Category Archives: politics

The Orwell Foundation Announces Fiction Award Finalists

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Universality by Natasha Brown
The Harrow by Noah Eaton
Precipice by Robert Harris
The Accidental Immigrants by Jo McMillan
Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn

These novels explore economic disparity, rape, racism, sexual intrigue, gentrification, the history of Mesopotamia, and mental illness. None of them tell the story of the 2020 lockdown and the rise of totalitarian power.

V. N. Alexander’s novel Orwell 2020 is represented by Eric Miller at 3iBooks.

Shannon Joy covered my work critiquing transhumanism

I write a substack called The Posthumous Style critiquing AI and transhumanism hype. This past month, my stack went viral.  (All that hate for Elon did it.) Yesterday, Shannon Joy covered my critique on her show. Have a look starting at about 48:00.

I have written/lectured quite a bit about transhumanism.  That topic is also part of my yet-unpublished novel, C0ViD-1984, The Musical, wherein I include a parody of Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, just as George Orwell included a mock version of John Burnham’s work The Managerial Revolution. (Burnham was Kissinger’s mentor and Kissinger was Schwab’s mentor.)

There is an effort underway to make the world into Orwell’s novel, finally.  An updated version of that story would really help sort our understanding of what’s going on.

The Girlie Playhouse to be published by Heresy Press

My mother, Tricia, circa 1977.

In the mid 1990s, I could not find a publisher for my second novel, The Girlie Playhouse, because it “promoted the politically incorrect idea that woman are mere sex objects.”  Why is it dehumanizing to women to portray them as sexually attractive? That’s an honest question.

I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas where all the women and older girls donned dresses and high heels for church on Sunday. As a teen, I was greeted by the preacher’s wife on the church steps, “Now, don’t you look pretty, young lady!”

My mother was a devout Christian. According to her own lore, she was even destined to become a nun at one point, but she was also a sexpot: her dancer’s poise, her deep voice, and her cat-eye make-up. In my earliest memories, my mother and I leapt around the living room in our underwear while Tchaichovsky’s Swan Lake blared on the stereo. It seemed it never occurred to her that being sexy could be sinful.

“God created us naked,” she once said.

Imagine my confusion when I arrived in New York City at seventeen, in my high-heels and short skirts, to attend college where I was told that I thought of myself as object not a subject, as a thing not an agent.

Like most Texan females, I actually thought of myself as strong, independent, and whip smart. As far as I was concerned, my beauty broadcast the message that I was in control of the mate selection process. It seemed to me that studying on the East Coast meant that I was going to have to learn what kind of victim I was.

Instead, to understand sexuality better, I took courses in Anthropology, Biology, and evolution. I learned about reproductive fitness and hormones.  But that didn’t quite explain taboos. I studied Religion. I read the Scarlet Letter. I learned about the Puritan revolution. I read a lot of Victorian novels about women whose lives were destroyed by pheromones.

These questions helped inspire my novel about feminine sexuality, set before the fall, as it were, in a strip club called The Girlie Playhouse, where nothing bad can ever happen, until it does. The heroine, Trixie, is inspired by my mother and the novel is dedicated to her.

Academic fashions change and in the last several years, the same professors who had shamed me for dressing “like a prostitute” began to praise transwomen traipsing around in stilettos and pole-dancing for pre-schoolers. Apparently, feminine sexuality is okay when people assigned male at birth express it.

Have we finally gotten over our biases against feminine sexuality? Or did this sudden reversal reveal the covert misogyny that energized the many waves of feminism in the 1990s?

The Girlie Playhouse has finally found a home at Heresy Press, which is dedicated to “unbounded creativity and fearless expression.” Publication date is April 2026. That’s a long time away so, while you wait, sign up for the HP newsletter and book club.

Off-Guardian article about Naked Singularity and Euthanasia

The Ethics of Euthanasia Are Complicated: I Speak from Experience

Over twenty years ago, my own father—who had exhausted every treatment for throat cancer—alone with no family to comfort him, took a toxic cocktail he mixed up on his own. He lived in the Bible Belt, where euthanasia is not only illegal, but inconceivable. Although the drugs severely disabled him, he took over a week to finally succumb, during which time he and the family suffered great pain.

At the time, I wished that there had been someone or some agency to help.

In such a situation, where euthanasia is illegal, the family is vulnerable to predators. I wrote a novel Naked Singularity in which I explore this eventuality: a male night nurse sees an opportunity to take advantage of a daughter who is desperate to end her father’s suffering. As when abortion is illegal, DIY strategies don’t often work out so well.

Read more.

Great 2015 Interview with Kevin Barrett about Locus Amoenus

With the recent release, finally, of the Locus Amoenus audiobook on all listening platforms, it’s time to reacquaint my readers with that 9/11 novel. Among the many interviews I gave in 2015, this remains my favorite. Barrett, a 9/11 truth activist, is also a very well-read academic, whose appreciation for literary works is notable.

“Until now, the only 9/11 themed novel of high literary quality was Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Locus Amoenus is the best fictional treatment of 9/11 yet. It’s hilarious, darkly ironic, playful, deeply moving.”  –Kevin Barrett

The audiobook is available on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.

New 9/11 Article on Free The People

Having gone through the Co\/iD-I984 debacle, many people have lost trust in the media and government. And they are wondering if the news wasn’t trustworthy about past emergencies, such as the attack on 9/11.

In the article linked below, which appears on Free the People, a new media organization, I discuss my decision to write Locus Amoenus, a dark satire about 9/11, which was published in 2015.

This week, the audiobook has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.  (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)

2023 Was the Year of the ChatGPT-4 Scare. What’s Next?

2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)  Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth. Continue reading

My Off-Guardian article about Locus Amoenus & Co\/id-1984, The Musical goes viral

Just before the anniversary of 9/11 this year, I wrote and article for the Off-Guardian about how literary works can be useful for neutralizing the brainwashing effects of propaganda. Please click over to Off-Guardian to read it and come back when you’re done.

As most of my readers know, my 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, which was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (by the publisher, don’t get too excited), retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  It’s a high comedy, written to lure in the Atlantic Monthly subscriber, to trap the Vanity Fair reader with my erudite and clever prose. Once inside the story, I have them.  They cannot unsee the scenes I paint. Continue reading