Articles with the Tag John Ringo

Oh no John Ringo!

science fiction, wingnuts
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I would just like to note Davind Hines’ delightfull takedown of John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series makes. If you don’t know Ringo, he’s one of an interchangable stable of authors writing the kind of formulaic mil-sf series Baen Books churns out by the dozen, featuring flint-eyed conservative he-men saving the world from alien menaces while spineless liberal appeaseniks are trying to stab them in the back. Those are bad enough already, both in content and writing, which is several rungs below David Weber, my personal bright red line below which I don’t bother, but this is much worse. A sample from the first chapter of the first book:

He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any “normal” human being. They purely pissed him off. He’d spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He’d fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in. He’d had one truly screwed up bitch get completely naked, with him naked and erect between her legs, and she still couldn’t say “yes.” And he’d just said: “that’s okay” and walked away with an amazing case of blue balls. When men gave in to that dark side, it made him even more angry then listening to leftist bitches scream about “western civilization” and how it was so fucked up.

It gets much worse and Hines is good at showing how bad it gets without getting the ick all over you, so to speak. What is it with Baen anyway? It’s not that they publish rightwing wankfests that I mind, it’s that several of their authors are decidedly creepy. There’s Krautman, who seems to think having the Waffen-SS star as heroes in one of his booksis no biggie, Leo Frankowski, who first presented a lighthearted rape in one of his intermibable Crosstime Engineer novels before moving to Russia because American women just didn’t understand a man’s needs and now Ringo and his not-quite rapist-hero and his collection of whores. To be sure not every rightwing Baen novelist is this batshit insane –David Weber might have some issues with liberals but seems quite sensible otherwise, while Eric Flint writes the same sort of mil-sf as the rest of them but featuring union members (he calls himself a Trotskist as well) — but there is a high percentage of outright nutters being published there.

Science fiction gets the reputation it deserves

science fiction
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With representatives like Vox Day:

But the greatest evil of women’s rights is demographic. Europe’s demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as women’s individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing Europe’s birth rates far below replacement levels. And women’s-rights advocates are now finding themselves in an ironic intellectual bind, as the onset of sex selection technology has them arguing that while a woman has a right to choose abortion, she can only do so for approved reasons.

Leo Frankowski:

I’d been getting less and less happy with America. I mean, I love my country, volunteered to join the service, paid taxes and all of that. But this Political Correctness thing was really getting me down. I was in my late fifties, a company president, a writer with lots of books under me, the holder of seven US patents, and a bachelor. Now, if I couldn’t speak my mind in public, just who in the hell could? The Feminists bothered me, too. It seemed to me that they were trying to be both men and women at the same time and failing badly at both. And there were a dozen other social changes going on that I didn’t like. I suppose that some of it was the way I was getting old, but I was sure that all of it wasn’t. I’ve often looked at the kids goofing off and thought “Amateurs! Hell, I’ve done dumber things than that!”. So there I sat, thirty miles from where I was born, old, fat, and lonely. Getting old just sort of snuck up on me. The fat was because I just didn’t much care about anything any more. Lonely happened because my family was gone, my friends were scattered across the country, and I couldn’t find a woman who wanted anything to do with me. And the more that I looked at the women of America, the less I wanted to do anything with them. I wanted a woman like my grandmother was. Intelligent, tough, and self reliant. Warm, loving, and absolutely straight. Compassionate with all that lived, caring and supportive, but don’t you DARE cross her! There don’t seem to be any of those any more in America.

And John Ringo:

“Well,” he said, grinning, “if you ever see me again, for the first time, be overwhelmed by a wave of lust and need to give me a blowjob right then and there, even if it’s in public. Okay?”
“Sure,” Ashley said, shaking her head. “Men. Maybe not in public, but we’ll talk, okay? This has . . .”
“Don’t let this put you off of men, God damnit,” Mike said, firmly. “I didn’t risk my fucking life to have you go lesbo. All men aren’t these filth. And if you decide they are, you’re spitting on what I did. Because the good guys want to get laid, too. Understand?”
“Understand,” Ashley said, nervously. “Christ, you sound like my dad.”
“Oh, that’s really what I needed to hear!” Mike said, spinning away.

Dialogue from one of Ringo’s latest novels, not the one in which revitalised Waffen SS soldiers save Germany from an alien invasion.

It makes you ashamed to like science fiction, reading these assholes. Especially the latter makes me sick.