@HBenthow Agreed, he returned to the theme many many times in his body of work, including both Therns and First Born.
My read is that the ambiguity you mention was camouflage against offense taken by a more Christian culture than we presently have.
https://t.co/dx0p7JXwrR
@metal_gifs Oh, yeah, dude. Like half of his novels he hits on the theme that the highest priests of any religion, knowing the most about said religion, are invariably atheists.
He's got a deist-ish angle he hits on sometimes (e.g. "The God of Tarzan"), but generally? Reddit atheist. Sad.
I love Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the man (I am sad to say this) was a Reddit atheist par excellence. This is from 'Tarzan the Terrible' where Tarzan, in the savage land of Pal-ul-don, is pretending to be the son of their god Jad-ben-Otho.
Subversive is the only word for it.
This is what they’re selling on the official America 250 store. You are allowed to buy these grade-A designs if you choose.
OR
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@Elvish_Harper@JosonCernel They did literally define a genre though.
I am ERB's strongest soldier and even I will admit his quality is highly variable, but his sword-and-planet stories very much did define a genre.
@jd_sauvage There is common ground to be found! I'll eat my hat if the original drow weren't specifically and shamelessly based on Barsoom's First Born.
@cafeviolenza White leftists think "A senseless tragedy from which the only lesson to be learned is to further crack down on knife crime (of the native population only of course). Awful how the far right racists are politicizing it."
Brown leftists think "white people dying fuckin rules."
A tragic and stirring story.
Take away from this that if you are in a position to save your blood kin from a terrible fate without treachery, do it. Don't delay.
Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Clark may have paid the highest personal price. Almost nobody knows his story. Buckle up.
He was a New Jersey farm kid considered too frail for farm work, so he taught himself math, then surveying, then law. He never got rich from it because he kept defending poor farmers who could not pay him. His neighbors called him "the Poor Man's Counselor."
In the early hours of July 4, 1776, while Congress debated independence in Philadelphia, Clark wrote a letter to a friend with one of the most chilling lines of the Revolution: "Perhaps our Congress will be exalted on a high gallows."
He signed anyway.
Then the British made it personal. Two of his sons were officers in the Continental Army, and both were captured. They were thrown onto the prison ship Jersey in New York Harbor, the deadliest place of the entire war. More Americans died on British prison ships than in every battle of the Revolution combined.
One son got it even worse. He was locked in the dungeon and given no food except what other starving prisoners could push through the keyhole of his cell.
The British reportedly offered Clark a deal: renounce the Declaration, switch sides, and your boys go free.
He refused.
Here is the part that breaks me. Clark sat in Congress through all of it and never once brought it up. No special pleading, no favors. Congress only found out through other channels and threatened retaliation against a British officer, which finally got his son out of the dungeon.
After the war, he kept choosing the little guy. He fought for debt relief for struggling farmers and refused to support the Constitution until he was assured a Bill of Rights would protect ordinary citizens.
In September 1794, at age 68, the self-taught surveyor who outlasted the British Empire died of sunstroke after a long day working on his own farm.
No statue on the National Mall. No musical. Just a small town in New Jersey called Clark, and most people who drive through it have no idea why.
Some men signed the Declaration with ink. Abraham Clark signed it with his sons.
I love Howard, he is a titan of weird fiction and fantasy, and Moorcock has many virtues as a writer - including that his art often cuts directly against his ridiculous views.
But come on now.
@BretVDB I agree with his judgement here, which is the same as Michael Moorcock's, who quoted a chunk of TLOTR & wrote "It just goes on like that for page after page", with not a jot of humour. For well-written fantasy read Moorcock, or Robert E. Howard.
To me, this is a perfect artifact of “Peak Woke.” A totally senseless factoid, where the premise is a complete lie — and that lie is the actual payload.
On a factual level, “Avicenna” is just a transliteration of “Ibn Sina.” And besides, it’s not some insane jump, especially when Plato in Arabic is “Aflāṭūn,” and Hippocrates is “Buqrāṭ.” But none of this is the point.
The real content of this genre of post is asserting to the reader: “You grew up learning that Avicenna was a white European man, as part of a systematic effort to wipe nonwhite historical accomplishments out of the public record.”
This is an insane lie. Completely off-the-wall. But it goes unquestioned, and the reader is meant to absorb and be outraged by this act of ignorant racism.
(That he didn’t know who Avicenna was before reading it is irrelevant — and he will not learn who Avicenna was after, either)
But… he now knows in his heart that it’s *ackshually* written “Ibn Sīnā.” He feels not only intellectually, but *morally* superior for knowing this. His imagined miseducation has been corrected.
This lying-by-premise schtick is, to me, the central pillar and hallmark of “Wokeism.” All of education and media has orbited around this rhetorical device for… what, over a decade now? Everything from K-12 to network TV to graduate scholarship to national politics.
I can’t count how many times I had a teacher tell me that some historical figure “wasn’t the hero you were always taught he was.” Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Henry Ford, etc… meanwhile, that’s how all of these figures were being introduced for the first time!