powers of the Gods but still mentally a 14 year old boy whgo has to adapt to his abilities and identity. It’s not bad. Zachary Levy was pretty good as Captain Marvel. I dunno, the second film crashed really hard and Zachary Levy made some bad PR for himself which pretty much doomed the series to two films.
Anyway, I am getting way off track here. What I want to talk about, albeit briefly, is the 2025 Superman film directed by James Gunn.
The long way around to this is that for Superheroes to be a popular culture phenomenon as they have been it requires darkening them up to make them palatable to adult audiences and as a way to downplay the overwhelming goofiness of the presentation on its face. This led from Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Forever to Blade to the Deadpool movies etc until we get to the DC universe as envisioned by Zach Snyder. Say what you want about the guy but he is consistent if nothing else, and as someone who writes dark superhero stories I have a lot of respect for his vision. Even if, like with the Justice League, I don’t agree with it, because not everything has to be Watchmen. Not everything has to be Miracleman.
Superheroes can be fun and colorful and be written to inspire us as readers/viewers to be better people. That is what makes them fun and what makes the morality tales that provide their foundation so prescient.
Superman 2025 Review
Anyway, that brings us to James Gunn’s Superman.
Go see it. It’s great. It is so light and airy and embraces the morality plays that underpin comics from the golden age and still manages to be complex and gripping.
There, that’s my review.
No really, I don’t really want to spoil anything. I’ve seen it twice now in the cinema and I may go to see it again tomorrow (July 26). The cast is great, the writing is crisp, and the special effects are to be expected in a big budget studio superhero movie.
Themes
There are a lot of great themes in the film that include not only right and wrong, but the place of immigrants in society, the role parents play in how we develop as adults, what sacrifice means etc... There is so much to unpack that i can't even pretend to do it here.
Go see it.
Miscellaneous
As for me. Well, I’m still writing lots and reading lots too. My books and stories aren’t selling other than the couple of art fairs I do each year. I tried Amazon marketing but that didn’t get anything sold, it didn’t get stuff clicked through either. So, at least on the upside, it didn’t cost me anything other than a week of wondering what to do next. I’ve seen people on TicTok shilling their books but the thought of having to do that fills me with dread. My podcast has a small audience too. Tumblr, not matter what I do, is mostly followers who are porn bots. I can’t even get anyone to jump on the Self on the Shelf 100 Page Challenge. So far no one has pitched their book so I haven’t bought any. Tumblr, even on Communities for original fiction writers, is silly with fanfic writers.
What’s a writer like me to do? Send me your ideas for better marketing? Should I do the TicTok thing? Youtube? Yelling at the sky? Naked performance art?
Coming Soon...
Story Published!
For anyone interested my story “Anna F” is available to read in the Summer 25 issue of Portrait of New England!
A regionally-themed literary magazine.
New Bunch Of Stuffcast
The podcast version of my read through It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is up. Enjoy.
What if I told that 90 years ago Sinclair Lewis predicted the condition of the United States in 2025? Well, listen in and find out for yours
Sinclair Lewis - It Can’t Happen Here
Introduction and Initial Thoughts
I suppose I should be more familiar with Sinclair Lewis’ work. I have heard his name bandied about since high school and know titles like Elmer Gantry, but until now I have never read him. That changed after I saw a reference to his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. I had heard of this title too, but it was always in the context of a high school or college history class when we were discussing the short lived “share the wealth” program of one time governor and later Senator from Louisiana, Huey Long. This was my first real brush with the idea of populism and while I guess it made sense in a historical context, American Populism and Fascism were lever linked, at least not in my studies. So, anyway, I heard mention of this book and its exploration of the growth of and takeover by Fascists in 1936 America I rushed out and bought it.
I’ve heard on some other podcasts that there was a run on this book and it ended up back in the NYT Best Seller List before the 2016 election. I guess none of the people who bought it read it though as we ended up with a populist president, and now have the same populist president now. At any rate, I picked up a copy and started in on it. This review will be a little different as I am only going to BROADLY call out the plot events and evolution because this is a book that everyone should read (and I hesitate to add this clause) while you still can. The parallels of the story in this book, especially the first hundred and fifty or so pages, and the 2024 election are almost unbelievable. As I read further into the story the more disturbed I became. In the 1930s, especially at the end of the Great Depression where the US government was so worried about communists and socialists pulling a Moscow 1917 due to the harsh economic realities of the time that Roosevelt was able to get the New Deal passed. The jobs programs created there and the stabilizing effect of regulatory controls of banks, the establishment of the break between investment and savings banks, and more regulation of industry and tolerance of unions helped prevent what many in power saw as a landscape ripe for communist agitation. Huey Long, as mentioned earlier, was a champion of the “Share the Wealth” program was gunned down in the Louisiana state house.
I don’t pretend to know if Lewis was modeling his political antagonist Berzelius Windrip on Long, or Mussolini, or Hitler, or Franco, but he seems to contain elements of all of them. Mussolini and Hitler get name checked a few times in this novel so the audience of the time could see the danger that these men and their countries were especially after they drifted further and further into dictatorship. The conditions that led to fascism in Europe were not unlike the conditions that led to the New Deal. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s have a look at the characters and I apologize in advance. I don’t know if it is novel writing in the 30s or something but the names in this book are memorable if only because they are so… well… you’ll see what I mean.
Characters
Doremus Jessup - Our main character, editor of the local newspaper in a small Vermont town Emma Jessup - Doremus’ wife. She is sort of ambivalent to everything Sissy Jessup - Doremus’ youngest daughter. Recent high school graduate. Mary (jessup) Greenhill - Doremyus’ oldest daughter. Married to Dr. Mark Greenhill Mark Greenhill - Married to Mary Walter Trowbridge - Outsted Presidential candidate and leader of the resistance from Canada Mr. Tasborough - Owns the local quarry Buck Titus- Doremus’ best friend and the owner of a hunting lodge in the woods Shad Ledue - Doremus’ handyman, later the District Commander and leader of the local Minute Men Lorinda Pike - Owner of the local tea house, Doremus’ girlfriend (it’s complicated) Hector McGoblin - Advisor to President Windrip and later Secretary of Treasury Lee Sarenson - Advisor to President Windrip and later Secretary of State General Haik - Leader of the Minute Men and then the entire military Mary Candy - Cook in Doremus Jessup’s home Karl Pascal - Local machinist and communist Bishop Prang - Advisor to President Windrip while on campaign. Has nationwide evengelical, racist, radio show Effingham Swan - District Commissioner of Northern New Hampshire and Vermont
There are other characters buried in here but for the most part this is all we’ll need to make sense of this story here.
Plot
So, while there is a through line plot for our hero, Doremus Jessup, in It Can’t Happen Here, this is more of an exploration of an idea or events than it is a character story. For me the first 150 pages or so when Doremus is mostly an observers and chronicler of the slide of the US into a fascist state were almost all set dressing for the story that rounds out the rest of the book. Namely, what do people do average Americans do when their system of government is subverted.
We open at a dinner party where we are introduced to Doremus Jessup editor of the local newspaper and one of the middle class or upper middle class in the town of Fort Beulah, Vermont. After the meal they listen to the radio news and we learn that the US is in the middle of the 1936 Presidential Campaign. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip runs strong on the Democratic Party side with Franklin Roosevelt (Progressive) and Walt Trowbridge (Republican) splitting the opposition vote. Windrip is presented through speech transcriptions and excerpts from his book “Zero Hour” that lead every chapter until around Chapter 13 or thereabouts. Each of these exerpts leads off the chapter and gives some visibility and characterization to Buzz Windrip even though he never interacts with the main characters in the story. What’s interesting in the first few chapters here is that Doremus and his family don’t really take the Windrip presidency with any seriousness. Who would vote for someone who promises to throw out minorities, rails against the Jewish ownership of banks, plans to impose protectionist tariffs even though the US is barely limping out of the Great Depression, and finally, silencing dissent on college campuses and mass media. Who would vote for someone who promised a $5000 per year income benefit to every American? (adjusted for inflation as of 2025 that is $114,000). No one, Jessup believes, because it’s clearly bullshit, but he can see the impact that the regular radio addresses, rallies, and sermons have converted a lot of the low income and unskilled workers in and around Fort Beulah. The most important of these is the Jessup household’s handyman, Shad Ledue. Forever on the verge of being fired for not being a very good handy man, Shad becomes our lens into which we view and interact with the Windrip presidency. But that doesn’t happen for a while. In the early parts of the book Shad is the first to throw his support behind Windrip’s campaign because he believes it will make him able to escape generational poverty. Some of the locals are like him as well and as the campaign goes on they get more and more overt in their support. Shad eventually gets himself fired from the Jessups but not to worry, he has become the precinct captain of the local force of militia who report directly to Buzz Windrip, the Minute Men. There is a pretty good description of how all of the campaigns function, and ultimately how at the convention Windrip’s use of the Reverend’s reach, and his appeal to the historical conflicts that the US has faced using veterans of the Civil War as props, and clear racist conservatism via the Daughters of the American Revolution propel him to the top of the ticket. Lewis takes time to describe the convention in detail and how Windrip’s theatrical nature helps sway the sea of delegates.
Once he’s installed as President, though he refuses to live in the White House and instead lives in the top floor of a Washington hotel, Windrip begins his plan to consolidate power and remove the checks and balances that keep things functioning. First he arrests and imprisons the Reverend that helped push him over the finish line, then all of the congresspeople from the opposing party. After those steps, Windrip then breaks the country down into 8 districts with their own governors and Minute Man police forces. Creates a new singular political party “the Corpos” and taken control of all facets of the economy, military, and education.
This is when the US has gone completely fascist. All of the people who were hard Windrip supporters march and threaten everyone else that payback time is coming. This includes Shad Ledue who already has an axe to grind with Doremus Jessup because of the way pre-Windrip society was organized, Jessup was Ledue’s boss and their relationship has always been somewhat fraught. Shad Ledue wasn’t a great handyman but Doremus kept him employed partly out of a sense of pity.
With Ledue in power now as the regional Commander of the Minute Men he has the ability to torment Jessup and his family. But for now the Minute Men have more important work than tormenting Doremus Jessup, they are rounding up communists and social agitators, social democrats, and eventually anyone from the opposition party and sending them to work camps. Once in the camps the workers are leased out to industry and paid a dollar per day, 90 cents of which is taken for room and board. Whole families of the unemployed are relocated this way.
Very shortly afterward the government open concentration camps to house political prisoners that the Windrip administration uses for propaganda purposes. They make films of the camps where the inmates are “gently re-educated” into patriotic Americans. Speak highly of the food and the necessary work, etc… When in reality they are hard labor prisons and the sadistic guards torture and beat the inmates to force them to reveal the names of potential enemies of the state.
Jessup decides to quit the paper but he is arrested and taken into a “trial” before the magistrate Effingham Swan because of an editorial he wrote that was critical of Buzz Windrip. Swan tells that Jessup that he would like to kill him but he is going to remain free for now so he can train up another editor to take over the paper. During this hearing, Jessup’s son in law is brought in and threatens Effingham over the whole situation. Effingham has him taken outside and shot.
Jessup returns home. Mary learns that her husband is dead and her child has no father. She falls into a great, deep, silence and stays that way for a lot of the novel. Emma doesn’t really care about the state of the politics of the world and is, like always, more concerned with keeping a nice home and having friends. Jessup returns to the paper and begins training his replacement. During this time Shad Ledue continues to torment the family. He arrests and/or beats several of the smaller characters from the beginning of the story including Karl Pascal. Karl, as we learn quickly, is a communist and they are the first real targets of the Minute Men.
Let’s speed this up. Things get bad enough that one of Jessup’s friends suggests that he, Sissy, and Emma flee to Canada. With the expectation that he’ll be scooped up and shot in the head like his son in law, Jessup agrees. After a harrowing trip north in a blizzard the group is unable to get over the border and returns home.
Jessup’s son visits and spends all of his energy trying to talk his father into supporting president Windrip. Jessup decides then that he may not be able to break the government but he can’t sit back and do nothing. He gets some help from his friends and steals an old manual printing press from the newspaper basement and sets it up in the basement of one of their homes. They begin printing pamphlets criticising the government and distributing them around the state. Employing Sissy and her potential boyfriend, Mrs. Candy even, and others, the pamphlets give them all a sense of purpose.
The Minute Men begin burning books. Dozens if not hundreds of titles are declared illegal. Shad Ledue leads the Minute Men to Jessup’s home where they beat him and take all of the books in his study and burn them. Sissy tries cozying up to Shad Ledue to get information about upcoming raids so that she can warn people. She flirts with Shad but he isn’t a rapist, though he nearly does rape her. Sissy, as we remember, is barely 18 years old. Jessup warns her to stay away from him, but she’s sure she can maintain control of the situation. Meanwhile her boyfriend enlists in the Minute Men and begins to act as a double agent, later he is discovered and sent to the concentration camp. Lorinda works as as a delivery person and information gatherer from her tea house. She spends nights at Buck’s in bed with Doremus Jessup. Their relationship has changed though and they both know it.
The printing press operation is eventually discovered as are several articles and papers that Jessup had hidden in his study. He’s is beaten mercilessly and thrown into the concentration camp. In there with some of his compatriots, Karl, for example, they spend their days wandering around in a fenced yard or doing manual labor. In between this are more merciless beatings where the Minute Men try to get additional names of potential revolutionaries from all of them. Eventually the Minute Men begin to turn on each other and Shad Ledoux is stripped of his title and incarcerated for graft.
We also get a nice little aside here in that the US has been building up its military for a war of expansion into Mexico and Canada and one of the branches most in need of people is the Air Corps. Mary signs up and trains as a pilot. She has been single minded and mostly out of the story. We get this one chapter where we learn that she’s become a single engine fighter pilot and has stolen grenades with the plan to blow up the plane carrying Effingham Swan. The grenades don’t work but ramming his plane does and they are both killed. Ironically, Mary is awarded a posthumous medal.
Emma goes to live with her son.
Lorinda bribes guards at the concentration camp to get Doremus out and he escapes to Canada. After a few months of recovery he agrees to return to the US as a spy and agitator.
Thoughts
Okay So that was probably more dense in plot description than was probably necessary. Still, even this is just scratching the surface of the novel. Viewed through the lens of history it is clear that Sinclair Lewis was sounding the alarm as the US in 1935 was pushing towards the same trajectory as both Italy and Germany. Two countries where fascism has - at least temporarily - righted their economies. Huey Long was a populist Louisanna senator who was preparing a run for president under the Share the Wealth program which, like in this book, promised each American $5000 per year. Every man a king but no one wears a crown. Long was an agitator of both parties, though a Democrat he was pretty far left. At any rate he didn’t get a shot at the presidency because he got a shot in the belly on the steps of the Louisanna State House.
Long is, at least a little, the model for Buzz Windrip and some of Long’s sayings make their way into WIndrip’s book “Zero Hour” that we get snippets from leading into the first 15 chapters. There is a quote from Long that seems most appropriate to mention here. “When fascism comes to America it will be wearing the clothes of Americanism.”
So, jump ahead to 2023 and the ascendancy of the Trump campaign to the front of the Republican ticket. Some of the stuff that Windrip did in the book Trump does while campaigning. He holds long rambling rallies with little substantive information, publicizes grievances, attacks enemies relentlessly and not in the “proper” way that politicians generally disagree, rails about the current administration and promises a better world once he is elected to undo all of the wrongs that the current administration has created. He cultivates a deep relationship with very popular religious figures which helps swing the vote then, once in office, abandons those leaders and their followers almost instantly and carries out an agenda that will harm them in the long run. Economic policy, domestic law enforcement, and militarization are all part of the ongoing plan to remake America into his image.
I found myself checking the publication date as I was reading. It was like, at least for the first 150 pages or so it was a description of the current United States and I am writing this in June of 2025. The parallels between the fictional Windrip and actual Trump administrations are not only visible, they are terrifying. And, like the remaining 200 or so pages of Sinclair’s book we are all Doremus Jessup and family struggling under the boot of authoritarianism. Why Trump hasn’t banned oppositions parties (yes) he has damn well created his own, Trumpists, with their own political and social ideology Trumpism. You can map Lee Sarensen to Steven Miller, in fact that was how I pictured Lee as I was reading the novel, Peter Hegseth as General Haik, etc.. All of these people map to the characters in the book. It’s easy to see Trump as Windrip almost like Sinclair Lewis could see 90 years into the future.
Final Thoughts
Where It Can’t Happen Here was once a dystopian thought experiment of what would happen if fascism took hold in the US, it is now a document of how fascism took over the US 90 years later.
Go read it and shiver.
Hey, I Landed a Short Story
My short story Anna F will appear in a future issue of the literary magazine Portrait of New England! https://portraitne.com/
The Self on the Shelf 100 Page Challenge
Can you earn a place on a shelf in my library?
Hi, I’m Jeff DeRego and I’m a writer. In fact I am mostly a self-published writer with Fleas, and Park Place, and Team Shikaragaki Go! and Pleasant Hollow all coming out in the last few years with me as writer, editor, print layout guy, and publisher. I published Fleas after I paid for a professional edit, but for all of the other ones I’ve worked with writing groups and trusted readers to get the bulk of the subsequent draft fixes done then done the final edits myself. There’s a reason that Park Place took 8 years, I did almost all of the editing for that one myself.
I’ve been reading some other self-published writers’ work of late and, well, to be honest, it makes me feel better about the amount of time and care I put into the work I publish.
However, I have found a lot of fun in reading these novels and as so many of us are competing for an audience in a country (at least the USA) where the majority of the population tops out at 6th grade reading level (and a significant amount of them are functionally illiterate, like, literally haven’t read a novel in many years and can’t if they are asked to do so). Therefore, any amount of discussion outside our pocket sales group can only help spread the knowledge that our work is out and available. It’s an uphill battle not only to rise above the din but to make any headway at all among that tiny percentage of readers who’ll give our work a chance.
Getting our stuff reviewed is even harder. Where do we send it? Can you get it on Book-Tok or Book Tube? How? How do we find a place that’ll give us an honest review when there are tens of thousands if not millions of us toiling away all hungry for the validation that we have real skills?
Well, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring here and offer myself as a reviewer.
That brings me to what I am calling The Self on the Shelf 100 Page Challenge in which I will purchase and read your self published novel and review what I read with the goal exceeding the 100 page mark and ultimately finishing the novel. I will then publish a detailed review and critique here at Tumblr for all (of my 17 followers) to read and enjoy.
I don’t want your book. I want your pitch. What’s your logline? What’s your elevator pitch? Why should I read your fantasy romance/science fiction epic/teen angst novel/pulp detective story, etc…? No short story collections, no true crime, no nonfiction of any kind. I don’t want it and I won’t read it.
Pitch your novel to me and send me a purchase link!
If I like your pitch I’ll buy your book. I’ll start to read it, and I’ll review what I read. If you don’t know what my detailed reviews are like check out ANY of the Heinlein Marathon reviews on my Tumblr page. It’ll be something like that. If I fail to hit the 100 page mark the review will almost certainly be shorter and less detailed, but anything I go over 100 pages on will be very detailed and anything I finish will be very thoroughly explored.
Do you have what it takes? I’m not one to piss all over someone else’s work. However I’ll be pointing out the bad as well as the good. I want you to be a better writer. I want you to sell a shitload of books. I want an audience to find you and buy everything you write and look foward to whatever your next thing is!
This doesn’t mean I’ll sugar coat what’s wrong with your book, but I also won’t go out of my way to point out the negatives, unless, and this is a big unless, I don’t make the 100 page mark. If I can’t get to the 100th page there are serious issues with your book and I’m going to call them out so you can fix them with a subsequent release. And, if you ask I'll mark up the first couple of chapters and send the book back to you at my own expense. If I REALLY like your book I'll feature it on a future episode of the Bunch of Stuffcast.
Send me your pitch and your link in Tumblr chat or email me at [email protected]. If I buy your book I’ll post the cover here, book being held in my hand, at Tumblr and announce your future review.
Just a quick note that I am less inclined to read high fantasy because I don’t enjoy it at all, but who knows, yours might be the story that opens the door to the genre for me. I doubt it… but, stranger things have happened; it’s the same for Young Adult fiction. I do not find YA fiction in any way compelling minus Robert Heinlein’s juvi novels, so that’ll be a hard pitch but I am still open to them. If you pitch well, I’ll buy it.
Since I’m always reading (and writing) your book will be interleaved with whatever else I am reading so I am not promising short turnarounds on these. I mean, at the moment I just finished Sinclair Lewis “It Can’t Happen Here” and have started two Destroyer novels, and have to select the next Heinlein Marathon title, AND I’ve just been given Octavia Butler’s “The Parable of the Sower” and I am reading a self published supernatural romance called “Fated Bonds”. So my read will probably be a few months after purchase, but if you read through my Heinlein Marathon reviews I’ve been doing these for like 4 years or something and I don’t plan to stop until I run out of Heinlein novels or die - whichever comes first, and that sort of insane tenacity applies here. I may not be very fast but I am SUPER thorough.
So pitch to me! Why should I read your book?
Stop Giving Away Your Writing, Dumb Ass
Robert Heinlein established the rules of writing back in 1947.
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
In some of his other essays he also says in response to rule 3, that the editorial order better come with a check. This isn’t to say that everything we create is perfect but that significant changes to content should be after an agreement to purchase is made and only then. This doesn’t mean that we stop editing… LOL… A common take away from this rule when I talk about it with other writers. We are always editing.
I bring this up because it’s important that we writers not forget that we are selling our labor when we submit stories for publication. Good, bad, or other, it’s our labor. And finding the right markets or paying markets is a lot of the writing game. Market research isn’t my favorite thing, submitting doesn’t make me happy, and receiving rejections is… well… I don’t care anymore as I’ve received enough to wallpaper a room.
One of the aspects of writing that doesn’t get a lot of page space here is the ongoing relentless market research and submissions that are required to get work seen (and with podcasts, heard) in the wide marketplace. I follow a few different fiction opsn submission groups on Facebook where I do a lot of hunting for places to send stories. There are a few of these and they are really helpful especially if you have a specialty story or are from a specific author subgroup these are great places for REALLY specific anthologies on both sides of that coin. I have found some great indie mags there like Planet Scumm. It’s easy to find an anthology market with a cool theme that might spark a story idea, and really whatever skein of speculative fiction you write there is probably an anthology for it. Seriously! It’s almost like the, at least science fiction, short story market has become more varied on the low pay side than how current professional science fiction magazines are currently. This is good and bad. It’s good in that there are more markets that will look at your stories. It’s also good, in that I’ve seen at least some of these anthologies in actual physical Barnes and Noble bookstores so they aren’t being published then achieving only pocket sales numbers through the publisher’s website or Facebook friends list or whatever. I am sure the editors of these face the same sort of struggles that we self publishers do, namely getting these into a store, generating interest and ultimately making book sales.
Where the anthology market has its problems isn’t in the editorial bent or style of theme of the books it is the expectation from a lot of them that authors will submit for “name recognition” rather than actual either money or copies of the anthology.
Harlan Ellison has an excellent rant about working for no pay. Every writer should listen to him and record this as an MP3 and keep a text version of it on their computer to read every time they do market research. Lately these have been soliciting stories for “charity” and often no mentioning what that charity is… But that isn’t the issue really, it’s that because these are “charity” anthologies that writers should be happy to submit for no reward other than a publication credit in an anthology that no one will read. There are a lot of them out there who offer as payment - a PDF copy of the anthology.
How good is that? Not good at all. It is impossible to fill my car with gas on a PDF copy. It is hard to generate interest among my pocket sales group to buy anthology that I am in without even a physical one to show them. I’m in several anthologies that paid me just in a physical copy of the book, and for all intents and purposes that is at least something that is physical and has some measure of intrinsic value at the absolute lowest level of pay for effort.
Writing short stories is hard. It takes time and skill and a continuous refinement of skills and approach to stay engaged in the market until, like when you’ve landed a few pieces in Asimov’s you can get by on name recognition and can play all over the market. Until then being aware of what these markets are is really important. Depending on the rights that the publisher is buying you may be literally giving away a short story that, if you’re anything like me, has taken tens of hours to complete. But, as P.T. Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute. There are writers who submit work that they have slaved over to anthologies that won’t sell and won’t pay them for name recognition that doesn’t exist on a science fiction anthology about, for example, sea monsters.
To quote Harlan Ellison, “Tell that to someone, a little older than you, who has just fallen off the turnip truck. There is no publicity value of my essay being on your DVD.” Substitute in “short story” for essay and anthology for “DVD”.
Stop submitting to these things and they will go away. It is the only way to drive them out. Starve them of content, make them pay. Back when I was successful in selling stories into the podcast market there was a new editor with a new cast that advertised he wanted short stories under a certain limit for no pay and exposure only. He announced this in one of the podcast forums and was roundly corrected until he offered at least a token payment of $5.
5$ isn’t NOTHING. It’s not a lot, but it is a recognition of your work even if you are ultimately working for pennies an hour. $5 is pay. An anthology that has 30 stories in it would pay out $150 at five bucks per story. If you can’t scrape together $150 to pay for content, then stop publishing and do something else.
Short story writers, you know you can take the story that you slaved over and polished and make awesome and if all else fails put it up at the Kindle store for .99 and make a couple of bucks off of it more than you will ever make of a charity anthology.
When writers submit their hard work for free it reduces the value in the marketplace for all of us who are actively trying to sell our work. Cut it out.
Harlan says it better than me.
In other notes, it seems to be a week or two for arguing on the internet. This one is a Heinlein specific argument. I like Tumblr most of the time and spend some time reading and occasionally commenting on other writing content here and there. In one such case the OP was asking about recommendations for something to introduce their 14 year old non-binary child to science fiction and fantasy. I recommended Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky along with fantasy standards Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydian all of these books are good entry points for a teen to enter science fiction and fantasy reading. The reply I received was that Heinlein wasn’t “appropriate” because his writing was full of content that was “racist, misogynist, eugenic, and enemy of the LGBTQ community.”
Heinlein in the Modern World
In the spirit of discussion I asked where I might find examples of said concerns as I was a pretty avid reader and always looking for where a different viewpoint might be coming from. Was there something I missed in his writing? But alas, like so many other commenters who step in, the commenter only restated their position and told me to do my own research etc…
I guess the short reason I’m even posting this is because it irritated me. There is always room for criticism of stuff and Jeez-Louise I am certainly always interested in another interpretation of something I’ve read and written about. At least give me that rather than the knee jerk reaction “this isn’t appropriate” with absolutely nothing but some shouted concerns that literally aren’t reflected in any of Heinlein’s books that I’ve read. I get that it's easy to say "this was written in the 40s/50s/60s by an old white man therefore it must be everything wrong with that time in history... But in Heinlein it's demonstrably not the case. I admit too that some of his prose can be dated, some of his interactions as well are a product of the time when they were written but to write if off wholesale is just... I don't know... disappointing. Admittedly the commenter who prompted this makes drawings of other people's characters... so I guess it's apropos of the state of Tumblr.
But, god it’s annoying sometimes.
Rest In Peace Dave Thomas, Long Live Pere Ubu
I was introduced to Pere Ubu in 1991 when I was a "format show" DJ at WKKL the college station on Cape Cod where I went to school. The record Cloudland had been released a little earlier and we had a slow as molasses music director so it was still in the rotation clock even though it had come out at least a year before I got my Saturday morning show. The song we had in rotation was Bus Called Happiness.
A good tune for sure, but at the time not enough for me to really become amazed by their range and longevity. See, when I started DJing it opened me up to a whole new world of music. Acts that I had never heard of were suddenly in regular rotation for me that would not cross over to the mainstream MTV audience for months or sometimes years. So in that sea of new experiences, Pere Ubu was lost.
Who are Pere Ubu, You Ask?
I'll let Dave Thomas one of the founding members, and until last weekend, the only surviving member of the band.
Pere Ubu have been around since the mid 1970s and ultimately helped define the "post punk" movement before the punk movement really started. Their first real record, The Modern Dance has some of my favorite weird, rocking, stripped down, essence of punk songs like Non-Alignment Pact.
Previous to Pere Ubu, Dave Thomas was a founder of the short lived band Rocket from the Tombs. Some of the songs they created, and later rerecorded as Pere Ubu are some of the best of their early output.
By the time I really discovered them I was already an adult, with kids, and possibly even already widowed. I was reading something on the internet and it mentioned them playing live in Denmark and there was a link to a live video of them performing Waiting for Mary, the real single pushed off of Cloudland.
I vaguely remembered it, or at least remembered playing something from that record as a DJ. I watched the video, then another, and another, live, studio, interviews, and the world of Pere Ubu just opened up to me. I hunted every record I could find, and there weren't many to be found! One of the things with weird outsider music like this is that people don't sell their used copies, and new copies aren't really printed all that often. So, once Dave Thomas was selling these directly it was easier. Though Pere Ubu is still at the top of my list of records whenever I go used record hunting.
I was fortunate enough to see Pere Ubu twice live - 2013 and 2017. By then Dave Thomas' health was in steep decline and he was performing from a chair. That said he and his band were able to put on an amazing show.
That blurry blob in the middle there is Dave Thomas in 2013. The second show in 2017 was better attended and in a slightly larger venue. Their records are very much outsider music, for every Final Solution there is a Lonesome Cowboy Dave and all of their records are different and strange. The lynchpin holding it all together was Dave Thomas. The last record of theirs was 2017's Trouble on Big Beat Street. This throws back some towards their most acclaimed record, "The Modern Dance" from 1978.
This is Pere Ubu in the last iteration that I saw, 2017, doing arguably their most famous song, Final Solution.
I have my records. I have my memories. I'll always have Pere Ubu.
Rest in Peace, Dave Thomas. I'll miss you.