By Men, For Men, About Men

Maybe some of you have noticed we’re much more free-wheeling at VP than we used to be. We still aren’t intentionally offensive, but we don’t worry about offending anymore, either. There is a growing subculture that makes a lifetime hobby (or profession, in some cases) of finding excuses to be offended. Such individuals were never part of our target audience, nor will they ever be.

Virtual Pulp never was intended to be all things to all people.

With that in mind, I thought it was time to reassess our “mission statement,” and here’s what I came up with:

Virtual Pulp began as an intended second advent of pulp fiction/men’s adventure in an electronic format–somewhat motivated by the quixotic desire to lure men away from internet porn and the Breast Cancer Awareness, Pro-Homosexual, Anti-Gun Football League (called “NFL” for short), back to the written word.

That’s still part of what we’re about, but we’re in an ongoing process of removing self-imposed restrictions.

In our fiction, we don’t merely duplicate the material we enjoyed as boys and young men. Our efforts concentrate on retaining the attractive elements (namely action, adventure, and larger-than-life characters) while perfecting the weak links in much pulp and men’s fiction in years gone by (plotting, character development, accuracy in details, etc.). Our fiction also provides readers a respite from the obligatory feminist tropes and typical left-wing bias which permeates nearly every form and item of entertainment available today. (Available anywhere else, that is.)

We’re expanding into some non-fiction and even videos. But in addition to generating our own material, we’re always on the lookout for those diamonds in the rough…and of course we share our findings with those of similar tastes–mostly through this blog.

We’ll be putting that on the “About Us” page.

Our freedoms are being stolen from us. But while we still have them, we’re going to use them. In a perfect world, there would be no politics, no evil to point out and no sides to take. We won’t pretend to live in such a world.

 

Mad Maxine and the Culture War

Andrew Klavan has weighed in on the destruction reboot of Mad Max. The reaction to this flick could be fairly summed up as “A Tale of Two Worldviews.”

It would appear that the $200 million social conditioning tool is flopping—actually being outperformed by the sequel to some heretofore forgettable chick-flick about a singing group. (There must be some blog-worthy irony in a Grrrl Power flick targeted at guys losing out to a Grrrl Power flick for girls, but I’ll let somebody else report on that.)

However, if you perform an Internet search, you’ll find all the “mainstream” (left-wing) sources claiming that Max is strong at the box office. “Nyah-nyah! In your FACE, all you misogynistic naysayers! Your Y-Chromosome Ilk are falling for the brilliant bait-and-switch all according to plan!”

Andrew Klavan brings up a point that is related to part of Virtual Pulp’s mission (contesting the left’s monopoly on the culture):

As long as you conservatives stay on the sidelines, the left will win the culture and the culture wars.  As long as you refuse to build a critical and award-giving infrastructure to celebrate great liberty-loving works, as long as you praise only G-rated films while watching the R-rated ones in secret, as long as you dismiss freedom-supporting art because it’s naughty or contains violence and sex or four-letter words or sympathetic gay characters…

Boy, Klavan was really going in! Then he had to slip in the obligatory “gay” element.  Sorry Andrew: you can sneak mushrooms, onions, and even hot sauce into my bowl and, if the stew was tasty enough to begin with, I’ll dodge my spoon around those unwanted ingredients. But when you plop in steaming heaps of dogshit, I not only won’t eat the stew (or drink the Kool-Aid), but I will no longer trust the cook, either.

…or whatever makes you wrinkle your righteous little nose — as long as you do those things, the left will continue to use the culture to eat away the free earth beneath your feet.

And now Klavan has sufficiently recovered from his Pavlovian pander to the pervert lobby. His sights swing back on the target and he mauls it with a sledgehammer:

The results are already plain to see. Only a nation in which the left had monopolized the arts for 50 years could have elected a mean-spirited little anti-American incompetent like Barack Obama to the presidency while honestly believing him a messiah bringing Hope and Change. Only a nation that has been taught to believe what Shelby Steele calls “poetic truth” over actual truth could make that stupid a mistake. We learned to believe the Obama mythology at the movies.

For decades, feministas and white knights have been slipping their amazon superninja fantasies into action adventures. To a large degree, this has had the desired effect. More men have been assimilated into white-knighthood and the ridiculous ideas planted into the subconscious from entertainment have convinced people, for instance, that women in the military—even in the combat arms—is a great idea.

But this isn’t enough. Now the cultural programmers are trying to take it a step further. They’re gonna take an iconic hero, put his name on the marquis to draw fans in, then shove him to the sidelines to showcase the amazon superninja trope that they really care about, mix in plenty of explosions as camouflage, and assume you’re too stupid to notice their bait-and-switch.

Movies like this are an attempt at a transition. What they really wish we would do is make blockbuster successes out of overt feminista flicks like Tank Girl, Barbed Wire and Elektra, without needing to be tricked. Until then, though, they’ll hijack the heroic icons that have earned our admiration, to try programming us into liking what they think we should like.

If they had the confidence they pretend (much less some artistic integrity), the Ministers of the Propaganda Corps would come up with their own stories and characters, instead of hijacking, say, a historical figure like Noah to pimp their bankrupt mythologies. Instead they fawn in masturbatory glee over Frank Miller introducing a female Robin, and Marvel giving Thor a sex-change.

What’s sad is, George Miller himself has assimilated to the point that he willingly ruined his own creation in order to prove himself a loyal conformist.

In the past, I might have gone to see the movie anyway, in hopes that something good accidently survived to the final cut.  But the truth is, we’ve all seen this movie a zillion times already, only with different titles, actors, and camera angles. And all the desperate hype from the Marxosphere about how great it is only confirms what we knew well before it was released. Fool me once, Hollywood…

I refuse to pay for a ticket to Fury Road precisely because I am a fan of Mad Max and The Road Warrior.

Looks like some other men are finally wising up, too

Testosterone-Dripping Cover Art

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” We all know the cliche is true. And yet when we’re browsing for a good book, we forget or ignore that wise adage (I’m including myself here). I’ve made perhaps every mistake an indie author can make in this business, and one of them was publishing a novel with a weak cover design.

Subsequently I learned a few things about Photoshop, and took more time, making the cover better…but it still wasn’t great. Same goes for a few of my e-books.

Recently Virtual Pulp has enjoyed working with Logotecture, who designed the cover for the newest Retreads novel False Flag, and replaced the cover design for the first novel, Hell and Gone.

It's almost a crime to obscure any part of this image with text.
It’s almost a crime to obscure any part of this image with text.

We’ve found them to be accommodating, fast, reasonably-priced…and, best of all, Logotecture does darn good work.

Two decent images were merged and tweaked here to form something flat-out amazing.
Two decent images were merged and tweaked here to form something flat-out amazing.

The paperback version of False Flag will be published soon, and this is what it looks like. You can see they added the barcode already. From the tinting to the font, the designer did it all right the first time with no suggestions from us. He just knew what it should look like.

We are very fortunate to have found Logotecture and can’t recommend them highly enough. Whether you need a cover for a new book, a redesign for an old cover, formatting of a manuscript, banners or advertising art, they’ve got you covered.

Mission Veritas by John Murphy

In the future, the USA and other countries have surrendered their sovereignty to the Global Alliance—which is the puppet organization for E.T. imperialists (the Carthenogens).

Vaughn Killian’s life and parents are part of the collateral damage in the Carthenogens’ brutal occupation of Thailand. A naive teenage gamer when the story begins, he becomes part of the guerrilla resistance in Bangkok, learning to fight and survive on the streets.

Killian is eventually rescued out of there by a Tier-One American unit known as Black Saber. Once stateside he enlists in the regular military and is quickly disgusted by the PC attitude, couch-potato standards, and social engineering purposes of the whole fiasco (pretty much how the Armed Forces are right now, extrapolated a few years forward). Lucky for him, he is offered a chance to qualify for Black Saber.

Black Saber transports him and some other candidates to a planet called Veritas, where they will be evaluated based on their performance during one training mission.

veritas

Where this novel really shines is in the characterization. I guess we’ve all seen basic training/academy type movies (most recent in my memory, Ender’s Game had such a segment), and read such stories in books (Starship Troopers had this element) so it’s nothing new. There’s a reason it’s done so often—probably the same reason “reality shows” are so popular: all those different personalities crammed together can generate a whole lot of drama. In this book Murphy exploits that quite well.

There were a few technical details that gave me pause, and I really believe readers would have been happier had Kerrington and a couple other candidates received the dressing-down they deserved after all was said and done.

Tyla_Gore_AD

As a whole, Mission Veritas is far superior to anything the Hugo-nominated authors of the last two decades have foisted on us. It’s nice that the democratization of publishing has allowed entertaining fiction like this to slip past the gatekeepers and into the hands of readers.

Final judgement: A strong start to a military sci-fi series that promises much drama, surprises, and adventure to come

When an Obamunist Tells Lies in the Forest…

…But the alternative media isn’t there to blow the whistle…was it, in fact, a lie?

According to Sherman’s sources, in 2013, Williams refused to broadcast the news about a Justice Department memo justifying drone strikes against American citizens. Later that same year, Williams wouldn’t air a report that said the Obama Administration had known since 2010 that ObamaCare would cost millions of Americans the very same insurance policies President Obama repeatedly promised they could keep.

It never ceases to befuddle me how NeoCons and others seem to assume things like:

  • The only time Red China has ever shown brutality toward its own citizens was at Tienamin Square.
  • The only crime ever committed by Bill Clinton was perjury about the blowjob he got from a White House intern.
  • The only time the mainstream media has lied, distorted, covered-up or otherwise perpetrated a fraud on the American people was when Brian Williams lied about his experiences.

…Myers couldn’t get Williams to air a segment about how the White House knew as far back as 2010 that some people would lose their insurance policies under Obama­care. Frustrated, Myers posted the article on NBC’s website, where it immediately went viral. Williams relented and ran it the next night. “He didn’t want to put stories on the air that would be divisive,” a senior NBC journalist told me.

Divisive? Hmm. As opposed to how NBC and their fellow travelers handled the Trayvon Martin and Ferguson stories? ‘Cause, you know, editing the 911 tapes and their other race-baiting tactics weren’t designed to be divisive at all.

Vaginas Rule the Wasteland (But Enough About Hollywood)!

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.

Most Feministas Don’t Consider Themselves Feminists

A whole lot of recent news is comment-worthy, but it’s hard finding time to comment.

One story I really found illustrative is the one about Joss Whedon coming under fire for Avengers 2 not being feminist enough. Nevermind that Scarlett Johenson’s amazon superninja character is portrayed in Marvel movies as somebody who could take on Bruce Lee, Mike Tyson (in his prime) and Chuck Lidell (in his prime) all at once and subdue them in half a second without wrinkling her tights. Not strong enough, say the feminazis.

blackwidow

You’re a sexist unless Black Widow is shown to be superior to Captain America, Iron Man and Thor (not just Hawkeye).

But here’s a quote from this article that made me groan/laugh:

“For years Whedon has been lauded as one of the few Hollywood screenwriters who creates strong female characters.”

Face-palm. One of the FEW????????

Has this writer been hiding under a rock?

For anyone with eyes and a brain, it’s obvious that females dominating males is obligatory in the Hollywood Bible. Physically in action movies. Intellectually in sitcoms. Morally in dramas.

Okay, there are some weak female characters in romantic comedies; but the males in that genre are even weaker (except when the male is homosexual).

But white knights and manginas accept that as the status quo. It’s only when the cultural svengalis get really outrageous that anyone in the mainstream (including “conservatives”) so much as raises an eyebrow. Until that outrageousness becomes the status quo.

 

Can Well-Armed Alpha Dogs Rescue Western Civilization?

Loss of freedom. Militarization of the police. Politicians who routinely break the law and violate their oaths. A powder keg of race-based animosity. A mortally wounded economy. And an ignorant population hostile to those who draw attention to the real, underlying problems.

For some, these are signs of progress. For others, these are harbingers of impending oblivion.

That’s the scenario faced by the characters of False Flag. And then it gets worse.

FF1

This speculative tale follows how these and other trends may lead to their logical conclusions in the very near future; and how a few good men respond.

Those good men happen to be The Retreads, who brought smoke on terrorists and modernday pirates in previous novels.

Simply because it portrays a growing resistance movement in action, I’m including a clip in the Red Dawn remake below.

The Kindle version is now available for $2.99. Paperback coming soon.

“Sexist” and “Misogynist,” but Chicks Loved It

When I was a kid, I always swore I would never be like the old-timers of the day. You know the type. Always complaining about the country going to hell in a handbasket and how we were too young to realize what we had already lost. How we scoffed at their foolishness. After all, we were the generation that had invented sex and were going to save the world with our forward thinking. Now, I am that guy and wish those old-timers were still around so I could apologize. Accuse me of being a free speech extremist and I will gladly confess.

I mentioned in my last post some books and authors that were once common and relatively mild, but are now considered subversive due to their non-progressive themes and values. Others were more daring and controversial, but still were dutifully stocked wherever books and magazines were sold. There once was a time when people who invoked free speech meant it. The old-timers were right. We have lost a lot and we’re losing more every day. It’s amazing how the PC crowd has managed to give us a world that’s prudish and crass at the same time.

gorfantasy

In my hometown we had a bookstore run by the most devout Christian you ever met. He always closed on Sundays so he could attend church. He also stocked the most extensive inventory of girlie magazines in town. I asked about the apparent contradiction and he told me it wasn’t his place to say what other adults should read. My step-mother would use her employee discount at work to buy those same magazines which she brought home for my father. Mandingo sat in the bookrack at your local supermarket next to The Cross and the Switchblade. There were the obligatory busybodies of course, but mostly what you wanted to read was your own business and nobody would blink an eye at your choices. Fortunately, the enlightened few dragged us out of these benighted dark-ages for our own good.

Which brings us to the books by John Norman and Sharon Green—science fiction with a difference. At one time they were as ubiquitous roguesgoras roaches, and often as highly regarded. The critics savaged them. The general public considered them obnoxious, when they considered them at all. These books occupied the antipodes of Political Correctness. It was hard to find anyone who would admit to reading them, much like the missing disco music fans today, but they sold and sold and sold, going through printing after printing. There was a niche out there and those books fit in it like a hand in a glove. These are not literary masterpieces by any measure, but of the two, Sharon Green is by far the better writer.

John Norman (real name John Lange) is a philosophy professor at Queens College in New York. He has some ideas, especially concerning male-female relationships, that could be accurately described as retrograde in the current milieu. His first book, Tarnsman of Gor (1966), the first of many in the Gor series (also known by other names) is a blatant rip-off of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars with a tad more raunch. The word “misogynistic” gets thrown around a lot in discussions of Norman’s work.

priestkingsgorNorman’s works could reasonably be dismissed as a juvenile (in the sense of immature) indulgence of male fantasy. A strange thing happened on the way to the forum though. The books are very, very popular with women—at least a certain subset of women. I used to take the “pocket books” idea very literally and I kept a paperback in my back pocket everywhere I went. When I tackled the Gor stories, an odd thing happened. I was approached by women—a lot of women. The conversation usually went something like this: “Oh! You’re reading the Gor books! They are so good!” This never happened with a man. I eventually read 25 of the books. They were OK at first, but an ordeal by the end. Norman never misses a chance to push his philosophy, resulting in absurdities like the protagonist taking the time during a kidnapping to explain to the victim her proper role as a woman—for 93 pages. In another book, the protagonist and a comrade take the time during a battle to discuss a woman at great length—a battle that’s going badly. A critic once remarked that the series starts as fair science fiction, but rapidly degenerates into pornography and travelogue. That is a reasonable assessment. If your curiosity is piqued enough to give the series a try, confine yourself to the first 5 books. Assassin of Gor (#5) is most popular, followed closely by Nomads of Gor (#4), but I thought Priest-Kings of Gor (#3) was best. If you wish to experience the decay, read to Hunters of Gor (#8). Going any further is just masochism.

Sharon Green came to be a writer because she read a few of the Gor books and thought John Norman got it all wrong. She believed that Norman “doesn’t understand female submission.” She embarked on her own series of books where, strangely, the female protagonist winds up in basically the same situations as in the Gor books, just for different reasons. Her books were intended as a rebuttal to Norman. Fate was cruel, however, as her books appealed to the same audience and she was dubbed “the female John Norman.” Jalav, the female protagonist of the Jalav—Amazon Warrior series is tedious in her own right, endlessly whining about being reduced to a sex slave instead of being allowed to die a noble warrior’s death.

jalav1

 

Whatever the shortcomings of these books, however, the fact remains that the freedom of speech is near absolute. Norman and Green had every right to write their books, and their fans had every right to read them. Most importantly, you have the right to read them if you so choose. The good times were coming to an end though. Both authors were published by Donald A. Wollheim of DAW books. In 1990, Wollheim died and was succeeded by his uber-feminist daughter, Elizabeth Wollheim. Virtually her first act was to order a halt to printing of Noman’s and Green’s books, on the unlikely justification of poor sales. It is commonly believed that the truth was that she objected to them personally. The books disappeared quickly from mainstream bookstores, then from used book stores. Interested readers couldn’t find copies for love nor money for many years. Green would reinvent herself as a more mainstream SF and fantasy author. Norman would disappear from print for 13 years. Green would comment later that it would be impossible to publish her early works in the current climate.

Technology would come to the rescue as it often does. Alternative publishing brought the old books back from Never-Never Land and allowed new books to be published. The vital thing is that, whatever their artistic merits, both authors were punished for their beliefs, opinions, and self-expression, as usual by the self-appointed arbiters of tolerance and open-mindedness. The principle at stake here is far more important than the books themselves. Read the books or don’t. It’s your business. The fact remains, however, there are droves of people for whom the Constitution is a punchline—and that’s terrifying. Popular speech by definition needs no protection. Beware, the Left never sleeps, and the battleground is your mind.

Jet Jocks Over Vietnam

There’s an expression for people who consistently order more food than they wind up eating: “His eyes are bigger than his stomach.” That’s how I was with books in my younger days. It dawned on me yet again the other day while building more bookshelves for my personal library that, even if I never buy another book, I’ll still probably never finish reading everything I own before I die.

One of the paperbacks that’s been gathering dust for many, many years was this novel of the air war in Vietnam.

All those years, and then the first time I opened it and read the opening paragraph, it grabbed me by the throat.

Berent tells a rip-snorting story of men both in the air and on the ground serving with honor in a conflict in which victory was forbidden.

The characters are great—Hollywood prodigal Court Bannister; soul sick rich boy Toby Parker; and devout killer Wolf Lochert. Much like W.E.B. Griffin, Berent seems to like privileged, wealthy characters who don’t have to serve, but do anyway and prove to be natural, superb warriors. Not easy for me to relate to that caste, but the author did a fine job winning my sympathy.

And you will probably learn more relevant information about Vietnam in this one novel than you can from any and every history book that covers US involvement in the conflict. I’ve read plenty of fiction and non-fiction about Vietnam, and this has become my favorite so far–just from one reading. I can’t believe I only just now got to it. But I fully intend to read the next one, STEEL TIGER (Wings of War). If that one is as good as this one, I may read the entire series.

Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World