So I'm reading Flashback by Dan Simmons. The setting is

[hedgehog]

a Right winger's ultimate nightmare - as if every word on Fox were true and America collapses in the next few years because of the liberals and the hippies. My question is, some of this stuff is so over the top, does Simmons really believe this or is it all an elaborate satire?. I mean, there is even a passing reference to wind turbines slaughtering millions of birds.

[getting old in mke]

1. Quoting him: "In a word . . . no. In two words . . . hell no."

His explanation is on his site at http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2011_06.htm

[hedgehog]

2. I don't buy it.

Lots of science fiction is based on accepting one or more unlikely premises.For example, one is expected to accept some form of faster than light travel. This book merely asks that you accept every single crack pot Tea party notion as reality.

[Posteritatis]

3. He believes it. He's one of the viler writers out there.

After reading his essay complaining about the lack of civilian casualties in the wars in the Middle East, I wrote him off as just another would-be genocidaire.

[Rowdyboy]

4. I've really enjoyed his work in the past but a few things I've read make me think he's fucking crazy

I'm very much afraid that he's seriously delusional.

edited so it would make sense, duh....

[jambo101]

5. Dan Simmonds

I've read his Illium and Olympos series and the Hyperion series and found his writing in those books very satisfying..As yet i havent read Flashback,is this a new book or something he wrote when he was starting out?.

[hedgehog]

6. I think it was published in 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/dowd-here-comes-nobody.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

One of the sillier side bars is a commentary on Ward Churchill. I'm no fan of Churchill, but I suspect he is nowhere near as influential as Simmons makes him out to be. The description of Churchill's ignorant students of Native American studies physically shoving aside hard working English majors was absolutely absurd.

[sudopod]

7. I comfort myself with the idea that we wake up as slightly different people every day.

That way, I can still love the Dan Simmons that wrote the Hyperion series while pitying the one that walks the earth in 2012.

[semillama]

8. Well, shit. There's another author down the tubes.

Did he catch the insanity bug after 9/11 too?

[Posteritatis]

9. Thoroughly.

He was in favor of an actual war of extermination in the Muslim world; complained about the lack of civilian casualties in Iraq and stuff like that.

[semillama]

10. well, at least we still have David Brin. n/t

[Bucky]

11. Sadly, most of what wingnuts genuinely believe is just that OTT

just cause it seems ridiculous to you doesn't mean someone else doesn't think it's a just a few months away from happening. A few years ago I read some cockamamie essay by a well respected SciFi author--a very talented writer--and it was essentially a story about his own son, then still a toddler but now 60 years old and heavily battle scarred, who'd jumped back in time from the mid-2050s where he was a mechawarrior fighting in the North American resistance movement against the imposition of Shariya law on the former United States. His child was warning him about how Muslim fanatics had overrun our society because we were too tolerant of them and had failed to realize that most of the immigrants to the US from the Middle East were sleeper agents waiting entire generations to conquer us.

We can laugh off such silliness, but this was the same type of paranoia that led a reliable lib like FDR to lock up all the Nissei. For that matter, it's the same paranoia that led Germans to believe half a million Jews--mostly shop keepers and urban professionals--could manipulate a nation of 66 million Germans. Crazy doesn't need your stinkin' facts.