Category Archives: SPRB

Sad Puppies Review Books: CAPS FOR SALE

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

caps for saleCAPS FOR SALE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

When this book opens we are introduced to a peddler. I began to feel a sick sense of dread when the book told me that he was not an ordinary peddler. The need to be a special snowflake is ingrained in the sick psyche of the Social Justice Warrior. It is what drives them. It is what makes them all they are.

This peddler walks around with a stack of caps on his head, red caps and blue caps and brown caps and gray caps, and then his special snowflake checked hat that I guess isn’t for sale because how is anyone going to know he’s Mr. Special Cap Guy if he doesn’t have his special cap?

A head-based cap delivery service is so woefully inefficient that it is no surprise he does not sell a single cap all day. “Not even a red cap,” he laments, which suggests that he knows that red caps are best, even if he insists on wearing his ridiculous checked one. Yet they are the ones at the top of the stack, where no one can reach them. SJWs don’t believe in simple market forces like supply and demand. If he knows that red caps are the caps preferred by the majority, there’s no financial reason for him to stock anything else. It’s okay for people to like other caps, but they can’t just expect to be pandered to!

But of course the same radical feminists and I-dentitarians who demand that honest milliners and hardworking haberdashers cater to their every whim lest they be called “offensive” never actually seem to have any money to buy caps! So no one but our poor little cuck of a peddler is surprised when he doesn’t make any sales, boohoo.

He gets no sympathy from me. Should have thought that before you insulted your audience by offering them choices!

So he tramps out into the countryside and sits his lazy ass down beside a tree and falls asleep. Maybe he should just get a Patreon, if working a real job tires him out! It’s when he wakes up that this so far too-predictable tale takes a turn for the interesting: acting individually, a number of unrelated freethinking monkeys have all decided to take it upon themselves, as individual sovereign citizens of the tree, to take one of his hats.

Of course he massively overreacts.

The way the peddler goes off on them, you’d think they’d all taken all of his hats, but each monkey took no more than one. This is also the first time any living creature in the story showed any interest in his hats. He failed to sell them at 50 cents. He communicated no reason to the monkeys or anyone else why they should pay him such a price, or any price. The market has spoken. The hats are worthless! Taking one is no more unethical than pirating a movie that you don’t even want to see in the first place.

Rather than dealing with each of the monkeys as an individual, he generalizes them, which according to Social Justice Warrior logic, is the worst thing you can do. He calls them “YOU MONKEYS”. They freely sell this book to children, and yet I have been banned from many forums online and offline for using those exact words to refer to people. Why is it okay for him to say it but not me? Creeping moral relativism at work!

So the guy gets entirely bent out of shape and he tries to impose his will on the monkeys, the way leftist authoritarians always do, but he finds that they, like all freethinkers, are immune to his only weapon, the feelbads. They won’t be shamed into compliance. They mock him and his beta impotence, each and every individual monkey a shining example of an alpha male, and then in the beautiful, glorious finale, after trolling him so hard that he throws his ridiculous checked cap down at his feet, the monkeys all throw his stupid caps down right at him, too.

It’s a powerful display of defiance and individuality.

They don’t have to give him back his caps, no matter how many times he shakes his fist or stomps his feet, no matter that he pulls out every stop from the Sal Alinsky playbook. He has no power over them. They give him back his caps because they choose to. It’s like they’re saying: it is only through our benevolent forbearance that you have any caps at all, you pathetic mangina. 

They have shown they can take his caps anytime they want. And he knows it. They have nothing left to prove.

Does he learn, though? Of course not. If he could learn, he wouldn’t be a leftist. Just like if there was any demand for caps in the village, the market would already have provided a solution rather than waiting for some “wandering peddle” to happen by.

But he goes right back to it, still haranguing passersby to give him fifty cents for caps that the invisible hand of the free market has already rejected.

Two stars.

Sad Puppies Review Books: The Giving Tree

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

giving treeTHE GIVING TREE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

The so-called Social Justice Warriors always say they want strong female characters and realistic role models for women but they once again prove that SJWs always lie by ignoring this book, which provides the most complex, intricate, and yet startlingly true-to-life depictions of females of any book I have read or will ever read.

The Giving Tree is the story of a real man, a red pill-downing alpha male who knows the importance of maintaining frame and consistently demonstrating value to any tree he wants to fuck by being confident and taking what he wants, then leaving her alone so that she knows his time is valuable and that he is not to be trifled with. This pleases her because as a female tree it is her biological imperative to find a male with a high sexual value. It is so refreshing to finally see a believable depiction of a woman like this.

The tree supports her man through all his endeavors. Whether he is working hard to sell apples, harvest lumber, building a house, or cutting down the tree to make a boat to get away from the shrew of a wife and the children she no doubt conceived to entrap him into marriage, she leaves him alone to get on with the hard work and the sacrifices he makes to achieve his dreams.

As vivid a portrait of the female psyche as the tree paints, though, it is the man’s wife who steals the show. She is first deftly foreshadowed when the man shows up at the tree explaining to her his plans to build a house. Why does he need a house? So he can have a wife and a family. This is the moment when we know our hero has slipped into blue pill thinking. When he was a child, before our female-dominated society had filled him with its propaganda, he was happy doing nothing more than going from tree to tree and having his fun with each one, keeping many plates spinning in the air, but when he grew up he drank the Kool-Aid and believed he had to settle down with any woman wily enough to steal his sperm.

And the wife. The story brings her to life in nightmarish detail. Overbearing, emasculating, controlling, frigid, and ugly but with an inflated sense of her own value given to her by feminism and its lies. The book almost spends too much time and detail making you picture her, and his life with her. You can’t get away from her.

Or can you?

Because our hero turns it around. He realizes he’s had enough, and he goes his own way. He takes the red pill. With nothing but his own two hands and the sweat of his brow, he makes a boat out of the tree and he sails away and we never have to see his wife disgrace the page again.

As satisfying as his escape from the clutches of her tyranny is, it’s almost too little, too late to save the book. She had too much of a presence in the book to begin with. The story is not about her, it’s about him. Why did they have to interrupt the fascinating story of this man in order to focus on her?

The ending of the book is a complete letdown, when the man who had gone his own way before comes back and settles down with the used-up old stump of a tree. Why? A man of his proven sexual value should never have to settle for a woman his own age unless he wants to, at which point there’s no reason for him to not keep a dozen or more plates spinning because men of his value become even more rare with age. This is the point where the book goes from grounded, realistic depictions of female existence into a flight of pure fairy tale fantasy, and it is the point where I check out.

Using strong, fully-developed female characters with personalities deeper and realer than I assume most actual women have and a classic tale of red pill redemption to sucker the reader in and then deliver this ending is such a classic example of SJW-style entryism that Saul Alinsky himself might have penned it.

Two stars.

Note from Alexandra: If you enjoy my coverage of the Sad Puppies and related nonsense, satirical and otherwise, please help me get to WorldCon 74 in Kansas City. For every $150 I collect towards my goal of $1,800, I will write another piece similar to this one.

Sad Puppies Review Books: The Cat in the Hat

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

cat in the hatTHE CAT IN THE HAT

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

This book is the classic tale of David vs. Goliath as in the modern gaming industry where nature’s greatest underdog, the multinational video game company, is forever at the mercy of powerful and ruthless game journalists who might at any moment decide to rate a game as low as 8.8 or even 8.7 for reasons that can only be described as “subjective”.

The protagonist of the book is a cat who develops games, games that are fun (like all games should be), and who wants nothing but to share them with children who are bored. Not so fast, cat! There is a game critic in the house, a fish who is clearly used to thinking of himself as a big fish in a small pond.

I almost threw this book across the room at one point, because the cat is playing a game and he is clearly having a lot of fun, but the fish says, “NO! THIS ISN’T FUN!” Imagine hating fun so much that you lie about what’s fun in order to ruin a game for everyone else. This is why we need Gamergate. Game critics like the fish have too much power and they’re willing to lie about games to uphold a social justice agenda that has nothing to do with what’s fun, which is the only thing that games should be about.

Throughout the book the fish acts as a literal gatekeeper trying to keep the cat out of the house and constantly trying to stop him and the children from having any fun. The boy, the main child, sadly succumbs to the propaganda onslaught. After forty-some pages of passively taking in the conflict between the game critic fish and the game developer cat, the boy starts parroting the fish’s party line, turning the house into an echo chamber. But notice how the fish needs the boy to do his dirty work? He can’t get his hands dirty.

This is the secret weakness of SJWs. They have no power except the “feelbads”. He convinced the boy that fun games were bad and wrong, so in order to signal his virtue the boy felt the need to join the fish’s hate mob against the cat and his friends who had done literally nothing wrong except try to relax and play games.

Unfortunately, Goliath wins this time. The cat’s friends are rounded up just like the social justice commissars want to round up everyone who disagrees with them, and he is forced to leave. Then, the fish, having basically established the house as his own tin-plated dictatorship, is not prepared to take responsibility for the state of the house, so complains and throws a tantrum until the cat comes back and fixes everything. Isn’t that typical? The ultrapowerful game media that the fish represents colludes to libel and defame gamers at every turn, then when their advertisers desert them in droves and their revenue drives up and their mom is coming home, they look up at gamers and say, “Save us!”

In a just world, this book would end with the cat looking down and whispering, “No.” but that book would never have been published. It’s not politically correct. Instead, in a twist that even Saul Alinsky would have found a ham-fisted bit of propaganda, the gamer cat cheerfully comes back and cleans up the mess that the fish made in order to disrupt his games.

I knew this book was bad news from the opening pages when the boy, the main child, wasn’t even given a name but his sister Sally, who never does anything, had her name. This is a sexist double standard. Most female characters are barely even characters and they still get more respect than the actual people in a story. And liberals say you can’t be sexist against men!

Two stars.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Upjohn will be attending WisCon in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend and livetweeting what he finds there on behalf of his publisher, Hymenaeus House. Follow them on Twitter to watch the fireworks unfold. Mr. Upjohn has pledged to attend WorldCon and do the same if I somehow am allowed to attend, as he feels the need to balance my presence out. You can help both of us get there by throwing money in my WorldCon travel fund. For every $150 I get, I will publish another of Mr. Upjohn’s piece, or something of similar value and tone.

Sad Puppies Review Books: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Mike_MulliganMIKE MULLIGAN AND HIS STEAM SHOVEL

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

There is a disease men get sometimes, or at least some men. Blue-pill beta cucks who have not yet learned the value of going their own way. It is called one-itis, and the women who control the media use it to foster this disease by shoehorning the same love story into every movie and TV show, telling men that there’s one woman out there for them whom they must spend all their time and energy trying to please in order to win her. There’s nothing modern feminists want more than a world where men have to see them as prizes to be won and fought over, because that is the only way they can have true power.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the story of a sad, broken little man who ultimately loses his lifelong battle with one-itis. It depicts his journey from a proud construction worker to a humble janitor, living out his last days in the dingy basement of a building that only his own honest labor made possible while the man who bested him, a powerful man who consistently demonstrates his value, lords his position over him.

The main characters in this book are Mike Mulligan, the construction worker who is led around by the nose by his ungrateful, greedy shrew of a steam shovel Mary Anne, and Henry B. Swap, a local politician who knows the importance of keeping frame.

The opening pages of the book are a sickeningly, sappy love song to the so-called “virtues” of Mary Anne. Mary Anne is so great, she and Mike Mulligan “and some others” dug the canals for the boats and the roads for the cars and the landing strips for the airplanes. This wording clearly shows us how completely our hero has succumbed to one-itis. Even when he’s participating in grand architectural projects, he only has eyes for his steam shovel, his One True Love.

For a while, he’s so wrapped up in the grand romantic fantasy of it all that it seems like they have a good life together. We’re told that he works so hard and takes such good care of her that she never grows old, but what we never hear is what she does for him. When is it her turn to take care of him? Feminists say they want equality but they have created a world in which men must labor to support them.

And even if Mary Anne looks good for her age (only because Mike supports her!), there’s still trouble in paradise because here comes younger, sexier power shovels: Diesel shovels, electric shovels, gas shovels. Men who know their own value prefer the younger models, and soon no one wants Mary Anne around except for sad sack Mike Mulligan, who can’t bear to let her go, but now can’t find the work he needs to do in order to support her in the lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed.

This is one-itis. Mike Mulligan would have been just fine if he’d been willing to say, “Later, toots!”, leave Mary Anne on the scrapheap where she belonged and started fucking one of the modern shovels instead. Or why one? He could keep a lot of them in the air until he knows he’s ready to settle down. He should be living large. Nothing demonstrates your value to women better than your willingness to keep a lot of plates spinning.

But because he has one-itis, Mike doesn’t realize that while Mary Anne cannot function without him, he can function just fine without her. Mary Anne needs Mike Mulligan inside her in order to come to life. Without him stoking her furnace, pulling her levers, and ramming pistons, she would remain cold and inert, without purpose or function. What does he need her for? To dig a little faster and a little better? I submit to you that Mike Mulligan on his own could eventually dig any hole that he dug with Mary Anne’s nominal help, but Mary Anne on her own is just a big useless thing, waiting for a man to fire her up and give her direction!

But rather than trading her in for a younger model, Mike follows Mary Anne out of the city and away from the lucrative construction jobs to a podunk town where an aging beauty can still act like a big fish in a small pond. There, desperate to be able to continue to please her like he once did, Mike lets himself be manipulated into a bet with the town’s alpha red pill selectman, Henry B. Swap: he’ll dig a cellar for the new town hall, and he’ll either do it in a single day—meaning he’ll bust his ass way harder than he needs to—or he’ll do it for free, meaning he’ll bust his ass for nothing.

Mike’s problem, from start to finish, is that he has no notion of keeping frame. Frame is how men control their interactions with the world. You, not some steam shovel you picked up, should be setting and controlling the frame in your relationships. Whoever sets the frame for any negotiation, in a relationship or business transaction, controls it.

Where Mike should have been demonstrating his power to Swap, he instead broadcast his desperation. And he gets taken advantage of, because of it. He lost frame with Mary Anne years ago if he ever had it to begin with, and he loses it immediately with Henry B. Swap, and so we’re treated to the sad spectacle of a man who once laid the foundations for skyscrapers trying to scrape out the basement for a two-story building in a single day.

Now, he succeeds, sort of. He succeeds because Mary Anne isn’t even loyal to him. She’s an exhibitionist. Any time a crowd watches her work with Mike, it just stokes her boiler even harder, and so they “dig faster and better” the more people are watching.

Men, if you’re ever dating an excavator, her work should be for your eyes only. She shouldn’t need a crowd watching to do her job. She should be digging modestly, in the privacy of your own home. It’s one of the simplest rules of red pill logic: sooner or later, a steam shovel that needs to dig in front of other people will want to dig with other people.

One-itis often leads to tunnel vision, and that’s the case here. Mike fulfills his beta boast, but at the cost of everything. He has literally dug himself into a corner. With no ramp to get out of the cellar, he’s stuck.

Or is he?

There’s no way to get Mary Anne out of the pit he dug, but just a few pages later, Mike’s climbing out on a ladder. It’s only his irrational attachment to her that keeps him there with her. The lesson here is that it’s easy for women to fall, but men can still just get up and leave when that happens. Mike, sadly, doesn’t learn it. A little boy suggests that if Mike is so in love with Mary Anne, he should just stay in the basement with her. If there was any doubt that Mike was a cuck of the highest or maybe lowest order, Mike agrees.

When the book closes, Mary Anne is keeping Henry B. Swap warm while Mike is still devoting his life to maintaining her. That’s the way it is. Women keep men like Mike Mulligan around only so they can leech off their beta bucks while they chase after the alphas. This book shows the entire process from start to finish in breathtaking clarity, but in an Alinsky-style propaganda twist, it puts a happy face on it, showing Mike Mulligan’s final defeat as a kind of contentment.

He’s going to live the rest of his life in that basement, because retirement would mean walking away from his “one” and if he could have done that he’d have been living the high life with a string of motor shovels up and down the coast, and we’re supposed to believe he’s happy about it. He certainly does.

Two stars.

Want to send John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired) to WorldCon? Help Alexandra Erin get him there! For every $150 donated, we’ll post another piece like this.

Sad Puppies Review Books: Yertle the Turtle

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

YERTLE THE TURTLE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

This book is the all-too-plausible story of one evil turtle and his tyrannical desire to enslave all other turtles to his bidding.

If when you read this book it seems to echo eerily close to something you have heard before, that is probably not a coincidence. This is no mere children’s story like the ones you’d find in Aesop’s fables. This is a story with an important moral lesson to teach us and it relates to real life.

The villain of the piece is a turtle named Mack who is so dissatisfied with his place in the world that rather than climbing the ladder and making something of himself, he instead blames society for such petty things as the pain in his back and his lack of food. Not content to merely complain, he uses his extraordinary power and privilege to impose his will upon all other turtles. Lacking the gumption and will to raise himself up, he instead only tears down, and will not be satisfied until all other turtles have been brought down to his level.

Set against Mack is the tragic hero of the piece, a Randian super-turtle named Yertle who, though born to lowly circumstances on top of a rock only a little bit higher than the station of any other turtle in the pond, raises himself up to be the self-made king of everything up to forty miles away. Because a rising tide lifts all boats, in the process he raises every other turtle in the pond up with him.

Even Mack—the greedy, grasping, ungrateful, Mack—is elevated to the very same position Yertle was when the story began, sitting atop the very same rock. If he really wanted to be where Yertle is, there was absolutely nothing stopping him from doing as Yertle did. He was given the exact same opportunity Yertle had. Yertle’s very success proves the existence of upward mobility in the pond. Every single one of the turtles under Yertle only has to look up to find something to aspire to.

But when Mack’s  incessant complaints and whiny demands do not give Mack any greater reward than he has earned, he brings the whole thing crashing down in the most vulgar way imaginable: he burps.

In this one burp, he becomes worse than the Soviets who condemned the Kulaks during holodomor, worse than the people on the street who mouthed the Nazi lies about Jews during WWII.  Why worse?  Because those people lived in fear of their lives.  They had to say what they did because they feared being next on the kill list.

But Mack? Mack drags everyone down into the mud and dashes every turtle’s dream of attaining a higher place in society of his own free will. Does he care about the wishes of the turtles above him? No, he does not. Mack imposes his will upon all. In his pond, all turtles are slaves shackled to the ground, doomed to swim about the pond without the benefit of direction or purpose.

And in the end, the turtle who had the vision to build a society where any turtle could climb so high as to see forty miles in every direction, where any turtle could through nothing save their own hard work and determination could become king of a house and a cow and a mule, he is down with the rest, only able to see mud.

The burping vulgarians of the world cannot tolerate men or turtles of Yertle’s grand vision, and so cannot rest until they are destroyed. Saul Alinsky would be proud.

Two stars.

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I am officially retiring the Sad Puppy Book Reviews as a regular feature.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

I’ve said before that they’ll probably taper off, but I sat down to consider what books I want to do this week and you know, I look at it, and while there are plenty more children’s books I could give the SP treatment to, but I’m just not sure there’s not much more to say. The fact that John Z. Upjohn is a “composite puppy” kept it from being quite as much of a one-joke premise as it might have been, but it’s bound to get repetitive.

I may bring it back if any of the major players says or does something that is both egregious and a relatively new specimen of troll logic, but for now I think it’s run its course.

The temptation to keep it going is strong, insofar as it’s netted me some very positive attention, brought new readers to my blog, and garnered notices from some fairly big names… but that doesn’t really translate into anything except more attention for subsequent reviews. I know that I could keep cranking them out, but where’s the end game? Or rather, what comes next? Without a solid answer to that, I’d rather focus on other things.

Sad Puppies Review Books: THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Editor’s Note: Some wags (no pun intended) have claimed that our normal Sad Puppy reviewer of books, Mr. John Z. Upjohn, is not actually representative of the diverse opinions, tastes, and political ideologies of the Sad Puppies as a whole. Some have even suggested that he is little more than a ridiculous, over the top caricature. So in the interest of fairness, I have brought in another Sad Puppy for today’s review, to give this webpage generally and the SPRB feature in particular a more balanced perspective.

 

poky little puppy

THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY

Reviewed by Special Guest Reviewer James May

We are already aware you are blind to your own activism. You support a bizarre race-gender cult obsessed with patriarchy. It is anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western and even anti-Anglophone it is so steeped in racial hate, misandry and heterophobia. I regard it as nothing more than a hate movement, and that’s using your own paper-thin standards. How you get around that is by claiming the “marginalized” are never racists, sexists, misandrists, etc. I reject that.

Here’s the dividing line and the crucial issue: I don’t care what you do. I don’t care about any of your initiatives. What I care about is it is never expressed without dehumanizing men and whites as racist, women-hating, homophobes who have conspired and continue to conspire to keep everyone but the straight white male out of SFF. That is a lie we have proved with facts over and over again. The history of SFF as portrayed by SJWs is a hoax. It has never been any more exclusionary than Field & Stream.

We have also proved with facts over and over again that SJWs do exactly what they claim we do: namely advocate for and discriminate against people based on their race and sex.

You claim you are against Vox Day and John Wright but in fact you were throwing us under the bus in swaths of no less than 100 million people before you ever heard of them. You are a protected and privileged class of goofball feminists who will never pie-chart a military cemetery as long as you live because intersectional gender feminists are liars.

The idea we as an entire sex and racial group oppose women, gays and non-whites entering any arena whatsoever is laughable. Pretending we are all conservatives is Bigotry 101: paint an ethnic or sexual group as an ideology. Boom! Done. Let the Anita Sarkeesian “critiques” begin. We are aware of what your so-called “allies” have to do to escape the shame of being straight white men and so escape their “ideology” by showing their bona fides. We are aware of how quickly you turned on “ally” GRRM. Crime? Oops! He reverted to a straight white male and forgot to only torture men in his books. Concern for the in-group while ignoring the out-group is just more classic bigotry. Either you’re against violence or you’re not.

And notice how I myself have gone out of my way to show you are not liberals or Marxists and nor do I light up entire demographic groups. Although your cult laughingly pretends to represent all women, gays and non-whites – with radical feminist shit-titles like “Women Destroy SF” – you don’t. Gays are not the problem – gays who are bigoted supremacists are. Women are not a problem – female bigots are. Non-whites are not a problem – non-white racists are. If you claim to be human, then claim those human failings, since it is so self-evidently true of your cult. Whites are not a problem – white supremacists are. And that is a principle any race or sex can embrace. Wake up to that. My pushing back against this cult is no more pushing back against women, gays and non-whites than pushing back against the KKK makes me anti-white.

SJWs continually use random demographic spikes as if they are Jim Crow – but only if they benefit you. Otherwise random demographic spikes are fine as long as they aren’t straight white men. Boxing, Arab film, Samba, the NBA – no prob.

Say this over and over again: demography is not ideology.

Say this too: group defamation is always wrong – ALWAYS.

Stop lying and pretending you critique anything but our race and sex. No matter what we say, no matter the facts, you move the goalposts so straight white men remain in the crosshairs. Go look at Nebula Awards Weekend. It is a disgrace. Literature? LOL

I am not interested in your stupid con game or your hateful brand of feminism which pretends to be the successor to equal rights feminism, a thing I do support.

We cannot even converse until we agree on rules that work for all, not just some. This is called a “principle.” We have rightly portrayed your cult as one which rejects principle in favor of identity.

I reject everything your cult stands for.

3.5/5

Sad Puppies Review Books: STREGA NONA

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

strega nonaSTREGA NONA

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

If you want chilling proof of the radical feminist lesbian witch cult (also known as “Social Justice”) that has infiltrated all ranks of society, look no further than this book which blatantly glorifies witchcraft, matriarchy, and the creation of a loyal slave nation of emasculated beta male cucks.

Exactly as foretold in a literal straightforward reading of the Book of Revelation, this book portrays a near-future world where even the Catholic Church itself is in thrall of a woman. The church is no longer the Bride of Christ but the scarlet woman of Babylon.

“Although all the people in the town talked about her in whispers, they all went to see her if they had troubles. Even the priests and the sisters in the convent went, for Strega Nona had a magic touch.” If that isn’t straight out of the Bible then I don’t even know what the Bible says. I do know that it says to not suffer a witch to live, not to treat her as a valued civic leader.

I think we can all agree that this is an example of the kind of ideological, agenda-driven “message fiction” that has replaced real God-fearing SF/F that embraces and centers Christianity in the best traditions of classic science fiction.

This story shows a town that turns their back on God and then is almost crushed under a “flying spaghetti monster” of its own making. In their last moments they remember who made the heavens and the earth and cry out for Him to save them, and He, as was foretold in the holy book, looks down and whispers “no”. It is exactly what will happen in the end times, only in this fictitious example the witch returns at the last minute and spares them. When it really happens, though, she will find herself as powerless as the rest and the tide of pasta will roll over her with the sheep she led astray for Satan is the real “spaghetti monster” and like Saul Alinsky he is a great deceiver.

In the world that the SJWs seek to create, men don’t woo and win women as God intended but instead women go to a matriarchal elder and have a husband assigned to them and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Strega Nona decides she is too busy and important to keep a house, do the gardening, wash dishes, or do any of the things that women do for free. Instead she humiliates and browbeats a man who is denied any other employment opportunities because he is living in an upside-down society, forcing him to do a housewife’s work for no other compensation except security, food, shelter, and money.

As you might expect from a work of pure propaganda, the conflict in the book comes when her beta cuck housepet “Big Anthony” has had enough and decides to go his own way, daring to take for himself the power and prestige that Strega Nona decided only belonged to the approved feminist elite like herself. In a proper rollicking adventure story, his bravery would have been celebrated and duly rewarded. Because this is “message fiction” though he gets only bitter comeuppance for daring to seize power.

If this book is true to life in any way it exactly captures the nature of the backlash the SJW Hugo elite has had to the whole Sad Puppy campaign. I’m sorry, were we not supposed to touch your special pasta pot? Was it not polite to ram through a slate of nominees based on the fact that one of us said they were pretty good? Is that not how it’s done?

Well, I’m sorry if I’m not willing to “blow kisses” at the “sacred feminine cooking pot” in order to get anywhere, as this story suggests we all must do. Is it any surprise that the treasonous miscreants at the Caldecott Medal chose this book for an honor?

Two stars.

Sad Puppies Review Books: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

alexanderALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

There are some days when it seems like fighting the causes of puppy-related sadness. When the whole world is arrayed against us due to the vile calumnies of a tiny insignificant clique, when hit piece after hit piece is slipped into liberal rags such as The Atlantic and Popular Science, when no one who attempts to refute us bothers to keep track from day to day what our motivation is, I start to wonder, “John, what is even the point of it all?”

Then I read a book like this, and I remember. I remember why we fight.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is the tale of a young man persecuted past the point of all reason. Only in the sick world of so-called Social Justice would he be held up as a comic figure rather a tragic one to be rescued or, failing that, avenged.

Our story begins when the main character wakes up with gum in his hair. Yet when he went to sleep, it was safely and responsibly in his mouth, where gum belongs. I am sure the SJWs would say that it is his fault for chewing gum in the first place, that he was somehow “asking for it”. They hate victim blaming until the victim is a white straight “CIS-MALE” and then suddenly everything is the victim’s fault. I ask you, is this morality where a person is always wrong 100% based on the gender and race?

If you say it is Alexander’s fault that the gum wound up in his hair, then you are saying he shouldn’t have had it in his mouth. If you are saying that he shouldn’t have had it in his mouth, you are saying he shouldn’t be allowed to chew gum. Who are you to say that he shouldn’t chew gum just because he is a straight white male, or as normal people who don’t notice sex or race would say, a normal person?

The rest of the book chronicles the world’s attempts to punish a young normal person for being normal. His brothers—doubtless good little sheeple who baa along to the SJW line—are given toys in their cereal while he has none. He is cruelly and arbitrarily denied a window seat. He is blamed for doing things that he clearly intended no negative consequences to come from.

When he loses his marbles down the bathtub drain, what is the lesson supposed to be? That it’s his fault? That he shouldn’t have taken his marbles into the bathtub? What man could live like that? What man would want to?

Even his beta cuck of a father—a man who has so little self-respect he allows his wife to drive him to and from work so she can have the car to gallivant around town from children’s shoe store to pediatric dentist office to wherever her little heart desires while he’s out earning a living to support her carefree lifestyle—chides Alexander for what is essentially his own failure to impose discipline.

The part that really struck home with me is the moment when his teacher chooses to praise—or “award” we might say—another student’s piece of artwork over his, just because the picture of a sailboat conforms more to her narrow-minded ideas about what art should be than his picture of an invisible castle.

Why should one person be put in charge of judging what is and isn’t art? Why should one person have to submit to a socialist public school teacher’s decision about whose art is allowed to go up on the board? This is exactly the attitude we of the Sad Puppies campaign took a stand against when we decided to nominate the books chosen by Brad Torgersen in order to make sure that science fiction stays exactly the one way we think it should be forever.

If at times during the book it seems that the victimization of the young white male protagonist is so blatant that it almost reads as a subversion of the Alinksy-approved SJW narrative, the end erases all doubt. They’re simply that open in their racist misandry these days. The book ends with the character’s mother writing off his troubles, minimizing them. So much for “listen and believe”!

She tells him that some days are just “like that”, as if it was all just a coincidence, as if she and the teacher and the carpool driver (all women!) hadn’t conspired together to make it happen.

But then, this is the same crew that wants us to believe that it’s somehow not a massive conspiracy when multiple news outlets cover the same story within a day of each other, isn’t it?

They must think we were born yesterday.

Two stars.

Rabid Puppies Review Books: HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

haroldHAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON

Reviewed By Special Guest Reviewer Theophilus Pratt
(Publisher — Hymenaeus House)

This instructive tale tells of a young man who all by himself creates a road which he then travels down, makes a mountain which he climbs, then saves himself from falling by conjuring a balloon which he hangs onto until he can bring into being a basket capable of supporting himself. His boundless creativity allows him to shape a whole civilization of buildings until, amusingly, he re-creates the very house he started out from and sleeps the sleep of the just, knowing that everything he has in life was fashioned by his own hand.

Amusingly, this book was sold to me as a work of fantasy when it is in fact the most realistic work of fiction I have ever encountered. If anything, it was too realistic to be fiction, a fact I found very amusing. Flipping through its pages proved to be instructive, as I began to see it was nothing more than a thinly veiled if amusing allegory for my own inimitable life.

Did I not provide myself with the only light I ever needed to walk by, as Harold did? Have I not always made my own road, and even left it when even it proved too stifling to my boundless intellect? Has not my dizzying intellectual magnitude taken me to the height of peaks so high that even I cannot long find purchase upon them? And when I fall, whom do I rely upon to prop myself up except myself?

If I am found to be apparently sinking into a morass of intellectual quagmire as Harold found himself floundering in a sea, you can bet that it is of my own devising and for my own purposes, and I will just as quickly pull myself out when the time is right for me to strike.

Like Harold, I am a master of fourth generational warfare honed over long epochs of electronic correspondence and nights spent around the table with my beloved custom Warhammer miniatures. Like Harold, I move in dimensions that the limited minds of the hated lying SJWs cannot fathom, though it is both amusing and instructive to watch them struggle to do so.

But as I raced back and forth through the text, admiring “Harold” and his facility with his purple poison pen, I began to wonder how this book came to be. Who could have written a book that so perfectly captures every aspect of my life in its instructive allegory? There is only one man I know who has paid such attention to my doings: that arch SJW, Johnny Con himself.

Yes, this book is clearly the handiwork of John Scalzi.

I ask you, does the man’s obsession with me know no bounds? It is as amusing as it is instructive to see what depths—or rather heights—his fascination now leads him to. Under the transparent pseudonym of “Crockett Johnson” (do I even need to begin to dissect the painfully obvious allusion?), Scalzi has published a whole series of thinly veiled paeans to the civilizing influence of my plus three standard deviation intellect and supreme force of creative will.

And is it so surprising? As amusing as it is that Scalzi plays up his apparent hatred of me, it has always been apparent to anyone with the wit to see that the root of his obsession lies in jealousy, and are we jealous of what we loathe or are we jealous of that which we admire? Here we see Scalzi’s grudging admiration of me bearing fruit in a most instructive if amusing fashion.

Well, rest assured, Johnny: your efforts have not gone unnoticed. I have added this rather instructive book to the copious other evidence I have compiled in my extensive files on your obsession with me. Most amusing!

7.5/10