The book, like all of Stephenson’s, is extremely character driven, flipping from one viewpoint to another, often in the same time sequence, allowing the reader to experience the action from multiple viewpoints. It revolves around a growing cast of characters, starting with former marijuana smuggler, now online pole playing game mogul, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He brings along his adopted niece, former Eritrean refugee — now Midwestern girl — Zula Forthrast.

The motley lot expands to include an ex-Spetsnaz security expert, a Hungarian hacker, a Hakka guide, a Chinese virus righter, a Welsh convert to Islam cum-terrorist mastermind, an MI-6 agent, and an Irish American CIA agent.

One of Stephenson’s greatest talents is on display in this novel. He has an uncanny ability to take normal people and show how they are able to achieve extraordinary things when put in extraordinary situations. Unlike the ubermen of Heinlein and Hubbard, Stephenson’s protagonists are completely fallible. They make mistakes, break nails, fall over, and land face first in the mud. Yet, they still manage, barely, to make it out alive. Well, most of them.

This novel isn’t as groundbreaking as the one that put Stephenson on the geek radar, his cyberpunk thriller “Snow Crash,” based in a dystopian future. Nor does it deliver with the super technical red meat of cryptography that defined “The Cryptonomicon.” With a few minor forays into talk of secure network protocols and some other technical minutiae, “REAMDE” is much more accessible to a broader audience than most of his other works.

What really helps set “REAMDE” apart, though, is its take on religious extremism. There are bad guys in the book. There is no mistaking who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. The villains are Islamic terrorists who have no qualms murdering innocents, rape for ideological reasons, and kill whoever gets in their way. It was surprising, actually, as every other potentially bad actor is given a positive spin. Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers, CIA network specialists, they’re all good guys, regardless of their foibles.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the Christian isolationists living off the grid in the Idaho panhandle. They happily refer to themselves as wingnuts and don’t take themselves too seriously. They do take their individual rights and religious beliefs very seriously. The only really derogatory mention of them is by one character who refers to them as “Christian Taliban,” but he, too, goes to them for help and appreciates their frontier spirit in the end.

The book comes in at a whopping 1,056 pages, but the action never stops and the enjoyment never lags. The characters are believable, the story implausible and the little details that Stephenson fills the book with are, as always, breathtaking.  If you have a few days to spare and don’t mind getting nothing else done, I highly recommend it for some good fun.

Content Warning: There are frequent uses of coarse language and very graphic descriptions of violence.

That was the first coherent thought that ran through my mind as Ali bin Ahmed Al Falah’s chest puckered into a grapefruit sized exit hole right in front of me. Scarlet and white bits rose like a cloud as he went to his knees, heart torn in half and still pumping…

What ever happened to the world of men’s fiction? In times past, there were whole magazines devoted to telling stories men wanted to read, entire shelves full of books at the local bookstore devoted to men’s fiction. Westerns, pulp adventure, post-apocalyptic survivalist fiction, war fiction, and books that combined all of the above could be found in any B. Dalton and Waldenbooks at the nearest mall.

But now in 2011, that’s all gone. The men’s adventure category has disappeared from the modern bookstore, scrapped to make room for “Twilight” and every other chick-lit paranormal-romance copycat that is glutting the market. And that’s okay. I don’t have anything against Stephenie Meyer and similar authors. More power to them. Anything that gets people away from the TV and gets their noses stuck in books is all right by me, but what about us guys? Don’t we deserve a section of our own in Barnes and Noble?

Yeah, we used to be exiled to the sci-fi and fantasy section, but the ladies are starting to love those genres as much as we do, thanks to Meyer and J. K. Rowling. Those of us nerds who used to hide out in the sci-fi section, silently browsing the shelves and never looking each other in the eye, suddenly find ourselves being overrun with noisy tween fangirls and their fangirl grandmothers scouring our sacred shelves for the next Edward and Bella to get obsessed with. It’s maddening, I say. There’s nowhere left for us to turn. No more really good Westerns. No More pulp. No more War section. Nada. This is an unacceptable turn of events.

Well, I, for one, am going to be a champion of the Men’s Fiction Movement, which I just made up. I declare this, here and now, for all my Big Hollywood brethren to witness. I will be the one to shine a spotlight on the kinds of books that make full grown, meat-eating, hairy American men want to slack off on the job so they can read instead; books that will make the industrious among us steal a few extra minutes reading on the forklift while the boss is in the john, or pulling over to the side of the road in the big rig and taking fifteen just to finish a chapter before they hit their next stop.

That is my job, to point out the books you might be missing out on, and hopefully the guys of Big Hollywood (any of you ladies that want to get on for the ride are welcome, too) will be entertained by the books I review.

And with that, I introduce you to “Dead Six” by Larry Correia and Mike Kupari.

“Dead Six” is a modern techno-thriller set in a world that is only slightly different than our own. Mexico has fallen to a civil war, China has broken up into two nations, and Africa, as in the real world, is still completely effed up. The action takes place in a tiny Middle Eastern nation, The Confederated Gulf Emirate of Zubara, or the Zoob, to the local expats and foreign contractors who call it home. When the characters arrive in-country, the Zoob is on the verge of a military coup and is ready to pop. Wacky hijinks ensue.

“Dead Six” has a unique schtick, differentiating itself from most novels by having two main point-of-view characters, Valentine and Lorenzo, with both character POV’s told in the first person. They are not friends.

The novel is a collaborative effort. Correia wrote one character, and Kupari wrote the other. This gives “Dead Six” a distinctive flavor all its own, as each POV character sounds like a completely different person, rather than two different characters being written by the same author.

Most techno-thrillers nowadays tend to be alike in many ways. The heroes are usually government-sponsored, jut-jawed men of action in the vein of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp or Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, who act on behalf of .gov to save the day against the nefarious enemies of the U.S. of A. There are also the kinds of techno-thrillers written by authors like Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child which feature jut-jawed Men of Science saving the day against the insane CEO of whatever megalomaniacal, high-tech corporation the writers came up with to threaten the world.  Not that I have a problem with any of these books, but I’ve read them all before. Now I want something a little different.

“Dead Six” is different.

For one thing, instead of the jut-jawed, chiseled government heroes of most thrillers, you have a young, nerdy, burnt-out mercenary and a runty thief-slash-con-man fighting against terrorists, crime lords, and each other, in the middle of a city-state on the brink of civil war. And it’s awesome.

The secondary characters are all great as well. The heroes’ compatriots are fleshed out, engaging people that you grow to care about. The villains in “Dead Six” are the kinds of villains you find in real life, rather than in the pages of a James Bond novel. These are the kind of bad guys who won’t leave you to die in a pit of crocodiles while they and their henchman go off to creepily menace the scantily-clad heroine. Nope, these black hats will just drag you into an abandoned warehouse, saw your head off with a rusty bayonet for Al-Jazeera and be done with it; and the girl is not your problem anymore.

“Dead Six” is a pretty violent book. It’s about war and terrorists. Murderers, assassins, and torturers abound. The action is visceral and bloody without being overly graphic for you squeamish tenderfeet. Well, maybe a little graphic. Correia and Kupari know their business and portray the firefights and violent scenes in this book realistically. Both authors know their weapons, too. You won’t find any automatic revolvers or Glocks with cocking hammers in this book. The firearms and action scenes are authentic and well-researched. As a bitterly-clinging gun nut, I can appreciate that.

Action, excitement, ambushes, and desperate battles, with a little romance, conspiracy, and betrayal added for flavor — “Dead Six” has it all.

It’s not without its humor, either, especially for us red state plebes in flyover country. “Wow, you really kicked Michael Moore’s ass,” a character tells one protagonist after a fight with a large “slug of a man.” The narrator dryly recalls, “It had kind of looked like him… Naw.”

Correia is best known for his New York Times bestselling “Monster Hunter International” series. His new series, “The Grimnoir Chronicles,” began this year with “Hard Magic” and “Spellbound.” “Dead Six” is the first book in a trilogy, but it also stands alone.

Correia’s is a hell of a nice guy; a family man, an accountant, former machinegun dealer, competitive shooter, and a great blogger. It’s always a treat when one of his snarky political rants gets linked to Instapundit and a thousand liberals’ heads explode out of sheer outrage. You can find his blog here.

Kupari is an ex-Army National Guardsman, a former private military contractor, a hand-numbed wielder of .44 magnums, and is currently defusing roadside bombs in Afghanistan serving as an Air Force explosive ordnance disposal technician. Yeah, he’s one of those badass Hurt Locker guys, only without the death wish and the homoerotic wrestling. He’s also a nice guy, and he’s missed the release of his first book to serve his country doing one of the riskiest jobs in the military in one of the worst hellholes of the Middle East. Watch your back, Kupari, and send in the robot first.

You can find “Dead Six” on Amazon, or you can order the DRM-free e-book in any format you want, directly from the publisher, Baen Books, for only six bucks.

And just like crack dealers, Correia and Kupari have given away two prologue chapters of “Dead Six” which wound up on the cutting room floor, free of charge and for your enjoyment, just to get you hooked.

A floorboard creaked on the landing.  Shannon tensed, his hand frozen reaching for the cash.  He turned to see Benny’s dark shape likewise frozen by the door.  In their silence, they heard light footsteps running on the hall carpet.  All the pieces—all the half-acknowledged thoughts—fell into place in Shannon’s mind and he understood:  There was someone in the house.  There had been someone in the house all along.  That’s why he’d seen a glow at the door.  The someone must have heard them break in.  The someone must have turned the light off in order to hide his own presence.  Now the someone was trying to get to the stairway and escape.

For another second, Shannon hoped things might still turn out all right.  All they had to do was let the someone go.  Then they could grab the money and get out of here before the police showed up.  Even with Benny’s supercharged engine roaring for all the world to hear, they might still get away without being spotted.

But then Benny moved—and he moved so fast Shannon had no time to stop him or even call out.  His shadow flashed through the door like a streak of black lightning.  When he flashed back he had the someone in his hands.

It was a woman.  Benny was gripping her by the throat.  He shoved her up against the wall hard, hard enough to make the room shudder.  He shone his flashlight in her face and then down the whole length of her.  She was in her twenties, very pretty, with a curvy figure pressing through her blouse and skirt.  In the outglow of the flashlight beam, Shannon could see Benny’s bright eyes and the teeth in his fierce smile as he breathed over her.  His breath was a low, laughing growl of triumph and desire.

Shannon jumped to his feet.  He shone his own flashlight on Benny, the blue beam crossing with the white beam in the dark.

“What the hell’re you doing?  Let her go,” he said in a harsh whisper.

“Shut up.  Get the money,” Benny said.  He shoved his flashlight in his back pocket.  He held the girl by the throat with one hand and tore open her blouse with the other.  The buttons of the blouse pattered on the carpeting.  Benny grabbed hold of the girl’s breast.  The girl struggled, crying out in anguish and pain.

“I called the police,” she managed to say.  Then her voice ended in a gasp as Benny squeezed her hard and pressed himself up against her.

“Damn it, there’s no time for this shit!” said Shannon.

“Shut up,” Benny said.  He was crazy.  “Get the money.”

Shannon hesitated.  His blue flashlight beam played over the girl’s face.  He could see her terror and then her despair as Benny’s hand started fumbling under her skirt.  Tears streamed down her cheeks.  Her eyes went up and her lips moved silently.  Shannon could tell she was praying.

His heart went out to her.  He was surprised by the force of the feeling.  It was just one of those things you didn’t know you would feel so much until you were in the situation.  Now he was here and he was looking right at her, looking at her tear-streaked face.  He could see her praying and choking, helpless in Benny’s hands.  And he felt awful for her.  He knew he ought to forget about it, ignore Benny and just grab the money so they could get out when Benny was done with her.  He knew if he started trouble now, they were sure to get caught.  That meant prison for Shannon, prison for life.

But look at her, he thought.  An image flashed in his mind of the girl getting dressed for work in the morning, turning this way and that in front of her mirror, pleased because her blouse looked pretty on her.  And now Benny had torn the blouse and her face was twisted in fear and agony.

Shannon had one more moment of indecision.  Then he thought:  Shit.  Then he thought again:  Shit!  Because he realized there was no way he was going to just stand there and let this happen.

Shannon had fought characters like Benny a couple of times in prison, and this is what he knew:  there was no talking involved in it.  Benny was big and mean and drugged out of his mind.  There could be no threats or poses or hard-guy exchanges with him because by the time you got through with that garbage you’d be dead.  So he simply bent to his roll and slipped his crowbar out of its pocket.  It was small but it was heavy enough.  He stepped around the desk and took half another step and he was next to Benny.  Benny was choking the girl hard and mashing her hard with his hand under her skirt.  Shannon could hear strangled phrases of her prayer:  “Santa Maria…  Madre de Dios…”  That settled it for him somehow.  Without another thought, he brought the crowbar whipping around in a low Laredo sidearm and shattered Benny’s kneecap.

Benny did a sack of potatoes, dropped right down to the floor, boom, clutching his leg and shrieking like a woman in a horror movie.  All of which was fine with Shannon because what a piece of garbage this guy was.

The girl, meanwhile, staggered away from the wall, clutching her throat with one hand and the front of her skirt with the other.  She straightened and glanced at Shannon, confused.  Then she looked down at Benny.  Benny was writhing on the floor.  His shriek had sunk away to a series of gibbering sobs.  What a piece of garbage.

The girl looked up at Shannon again, hesitating, uncertain.  Even in the dark, he could see she was trembling violently.

“My knee!” groaned Benny Torrance.

“Aw, shut up,” said Shannon.  Then he turned back to the girl.  “Go on, sister, get out of here.  No one’s gonna hurt you now.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice.  She stumbled to the door and out onto the landing.  But just as she got there, the long, urgent cry of a siren came to them through the night outside.  The police.  She really had called them, like she said.  By the sound of it, they were turning off the street, coming down the drive to the house.  Shannon’s heart just about broke when he heard them.  He was finished.  He was going to grow old in slam.  He’d always known this was going to happen if he kept at it and it was his own stupid fault, but that didn’t make it any easier now that the time had come.

“You broke my knee!” cried Benny Torrance.

“Shut up, I said,” said Shannon sadly.

The girl was still on the landing.  She had halted there at the sound of siren.  As the siren drew closer, she looked back at Shannon.  He could see the whites of her eyes in the shadows.  She tilted her head down the hall.

“There’s a back way,” she told him.

Shannon gaped at her.  The sudden rush of hope gave him vertigo.  The siren stopped.   He could hear the police radio right outside the door.

“Hurry,” the girl said.

Dumbfounded, Shannon glanced back at the money in the safe, at his tools on the floor.  He glanced down at Benny.  Benny writhed and held his leg and went, “Ah God.  Ah God.”

“Hurry,” the girl said again.

Shannon let the crowbar slip from his fingers.  He took two long steps and was out on the landing next to her.  Instinctively, she recoiled from him, her arm pressed protectively against her breasts.  He was close enough to smell her fear and her sex and her perfume and the vomitous smell of Benny on her.

“Thanks, baby,” he said.

Still recoiling fearfully, she nodded.

Down the stairs, he saw the flashing red and blue lights of the police cruiser playing over the beveled glass of the door.  He saw the shape of a lawman approaching.

“Don’t leave me here!” cried Benny Torrance, clutching his knee.

Shannon took off down the hall.

—–

 Another excerpt will publish tomorrow morning.

 “The Identity Man” is available for purchase today at Amazon.

Times Square -

Jake Sinclair’s face was forty feet high on the Jumbotron above Times Square, smiling at some private joke only he was privy to.  Since he pretty much owned the media in the U.S.,, that was not an outrageous supposition.  Underneath his picture, the Zipper was proclaiming to the world: “WITH BLAST AT TYLER, SINCLAIR HOLDINGS SELLS MANHATTAN HEADQUARTERS TO GERMAN MEDIA CONSORTIUM.  CORP. HQ TO RE-LOCATE TO LOS ANGELES.”

Those who looked up at the Jumbotron at that moment would have seen Sinclair, speaking now, praising Tyler’s rival in the upcoming election.  “The Tyler Administration,” he was saying, “has forfeited all claims to credibility.  The attacks last year on the homeland — the first since September 11th — proved that this administration is not to be trusted with our national security.  Despite his gross and flagrant violation of civil liberties, President Tyler has not kept us safe and, in my opinion, it’s time for a change.  That’s why every patriotic American should send a message to Tyler and his part at the polls this November.  Not just ‘throw the bums out,’ but hell yes, throw the bums out.” He smiled the oleaginous smile that had made him a favorite of most of the media, for Jake Sinclair had long ago learned the first and most important lesson of Hollywood, which had since translated to journalism: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

“I hate that sonofabitch,” said Morris Acker to his wife, Shirley, as they traversed the new pedestrian zone and waited to cross over to 42nd Street, heading for the theater where Mary Poppins was still playing.  Once upon a time, this had been the crossroads of the world, the place where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersected, collided, and then split to go their separate ways.  In the old days — the very old days — it had been a concatenation of pedestrians, pushcarts, horse-drawn vehicles and motorcars, but gradually order had been imposed upon civic chaos.  Now, where traffic once had rushed, pretty girls sat and gawked at the buildings while the boys sat and gawked at them.  Meanwhile, cars fought for space in the few lanes still allotted to them.  It was a typically lunatic idea of the former mayor, a nasty little busybody, who had finally been driven from office when he attempted to delink the price of a slice of pizza from the subway fare by raising the former fourfold, on the grounds that would improve the health of the average New York if he ate less pizza.  And then he raised the subway fare anyway, on the grounds that people would be even healthier if they had to walk forty blocks instead of spending $5 for the subway ride.

“We should have parked closer,” said Shirley.  “If we’d parked closer, we’d be there by now.”

Morris shrugged.  He hadn’t gotten this far in life by wasting money when he could save it, and he hadn’t saved it when he could prudently spend it on Mrs. Acker.  It was one of the many reasons they had lasted this long together, longer than most couples their age, longer than most couples they knew.  An occasional trip to the diamond district nobody knew about, the merchants who conducted their business out of anonymous, well-fortified, buzzer-entry buildings on the west side in the 20s and 30s, not cheap but off-price, not open to the public unless you were mishpocheh.  You didn’t even have to be Jewish, just haimish — and if you had lived long enough in New York, you probably were.

Anyway, the parking garages around here were outrageous, and for a few bucks a trip uptown to the cheaper lots on the Upper West Side was well worth it, even with the new subway fares.  The Ackers were in from Rye for the day to catch a matinee on Broadway, an early dinner and then home to Westchester.  Mr. Acker was a recently retired employee of Time Warner, who over the course of his career had managed to upgrade his life by two neighborhoods, four automobiles, one boat and zero wives from his humble beginnings in the Five Towns.  In his opinion, if he never set foot again on Long Island, it would be too soon.

“But he means well,” said Mrs. Acker.

“You mean you actually read that scheiss he pushes?”  Mr. Acker spat, symbolically.  They were nearing the stairs at 42nd Street and Broadway.

“What’s happened to you, Morrie?” asked Mrs. Acker.  “You used to be in favor of social and environmental justice.  You used to be for the little guy.”

As he stepped off the curb, Mr. Acker looked down so as not to miss the step.  His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and nothing would be more ridiculous — or would kill him faster — than a stupid pratfall.  When you got to be his age, what was once funny was now lethal.  “Schmuck,” he said.

—

Across the street, a pushcart vendor was just setting up at the corner.  The man was slightly out of breath from his sprint uptown, but he had arrived in plenty of time, and now all he had to do was wait for his customers.  His cell phone buzzed silently in his breast pocket, and he took it out and looked at the display.  It was not a caller, but a text message.  He read it, then began his preparations…

—

At that moment, Marie Duplessis, a recent immigrant from Haiti, was trudging up the steps at 42nd Street, heading for one of her three jobs.  She had taken the train in from the airport, where she worked cleaning the bathrooms at Terminal Six, and was now headed to the Condé Nast building to perform the same task for the journalistic princes and princesses still lucky enough to have paying jobs churning out copy that instantly outdated long before it achieved print.  Luckily, she had had just enough time to stop off at her apartment in Jamaica to check on her pregnant daughter, Eugénie, who was all of 13 years old.

Eugénie’s pregnancy had broken her heart.  True, life in America, even in Queens, was preferable to Port-au-Prince, but there were trade-offs, differing social mores being one of them.  At the Catholic girl’s school back home, Eugénie at least had a fighting chance to retain her honor, but here…  The boys had found her quickly, like predators on a domestic creature that had suddenly been released back into the wild, with predictable results.  Back home there had been community, family, language, religion.  If you stayed within those boundaries, there was still a chance that a girl wouldn’t have to go the altar with child.  Here in America, there only certainty for people like Eugénie was a trip to the abortion clinic, and that was something her mother was simply not going to allow.  To Marie, every life was sacred, even this as-yet unborn offspring of her only daughter and some gang-banger, the kind of boy who would never have been admitted into her society back in Haiti.  America might still be the land of economic opportunity but the tradeoff in social dysfunction was not worth it.  Which is why Marie had just made up her mind to take Eugénie home to Haiti to have her baby.  She’d tell Eugénie just as soon as she got home this evening…

—

Stranded in the middle of the great intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Uwe, Helga and Hubertus Friedhof watched the crossing signals carefully, awaiting the green light.  They had been to the movies where, despite all the years of English they had taken in school in Germany, both east and west, they had hardly understood a single word of the dialogue, which bore not the slightest resemblance to the English they were used to hearing back home.  At least the tickets were cheap, just like everything else here for euro-bearing Europeans.

They were discussing this strange new language of the New World as they crossed the street, heading for one of the chain restaurants they had heard so much about back in Wiesbaden, one of those places that made Americans so amazingly obese, which they had to see and experience for themselves.

“Look!” exclaimed Hubertus, who was nearly 19 and about to leave the Gymnasium for university; with any luck, under the German system, his parents would only be financially responsible for him for another seven years.  Which is why they had had only one child — and if they had to do it all over again, they probably wouldn’t have.

Hubertus pointed up at the Jumbotron and to Jake Sinclair’s face.  Everybody knew Jake Sinclair’s face, even foreigners, and in point of fact the movie they had just seen and hardly understood a word of had been made by Jake Sinclair’s studio.  “… We betray our real values, the values that made this country,” Jake Sinclair was saying, at least according to the Zipper, which ran a crawl in real English across the bottom of the giant screen,  “the values that made this country the greatest country on earth…”

—–

Uwe was just about to ask Helga why the Americans were always banging on about being the greatest country on earth when the light changed.  The crowd moved forward, in that impatient New York way, but Uwe’s way was blocked by a young man standing stock-still.  Being German, Uwe’s instinct was to plow ahead.  He was sick of these Americans and their uncivilized ways, and it was high time he showed one of the natives how things were done in Germany.  Back home, if somebody was standing between you and wherever you were going, you simply knocked him aside, whether you were a pedestrian with the right of way or a bicyclist zipping down a marked bike path onto which some hapless tourist had inadvertently wandered, or even a speeding motorist, exercising his God-given vorfahrt vom rechts.

The pedestrian signal had already turned to the blinking red hand, and the numerical countdown begun.  Uwe pressed forward in that familiar way that Europeans have and that Americans, with their greater need for personal space, invariably resented.  The young man, however, did not budge.  Instead he turned back to Uwe with the most remarkable look of hatred on his face.  “What is your fucking problem, buddy?” he said.

Uwe stopped, taken aback.  In Germany, nobody spoke back.  They simply got out of the way.  But these rude Amis were a different tribe.  Well, their days of strutting around the globe as if they owned it with their no-long-almighty dollar were over.  “Ja, OK,” said Uwe, “so now we can go, yes?”  If Uwe had given it a moment’s thought he might have composed a more elegant valedictory.

—

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz had come to America on an express visa from his native Saudi Arabia.  It amazed him that, even after 9/11, Americans were still so friendly, so trusting.  Part of that friendliness, true, was owing to the country’s desperate need for oil, which ensured that the old partners in Aramco  would still have need for each other’s goods and services, and a little thing like 3,000 dead people and a gigantic hole in the ground in lower Manhattan would not be allowed to come between them.  As long as America ran on oil — and as long as the Americans, unaccountably, tied both hands behinds their backs by not drilling for it in their own country — Saudi-American friendship would go on and on.

It felt good to be standing here, just a few miles north of where his holy brothers had accomplished their spectacular act of martyrdom.  Before he embarked on his own martyrdom, he had made sure to tour the holy site, still essentially empty after all these years.  It was typical of the degenerate state of America and its inhabitants, he thought, to still be squabbling about something unimportant like a memorial when there was work to be done.  They could have shown the world that even a grievous blow such as 9/11 would not stop them in their godless pursuit of commerce and harlotry, but instead they reacted just as the sheikh had predicted, in sorrow and fear.

When the Towers fell — something not even the sheikh had predicted — there was much joy across the ummah.  But in the succeeding years, as blow after blow was plotted and then failed, the opportunity to bring forth the tribulations was slipping away.  What was needed now was a killing blow.  Beneath his breath, he began to pray.

And then he felt a tap on his back, more of a bump, and he began to fear that his prayers were not sincere enough, that he had been discovered by the enemy.  He slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the grip of the gun as he turned to see what was the matter.

—

The taxi let Hope and her children off at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd street.  To the east, a series of multiplexes beckoned.  They weren’t the kind of theaters she was used to back home — for one thing, there was no place to park — but she’d heard that once you were inside, it was like being at an especially nice shopping mall.     Behind them, the ugly monstrosity that was the Port Authority bus station loomed.  The Gardners had no way of knowing that at this intersection a century ago, one of the great gangland shoot-outs had taken place, the battle of Nash’s Cafe, which had taken three lives and spilled out into the street, bullets whizzing in all directions.  Had Hope known that, she would have offered up a silent prayer of thanksgiving that New York was no longer like that, this part of New York at least, that the wild West Side had long since been tamed, made safe for tourists and families and Disney shows.

“What’s that?” cried Rory, pointing across Eighth Avenue at something called Show World Center.  “Never mind,” said Hope, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him east along 42nd Street.  He would learn about porn soon enough, if he hadn’t already.  Up ahead, the legit theater marquees beckoned…

—

The man blocking the Friedhof family had not budged.  Instead, he was staring at his cell phone, as if waiting for a call.  He was also cocking his head to one side, as if listening for something, but the only thing he could possibly hear, besides the traffic, was the rumble of the IRT subway under the ventilation grate beneath his feet.  In any case, he wasn’t moving.

Uwe pressed forward again, deliberately bumping into the man. Pedestrianism was a full body contact sport in much of Europe, especially Germany, so what Uwe was doing was, by his lights, a perfectly reasonable way to show one’s displeasure and to remind the fellow to get a move on.  Unfortunately for Uwe, the man did not see it that.  Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz  turned back to him, but instead of speaking he pulled a revolver from beneath his windbreaker and shot Uwe Friedhof right in the face.

Uwe Friedhof never had time to realize what had happened as he toppled and fell.  Helga started to scream and then she, too, dropped with a bullet in the chest.  Hubertus, who had dreamed of studying the law in Munich, had just enough time to register a dark beard and a pair of piercing brown eyes when the next shot hit him in the gut.  He collapsed into the street, where he was hit by a speeding taxi anticipating the change of the light.  His body flew into the air as the cab stopped, then landed on the windshield and rolled off and onto the ground.

The cabbie, a recent immigrant from Bangladesh, jumped from his cab, recoiling in horror as he realized what had happened.  Three young women dropped their ice cream cones as the enormity of what they were witnessing overtook them.  Others screamed, cried, fled.  The gunman, however, never moved, but instead seemed to be talking to himself, muttering really, as the roar of the Seventh Avenue express train approached.  As the brakeman slowed the train, the roar changed to a screech, and Ali held his cell phone aloft in the air for all to see, and bear witness.

—

At that moment, Marie Duplessis decided that her Metro Card needed a refill, and that as long as she was here, she might as well go back down the stairs and put some more money on it.  She hated running for a train only to realize she was short of funds, so while she had money in her pocket and plenty of time to get to her next job she could take care of it now and not have to worry about it later.  She turned and headed back down the stairs.  She stuck her card into one of the addfare machines, punched in how much she wanted, and inserted a $20 bill.

Hope and her children were moving east on 42nd Street, savoring the marquees of the theaters on both sides of the broad crosstown street, trying to decide what to see.  This was not like even the big cineplexes back home.  This was a veritable feast of cinematic choices  There were a couple of vulgar sex comedies, which she was under no circumstances going to allow them see, along with the usual assortment of full-length cartoons, vampire movies, gruesome slasher flicks, and movies about giant robots that could turn into cars and other heavy machinery.  She and Jack had not been to the movies on a regular basis for years, and from the choices available, she could see she wasn’t missing much.  Why couldn’t they make movies like Tender Mercies any more?  Well, she supposed those days were long gone; not enough sex, and nothing to blow up.  It was going to have to be the talking cars.

They went inside the AMC Theaters complex on the south side of the street and bought their tickets.  Even though she was expecting the worst, Hope was still amazed at how expensive they were, twice as much as back home.  How in the world could people afford to live here was beyond her.

They took a series of endless up escalators, higher and higher, until she was sure they were heading for the top of the Empire State Building, which she knew was around here somewhere.  At last, they got to the top floor, where a giant candy counter practically begged them to spend some more of their money, but Hope steered Rory clear of temptation and pointed him and Emma toward the theater.  She was about to wonder what had happened to grownup culture suddenly the whole building shook and everything went dark.

—

A car bomb is no ordinary bomb, nor even an enhanced Improvised Explosive Device (IED).  In fact, it is three bombs in one.  The first bomb is the one packed tightly in the trunk or under the vehicle — Semtex, or C-4 plastic explosive.  Detonating with the force of 150 pounds of TNT, it will destroy everything within a 100-foot radius, shattering glass, penetrating and exploding brickwork and masonry, tearing and rending flesh.  Its fireball will incinerate everything it touches and, as the blast radius extends outward, it will singe all living creatures within a tenth of a mile.  But that is just the beginning.

The second, and worse, effect is the air-blast shock wave, which causes devastating failure in exterior walls and interior columns and girders, causing floor failure.  The third effect is shrapnel.  For, packed tightly into the plastic explosive, is an array of common objects — nails, screws, ball bearings, washers — that turn suddenly lethal when propelled at several hundred miles an hour.  They rip through flesh and bones effortlessly, hurtling outward like some ontological recapitulation of the phylogenic Big Bang.  And, in a confined space such as a movie theater on a New York city street,  the amount of damage they can do to human beings is almost incalculable.

The United States military calls them “VBIEDs,” or “Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices.”  When there is someone at the wheel, willing to die for his cause, they are referred to as SVBIEDs, the “S” standing for “suicide.” They are often referred to as “the poor man’s air force,” for they accomplish on the ground what cannot be managed from the air.  But the effect is the same.

Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz heard the explosion.  In fact, he could see it, across Times Square to the west.  That would be the signal to the others, the sign that the glorious strike was beginning.  They had planned this martyrdom operation for years, since right after 9/11, but the Americans had been too quick for them, had reacted too fast.  They had instituted all sorts of safeguards, been aggressive in their counter-attack, disrupted the domestic cells, shut off much of the funding.  What the movement had hoped would be a killing second blow had been on hold, first for months, then for years.

But then they had learned how to penetrate the defenses, how to hack the security codes.  Not on their own of course, but with the help of their friends in Russia and central Europe.   Left to its own devices, the ummah would never be able to create even a single computer, much less a network.  The only proper study in a university was the study of the Holy Koran, the divinely revealed word of Allah to Mohammed, his Messenger.  But he and the others were no longer students, they were holy warriors, jihadis; no longer dwelling peacefully in the dar-al-Islam but fighting the infidels in the dar-al-Harb, the territory of war and chaos, where the final battle against the West would be fought and won: on its turf.

It was true: so decadent had the West become that there were many who actively supported the jihadis and their networks, not men of Islam but men of no faith at all.  Men who would be among the first killed when the final triumph was proclaimed, men who cared so little for themselves, their wives, their families and their decayed culture that they would rather submit to the holy blade than raise up among them a Martel, a Sobieski, a Cid.  They deserved nothing less than scorn, and death.

The subway train beneath his feet had stopped.  He could hear the conductor’s voice over the loudspeaker.  He said a quick silent prayer and then pushed the talk button on his cell phone just as he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”

Marie Duplessis waited for the machine to spit back her card at her.  She was old enough to remember the days of tokens, and she guessed that, on balance, the present system was better than the old one.  But still, it was a racket, since a lot of times you never quite managed to use every dollar of your fare before you bought a new card.  Marie, who had a head for figures, reckoned that the MTA made millions a year in unused credits on the fare cards, but somehow it was still always broke, always asking for fare increases, and usually getting them.  The days when a slice of pizza and subway ride used to cost the same, and moved in lockstep, were over.

The card snapped back out at her and she took it.  There were plenty of rides on it now, and when she got home she would give it to her baby to let her take a ride out to Coney Island to get some sea air and some exercise before the baby started weighing her down.  Then, before she really started to show, before the other kids in her school started making fun of her, before the boy who had knocked her up started bragging all over Jamaica about how he’d treated this “ho,” before the other pregnant girls could start in on Eugénie, making her weak and soft, making her think that it was okay to do what she had done, they would catch a flight home, maybe leave the child with her mother to be raised properly, maybe put it up for adoption with the church.  It would all work itself out, and they could get on with their lives.

Alas, Eugénie would never learn of this plan because these, as it turned out, were the last thoughts Marie Duplessis ever had.

—

At the sound of the explosion Ben, the hot dog vendor, pulled out his AK-47 and opened fire.  God, but it felt good to finally be able  to strike back.  All the years in Green Haven and other prisons had hardened him, made him even more vicious and relentless than he had been growing up in Brownsville/East New York, Brooklyn.  Guys from Brownsville prided themselves on how tough they were, how relentless, how remorseless.  They had to live up to the standards of the old neighborhood, the place that had given America Murder Incorporated, guys who would put your eyes out with ice picks, who would hang you from meathooks and leave you there to dangle until you finally died, guys who ambushed you from behind and emptied a .22 into the back of your head as you were on the way home to the wife and kids with flowers in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other.  Who shook you down, set your stores on fire, stole your vehicles, slashed your tires and stole every cent you had.

Which is what had gotten him into trouble.  It was easy to leave Brownsville, but it was impossible to leave it behind.  The only rules Ben Addison ever knew were the rules of the street, the law of the jungle.  School held no interest for him, and when his mama managed to scrape together enough scratch to send him to that Catholic School one year, he never got along with the other kids, mostly Latinos, never liked having to wear a uniform, and seriously disagreed with the turn-the-other-cheek tenets that they preached there.

One hot summer night Ben and some of his crew had gone into the city — gone into New York, as some Brooklynites still said, to see what was up.  Even after one of the former mayors had cleaned up the place, there were still parts of Manhattan that outsiders were well advised to stay out of, and when they found a group of smashed college kids bar-hopping along the old gangland main drag of Allen Street, near Rivington, they decided to mug them.  The boys gave it up quick, but one of the girls had mouthed off to him, called him out, dared him to do something, and so he did.  He shot her in the head and then, because the guys had seen them, he shot the rest of them too.  One, though, had lived, and it was his testimony that had sent Ben to the slammer.  The mouthpiece had managed to negotiate the beef down to manslaughter, on the grounds that the kids had provoked him, and that they reasonably should have known that a man with his underprivileged background might react violently to any perceived assault on his manhood.  At sentencing, Addison’s court-appointed shrinks made the pitch that “black rage” had contributed to the events of that night, that Ben was not solely responsible for his actions, which were practically Pavlovian, and the judge basically saw it their way.  Ben got eight-to-twelve years, was out in seven.

And that had been the only break he had ever caught in this life until he got to Green Haven, which was where he met the Imam.  It was not until then that he learned what the words mercy and compassion truly meant — not weak weasel words, the way the Christians used them, but strong, muscular language that befits a warrior race.  Courtesy of the people of New York State, and cheered on in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Imam came regularly to minister to his burgeoning flock.  He was so much more compelling than the pallid padre and the rabbi, both of whom spent their time trying to understand the men and their crimes, to “work with them,” to tell them that God forgave them.  Well, the hell with that.

Most of the converts were, like Ben, African Americans, but there was a smattering of white boys as well, guys looking for something better than passivity and forgiveness toward others, cons who regretted their time but not necessarily their crime.  In Islam, they found a new way of looking at the world, at their society and at themselves, and they liked what they saw.  The Imam Abdul never forgave anybody; forgiveness jive was not what he was selling.  Instead, the Imam was selling punishment, misery, pain.  The Imam didn’t want to understand the old you: he wanted him to die, and be reborn, not as a sap Christian but as an ardent fighter.  You died in Christ, but arose again in Allah, whose plan for mankind required killers, not healers.  “We love Death as you love Life,” the Imam taught them to chant in Arabic, after he had trained them in the recitation of selected verses from the Holy Koran.  Ben’s childhood Christianity, what little there was of it, had sloughed away like an old skin, to reveal the proud Islamic warrior beneath

And so Ben Addison, Jr., had become a new man, with a new name.  He was now Ismail bin-Abdul  al-Amriki, Ishmael the American, son of Abdul, and his vengeance on the society that had spawned him would be terrible.  Once he had nothing to live for; now he had everything to die for.

—

“You know how I hate that word, schmuck,” said Shirley Acker, just as they heard the shots behind them.  Not that they recognized them as shots.  Like most New Yorkers, the Ackers lived in a gun-free world, at least as far as their social circle was concerned.  They were against firearms in all forms, didn’t see why a little thing like the Second Amendment couldn’t easily be ignored, failed to understand why anyone would hunt for food when you simply buy it at Fairway, and were quire sure that, were they ever to encounter a gun, one of them would quickly kill the other, or perhaps him- or herself, entirely by accident.  And should there ever be trouble in a post-Giuliani New York (they hated the sonofabitch, but had to admit that fascist had cleaned up the town), they would simply call 911 and the cops would come running.

“Look, Morris, there’s a Sabrett’s guy,” said Shirley.  “I could use a nosh.  How about you?”

—

With a muzzle velocity of 2,346 feet per second, and a 40-cartridge magazine, you could fire 600 rounds per minute and pretty much hit everything within 300 meters.  Unless you were a sniper, in combat you were basically firing at a man standing right in front of you, and the Kalashnikov was designed to be operational in all kinds of weather and under all kinds of conditions.  There might be better assault rifles — and there were — but none could touch it, even today, for ease and reliability.

Death from a weapon like the AK-47, even the cheap Chinese-made imitation of the Soviet original, was not like it was in the movies.  The impact of the bullets did not lift you off your feet and knock you back 25 feet.  Instead, it put you down, hard.  One shot might shear off the top of your skull.  Another might drill a hole in your forehead and blow out the back of your head like a pumpkin, but in either case you dropped, dead.

At the training camps in Pakistan, Ismail had learned to shoot.  Not for him was the gang-gangers spray paint job, stylin’ as they shot and pretty much missing everything except babies in their carriages and nuns on their way to Mass.  With the AK-47, you fire either semi-automatic — one trigger pull, one shot — or full auto, but Ismail had learned to husband his ammo, and make every shot count.  Besides, he wasn’t alone.  From all over midtown Manhattan, Chelsea, the Flatiron District and Hell’s Kitchen, more holy warriors had converged and were in place, freshly armed and thus far undetected.  In fact, he could hear them firing now.

The first people the former Ben Addison, Jr., killed were an elderly couple, who were heading for him, right in the line of fire.  The old man never saw him so intent was he on not falling on his face as he stepped into the street and the woman only had time to allow a fleeting look of understanding flit across her face and then she, too, went down.

Then he opened fire in earnest.  At first he fired single-shot, semi-automatic.  It was fun to see how well he had been trained, to watch the enemy — he didn’t think of them as “victims,” since everybody was a victim these days, most especially himself — fall, ripped apart,  just as first the paper targets had shredded and then the metal targets had clanged and finally the live-fire captives, scrambling desperately for their worthless lives, had been cut down in a burst of well-place fire.

Now people screamed and ran.  But withering fire came from everywhere, from all directions, high and low.  The brothers, activated by the sound of the explosions.  Gunfire came from everywhere, from several stories high in some of the surrounding buildings, from the streets, even from the storm sewers.  Screams rent the air as bodies dropped.  Panic broke out.  Nobody knew where to run, where it might be safe.  There was no place to hide.  Vehicles collided, pancaked.  And still the gunfire continued, a rain of fire from hell.

Phase one was now well and truly underway.  And then the ground beneath his feet rippled, buckled and exploded.

—

The No. 3 train was just starting up to leave the station for its run uptown to 72nd Street when Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz pressed the talk button on his cell phone.  The resulting explosion sent several cars of the train hurtling skyward, ripping apart the street where the ancient cut-and-cover was at its shallowest.  Immediately, the signal shorted out all along this stretch of the line, which meant that the trailing No. 2 had no way of knowing that the station wasn’t clear.  The resulting collision forced the cars from the demolished No. 3 train up and out into the street, carrying a load of incinerated corpses into what had become a running gun battle.

The force of the car bomb that had struck the AMC Theaters on 42nd St. was nothing compared to this.  Triggered by the cell phone call, more than a 1,000 kilos of plastic explosive had obliterated much of Times Square.  A giant sinkhole washed across the famous intersection, swallowing up cars, buses and small buildings alike.  The military recruiting center above the station was one of the first to go, collapsing in upon itself and tumbling into the abyss.  Beneath the ruined train, tunnels fell in upon themselves, then plunged down, into the network of other tunnels — electrical, steam — that had run beneath the streets of Manhattan for more than a century.

The ripple effect was terrible, as electrical systems failed, manhole covers were blown 50 feet into their dozens of blocks away and scalding steam flayed alive anyone unlucky enough to be near a vent when it sundered.  Chunks of pavement became lethal weapons, buried electrical wires became snaking, spitting instruments of death.   Worst of all were the ruptured gas lines, which quickly ignited and set ablaze the buildings directly above.  The air quickly filled with acrid, lethal smoke.

And still, gunfire from all directions continued to rake the killing field that had once been Times Square.

More tomorrow…

While the best tactics to achieve this goal are open to debate, its ultimate worth and necessity are indisputable – for too long, conservatives have ceded the most influential segments of society, from academia to Hollywood, to the Left with nary a fight.  The current sorry state of our movement is in no small measure the result of this refusal to engage the battle of ideas where it impacts people the most- the culture that they absorb every day through radio, Internet, television, and movies.

The piece which will appear in eight installments, one chapter each Saturday and Sunday, over the next four weeks, however, will deal more specifically with the literary world, and the conservative’s place therein.  For contemporary literature (by which I mean drama, poetry, and written fiction) is also more or less the exclusive province of left-wing thinkers and practitioners.

Some may argue that literature these days is not nearly as influential as movies, say, or television, and therefore perhaps not as worthy of conservative efforts to engage.  On the face this is true – far more people watch Sex and the City, for example, than read The Kenyon Review.  But in a larger sense, this argument misses the point and dangerously underestimates the influence of literature as a vehicle for poisonous ideas to enter the cultural mainstream.  

Let us say that a talented young person, whose passion is film-making, enrolls in an elite educational institution.  At that institution, he is exposed daily, both directly and indirectly, to the works of left-wing literary authors; in his university writing class, for example, he is given an essay by Susan Sontag to analyze and exemplify.

Let us suppose as well that this person is not inherently opposed to conservative ideas; nevertheless, having studied film and literature for four years without having been exposed to any conservative authors, he enters the film-making profession steeped in liberal thought.

Let us next suppose that this film-maker goes on to make a powerful movie which becomes a hit and is enjoyed by a wide audience, every member of which now exposed to the left-wing thought present in the subtext of the film.

This scenario, the trajectory of countless artists, illustrates the complex intersection between literature, art, education, and entertainment – all too often, it is on campuses and in literature where artists of all stripes are first exposed to left-wing ideology, to which they then give form in their work, some of which inevitably becomes popular and therefore a part of “pop” culture.

And it is precisely because literature has a foot in all of these worlds that I feel it is both worthy and fertile ground in which conservatives may stake a claim – if they are willing.

It seems, however, that by and large they are not willing.  There are terribly few conservative poets, fiction authors, and dramatists working in America today.  The aim of the following essay is two fold; 1) to discover why this is so, and 2) to explore ways in which this atrocious state of affairs may perhaps be corrected.

Tomorrow we will start by interviewing blogger, critic, and publishing expert Michael Blowhard.

Read Mr. Patterson’s “A Conservative Journey Through Literary America — Part 2: A Conversation With Michael Blowhard”

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

Opening sentence: “Suddenly I woke up strapped to a chair.”

Strapped to that chair is Charlie West, a typically bright and motivated high school student who has no idea how he got there. The last thing he remembers is a good though unexceptional school day but nothing that connects to the where, how or why of his present and immediate circumstance. Not only has he been tortured, but voices in the hall have just decided to kill him … slowly.

From here Charlie will have to escape, out run and out-wit his deadly, resourceful captors and unravel what happened in-between scoring a first date with his dream girl and waking up in, well,  an Andrew Klavan page turner. The plot never stops moving or thickening and as the pieces come together, Charlie finds himself the only hope between … and that’s all you’re getting from me.

As fascinating as the story is, our protagonist Charlie West, a young man who rebels against lock-step conformity, questions authority and is unafraid to speak truth to power is just as fascinating because he really is all of those things.  Charlie’s a Christian who sees a satisfying future in serving his country and is unafraid to stand up to a politically correct history teacher even if it means a lower grade.

You could fill an ocean with books portraying left-wing teenagers as outsiders, but that’s about as dishonest as you can get. Assuming the anti-American, politically correct default position is The New Conformity – is creating a one-dimensional character – is about as radical as bringing aluminum cans to a recycling center.

Charlie West is not only a refreshing and original burst of fresh air, he’s an iconoclast and an alternative for parents who might like their kids to read about a hero who isn’t a one-dimensional walking leftist cliché, down on America, organized religion and all into Mother Earth.

I’m two decades older than the intended audience, not a fiction reader, nor a book reviewer, but reading something written by someone from our side who not only gets it but can do it so well is the real pleasure in all this. There are two things we conservatives concerned with the culture must do to further the cause. First, support the work created by artists sympathetic to our side. Second, support it only when it’s good.

With “The Last Thing I Remember” you’re doing both.

“The Last I Remember” is published Thomas Nelson and available tomorrow. 

Any artist wants their work to be appreciated. And most artists want to leave a lasting impression. In order to do that, you are either naturally gifted and can do that through your instinctive performance, or you can do it through an understanding of the driving forces that make it happen.

Most people fall into the second category. That does not make them lesser artists. Even the people with natural talent can improve it by honing their craft and learning new tricks.

Where all this falls into the realm of this discussion centers around what I call the point of a story.

Think of it like the business end of a sword. If a sword is dull, it has less a chance to do its job effectively. Of course, most of us writers don’t want to hurt anyone with our work. We want to entertain. Enlighten, if possible. But some have lost track of why they’re doing this. Whether intentionally or not, they are hurting people with their fiction. They are doing harm. Their sword is being put to bad use.

We’re attracted to stories because we not only want to be entertained, we want to feel something. And for a story to do that, it needs to speak to us personally. It needs to tell us something we can relate to. Something we can understand. Even if the subject matter or situation is absurd, there has to be some kind of truth in there.

The stories that stand the test of time are the ones that hit home in some way. They are the ones we can get some kind of personal insight or meaning from. The reason? Stories act to make sense of the senselessness of our existence. They’re a tool for putting reality in perspective.

Reality is a vast, complex and often scary place. If you were to bother to look up the size of certain heavenly bodies for example, you would find you could fit around a million worlds the size of the earth in our sun. And as big as our sun is, you could fit 350 million Earth suns into the star Antares. And Antares is just one of a nearly uncountable number of stars in a possibly infinite universe. Which may only be one universe in an infinite amount of parallel universes. So, yeah, we’re pretty small in relation to all that. Even George Clooney’s ego.

It’s hard enough for contemporary people to take in our crazy world, but imagine how it was for our ancestors who knew almost nothing. They had to figure out why things happened and they had to get really creative. They didn’t have Google. They had to wing it.

Fiction was invented, in part, to provide a context for life. Religion (depending on your point of view, of course) sprang from a need to lay down some ground rules so a society could function properly. People learned that certain actions had bad consequences. So they wrote down rules that said: “Don’t do that, stupid!” And when people did that anyway, they said: “Do that again and you’ll regret it!”

in 350 BC, Greek Philosopher Aristotle explained how fiction worked in The Poetics. He explained that people can relate to cause and effect in a story. This is because in real life, actions often equal some kind of result, either good or bad. And we can all relate to that.

But we can’t relate to stories where a character does something that doesn’t make sense to us. And the result of their actions makes even less sense.

We’ve all seen those movies. Throw a rock in a video store and you’ll hit one.

The problem with a lot of entertainment today is that mindset has dominated the scene that tells us illogical things. Things that don’t ring true to us living in the real world. This is because the producers who commission these stories, the editors who supervise them, the writers who slap them together are either coming from a place of unreality and delusion, or they are trying to impose some kind of vision of reality that they want to believe on the rest of us.

This often results in bad fiction. Whether it’s in comic books, plays or films, even if it comes in the lyrics of a song, or a comedian’s joke, fiction is trying to pass on a version of reality to the audience. And many creative people today are passing on a negative, defeatist or depressing message that doesn’t really offer any solutions, hope or lessons worth a damn.

Stories don’t have to be uplifting or even positive to be good. But they have to have meaning to be relevant or effective. The meaning passed along by many of today’s entertainment is neither helpful or constructive.

Some creative people today are making fiction that seeks to tear down society, through slurs and condemnation. But they offer no ideas, no constructive solutions, and for many of us, no reason to agree with them. But to young impressionable minds, this is harmful because it makes many kids think it’s a form of reality. As I said, fiction can serve to put reality in perspective. The perspective many kids are getting is one of hopelessness, anger, fear and paranoia.

Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon had an axiom that 90% of everything is crap. He said that in the 1950s, so this isn’t a new problem. But if we want to make a difference and improve entertainment, we need to start focusing on solutions instead of sitting off to one side throwing bottles at the walls of the institutions we’re annoyed with.

We have to bring our convictions, values and ideas to the table. The naysayers will try to beat us down, but guess what? We don’t need their approval. Opportunities and new paths are always opening before us. The Internet is creating all kinds of exciting avenues to bring our work to the masses. When people band together they can achieve great things. Pulling our resources together we can make things happen.

Art is a calling. When you answer the call you have to bring it to make a difference. The people who were your heroes and inspiration when you started didn’t get there by playing it safe. More than likely, they broke some rules and rattled some cages.

If we’re to bring back a sense of balance and true diversity of thought to entertainment, you know what to do.