I had seen movies, of course, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, all of which could be called dystopian in their pessimistic, cautionary nature, but the potential as a storyform was still new. Nuclear war was the usual mechanism, though the viral apocalypse was already appreciated. Alvin Toffler’s seminal 1970 work Future Shock described the mental effects on society of the ever-increasing pace of change, while Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring had sounded the first warning bells over industrial degradation of the environment. They were not dystopian fiction, but operated in the same context as George Orwell’s ruminations.

Though it would be years before it became apparent, a cleft was developing in the genre. First, there is “dystopian” fiction, in which the message is profoundly cautionary and the potential deterioration of society is the theme – the classics such as Brave New World and 1984 fall here, and their legion of followers (Jack Sharkey’s Ultimatum in 2050 AD, and Philip E High’s The Mad Metropolis, published by Ace in the 60s, amply fit the bill). But there is also “post-apocalyptic” fiction, which is distinctly different. While it may share the concept that society has been radically altered, not by some conscious act of intellectual epiphany, but a natural cataclysm or the results of the darker side of human nature – malice or plain stupidity – the genre is essentially adventure in nature, and the apocalypse is the mechanism by which the structure, norms and laws of extant society are dismissed, freeing the writer to invent at will. Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) was perhaps a signpost on this divergence, while by no means the first stirring.

Is post-apocalyptic fiction a lazy artform? Perhaps – but only if pursued cynically. I would place Burroughs’ 1915 novel Beyond Thirty (published in later years as The Lost Continent) in this group, as he conceived the First World War continuing until civilisation itself was extinguished in the old world, opening the door to explorers from the other side of the Atlantic, centuries later, encountering a raw and dangerous land of mystery. Adventure, yes, but of the sincerest intent. But the genre certainly lends itself to pulp and hack writing, such as the long-lived (125 novels) Gold Eagle series Deathlands created in 1986 by Christopher Lowder under the pen name of Jack Adrian. Stories of this ilk are concerned solely with raw and bloody action and how depraved the bad guy can be. Any notion of an intellectual purpose implying avoidant action in the present day is lost, indeed the terrifying futurescape has become desirable, the ruins of the present become the exotic setting of tomorrow against which essentially timeless conflicts are played out – the protagonists could as easily be gunslingers, Indians and cattle barons, their motives and actions would be no different.

Has the true dystopian story been lost in the post-apocalyptic avalanche?  Not necessarily: Peter Beere’s 1984-85 Trauma 2020 trilogy was high-end pulp, written with a very British self-denigrating prose style that sought any skerrick of black humour that could be wrung from appalling situations. Perhaps, following the already-established tradition of 2000AD and Judge Dredd, finding the funny side of the gradual dissolution of the present into a bizarre future in which the individual is very much the prey of the system, Beere sought to normalise, thirty-five years ago, the sort of social collapse British society has actually undergone in the last ten. Anti-homeless spikes in dry alcoves? I doubt if any writer was cynical enough to actually imagine such a thing, and this time reality beat fiction to the punch.

A recent meme on Facebook contrasted two images – a soaring futuristic city, imbedded in natural forest, against a crystal blue sky symbolising positive aspirations for a technological tomorrow, while the second image was a raw industrialised cityscape half-seen through a haze of pollution, devoid of green. The latter has replaced the former as the popular expectation of the future, brutally underlining the failure of current society. Homelessness is one of the maladies of the present, along with drug dependence, poverty, crime, hunger, despondency, the fostering of stupidity and dependence on leaders. The last few decades have inscribed them in the consciousness of the age, along with mass shootings, sectarian violence and racism. These things used to be the extreme stuff of dystopian fiction, the ills of the present run forward and magnified to make them obvious in a terrible literary reductio ad absurdum. Well, the future is here and the social warnings were correct – and, sadly, ultimately irrelevant because they seem to have headed off nothing at all.

Having now traveled that road, allow me to share some of the lessons I’ve learned so that if you choose as I did, to have beta readers, you’ll be better equipped to get the most out of the process.

Who should beta read for you?

There are plenty of sites and services that are willing to help connect authors with beta readers. I went old school and asked family, acquaintances, and social media followers. Having not used any of the online services available, I’m ill-equipped to speak to their usefulness, but I would be reluctant to pay anyone to beta read for me – ever. If you want to pay someone, I would suggest skipping the beta readers and hiring a professional editor.

Be prepared for a large number of the people you get as beta readers to not actually read any of your work. I tapped 16 (non-family) beta readers that either asked me if they could beta read my draft, or that I approached. Of those 16 people, 4 finished the novel and provided me with actionable feedback. I get it, life gets in the way sometimes, and even people with the best intentions forget or get caught up in something else.

I found the types of people who were most likely to actually read my work and get back to me were other authors, people who have beta read before, and very avid readers. I would seek out these types of people in the future, and I would be less reluctant to tell other people, “no, I’m sorry,” if they ask to read my work.

Don’t be scared away from asking friends and family to read for you. I would suggest just being aware that their feedback is going to be “filtered” through a lens of knowing you personally, and not wanting to hurt your feelings. However, if you direct their feedback and guide them to what you need to know, they can actually be better for deeper discussions about your work than mere acquaintances or strangers.

What should my feedback look like?

This is where I made my major rookie mistake. You have to, and I stress have to, provide your beta readers with direction, guidelines, and boundaries. What your feedback looks like is largely up to you, the author.

First, give your betas a time-frame and stick to it. My beta reading wore on for months as a result of not doing this from the beginning.

Second, provide them with a few questions that you want them to answer after each chapter, such as, “How was the pacing: too slow, choppy, rushed, etc? Were there any plot holes? Did you find the characters relatable?” Otherwise, your feedback will be random and much of it will be less useful.

Lastly, recognize that there are two types of feedback: what I call “actionable” and “non-actionable” respectively. Examples of actionable feedback are notes on items such as plot holes, poor pacing, character development, etc, that if not remedied become a distraction from the story. Actionable feedback items are ones that, as the author, you should strongly consider making changes to.

Non-actionable feedback is typically a beta reader’s opinion, such as, “I wish character ‘X’ and character ‘Y’ had ended up together.” Not remedying such items will not result in a distraction from the story, and can typically be ignored if the author chooses.

There are certain cases where non-actionable feedback becomes actionable when a number of your betas all make note of it. For example, 3 of my 4 betas mentioned that a section of dialogue seemed too mature for the ages of the children speaking. Such feedback could be a simple case of opinion, but where 3/4 of my feedback made mention of it, I realized it was falling into the category of becoming a “distraction from the story.” I revisited the section, chose to simplify the dialogue, and now I feel my manuscript is better for it.

How can I maximize the results of using Beta Readers?

There are a few things an author can do to get the most out of using beta readers. First, you should understand what you’re using them for. Betas don’t replace editors. They are there to ensure that your story is structurally sound and there isn’t anything major you need to re-write before moving forward in the editing process. They give you a feel for how your story will be “received,” and how to improve it in that regard.

Second, realize that betas have lives. Ask more people than you think you’ll need in case some don’t finish, and make things as easy for them as you can. This includes providing your manuscript in a form that they typically read: either digital or hard copy. Online print-on-demand publishers make it possible to order a handful of copies of your work in paperback form relatively inexpensively. Having an actual “book” to give to those that typically read that way helps some betas to immerse themselves in the experience of reading your novel.

Finally, as mentioned before, the author needs to set guidelines for betas to follow. You are less likely to get the feedback you need as an author if you don’t explain what that feedback is. This is your novel, and so it is also your beta process.

Are Beta Readers worth it?

I would say, yes, beta readers are worth it. As the author, however, you have to realize that they are just another tool in your revision arsenal. Like any tool, they serve a specific purpose, and not every tool is the right one regardless of the situation.

Beta readers are great for when you’ve exhausted your own ability to look objectively at your novel. Once you have run a couple of edits of your own, and the work is as strong as you can make it, beta readers will help you to see it with new eyes.

While an editor can do this as well, in the age of self-publishing not everyone is ready to pay for that type of service without first testing to see if their work will survive in the “real world.” Think of beta readers as a product focus group, and you’ll be in the right frame of mind to deal with the feedback you receive.

After your beta readers are finished, you should know if your work is strong enough to take the next step, where small changes need to be made in order to make it strong enough, or if there’s a lot of re-writing in your future.

If you are like me as an author, and find value in someone else’s perspective on your work, beta readers are the best way to gather that feedback and guide you towards the changes you still need to make on your manuscript.

The Past

If you are going to set your story in the past, you’ve your work cut out for you: especially in the age of social media, you get so much as the pattern on a kilt wrong or put a flintlock in a wheel-lock era, someone will call you on it. So: research. As long as it seems you’ve really done your homework, only the most dysfunctional PhD under the highway overpass using stray wifi from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts will send you angry mail; and no one else will care. But, have your main character look out from the city walls of 13th Century Liegnitz at the Huns instead of the Mongols, and you’ve lost.

I’ve only made an outline and some simple dialog about a story set in three past times, Gilgamesh’s Ur, Caesar’s consulship, and 18th Century Scotland. My ratio of pages read to pages written were over 100:1, and, to-date, I’ve not completed that project.

An example of great world building in the past is Colleen McCullough’s series: a world that spans over eighty years in seven very large books. It’s a period we know quite a bit about, but she brings it vividly to life.

The Present

First of all, who’s present? I’m over fifty, so Apollo 11 is part of my present: I watched it with my own 2 ½ year old eyes. But to my 14 year old daughter, I may as well be talking about flappers and Prohibition. Any reference to culture or news will make your book dated the moment you publish it. I recall in my late 20’s reading the first book of Zelazny’s Amber series, published in 1970. Everybody smoked cigarettes! Even though that was within ‘my present,’ it was a slog to get over that suspension of disbelief. The only time I’ve written a story set in ‘the present’ is my visual novel, OTChi Kocchi, and even then, I ducked the issues: as a visual novel, I didn’t have to describe the scenes, the reader looks at them. Further, by setting the story in Japan, the reader will allow what they think are temporal incongruities are just a matter of cultural differences. Yes: I’m sneaky and lazy. Wait until you are old.

I’d suggest keeping it vague: mention no dates, avoid linking your action to current events (unless, of course, that’s the point of your story), and keep your descriptions ‘vanilla’: a man’s business suit, for example, has changed very little over the last 100 years, so saying “…his gray suit…” is fine in a way that “…his polyester bell-bottoms…” is not. Consider: anyone under thirty doesn’t know what the first line from means.

The Future

“In making future worlds, you’re obliged to talk in universals or else you’re not saying anything” ~ Larry Niven (paraphrased from my memory). There are basically two futures: working and broken (that is a better model than utopian and dystopian). Working futures can be a challenge in their own right. As that quote from Niven indicates, you have to make the reader understand the world you are trying to create in their mind. That may take time and description; not by you, lecturing, but by your characters talking. He slowly and over time built up Known Space, one short story after another, finally breaking out with .

Broken futures might just be the easiest to write. You can use both technology and the primitive (think ‘Firefly,’ with the spaceship Serenity transporting cattle) and no one can call you out on getting hardware or culture wrong. Now, if you make more than one story in that new place, those better be internally consistent or your audience just walked.

“Wait… Serenity has phasers? WTF?”

Tosses book; picks up X-Box controller.

Broken futures can allow you to really get the most out of your characters as your R&D drops to days rather than weeks.

Hybrids

Are generally mules, but mules can be obstinate. Steampunk, for example. It’s our past, but an alternate past with an almost recognizable culture and technology we can almost relate to. I have great regard for Steampunk and have written a 13-part script for a graphic novel (artists…? anyone…?) in such a world, but consider it a very visual genre, best suited for visual/graphic novels, animations (to a degree) and live action big/small screen productions. Given the number of successful SP novels, I’m obviously alone in that opinion!

Another hybrid is Near Future, where lazy, middle-aged people end up… *ahem* excuse me! This hybrid allows an author to make use of the world we see about us and add just a small handful of elements that make it different: zombies, aliens, AI’s…. Your reader finds themselves in a comfortable space: roads, buildings, place names are all recognizable. But.

But after the Breakup, Seattle went cannibal, sending tens of thousands of flesh-eating fanatics against Portland and Vancouver. After the Breakup, the Black Muslim Brotherhood holds the last bridge over the Mississippi, in St. Louis, extorting a crippling tax to use it, which includes the sacrifice of Whites and Asians. After the Breakup, the nascent Republic of Texas, against the will of its citizens, became dependent on the actions of ExComm, a political terror organization, modeled on the Checka, to stay intact.

See how easy that is? Places everyone either knows or can look up on a map coupled with a first-order deviation from the immediately familiar. Add cute robots and publish your novel.

Conclusion

An important point of world building for both writer and reader is familiarity: both are returning to something that, to a degree, they know. Sure, the setting, local politics, and characters can be very different: Lily and Ai in Waxahatchie, Texas are not Gil and Nichole in Portland, Oregon, but a reader of my world of Machine Civilization will know the ground rules – a broken United States and artificial intelligences. Similar when I pick up a book from Jerry Pournelle’s Co-Dominium series: a US-Russia alliance, early off-planet colonization, and mercenaries, were a given. Already familiar with his world, I could focus and the characters and their story.

Many writers, I know, will stay with the same kind of story, but the world and people will be different every time. Good for them. Again, I’m old and lazy, so whether reading or writing, I’m content to return to the well that I know has sweet water.

Books By Clayton Barnett:

I’ve written in the past about the pros and cons of an English degree and an MFA, so I’ll make this in the same vein. I’m not telling you to major in history if you want to be a writer, but I’m going to tell you my thoughts on my historical education and on the historical education I gave to others as a grad student. First, the pros.

If you want to write you’re going to need experience writing and a history degree, even at the undergraduate level, is nothing if not rigorous when it comes to writing. My freshman western civ class required a fifteen page paper on the Roman Civil War. Frankly, I didn’t do that much writing again until grad school where we were expected to produce twenty to thirty page papers every semester. The heart of history is writing, and writing in a clear style. Now, this isn’t to say historical writing is necessarily good. In fact you can get some bad writing habits out of a history program. Most of it is very dry and is full of circumlocutions such as “many believe that….” “it may be possible that….” “often we can see…” and you get the idea. Historical writing is vague, and that is because the historian wants to be right. Academics are a proud bunch and proving one wrong will wound their pride in a way you’ve probably not seen in the real world.

Second, you’ll learn to do research. That’s important because as a writer of fiction you’ll have to acquaint yourself with things you’re not necessarily knowledgeable about. In fact here at Uprising we often talk about research and how you can write what you know, by learning what you don’t know then writing about it. You can educate yourself on other cultures, places, geography and so forth. Whether you want to write historical fiction, genre fiction such as sci-fi, or steamy romance, you’ll have to learn about things you’re not really familiar with. Want to write about hot sexy pirates who abduct chubby single mothers who are then forced to choose between sexy pirate man and the rescuer from the Royal Navy? Might want to brush up on naval history. Might I suggest you start with Alfred Mahan? (Actually that’s not a bad place to start if you want to understand naval history).

Third, history is really the only place you can read biography. Here is the thing, biography is a big category and it’s not really taught outside of history departments. Maybe the English department or a foreign language department will cover something like the life of Shakespeare or Tolstoy but they’re not going to go in depth into the lives of the authors of their books. You’ll only really study the lives of great men in a history department. Want to understand power, try taking a class on the lives of the Roman emperors. Philosophy might cover a little about the lives of philosophers, but you won’t study them the way you will in history. The same can be said for a sub discipline of biography called hagiography (the study of the lives of the saints). If you want to understand Thomas Aquinas, and really you should because he was a fascinating mind and one of the smartest people to ever live, you’ll only do that in a history class.

Fourth, you’ll learn about different aspects of human society. This can also be studied in anthropology or economics, but you won’t really have the breadth of knowledge that comes from studying Christian theology in the Age of Reason in relation to Adam Smith in an economics class. Economics can be handy, but it’s not really going to give you much information regarding how to understand the world in relation to other aspects of life. Economists and theologians and philosophers tend to think in terms of their own discipline. That’s not bad, but it’s not really what you’ll want if you’re trying to build a world with a coherent economy, political system, theology, and magic system all tied together. History will work your brain in a way other areas just don’t.

Fifth, history is one of the only places in college where you will encounter the study of conflict, specifically war. If you’re lucky enough to go to a college with a military history program take advantage of it. The most valuable things I’ve ever learned in school were from my military history classes, especially the medieval military classes. Think all wars are caused by religion? Go study Europe in the middle ages and tell me what you think. (Hint: it’s mostly about consolidation of power or resources). But at the heart of writing is conflict. If you don’t study it you’ll never understand it. If your college offers a class on World War II or Vietnam (ahem… it’s probably full of pro-commie propaganda) take it. You’ll probably not read books on conflict anywhere else except perhaps a psychology class, and that will be very different than learning about war. And let’s face it, a lot of fiction deals with war. You need to learn military history.

Finally, you’ll learn historiography. That’s a big word that means the history of the writing of an area of history. More simply, it’s the study of a field of history by looking at what others have written about it. Historiography will teach you the single most important thing you can do for world building, how to create a history for your world. You’ll learn that by taking your senior historiography class seriously and putting in the elbow grease to understand something like the historiography of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and its relationship to Serbia in the late nineteenth century.

There are cons as well. I wouldn’t send you eagerly into a history program without warning you of the poison that also comes with this major.

First, your professors are hardcore Marxists and some are actual communists. I’m not exaggerating. There is a thing called Marxist historiography that your professors all studied in grad school and they probably take it very seriously. Marxism is at the heart of most historical fields these days. It’s a teleological worldview. That means your professors believe the world is heading to a utopia where all will have according to their need and others will provide according to their ability. Many will gloss over the evils of communism and the failures of socialism. They actually believe that real communism has never been tried. My freshman western civ II class ended with our professor telling us that communism was inevitable and resistance is futile.

Second, your professors hate you. Well, really they hate themselves for becoming professors. They really started out wanting a middle class lifestyle and then ended up making less than most manual laborers whom they look down their noses at. This translates into hating you because you’re not wasted your life yet. They also hate the fact that you will probably make more than they will. See, having their minds poisoned by Marxist bullshit makes professors believe they deserve to be paid according to a thing called the labor theory of value. I.E. they should be paid based on their inherent worth, rather than on market demands. Unfortunately for professors there are ten PhDs waiting to take their place should they ever retire, so the market doesn’t really grant them much of a salary. Go to your local college look at the cars in the faculty parking of business or engineering then look at the faculty parking for the humanities. One looks like a Lexus dealership one looks like an Audi dealership one looks like that place Clark Griswold bought his station wagon from in  I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

Third, your professors are not as smart as they would like you to believe. Well, most of them aren’t anyway. I’ve met a few who were insanely brilliant. My MA director, James Reckner, went from having no college degree to having a PhD in five years. That’s what he had to do to take advantage of his GI Bill. He’s that brilliant. But most professors aren’t really smart, they’re just autistic. They get interested in one little aspect of one subject and study it for forty years. As a consequence they don’t really know much about the rest of the world, and yet when they teach undergraduates they will actually pretend they know things they don’t, then will shame you for asking questions rather than admitting they don’t know something. I’ve seen it happen too many times. Even grad students do this. It really goes back to pride of academics. They simply cannot be wrong about anything, and if you challenge them on their knowledge they take it personally. That’s why they grade down conservative students. You’re very existence is a threat to their personal self-worth.

Lastly, if you’re not mentally strong, you’ll become one of them. I’m not saying this to scare you off, but you need to be secure in your understanding of the world and secure in your values before you engage with these people. Few undergrads are mentally tough enough to survive four or five years of Marxist propaganda without at the very least assuming their basic premises. You’ll hear Europe and America being treated as the bad guys while all the other people of the world are the good guys resisting the Fascist Imperialist rayciss white devils of Europe who are out to rape and plunder the lands of others. You’ll hear of women being oppressed, and men being evil, especially Christian men and the Church. You’ll see your professors tell you you’re gender is inherently bad, you’re bad for being white, you’re bad for believing in transcendent moral values instead of moral relativism, and you’ll probably be forced to take at least a few courses in “critical theory.” Get used to hearing the terms hegemon and subaltern as well. The humanities, especially history, are infested with the notion that being a weak victim is empowering and moral while being great is a bad thing. You’ll hear that power dynamics between the hegemon (those with power, whites, males, and religious people – usually) and the subaltern, (those without, women, PoC, gays etc…) are shifting thanks to social justice, and you’ll see common sense turned on its head. In the end, you’ll be pressured to accept the premises of Marxism and critical theory uncritically and with extreme pressure. If you resist your grades will be in jeopardy as will be your scholarships and social standing. Most nineteen and twenty year old students simply can’t endure that much pressure and you’ll likely end up writing SJW fiction.

So that’s basically it for my pros and cons of majoring in history. I hope it didn’t scare you too much, remember it’s basically just the opinion of a guy who studies military history. I know what I’m talking about, so either listen or don’t. But I really hope you do, as I’d like to one day read what you write, especially if you are a fan of Uprising Review.

I present a sample of social-justice prose – a fictional newspaper column written by a young social justice warrior, condemning my fictional scientist’s attire, followed by some of the insights I acquired about the nature and use of social-justice rhetoric.

End the Toxic Hyper-Masculinity of Science

Yesterday morning, wearing a shirt featuring scantily-clad women, Professor Chen of the Georgia Tech Physics Department announced a discovery to help make the world “safe” for even more deadly radiation. Professor Chen’s technique for finding where radiation is and where it goes helps proponents of nuclear technology argue that it can be safely managed and controlled, thus encouraging further proliferation. Proclaiming his results “sexy” and declaring “they did not come easy,” Professor Chen perpetrated the patriarchal narrative that science is the figurative rape of nature. Not content with emboldening those who want to make dangerous nuclear technology more readily available, Professor Chen demeaned and objectified half the human race in the process with his outrageously sexist shirt.

Could any shirt possibly be as bad as all that? Yes it can.

Imagine buxom button-bursting bosoms breasting boobily, amid guns, motorcycles, and other icons of patriarchal domination and violence. Professor Chen may say he respects his female colleagues and students, but his shirt says otherwise. His shirt says, “I have no respect for you as a professional.” His shirt proclaims that science is a boys’ club where women are merely sex objects for the visual pleasure of men. Professor Chen’s shirt visually rapes every woman who sees it, reducing women to pieces of meat that men get to utilize for their sexual pleasure. His shirt marginalizes his female colleagues just to show how laid back he is. Professor Chen isn’t the least bit stuffy, and he’s prepared to throw his female colleagues under the bus to prove it.

Most disturbing of all, no one in the physics department, not even his intimidated and browbeaten female colleagues, thought his shirt was inappropriate. By their failure to take action, they are complicit in his phallic imperialism. The physics department in particular and the so-called “Ramblin’ Wrecks” at Georgia Tech in general have once again exposed their flagrant hateful misogyny to the world.

Despite our best efforts, bigots and sexists like Professor Chen thrive in our society. The systemic patriarchal hegemony of science and engineering provides a breeding ground for their chauvinism. Their rampant sexual objectification triggers an environment wherein sexual harassment is commonplace. This pervasive atmosphere of toxic hyper-masculinity deters even strong, independent women like me from careers in science. Little girls watching Professor Chen get the message loud and clear – science is not for you; stay home, have babies, and bake cookies.

We need to send a different message – a message to Professor Chen and any other scientist who harbors such sexist and ostracizing attitudes. Get out of science. There is no place here for you to demean half of humanity with your archaic bigotry. We need to root out these sexist attitudes so scientists and engineers alike can be taught to think as critically about socially important issues like race and gender as they do about their test tubes and telescopes. This overt sexism is unacceptable, and the perpetrators must be held accountable. None of us can stand on the sidelines. If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.

One of my Alpha Readers cautioned that the social justice rhetoric of A Rambling Wreck sometimes sounded like parody. He had a point. I helped myself to the catch phrases and jargon of a wide variety of social-justice warriors. I collected many of the most colorful and ridiculous examples of hyperbolic social-justice prose I could find, and I distilled it to yield results like that above. By placing social-justice rhetoric in the concise dialectic form required by the narrative structure of my story, the inherent illogic and vacuousness of it become far more apparent. To that extent, my fictionalized social-justice prose may do an injustice to social-justice advocates.

In SJWs Always Lie, Vox Day explains Aristotle’s distinction between dialectic and rhetoric – between the logical arguments that persuade rational thinkers and the emotional appeals more effective with the less rational. A dialectic thinker may be prone to identify the rhetorical and dismiss it as invalid. There is a complex hierarchy of aims and motives for rhetoric, however, that even the most dialectic of thinkers must recognize. The ability to identify the use and purpose of rhetoric helps opponents side-step and defeat it.

One use of rhetoric is “virtue-signaling:” demonstrating one’s self-worth through skilled use of social-justice rhetoric. Countering phallic hetero-patriarchal imperialism and deconstructing one’s privilege in the approved fashion takes considerable study and effort. Mastery of the arcane jargon of social justice provides a secret lodge sign by which one SJW may recognize another and assess their relative place in the social justice virtue hierarchy. Fluency in social justice argot demonstrates that one has transcended the conventional duality between oppressed and oppressor to become a member of an elite third class – one of the heroic champions of the oppressed and a true social-justice warrior.

Another purpose for rhetoric is in emotional assault. SJWs fling trigger words at a perceived enemy, often with little correlation to the word’s true meaning: Nazi! Racist! Fascist! Sexist! Bigot! Hater! It is enough that the SJW perceives the object of the rhetoric as “bad” in some generic sense. The tendency to seek social approval and avoid criticism is particularly strong with SJWs. They prefer to employ the very tactic that would often be highly effective if turned against them. Anonymous Conservative offers an excellent examination of the biological basis of political thought in The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans.

A further use of rhetoric is to deliberately obscure the truth. “The fight for social justice may sometimes involves sacrifices that in other contexts we might abhor, yet the sacrifices we must make – and those we must ask of others – are justified by the goal of a just and equitable society.” The pitiless “truth” behind social justice is that the ends justify the means. When your end is securing ultimate power to enact your vision of ultimate good, the ultimate in evil is thereby justified: from the Dekulakization, to the Final Solution, to the Cultural Revolution, to the Killing Fields of Cambodia and beyond. One aim of social-justice rhetoric is to obscure this brutal reality, not only from the SJW’s audience, but also from social-justice advocates themselves. Any tyranny may be justified if cloaked behind sufficiently obscure jargon.

Saul Alinsky explicitly recognized the inherent contradiction between good ends and evil means: “We then recognize that for every positive there is a negative, and that there is nothing positive without its concomitant negative, nor any political paradise without its negative side.” He justified his embrace of the contradiction by reference to quantum mechanics. “Niels Bohr pointed out that the appearance of contradictions was a signal that the experiment was on the right track.… Bohr called this ‘complementarity,’ meaning that the interplay of seemingly conflicting forces or opposites is the actual harmony of nature.”

While it is true that “politics is downstream from culture,” there is a complex interplay between politics, culture, and even science. The cultural and political milieu of Weimar Germany that gave birth to Nazi tyranny, for instance, also led to acausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, which in turn are used to justify modern variations of similar tyrannies.

Opponents of the ends and means of social justice should familiarize themselves with the aims and purposes of social-justice rhetoric. A familiarity with these tactics aids in understanding and defeating their proponents.

Check out Hans’ series The Hidden Truth

The only people who should major in English are those wanting to obtain an MA in English and then teach. For most writers English simply isn’t the major they should be in.

Which brings us to the question of whether you should get the MFA.

If you’ve done undergrad right and didn’t go into too much debt and didn’t waste your time getting a degree that ends with the word “studies” then congratulations. You did a pretty good job at college.

So here is the bottom line: some of your favorite authors have an MFA, and some don’t. You can Google lists of who has an MFA and who doesn’t so I won’t belabor the point here, but the fact that some have it and some don’t  means exactly one thing: it’s a personal choice and that choice is largely dependent on what you intend to get out of the MFA.

The MFA can be of use if you want to work in the professional world of writing. It can be a credential that will allow you to work for a publisher, help you gain traffic on a blog, or even get a job as a guest blogger in the ever increasing lit-sphere. An MFA will allow you to teach other students. It might get your foot in the door with a publisher if you have a completed manuscript and are a recent grad. But that’s about it.

If any of that appeals to you, then maybe an MFA is what you need. Though this brings us to another question, perhaps a more important question. What should a writer major in at university?

I have a BA in geology, an MA in history, an MBA and have way too much time invested in a PhD in history. History improved my writing in a way no other academic class or department did. But then I had some excellent professors who taught me to write. I also read writing as dry as an academics bones and knew I didn’t want to write books for ten other academics, and I read writers like Norman Davies, Barbara Tuchman, Thomas F. Madden, and others. They demonstrated to me that history didn’t have to be tedious. It would be, for me, entertainment. And so today I write mostly historical adventures. I pride myself on my ability to create deep characters, complex plots, and (usually) accurate historical settings. History is a good major for a writer. But you have to be prepared to teach it to make a living.

This is why my advice on what to major in is largely dependent upon what you, the writer in training, would like to do while working to make a living off your words. STEM careers are hot right now, but that will fade as automation takes the place of computer programmers (and this is already happening according to friends in the industry and in Japan).

Ultimately, what you major in at university will be important only in that it should help you attain your goal of being a writer. Maybe it will be a way to support yourself, maybe it will put you in the publishing industry, but one thing I believe is that college isn’t necessary to write. And that should be the first question you ask yourself: do I even need a degree anymore?

My parents were born and raised in the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, AKA the East Sector of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union. You’ve heard of the infamous Berlin wall, right? Well, my parents lived on the wrong side of it.

Despite the term ‘Democratic’ in the title, there was nothing democratic about the German Democratic Republic. In short, it was North Korea Lite. The State Security called Stasi, basically an evil FBI with unlimited powers, forced citizens to become spies on their family and friends.  Every party and event you went to was infested with either agents or spies, checking weather you posed a danger to the state. Private business was either outlawed or sabotaged by officials because private ownership was deemed evil.

In those oppressive times, my parents studied to become artists and quickly enraged the state. They expressed criticism through their artwork and received warnings. Then threats. Then ‘home visits’ by the police who confiscated ‘problematic’ artwork, books and records.

Freedom of expression was seen as act of aggression against the state and its utopian ideas.

The state servants oppressed individual artistry in favor for the collectivist ideology. Needless to say, it was hell on Earth. And yet, my parents endured. They kept their mouths shut and nurtured their rebellious thoughts in silence.  They left the GDR five years before the regime collapsed and fled to the West.
It’s been over 2 decades now since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the ghosts of the past have returned, using the same rhetoric. Nowadays, expressing unpopular views is offensive, if not dangerous, having the wrong color/religion/nationality means you shouldn’t talk about X, and if you’re not connected to culture Y you are not allowed to be inspired by culture Y and must refrain from using it in your art.

In short, your words are considered weapons and must be controlled, all for the Greater Good of course.

It’s the same rhetoric authoritarians use to keep the populace in check, only this time, we have the Internet to fight back. It might seem like a joke, but the ability to reach millions and bypass the official gatekeepers is a huge win for the fight for freedom of expression.

This is where the Uprising Review comes in.

Stories fuel our existence, like Diesel that never ages. Vroom. Vroom. We use stories as guide posts to make meaning of the world. And the most powerful stories are the ones based on truth. It doesn’t matter whether your stories revolve around armed goblins living in underground mines or engineers who built hyperdrives to scare off wraths in space; if they make an honest statement about the human condition, they shoot straight into your membrane. They may even alter your thinking.

I hope to see exciting and daring stories on Uprising Review. Stories that make you cringe and even challenge your current mindset. And I hope you’ll join me to discover and write them here on the Uprising Review.

Check out Mars Dorian’s new book “The Crystal Crusade” available now!