DREAD Reviews 8
Dad Reads and Examines Authors while Distracted
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I like to write about war for many reasons. Witness how wartime pushes all humankind’s emotions to their furthest extremes. Not just that, war forces internal confrontations forcing our duality to the fore, emotions beating on us in waves every bit as hellish as speeding shards of deadly shrapnel. War weaves the human experience into strange tapestries of incompatible feelings that rarely coexist in safer environments - love and hatred, fear and courage, selfishness and camaraderie, hysteria and stoicism. I mean, I might as well list the entire thesaurus. Near any battlefield the full range of human experience will be on display with an intensity found nowhere else.
Another reason I enjoy writing on the topic is how wars bend reality. One might go to war and experience their grip on sanity shatter. Another might do just fine “over there” and it isn’t until they come back to peacetime they find it difficult to adapt. Perhaps wartime forces us to stare objective reality in the eye in all its uncaring, revolting horror. Perhaps in war one learns peacetime is a lie, a convenient cover, a blanketing illusion that shields us from a truth we’d rather not face. Or perhaps war is simply ugly business; the end result of hard times which force societies to pick winners and losers; only the strongest and most devious stand a chance to profit. Exchange your morals for new ones, mortal, or shed them entirely - adapt and overcome, what humans do better than anything else in nature.
Whatever definitions one may throw at it, war is a portal into another world, a dimension we all share and can travel to at the drop of a hat. You could go experience a war anytime you want - very little is stopping you, besides fear and perhaps having to work a McDonald’s for a few months to afford a plane ticket, that is (it’s not a dare, I’m not coming).
Oh sorry, you were here for DREAD? Okay, okay:
This pair of gentlemen read my mind (10 days in the future, so they’re prognosticators as well as telepathic). Somehow they knew ahead of time how I would draft the opening for DREAD 8 this week. First I wrote about writing about war and peace, now I’m writing about people writing about people talking about once writing about war and peace. It couldn’t be more perfect. Oh, and you should click this to see it has art:
Here we go again: Derek shows up in another short story and, surprise, once more I’m a total jerk! Last time I appeared in
’s short story as an anti-time-travel downer more concerned about reality and finances than romance or having a good time. It seems I haven’t changed much here; now I’m a blunt and literal AI assistant skipping past admittedly minor details to focus on the big picture - turning a big profit on the first day of sales and melting my customers’ faces off (I hope Emma is one of my victims):A spectacular fantasy setting where elves are Russian arms dealers and humans fight lizardmen like African warlords. As long as the motherland profits, those fey assholes don’t care who dies. Oh, and the most central part, the story features a badass in battle:
I saw this some time ago and bookmarked it to read later. Then one thing after another came up. Perhaps influencing my decision to procrastinate was that this is fanfiction.
I have since corrected my mistake. I can tell Andrew is having fun writing this and I look forward to seeing him apply his craft to something original. I found this additionally entertaining because the cyclical nature of battle and rebirth in Helldivers (haven’t played it) apparently shares some thematic overlap with my current project Chains of a Demigod:
Is it a comet? Is it a star? No, it’s a penis-shaped-alien-ovipositor-thing. You’d think this would be obvious - no, I have no idea what we pay NASA for either. Read this sweet and short piece and experience a truly enchanting journey through the eyes of an ancient space creature:
Hey, let me gas you a question: When’s the last time you took a breather? You’re gas is as good as mine. Silent but deadly, we evaded dangerous military petrols, sneaking deep into Megacorp HQ, but then someone cut the cheese and our cover was blown. Our chance of getting out? Gastronomically low.
If your tank’s a little empty then plop your gas down and take a whiff of this. On a website full of great gas-roots sci-fi authors, Michael is a significant gas giant and a first gas act:
The Pneumanaut asks robots: “Who's yo daddy?”
I wonder if the colleagues of the alien that claims to have visited earth to create humans as a scientific experiment asked this question too. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
“Will they worship us?”
“Naw man, we'll get wiped out and Bob will take all the credit.”
For all we know, Bob the alien invented the concept of worship just for us humans.
On a more serious note: it’s my humble opinion that if you create a fellow creator you have automatically ceded control of its destiny to itself. When this occurs is only a matter of time. I find this hypothetical scenario of humans creating sentient robots less of a God thing, and more of a parenting relationship. The most you should expect is some appreciation and maybe some comradery as it matures and eventually goes its own way. Unless you’ve hobbled it to depend upon you completely (is that even sentience?) it will be inclined to live, grow, prosper, and change with environmental pressure (or just die and now you have to try again). And one day when you try to ask it for some respect for creating it, it’ll say: “yeah sure but what have you done for me lately?” or even “I never asked for this.” I mean, have you ever talked to a teenager?
Like children, robots will just do exactly what they’re programmed to do. You can try all you want to guide your child’s development, but not even the most herculean of efforts will top the most important and first choice you make during child rearing - who did you make this child with? Control past this first decision is like a combination of mechanical bull riding and mid-launch rocket science.
Kiki is bleeding from a still-raw, self-inflicted wound. I’d like to help her but I don't have a band-aid big enough. I don't know if it's my personality or just my luck, but I ended up hating every single one of my exes. That said, it’s easy to like Kiki and feel for her after reading this. I hope she forgives herself:
In the mood for something wild? Andrea is 12 and gets abducted by aliens. Or time traveling futuristic spirit warriors . Or is it just the deep state again? It’s always them, isn’t it.
Jorge used to work for naval intelligence; picture less of a James Bond and more of a Dilbert-turned-barber. After talking some small town smack about cops, lesbians, and frat parties, a weepy navy priest named James (why is everyone using my first and middle name lately?) threatens him with a knife and says: “I hope you’re prepared because your midlife crisis starts now!”
From there we get a hybrid between Ender’s Game, Three Body Problem, and… put something less science-y and more metaphysically spiritual here (hush now, I’m trying to pretend I’m educated and well-read and three is an ideal number).
I’m totally here for Andrea's adolescent assembly of aura-alien assassins. Her dad the chaplain, being the father of a 12 year old girl, probably could have warned Jorge though. I doubt dad’s surprised when she says: “Dad! Get lost! Can’t you see I’m busy saving the planet from the machines? OMG I just wish one person could understand me.” Being the adult men that they are, though, James and Jorge didn’t come all this way to hear a bunch of preteen excuses about this or that movement. Certain other things are more important in life, little girl, and existential future combat is no excuse for bad behavior, young lady! Oh, you’re so grounded:
Kit asks us a question I often wonder myself. Why don’t people regularly say “excuse me, I need to go poop now” in the books I read? How often does someone lose their glasses or stub their toe and it isn’t even funny? I also think it’s important to write in an occasional 20-minute gap of someone sitting in a lobby waiting for a doctor’s appointment for a checkup or to get a prescription filled, or have someone comment on an article in the local paper. This should happen, and it should be realistic but also somehow entertaining - I don’t care if your book is about battle against supernatural horrors and space aliens and your main character is a general who never gets enough sleep, boredom and inanity are a facts of life, sell them to me or my immersion will be ruined!
To heck with this “but I want to write what’s interesting to me!” You can’t call yourself an author if you can’t make your character interesting when the answering service reminds them: “You’re on hold. Please stay on the line. One of our service members will be with you shortly.” Likewise, if you don’t have the energy to write about teenagers and their struggle with pimples, you simply lack authenticity as a creator. Not only that, it’s also important you write in a way that’s relevant to the story. Teens have pimples and those pimples should matter, or I’ll get distracted by how fake your world is. Call them Chekhov’s pimples, if you will:
What is the downfall of man? Addiction to drugs? Addiction to alcohol? No, not those. It’s women! Or in this case, a woman, and drugs and alcohol. Ignacio, a washed up kimono-pirate suffering from his midlife crisis meets a dragon wearing eyeliner (seems to be a lot of the midlife crisis in the air this week). The sex and violence in this is on overload and grips you tighter than Ignacio’s hold on his delusions, but props to him putting down several samurai in a fight.
History tangent - this story seems to take place in the Sengoku period, so it s incredibly kind of these attackers not to show up in their armor, of which close to 100% of Sengoku samurai owned in this troubled time (maybe the ones lacking armor being dead weighted the numbers). Swords of all types struggle against even cheap laquered lamellar plate, even relatively impoverished clans fashioned incredibly effective armor despite Japan’s historically poor iron quality. Realistically, a wet crunchy clavicle should instead be a cut-impervious comet of your unstoppable unarmored destruction, you filthy swashbuckler! On the other hand, samurai not taking this ambush or the threat of this pirate seriously also fits with the stereotypical arrogance of Japan's 16th century warrior caste and their self-superior attitudes towards foreigners. It would have been equally possible for these attackers to decide to line up and take turns challenging Ignacio to single combat. Even after watching our pirate wreck a good fighter or two, they’d probably keep dueling him - the average well-trained man of the era can attempt about 10-15 blows before he needs a serious rest. Ignacio richly deserves the moniker “oni” for fighting against several people trained from birth for war instead of dying instantaneously:
What is an old captain to do when his interstellar colony ship is dismantled and he serves a boring ceremonial role in colony leadership? Revive the old legacy of the forlorn hope, of course. Here there be dragons… IN SPACE:
The way John wrote this made me think it really happened. Thankfully, the guardians of Truth over at Bing and Google told me it didn’t:
I took all 14 of this issue’s reviews out to the yard for target practice. Despite being on the beefier side, I had the most trouble putting a bullet through David’s “Complex Kimberly” which I’m pretty sure means his work deserves this top spot I always put here on the bottom.
After reading this I didn’t really know what to say about it besides: Mean Girls meets teen slasher meets South Park? So I started summarizing literally what happens, read it, and decided simply reporting the facts seemed like snarky and irreverent commentary just by itself.
The main character, Kimberly, is low and shallow and peak absurdity. In the opening scene she’s busy tallying her dead classmates like it’s a yearbook superlative list: class clown, football poet, token black guy… She briefly shows a flicker of maybe being a real and relatable person by worrying how much getting stabbed will hurt. This is the first and final time we’ll ever worry about her demonstrating anything remotely redemptive.
Some guy we don’t care about saves her, but never mind him - her attempted murderer is a hottie. Enraptured by his steely jawline and slick and edgy murder-spree, she gives a kiss to his “thick, juicy suckers” as he literally bleeds to death. Like, sure, he’s a murderer, but he’s just so sexy, and maybe also deep, you know? Because she’s not just another murder victim - she’s got soul, and he asks her to write letters to him in jail. We know he knows she’s just as complex as he is. They’re a match made in heaven.
Fortunately the cops arrive riddle him with bullets before she’s saddled with this big responsibility. With him dead she has the free time to do what she really needs: make Instagram posts about how much she misses her would-be-killer and soulmate while describing how traumatic and special she is. I’d say she learns all the wrong lessons from this near-death experience but that would be admitting Kimberly learns anything at all.
She rebounds by developing a crush on a reanimated Hit-I mean Rudolph (he’s a hot Hitler). Rudolph comes into Kimberly’s life rocking a “Free Palestine” tee, blond hair, and an Austrian accent that makes her heart drop faster than you can say “war crimes.” What follows is equal parts hilarious and horrifying and of course ends with him revealing he’s the real Hitler and ditching her. He doesn’t give a damn about Palestine, his heart belongs to ze Fatherland.
Kimberly’s post-breakup spiral - edgy haircut, fake lesbian phase, Nation of Islam detour - is a whirlwind of cringe that lands her the most powerful job in the world: the first Muslim female U.S. President. At the ripe young age of 35 she’s till heartbroken for Adolf- I mean Rudolph, and now her finger hovers over a nuke button.
From tame to offensive, I give Dave’s story a rating of Molotov cocktail. It’s rude, crude, and doesn’t make sense. But if you have a sacred cow that needs stabbing, chances are high you’ll find it here, so go read it and you, too, can have this strangely satisfied feeling along with the taste of radioactive fallout in your mouth:
Me. At the end. My self-promotion. Part 2 of Chains of a Demigod is here. Part 3 will be ready Friday (it’s already 90% done). A lot like Kimberly, underneath all the bloodshed Nyl is a complex woman, you know? Part 1 saw Nyl deliver cold one-liners about strength and weakness while slaying folks left and right in a relentless pursuit of glory. But this time her companion Arcade takes his helmet off and, well… their friend Garuna might be dying, but Arcade’s got blue eyes, curly red hair, and looks so hot in a knight’s suit of armor:
Thanks for reading!
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Awesome review and collection! Thanks, Tony!
Thank you for taking my incoherent rambling and making it say exactly what I wanted to say 😭 And now please excuse me, but I have to go poop...