Category Archives: TEOTWAWKI

Sneak Peek/Sample Chapters, TEOTWAWKI

Power-Tripping Cop is a Role Model For Hitler Youth

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The sneak preview of False Flag continues.

(Chapter 1)

(Chapter 2)

(THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM A WORK OF FICTION. THE USE OF THE N-WORD BY CHARACTERS IN THE WORK DOES NOT MEAN THE AUTHOR TALKS OR THINKS THAT WAY.)

3

Y MINUS 20

SHREVEPORT, LOUISIANA

Trooper Jason Macmillan, 29 and fit with a full head of brown hair under his Smokey-the-Bear hat, turned his halogens on bright, then adjusted his side spot onto the little Chevy S-10 pulled over in front of him. After the make was run on the vehicle’s owner and radioed back to Macmillan, he got out of his cruiser and approached the S-10’s passenger window.

He turned on his big Maglite and shined it through the rear window into the cab. He didn’t see anything incriminating inside.

But that was kind of the point: he couldn’t see everything inside.

The driver rolled his window down. Already squinting from the bright light of the cruiser’s headlights and side spot in his mirrors, Joe Tasper was now completely blinded when Trooper Macmillan fixed the Maglite’s beam directly in his eyes.

“Driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance,” Macmillan said. “And please turn your engine off, sir.”

“I’ve got battery problems,” Tasper said. “If I shut it down, I’ll need a jump to get going again.”

“Do me a favor and shut it down,” Macmillan ordered. “Then please comply with my request, sir.”

Tasper turned off the ignition, dug out his wallet and leaned over to open his glove box. Macmillan rested one hand on his holstered sidearm. He’d never had to pull his gun in the line of duty, but could never tell when the opportunity would arise. Tasper handed over his papers and Macmillan took them, relaxing just a bit.

“The reason I pulled you over is that your windows are illegally tinted,” Macmillan said.

“I just bought the truck today,” Tasper replied. “I was on my way to get a new battery for it. I can take the tinting off Monday after work. You’ll give me a jump when you’re done, right?”

“You sit tight here,” Macmillan said, waving the license, insurance card and registration form. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“The store is gonna be closed in a half hour,” Tasper said. “I have to get there quick to get the new battery.”

Macmillan ignored him and returned to the comfort of his patrol car. He called in the additional info, but Tasper’s record was clean, except for normal traffic citations, and his story checked out about buying the pickup that day.

Macmillan took his time filling out the ticket. When he went back to the suspect’s vehicle, he asked to see the bill of sale, then looked it over. He questioned the suspect about why someone in northwest Texas had driven so far to buy a truck in Louisiana, but failed to trip him up or get him to admit anything. Macmillan added a seatbelt violation to the citation and got the suspect to sign. The suspect asked again about getting a jump start, but Macmillan ignored him and returned to his patrol car.

Normally he waited for the suspect to drive away first, but knowing Joe Tasper wouldn’t be able to start his vehicle now, MacMillan drove away without waiting. He decided to come back this way at the end of his shift and see if the S-10 was still sitting here. Who knew? Maybe it would be abandoned and he could schedule it for impound.

It turned out to be Trooper McMillan’s lucky night. A county mounty called for backup on a resisting arrest code. MacMillan floored the accelerator, flipping on his light beacon, and got the Crown Victoria rolling down the fast lane at 120. The incident site was only a few miles away. He would get some stick time tonight.

MaQuon Lutrell was pulled over for a “no turn on red” violation. The sheriff’s deputy asked to search his car. MaQuon had a bag of weed under the passenger seat and didn’t want to go back to jail. He heard people say that cops couldn’t search a vehicle without either a search warrant or the driver’s consent, so he didn’t give his consent. The deputy asked what he was hiding and the conversation soon turned into an argument.

When the deputy ordered him to get out of the car, MaQuon feared it might get ugly. And it did.

The scenario ended with the deputy and an increasing number of arriving cops beating on him with police batons. One of the arriving cops was a young State Trooper.

The beating took place in a well-lit area on a street connecting residential and industrial areas. Across the street, hiding behind a cluster of bushes, was a group of preadolescent boys. They were friends from school who got together to hang out one last time since Mrs. Thatcher was moving tomorrow and would be taking her son, Arden, with her to Texas.

The boys laughed and joked among themselves, watching the black grown-up getting the crap beat out of him. Arden bragged that he would be a cop one day himself, and get paid to beat up niggers.

Military, Sneak Peek/Sample Chapters, TEOTWAWKI

Why’s a Sharp Brotha Like You Workin’ For the White Man?

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Chapter 2 from False Flag.

(Read Prologue and Chapter 1 here.)

2

Y MINUS TWO

BAGHDAD, IRAQ

Jake McCallum hadn’t had many visitors since he’d been in the hospital. A few guys from Security Solutions, International, including the president of the private military company, dropped by. Ingrid–a field surgeon and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, checked in regularly. But his closest friend in SSI, Leon Campbell, was stateside. And after the first few days there was little break from the bedridden monotony in the cool, white room.

At six-foot-eight and with a massive, carefully-sculpted musculature, it was agonizing for Mac to lay here and feel himself atrophy. His arm was broken and his knee recovering from surgery. In a civilian context he would have been released to recover at home; but here he was treated like a wounded soldier because it wouldn’t be safe for him in-country in his vulnerable condition.

A black man, who was not Leon, appeared in the doorway and rapped his knuckles on the jamb. He was a little shorter than Leon, and huskier. “What’s up, my brotha?” the man greeted.

Mac noted his business formal attire, despite the environment. His shoes were in the latest style. The creases in his pants were razor-sharp, and his jacket was tailored to his V-shaped torso. With perfectly trimmed mustache and goatee, he looked like a model for the cover of Jet or something. Mac had rubbed elbows with plenty of Agency guys over here. Agency guys usually dressed business/casual Nobody except politicians dressed sharper than that.

From his bed, Mac chinned an acknowledgment of the visitor, who then entered with a very subtle three-legged swagger.

“DeAngelo Jeffries,” the man said, extending his hand. Mac wrapped his own huge paw (the one he could still use) around the offered hand and pumped it once.

“I’m in town for a while, checking things out,” Jeffries said. “Guy I’m with was assigned to debrief your girlfriend—tall Swedish blonde—so I thought I’d come by and holla at ya.”

“Debriefing” meant Jeffries was working for the Agency in some capacity. McCallum had wondered if his trip to Indonesia would get their attention.

“Nurse said they had to do some work on your knee,” Jeffries said, sliding the chair over to seat himself at bedside.

“Yeah,” Mac said. “I can get around on crutches for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to put weight on it before much longer.”

“Knee injuries are no joke, man,” Jeffries said. “I had to have mine scoped a few years back. It’s like the most critical joint in your body. Has to withstand the most abuse.”

“Hurt it playin’ ball?” Mac asked, slipping into a ‘hood accent without conscious thought.

“Yeah, you know it,” Jeffries said. “But nothin’ like yours. Speakin’ of ball, I know you had to play somewhere, with your height.”

Mac shrugged massive shoulders. “High school. A little college, before I went in the Army. So if somebody’s debriefing Ingrid, that means you’re here to debrief me.”

Jeffries shrugged this time. “Naw, man–nothin’ official. Wouldn’t do that here, anyway. But rumors go ’round, and I’m supposed to ask you some questions. That’s all.”

“What you wanna know?”

“You know: routine stuff. Like were you injured here or somewhere else?”

“On vacation,” Mac said, technically telling the truth.

“Where’d you go?” Jeffries asked, in a friendly, conversational, none-too-concerned tone of voice.

“Indonesia,” Mac replied, wondering how much Ingrid was telling this guy’s partner. She didn’t know everything, but she knew enough to raise some eyebrows in certain circles where a smart person never wanted to cause eyebrows to be raised. “My first time over there.”

“SOCOM never sent you over there, huh?” Jeffries asked, surprised.

So Jeffries had read Mac’s dossier.

“Not me,” Mac said. “They always had me focused on the Middle East. Taught me Arabic; oriented me on Islam; all that.”

Jeffries nodded. “I guess it makes sense you got a Private Military Company over here. Ain’t too many brothas got that kinda’ juice at War, Incorporated.”

“I’m only vice president,” Mac said.

Jeffries chuckled. “Looks to me like you do all the work at SSI, while the president just handles the administrative end.”

Mac shrugged again. “Nigga behind the trigga. You know.”

Jeffries shook his head, sadly. “We come all this way. Even got a brotha into the White House. But the white man still has the white collar.”

“Even in a war zone,” Mac agreed, chuckling himself, relieved that Jeffries didn’t seem to be hungry for details about his “vacation.”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” Jeffries said, suddenly serious. “But there’s a new development here. Al Qaeda is reorganizing; working on changing their name.”

Mac knew “former” Al Qaeda cells were instrumental in a lot of regional mischief. And white people were making entirely too big a deal that American tax dollars were buying weapons which found their way into the hands of the late Osama Bin Laden’s jihadists. The issue was much more complex than who was behind the 9/11 attacks and whether the new regime in Syria would be more hostile to the US than the old one was. Now, evidently, the jihadists were getting ready to topple the precarious post-Saddam regime here in Iraq, too.

“The withdrawal is a done deal,” Jeffries said. “The day is coming when you won’t have the Army or Marines here to back you up.”

“I go to the briefings,” Mac said.

“You ever consider working domestically?”

“In the States?” Mac nodded. “I tried to get on a SWAT team after I left the Army. Wound up a contractor instead.”

Jeffries shook his head, frowning. “I ain’t sayin’ you wouldn’t be good at it, but SWAT—that’s local stuff. The Man wants to keep us local and small scale, but we need to get in where the power is, on the federal level.”

“You mean like what you’re doing?” Mac asked.

Jeffries nodded. “I’m at the federal level. I got my finger on the pulse; feel me? And if bad stuff goes down, I’m in a position to do somethin’. Look at the whole Eric Garner thing…did you follow that?”

Mac shook his head slowly. “Yeah. Man, that jury…”

“That jury was just the start, man. You know I can’t talk about everything, but trust me, my brotha: it’s gonna get real ugly before too long. The man sees us movin’ up, now, and he don’t like it. I mean, we even got one of ours into the White House. White House. White. It’s their house, the way they see it. And they’re frothin’ at the mouth to make make sure us uppity Negroes don’t ever get up there again. There’s gonna be a backlash sooner or later, and you can kinda’ see it happening already.”

Mac considered his white friends. Some of them were just consumed with hate for Obama. They could rattle off facts and statistics to justify it, but what was the real reason? Then there were loose cannons like Josh Rennenkampf, who Mac was sure must be a closet Neo-Nazi.

“You got too much talent to waste on a SWAT team,” Jeffries went on, laughing derisively. “Or to waste bein’ a contractor.” He swept his hand in an arc–not to indicate the room they occupied or even the whole hospital, but the volatile country surrounding it, along with the chaos and military/political quagmire it represented.

“I dunno,” Mac said. “Contracting has been a good fit for me.”

“Well you might wanna think it over, my brotha. I might be able to hook you up, you ever decide to give it a try.”

“I appreciate it, man,” Mac said.

Jeffries stood from his chair. “Tell you what: I’m not gonna pry into your personal business about the vacation right now. You’re in the hospital, on pain meds. I’m just gonna say you fell asleep before you told me much. You get with Ingrid, find out what she said, then you can get your stories straight. Then we can finish debriefing. Sound good to you?”

Mac nodded, dumbly. When they shook hands again, it was in the familiar street method passed down and constantly revised by young men ever since the Vietnam era.

After Jeffries left the room, Ingrid came to visit him. She was a tall, well-proportioned, attractive Scandinavian woman, with a lab coat on over a nice casual blouse and pants. She asked how he was doing, and if he’d been questioned.

“Yeah. And he’s not done, either. What did you tell them?”

Ingrid shrugged. “What I know, which wasn’t much. I was on the boat when all of you went ashore. But I did see the one firefight.”

Mac groaned. Why did she have to mention that?

Well, he guessed the Agency probably knew about it already, anyway. “What did they seem most interested in?”

“Who all was there,” she said. “They knew about Tommy Scarred Wolf and his brother. And about you. They wanted other names, but I couldn’t remember them. I just gave physical descriptions.”

“Alright. If they come back to ask if you remember anything else, say no.”

They chatted for a bit, then she kissed him and left.

Mac pondered the whole strange encounter with Jeffries. The agent had saved Mac a whole lot of hassle, not asking questions there probably weren’t any safe answers for. In fact, if somebody really wanted to be a jerk, they could classify Mac as a suspected accomplice in the murder Tommy and Vince were framed for back in Medan, Indonesia.

Something bothered Mac about how easy Jeffries had made it for him. On the other hand, he was grateful to finally find an ally who saw things how they really were in this white man’s world. The negative possibilities surrounding Jeffries’ behavior paled in comparison.

Action, Politics/Current Events, TEOTWAWKI

Vaginas Rule the Wasteland (But Enough About Hollywood)!

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My gloomy predictions about the Mad Max reboot have been proven true. We’d all be better off if something like this fan video below was incorporated into a feature length movie:

Here’s the character we love and miss, in the milleu which has never been showcased as well, but in a story we haven’t already seen, which potentially fills the gap between the first and second movie, and doesn’t ruin the character, preach at us, or perpetuate the cultural programming we get from everywhere else.

So in other words, Hollywood would never allow such a film to be made. Same with Australia’s film industry these days, probably.

"Gee Goose: If only we had a strong womyn warrior to tell us what we should do..."
“Gee Goose: If only we had a strong womyn warrior to tell us what we should do…”

It’s not just the artistic tyranny of the SJWs permeating every nook and cranny of organized entertainment (except videogames so far, and a small outpost of science fiction authors). The authors, screenwriters, directors, etc. THEMSELVES, have been fully assimilated into the hive. All their pretensions of individuality are a pathetic joke: the same narrative is being pushed by ALL their hackneyed reboots, remakes, adaptations, rip-offs, knock-offs and “original” cultural-conditioning-disguised-as-entertainment.

But I’ve got a side-note that hit’s closer to home.

Even among self-described “red pill” males there is no solidarity. It’s nauseating how the feministas, SJWs, homophiles, cultural Marxists and other vermin routinely band together to push their agenda; but men on the opposite side are more concerned with hamstringing each other than cooperating on even something as small as a film criticism.

My article on the new Mad Max was posted on April 9. Yesterday, somebody on one of the big manosphere sites made the same warning. Initially glad to see somebody else getting the word out, I posted comments. Within a half hour my comments were gone and in their place was a comment by some other guy using the “Mad Maxi-Pad” joke I had made.

"You can run, but you can't hide! Sodomite marriage is coming to a wasteland near you!"
“You can run, but you can’t hide! Sodomite marriage is coming to a wasteland near you!”

This wasn’t the first time that ideas I’ve shared online have been “borrowed.” But why did my comments have to be censored?

Because I shared the link to my own, earlier Mad Max post.

Nobody at Virtual Pulp writes the “Five Ways to___________” or the “Why Serial Killers Shouldn’t Murder Pretty Girls” or “False Rape Accusation at __________ Campus” articles that is the primary focus at that site, but they obviously see us as competition.

And they can’t have that.

Ironic, because the article in question, reporting the same thing I did (over a month after I did), appealed to solidarity among red pill men, to vote with their dollars and boycott this flick.

Yeah, okay, you big team players, you. Since we’re all in this together and everything.

Politics/Current Events, TEOTWAWKI

The War Against Americans

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Every week this country is consumed in a new distended orgy of polarized, mutual hatred, set against the backdrop of outrage mobs, race riots, shuttered businesses, scandals, Twitter-induced career ruination, gleeful smear parties, and partisan hackery.

More and more people see writing on the wall all the time. But I had come to believe “conservatives” (whatever that means) would be the very last ones to realize or admit it, due to their myopic optimism.

That so many of them are sounding alarm bells now is kind of chilling.

My soon-to-be-released third novel incorporates into the plot many of the cultural, political and economic trends competing to topple America. Every day I worry that if I don’t finish it fast enough, the toppling will take place before publication is final.

Speaking of that, I better quit piddling around here and get back to work. But here’s a video for ya:

This idiotic conclusion by Brooke Baldwin is just one part of a narrative we’re gonna hear over and over until “everybody just knows” that veterans are dangerous. Almost as bad as (gasp!) Constitutionalists or (hiss!) gun owners.

This meme hasn’t even caught on with most of the flock yet, but I’m already sick of it. Here’s a few points that NEED to be made at every opportunity, to anyone capable of rational thought:

  • The Constitution is the law of our land.
  • Politicians (and all public officials) swear to uphold the Constitution.
  • 99.999% of them spend their careers violating, ignoring, circumventing and perverting the Constitution.
  • They consider their enemies to be anyone who would uphold the Constitution.
  • Their now-weaponized institutions like the FBI, CIA, IRS and Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, according to policy, consider patriotic Americans, gun owners, and veterans, to be a greater terrorist threat than actual, proven terrorists.
  • “Actual, proven terrorists” includes Bill Ayers, the mentor to and ghost writer for the individual presently occupying the highest office in the land.
  • Almost nobody cares. And they won’t care until it’s too late to do anything about all this.
  • And it’s probably too late already.
Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Revolting Developments in Revolution

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I mentioned recently that I’m on a TEOTWAWKI kick right now, in conjunction with trying to finish my third novel of Rocco’s Retreads–which is a genre bridge from military thriller (Hell & Gone) and men’s fiction/paramilitary adventure (Tier Zero) through dystopian SHTF speculative fiction (the new one), setting it up for a post-apocalyptic fourth novel, should I be inclined to write one. And if the world doesn’t end before I can.

So that’s the kind of audio books I’ve been listening to, and the kinds of movies/series I look for on Netflix as well. Trouble is, I think I’ve already seen (multiple times) everything that doesn’t suck. And more than enough that do suck.

But hope springs eternal, so this show called Revolution caught my eye on Netflix. It’s about some survivors trying to figure out why power grids around the world went down 15 years ago. (Nope, it wasn’t an EMP.) Civilization went back a few hundred years when the lights went out, to a sort of Planet of the Apes quality of life.

I previously reviewed The 100, and a lot of those criticisms apply to this series already by the 3rd episode.

Of course the protagonist is the obligatory Strong Independent Womyn. And, in a world where survival depends largely on strength, aggression and 24/7 toughness in a rough, unforgiving environment, women still sport vogue hairstyles; name brand shoes, prescription glasses, and store bought clothes are still evidently available; computer nerds have survived, maintaining their overweight couch potato physiques while failing to acquire a single survival skill; and despite reversion to survival of the fittest, our feminized culture is still perfectly intact.

Well, culture in this throwback world isn’t exactly like it is right now. It’s more like what the feministas pretend or wish it was like right now. So of course there are amazon superninjas. You just aren’t gonna get away from that idiotic trope in any action adventure from Hollywood. But you knew that already.

sillyrevolution

And there’s also nothing original yet in the plot or subplots. One of them, in fact, was lifted directly from Jericho. Remember the black dude who had some mysterious government connection who had a laptop that somehow still worked, and he would lock himself in a basement and connect to the Internet that was somehow still functioning, to communicate with other mysterious people also online somehow? Favreau’s writers\directors didn’t even disguise the rip-off so much. They changed the black man to a black woman, changed the laptop to a desktop, and want us to believe that an amulet about the size of a key fob not only overcomes the miracle of physics that made electricity stop working around the world, but is also an adequate power source for computers, radios and other 110 volt household appliances, that doesn’t need silly little things like wires or other conductors to deliver power to a device.

It’s commonplace to show military and paramilitary units moving about in a gaggle when contact is possible, in a movie or TV show, blowing noise discipline all to blazes. But I’m developing a pet peeve about Hollywood depictions of hand/arm signals. Their technical advisors have evidently researched the subject by watching other Hollywood productions. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but originally some pogue civilian film maker saw hand/arm signals used somewhere, misinterpreted what they meant, and put them in a movie. Other pogue civilians decided it looked cool, and copied the misuse. I wouldn’t doubt that grunts have to un-learn all this crap when they go through infantry school nowadays.

Like every other TV show and most movies, there’s too much stupidity to document. Just a few random highlights to give you a taste:

  •  In the flashback to the world before the blackout, there are two characters stationed at Parris Island with haircuts even the Air Force wouldn’t let them get away with. (The same two guys who have a conversation in the clip above, BTW. Their hair isn’t that much longer here than when they were allegedly in the USMC.)
  • Ammo is scarce in the new world, so characters have become expert swordfighters. The series badass is in a swordfight with a bad guy and has a few opportunities to kill him after disarming him, knocking his sword out of the way, etc., but instead he allows the guy to recover–as if we’re watching Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, who is just too chivalrous not to give his opponent another sporting chance to get in a lucky stab or slash. Finally, he knocks the bad guy unconscious and THEN makes to kill him. But alas, at this point the Strong Independent Womyn appeals to his morals, because to kill a momentarily defenseless enemy would be sinking down to his level, blah blah blah.
  • A gang of bad guys move in to wipe out a resistance cell that’s inside a building. They don’t surround the building. They don’t blow it up. They don’t set it on fire. They don’t kick in the door and murder everyone inside BATF-style. They open fire at the brick wall of the building with small arms from about 150 meters out, having no idea how many are in the building, what the enemy configuration is, or even if they’re still in the building. And it works.

As can be expected, “militias” are the bad guys. What’s interesting, though, is that they have a Marxist attitude toward the right to bear arms, and consider items like the American flag to be contraband.

 

Action, TEOTWAWKI

Mad Max Rides Again

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The reboot addicts of Hollywood have convinced Director George Miller to go back and fix something that’s not broken.

The Road Warrior was a landmark film. I won’t rehash my past commentaries on it here. Instead, check out this first car chase sequence:

Now we’ve got a fourth film scheduled for release this summer. When I first saw the poster, I was thrilled. Then I came to my senses.

So here are my predictions for Fury Road:

  • The Falcon Interceptor will be destroyed within the first 20 minutes.
  • Charlize Theron (and/or some of her Womyn Warriors) will fill the obligatory Amazon Superninja slot, as well as proving the most capable leader in the Wasteland.
  • Typical Marxist ideology will be woven into the film, including (but not limited to) environmentalism.
  • This time the sexual deviants will be on the “good guys” side.
  • Humongous (or whoever the villain is this time) will be thematically associated with the religious right.
  • Lots of vehicles will explode.

Those are specific predictions. My general prediction is: it will suck just as bad (or worse) than Beyond Thunderdome. Except the special effects will look better.

What Star Wars fan hasn’t regretted ever clamoring for more films after finding out how much the second trilogy sucked? I predict the same buyer’s remorse for this cinematic effort.

 

Adventure, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Holding Their Own II by Joe Nobody

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I’m a TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalyptic fiction fan going way back, to when I first saw The Road Warrior.  For many years, it seems like there hasn’t been a lot in the genre that’s well-written, unless you want zombies.

I’m working on such a novel myself right now, and wanted to keep my mindset grounded in the genre. So I’ve been listening to a lot of late ’60s rock (it works for me), and have tried a few TEOTWAWKI series on Netflix (all of which became overbearingly stupid after a few episodes).

I had some extra Audible.com credits this month, so I went shopping for a recorded book. And, being stung too many times by both tradpub and indie authors, I perused the reviews before taking a chance. I’ve been at this long enough that I usually know which reviews to ignore and which to pay attention to, and author “Joe Nobody” seemed to have a lot going for him. Also, his blurbs were competently written. (You might be surprised how many authors expect you to take a chance on their books after posting poorly written descriptions.) This is why I started the Holding Their Own series with the second novel–opinions were just about unanimous that the narrator for #1 was too awful to endure for hours.

So in this one, subtitled The Independents, the SHTF already, and folks are surviving as best they can.

The hero’s name is Bishop. Not sure whether that’s a first or last name, but it doesn’t really matter. He and his wife have a small ranch hidden in a canyon in Texas, surviving and minding their own business. The story kicks off when a former military/intelligence colleague of Bishop’s crash lands in a small plane after buzzing the hidden ranch.

“The Colonel” is seriously injured in the crash, and a whole bunch of other stuff is triggered as well. The plot involves a Colombian drug lord , a kidnapped girl, a treasure in gold, and a frustrated doctor without the right tools and materials to help his patients…just to name a few.

The adventure factor made this the most fun I’ve had in the genre since reading The Last Ranger and Doomsday Warrior series as a young man, though there are no radioactive mutants or B-movie villains in this one.

Where the author shines is in his characters. Bishop is smart and skilled. Not invincible, but he doesn’t cause me to groan like so many heroes in the genre, either. He faces some pretty intimidating odds at different points, and enjoys good luck for sure, but his triumph is entirely plausible as written. What’s more, I actually liked the character of his wife in this book. Most female protagonists in the genre are written in a way that causes me to roll my eyes and skip ahead. But this one is the kind of woman you’d want to have in such a situation.

Well, frankly she’d be a prime catch for any man in the western world these days, but especially in a frontierish survival scenario.

Mr. Nobody has made me a return customer with this book.

Fantasy, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Post-Apocalyptic Affirmative Action: The 100

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You can find this series on Netflix or Amazon.

The scenario:

Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war. Hundreds of people survived in space stations orbiting the planet. The space stations were sent up by different nations.  They eventually found “unity” and combined all their stations into one impossibly gigantic station called “the Ark.” Cute, huh?

This multinational colony all speaks English. No biggie–we can accept that, as it makes it easier to tell a story. There is artificial gravity everywhere in the Ark, too–even the sections not spinning. The ace mechanic (a woman, of course) manages to fix heavy machinery on a regular basis without even getting her hands dirty, and while maintaining a perfect manicure. Because booty. (That’s right, this actress, though typically skinny, has the nicest rump you may see on TV, and she’s also smokin’ hot above the shoulders. But you’ll only get treated to the full package when she’s first introduced.)

So much for technical realism.

Air and resources are running out on the Ark, so they send 100 juvenile delinquents down to Earth to both get them out of the space station, and to serve as lab rats and demonstrate whether the environment is survivable. There are some legitimate criminal types mixed in, but most are just misunderstood teens.

It turns out the Earth is survivable (or there would be no series). In fact, the “Grounders” (a primitive society descended from survivors who never left the planet) are doing just fine, biologically. They also speak English with no dialectic variation from the multinational space station contingent.

So what we have here is potentially a TEOTWAWKI survival story with plenty of conflict within and without the “100” culture for a competent writer to work with and keep interesting.

PC Utopian tweaks:

Every single leader of import is either a woman or a minority–with occasional antagonistic exceptions like a white male who leads a sort of lynch mob. And of course the best leaders are the females. Even the Grounders–a hunter-gatherer society where survival depends on physical prowess–have a female leader and plenty of pixie ninja “warriors.”

Ri-iiiiight.

There are a couple bad-boy types. One becomes the bleeding heart pacifist “voice of conscience” type after the ship lands. The other was a janitor on the Ark, and becomes co-leader with a Strong Female Character who is star of the show. Of course she is the stronger, wiser, more rational leader of the two. Bad Boy #1 has, as his girlfriend, the hottest chick on the show (the aforementioned “mechanic”), but, in a society where females are apparently in short supply, he ditches her for the plain-faced blonde protagonist with the body of a teenage boy.

In fact, within a couple episodes, the show began to resemble a soap opera. The question the audience is prompted to ask is not “How will they survive this catastrophe?” but “Who’s sleeping with who this week?”

Maybe that’s the root problem: Much like what feministas and SJWs want to do to video games (what #gamergate is all about), they have invaded genres like TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalypse and have twisted it into just another pop culture tool to sell their agenda and condition an audience that would rather just be entertained.

They weren’t content to have their own gynocentric gathering places and their own gynocentric entertainment. They have to take over what few male sanctuaries are left and ruin them, as well.

If you want to watch something in this kind of modern-people-dealing-with-prehistoric-challenges flavor, a much better choice would be Terra Nova. It only lasted one season, and is certainly not perfect, but is far superior to this flotsam.

Action, Adventure, TEOTWAWKI

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Four

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The countdown continues…

4. The Last Ranger

Here’s another hero that’s probably a beta male, but he ranks this high mostly because I enjoy the post-apocalyptic genre.

Whoever wrote under the name “Craig Sargent” was probably a peacenik from the Vietnam era, because that’s how Martin Stone comes off–despite being raised and trained by a Special Forces officer. The series was published toward the end of the Cold War and left-leaning nuclear disarmament sentiments permeate.

Yet despite the political proclivities and the beta nature of Martin Stone, he’s forced to act decisively and heroically due to the environment and the characters who inhabit it. He also gets his wick dipped on a regular basis, because there’s an average of one damsel-in-distress in every novel.

Major Clayton Stone wasn’t a Ranger, and his son was never even a soldier, so I’m not sure how the series title was justified.

I own all 10 paperbacks in the series. The plotting really goes downhill toward the end, like the author(s?) lost interest and were just typing words for a paycheck. But it’s a lot of fun prior to that. If I have to face a post-nuke future, I’d want to start from a secret mountain bunker full of automatic weapons, with a Harley and a loyal fighting dog to scout with.


I just found out these books are being released for the Kindle. And with the original covers! It looks like they started with the series finale and are working their way back to the first one for some reason. It’s great news for readers in any case.

Action, Adventure, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Castigo Cay by Matt Bracken

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Matt Bracken is a former SEAL with what seems to me an obsession about sailing. You’d think, when someone like this becomes a novelist, he’d try his hand at writing high seas thrillers after the manner of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt.

That’s not quite what he does.

Like a lot of us, Bracken is bothered by a government that views as it’s primary enemy the very citizens whose rights it was established to protect. Up until Castigo Cay the backdrop of his stories was almost entirely comprised of the efforts of renegade public servants hell-bent on violating a specific article of the Bill of Rights they swore to uphold. I’ve read and reviewed the first novel in his Enemies series.

Castigo Cay is a bit of an adjustment from his previous work–more of a straight-up adventure–with a point of view decidedly unorthodox, as you might imagine.

Dan Kilmer is a USMC veteran of the Iraq deployment who escaped the near-future dystopia in a 60-foot schooner, making a living as a sort of modern day privateer. His gorgeous, sexy girlfriend leaves him in the first act to chase her ambitions inside the economically ruined USA; specifically in the de facto fiefdom of Miami. Dan is sorry to see her go, but prepared to move on with his life, when another expatriate sailor brings him news about the shady billionaire who enticed Cori (the ex-girlfriend) away.

The billionaire is one of the amoral corporatists who has profited from the dismantling of the republic. He’s a real sicko, and has hired a crew of fellow sickos. On his private island in the Carribbean (ostensibly a “game preserve”) he brings young attractive women to be raped, tortured, then hunted and killed as if big game.

Dan spends a lot of his private savings (in the form of gold krugerands–the universal barter currency in the wake of the US Dollar’s obliterated facade of worth) and spends most of the novel on a sort of goose chase, but meets some helpful friends along the way.

Bracken really hooked me at the beginning with the strong characterizations. The story did bog down a bit, however, during the second act in the Miami area. The third act poured on the juice, though, with a return to the eponymous locale and a showdown between Dan and the sickos.

As apparently is SOP with Bracken’s novels, this one is packed with a lot of information, most of it about sailing. I didn’t always know what the names of different equipment referred to, but it was never so thick that I got lost, either. It reminded me a bit of The Sand Pebbles in that regard. I got the gist of it enough to follow the flow of the story weaved through this maritime universe.

Regardless of how right or wrong the worldview behind an adventure story is, or the technical details, what makes it sink or swim are the characters. Bracken batted it out of the park in that regard. Dan Kilmer is flawed to be sure, but he kind of knows it, can admit when he’s wrong, and when given the chance to redeem himself he charges straight for it at flank speed.