Part 5 (conclusion)
I have previously opined that the alt-dissidents ought to establish culture and aesthetics rather than just making formal arguments.
I decided to try to practice what I preach and for the last few weeks I’ve been working on a mini-novella instead of my regular blog posts. I’ve chosen to write in a fantasy setting because I’ve always wanted to, but also because establishing mythological tales is a natural place to start for an emerging culture. And much of modern mythology comes from fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero stories.
Narratives about gods and heroes are popular in every culture because humans seem to universally process the world around them in terms of archetypes. Greek Gods, Norse Gods, and modern superheroes all embody essential principles and the interactions of these characters mirror the relationships between those principles in real life. It is my guess that myth-making is a primal human activity because it can communicate abstractions even to people who are illiterate and/or low IQ on a visceral and intuitive level.
I have often used the concepts of Heaven and Hell on this blog to contrast the established social order with those who thrive outside of it and against it. Now, I have applied this analogy to a narrative.
I didn’t feel this blog was the right medium for longer pieces of fiction. I have always believed in sticking to essays here between 600-1500 words that readers can easily scroll through.
So I approached Kaiter Enless of Logos Club with a query and after reviewing it, he expressed his interest in publishing my story on his site divided into 4-5 parts. Part 1 was just put up today and I will have the rest forthcoming soon.
Special thanks to Garr who personally volunteered his time to edit and critique the story and to Ulric Kerensky who also read through the rough draft and gave me excellent feedback.
FORWARD BASE B 
19 replies on “My New Alt-Dissident Fantasy Fiction”
>I have previously opined that the alt-dissidents ought to establish culture and aesthetics rather than just making formal arguments.
Yes.
>It is my guess that myth-making is a primal human activity because it can communicate abstractions even to people who are illiterate and/or low IQ on a visceral and intuitive level.
Partially – the key understanding is that culture and aesthetics are the way to influence how society thinks about certain topics, and not to discuss the pro`s and cons.
However, I think that using the book or written text as medium is outdated. Might have worked during medieval times, but today it is music/video/youtube. May require significantly more effort, but I highly doubt that one will reach illiterate low-IQ people with novels nowadays.
You’re underestimating the level of literacy in the west – don’t forget the success of books like Fifty Shades, Game of Thrones, Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games… anything Stephen King writes, ect, you may not like these books but they made huge cultural impacts and all was the result of but a relatively small handful of people (author, publisher and their prime advertisers, etc).
Kaiter makes a good point. The generative ability of books to influence culture is due to their ability to “tap into” the core subconscious of the mind in a way that movies or music do not. Books have “mind viruses” embedded in them, in other words. Think memes. A successful book is geared to breaking the mold, not repeating it.
The novel and short story have never been mediums that appeal to the low IQ end of the spectrum.
Even pulpy thrillers and chick-lit are more of an entertainment for the perfectly average. I figure just being able to maintain attention on the written word and then forming a compelling mental image of its meaning is a significant bar to entry.
I get your point about youtube and visual media especially with younger millennials and gen Z. While that’s a huge market, it’s also massively oversaturated. There are already more youtube and social media personalities, even in the dissident community, than anyone can keep track of.
There’s been an explosion of interest in the alt-right and neoreaction since Charlottesville. My own essays here on culture, politics, and history have done better than ever since then. But I also get the sense that niche has grown so much it’s reaching saturation and most of the important topics are getting more than enough coverage. It’s a very different world than ca. 2012 when it felt like it was just me and a few trad NRxers writing about how enlightenment axioms gave rise to the problems of modernity. We’ve passed the point of reasoning from first principles and now the real world application of ideas has grown more important.
While there’s little established demand for dissident written fiction, the niche is still only sparsely populated, even the idea of dissident art still in its infancy. So far, the best developed are memes, which I see as a kind of informal street art.
Yes, you’re right about art changing how people think. The best part is it can persuade people on an intuitive level without making them get defensive like debating ideas does.
Your final point, Meta Falconer, is the most salient and best. Art bypasses, argument confronts. A Cicero brought forward in time to argue for the alt-right would do more harm than good to the movement. I support alt-right principles wholeheartedly, and the basis for this is similar to the low-IQ whites’, but we come at its resolution differently: they worship the power of TV and quail before “raciss” threats, whereas the strong and high-IQ are largely immune. It is our immunity that gives us the strength to fight.
Fascinating. Alf at http://www.alfanl.com is exploring a similar idea with the Orb of Covfefe
https://alfanl.com/category/the-orb-of-covfefe/
Yes, I was aware of Alf’s project as am a regular reader of his blog. I got some inspiration from his writing as I was working on my own story. It helps to know someone is thinking similarly. I also once saw an excellent story from Brett Stevens of amerika blog.
http://www.amerika.org/science/winners/
There’s a dissident poetry magazine now.
https://www.atopthecliffs.com/poetry/
I’ve had one poem published in it, I hope to work on some more for them soon now that I’ve finished my story.
There’s also a literary magazine, Uprising Review that publishes shorter short stories.
http://www.uprisingreview.com
Fantasy doesn’t seem to penetrate into the minds of other people unless it is through the screens of cinema. Take J.R.R. Tolkien for instance.
Fantasy in general seems to act as a retreat method. I somehow doubt the greatest philosophers, in terms of getting their point across, like Voltaire or Nietzsche used the fantasy medium to convey their ideologies.
The West subscribes to a fairly low entertainment threshold any lava lamp flickering lights action packed screen flick seems to tickle their fancy. We can take a look at most visual entertainment that they utilize the same consistent amount of tropes that’s been done before and time again.
The movie Pan’s Labyrinth seems to have been sorely forgotten (even though the critics raved about it when it was released).
Lord of the Rings had a huge cultural presence long before they were made into live-action films!
Actually, Voltaire wrote Candide and Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra as narrative vehicles for their ideas. While not like modern fantasy, they shared similarities with other fantastic narratives of their period.
You make a good point that fantasy ultimately became dominated by escapism for its own sake. That is why it’s fallen to such a low point with Game of Thrones not so much a revival of fantasy as it is a deconstruction of it. Fantasy is by nature a template for mythology and people like and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis understood this well when they created the genre in its modern form.
Lord of the Rings, for instance still resonates deeply today because, besides being a fun story to escape into, it very effectively describes the anxiety of the transition into the post-modern, post-WW2 world and the deep longing for the certainty and comfort of older social institutions. It described the feeling of a world where beautiful and sacred things were in retreat and life for most people was becoming more fluid and mechanical.
Every kind of trope gets re-used. The basic ones have always been there. We have Super Man in our times. The Ancient Greeks had Hercules. Tolkien drew heavily on established mythology to make his own. Tropes and archetypes are to a narrative like colors are to a painting or notes to music.
Pan’s Labyrinth remains a well-known and well-liked film, one of Del Toro’s best. I would say it’s an example of Fantastic Realism, a storytelling style more common in the Spanish-Speaking world. The idea being that natural and supernatural are indistinguishable or ambiguous. In Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s valid to suppose the little girl’s adventures with fantastic creatures are her own imaginings…or not.
In Plato’s Republic there’s the Invisibility-Ring story, the Cave Story, an Underworld-Tour at the end, the image of the soul as composite of many-headed monster, lion, and homunculus, the comparison of the soul to Glaucus the mutilated shell-encrusted sea-titan, plus a very imaginative depiction of the stages of personal and social collapse, and really the whole society depicted throughout is fantastic and humorously intended.
In his Phaedo there’s a fanciful reincarnation-account including soiled souls haunting graveyards and a fantastic geographic account at the end according to which we live at the bottom of an atmospheric pool like sea-bottom-feeders, while heavenly beings live at the top, on the dry “land” above us where everything’s bright and sharply colored and defined.
In his Phaedrus there’s the description of parades of pre-incarnated souls following the chariots of the gods around the outer shell of the celestial heaven with their heads sticking out into the empyrean where the meta-stars of true Beauty, Justice, etc. are.
In his Symposium there’s the story of how we once were double what we are now and are literally seeking our other halves. When Alcibiades comes in at the end and describes his history with Socrates, Socrates becomes a fantastic, mythical figure in his own right.
Those are the Plato-fantasies that I can remember now, but I think that there are some others.
And of course we’re very familiar with the invisibility ring from Tolkien. Just as in the original it represents the temptations and test of character we’d face if the forces that normally restrain our actions were taken away. The thesis is if we give in we lapse into slavery to our own passions and wretchedness, which Lord of the Rings explores in depth.
Power supersedes morality; fuck that slavery notion.
Xtrabeing beseeches a good point. At what point do we have to appeal to the lesser denominator? We only need to look at William S. Burroughs who decided his drug induced ravings were good enough to pass off as a high-art.
Many of the greatest writers were under the influence of some sort. Coherency isn’t a necessity per se to pass off as entertainment.
I agree that fantasy and philosophy overlap in the sense that they are both fixated with sort of escaping reality.
I think philosophy is another sort of form of navel-gazing where there seems to be a thin line between true insight and just glorified indulgent self examination to the point of frivolity. I don’t consider that type of philosophy valid or helpful to anyone except in an academic setting. Ironically enough those types of philosophers are reaching in the dark much like the people in the allegory of the cave.
I can see why one might think of those as fantasies. The main difference is that philosophy seems to be more self absorbed whilst fantasy seems more externally focused. Philosophy being an escape through self whilst fantasy being an escape through mythological settings and creatures.
This is great !!!! It reminds me of the fantasy-lovecraftian RPG: Darkest Dungeon.
Thanks, Ivan! The last 2 parts were just posted today.
Yes, they were already up so I read it all in one go.
I loved it, it elicited the same aura of pretentiousness and arrogance of A Song of Ice & Fire but without the “you-go-grrrl” and Plot Armor.
tbf the books of ASOIAF kind of deconstruct the “you-go-grrrl” with Danaerys in a way the show completely (intentionally?) missed.
If you really look at her Meereen storyline, you see that ultimately her noble interventionist crusade to end slavery is completely misguided, and her attempt at “nation building” worked about as well as George W Bush’s in Iraq
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