"DENIER LIT" : 'Hard' SF

     We think we know what women like to read - we claim it is something called "CHICK LIT". So what do deniers/birthers/spacers - call 'em what you will - read ?
    Can the jokes about them being unable to read, or only reading with their fingers while breathing through their mouths as the knuckles of their other hand grazes the ground , ape-style.
   These guys do read - a lot. A lot more than their younger critics probably do.
   I think we will find that they read 'Hard SF' and its close cousins - with authors like Robert Heinlein, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton high in their Pantheon of author-prophets.

   It isn't polite today to claim that anyone other than some long dead foreign Nazis believes in "The Triumph of the human Will" - so we have had to re-brand it as "the ultimate triumph of the human spirit" , for these guys and their boy-fans.
    Nice word 'spirit'  : particularly for a bunch of perpetual teenage boys who claim to be either religious and to despise atheists or to be atheists who despise the religious.
     Both types of 'hardcore' SFers are content to wallow in a form of softcore quasi-spirtuality, totally devoid of any hardcore of orthodoxy and doctrine.
   If high American literature - from Hawthorne onward was a critic of Americanism, this genre SF ( along with all manner of 'adventure' books: westerns,spy and war) is 100% patriotic American.
   Roth and his ilk, they say, is read and written by liberal Democrats: we are read and written by conservative (ie Liberal)/libertarian Republicans.
    DENIER LIT : filling the popular genre bins of what is left of your local bookstores: pick one or ten up today......

Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....