Gee, introductions are hard.
Hello, good people of ImpishIdea. I’m Brendan. I’ve been a lurker here for months and have finally gotten around to actually posting stuff. I’ve never really done a spork like this before, so I hope you’ll bear with me.
Anyway, what I’m about to show you is yet another self-published book series from a writer who thinks too highly of himself. However, unlike Tesch or Nelson or many of the other people who have incurred this site’s ire, this particular writer is actually respected in his field. His field is not fiction, suffice to say. Rudolph Rummel may be a respected political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii, but that doesn’t mean he can write good fiction. The books go to great lengths to list all his academic credentials, apparently unaware that those mean nothing here.
Now we are finally getting to the books themselves. There are six of them, however, it is clear that Rummel was not originally intending to write more than one. All of the books in his series are in fact available for free off his website. You can tell that they were vanity published because the covers are horrible.
If you want to read the books yourself, here is a link.
Here’s what he has to say about them:
On the Never Again Series
The six novels in this series are a what-if, alternative history. Two lovers are sent back in time to 1906 with modern weapons and 38 billion 1906 dollars. Their mission is to prevent the rise of fascism and communism, avert the major 20th Century wars, including World Wars I and II, and forestall such democides as those by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
A description and the cover of each book are given below, along with a link to the free [PDF] download.
Foremost, this series is character driven entertainment, filled with strong action, humor, pathos, high emotion, sex, conflict, and maybe even tears. There are a large number of docudramas in the books that provide a true background or context for the action and conflicts, such as Pol Pot’s killing fields, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, Stalin’s starvation of the Ukraine, Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians, Rwanda’s genocide of the Tutsi, the Russian abortive 1905 communist uprising, the Battle of the Somme in World War I, the Vietnam War and defeat of the South and resulting communist transformation of the country, and finally the Boat People.
But, above all, these books are a story about love versus power — the love of dedicated warriors for each other and for humanity and who risk their lives and each other in their deadly struggle against power, unaware that:
Unseen, loves dark foe
Power, like a deadly plague,
Infests, subverts, kills.
I’d just like to say that, much like the Twilight Saga, the summary of the book pretty much spoils the main twist. You’d better like waiting, because for a hundred pages, there will be no hint of any time travel.
Well, let’s begin with the first book, shall we? War and Democide Never Again
…I don’t know what to say about the cover, other than that it’s horrible. It’s utter chaos. If I were to guess, I’d say it shows an execution grounds in outer space while the upper bodies of a man and a woman (who look completely ridiculous, mind you) obscure part of the title. The only reason I propose the cover is in space is because an image of the Earth is superimposed in the center, with some weird rings around it. The whole thing is garish and really looks like somebody was messing around with Microsoft Publisher. Usually, you want the cover to get people interested in the book before they read it, but apparently Rummel did not get the memo. Of course, since one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, let’s get into the actual text.
Past the author shilling, title page, and copyright notice, the first thing we see is this:
Pray tell, my brother,
Why do dictators kill and make war?
For glory, for things, for beliefs, out of hatred;
For power.
Yes, but more because they can. (page 7)
I will admit, that actually makes me want to read the book. Surely things will get interesting, right? (Spoiler alert: They don’t. How disappointing.)
After that little poem (which does not have any attribution, so I assume that Rummel wrote it), he puts in an acknowledgements page. If he’s treating this like it’s non-fiction, and since his whole field of study is about war and democide, this book should be well-researched.
Next up is a Foreword:
Love is one of our greatest mysteries and the greatest reward that we can receive and give to others. It comes in many forms: love for our children and they for us; love for another person; love for our pets and the unconditional love they give us; our love for humankind; and our love of our country.
This is a story of the love between a man and a woman, and their love for humanity. It may make you laugh; it may make you happy—possibly even elated. It may make you sad. It may make you tear up, as I did frequently when I wrote it. All this is part of the aura of love, and we all have experienced it.
While love is a mystery, there is something in human relations that is not. It was known to the ancients, but has to be relearned by each generation, sometimes disastrously. It is the enemy of love, and this book follows the intimate and international struggle between the two.
Someday in the future, two people may undertake a mission such as the one you will read about here. If they do, I hope that they will understand this insidious, subversive, almost invisible enemy they will have to fight—an enemy against which they may have no protection.
What is it? Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it?
Many of the sub-stories you will read here, such as that of the Cambodian woman Tor, the Chinese woman Gu, and the German Ludger are false in the names of the characters themselves, but generally true in the background war, genocide, and mass murder. If you wish to read more about these events, you can visit my web site at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills.
R.J. Rummel (page 11)
Looks like this is serious stuff. If Rummel could make his characters believable, then I would feel those emotions he is expecting the readers to have. Sadly, most of the characters are as flat as those of the Inheritance Cycle.
Now, after all that, we finally arrive at the first chapter. It doesn’t have a name.
Joy had a body to die for. (page 13)
I kid you not, that’s the actual first line. Beginning a story with a character’s appearance is never a good way to start. This applies just as much to the love interest of the protagonist (as in this case) as to the protagonist himself. Speaking of the protagonist, who is as-of-yet unnamed, the first book (and only the first book) uses the conceit that it is actually the protagonist’s diary, with him telling the story after the events have already happened. This never ends well.
In any case, the Main-Character-Who-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Named says that he was an assistant professor at Indiana University. Now wait a minute here, isn’t the author a professor at a university? There’s such a thing as Write What You Know, but this is particularly obvious. Now, since this could get tiresome, I am not going to type out “the Main-Character-Who-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Named” anymore. Until we find out his name, I’m just going to call him Nameless. Nameless says that all he has to do in order to get tenure is to “Do [his] research, publish a book or two and some articles, keep [his] relations with the lovelies on campus discreet[…]”
Yes, he did just say what you thought he said.
Nameless rambles on about being a college professor for a few more paragraphs which have no bearing on the rest of the plot and somehow winds up visiting his cousin who lives in New York – who has a name, but will never be mentioned again. Why is this important, you ask? Because he takes the train into New York City on September 11, 2001.
Remember when Tesch tried something like this?
Let’s see how he describes the tragedy, shall we?
That morning, I took the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center. I arrived at 8:50 a.m. and hopped on the escalator up to the concourse.
I found the area empty of people; spooky, to see a public place so still and quiet. I looked around; for the first time, I noticed the smoke hanging in the air. It smelled sour. The air felt sticky. Empty shoes lay scattered over the floor.
My heart began to pound. Something was very wrong.
“Get out! Run!”
I whirled to see a policeman gesturing frantically towards the concourse doors. Without thinking, I obeyed.
Outside, the street was littered with glass, concrete, and papers of all kinds. Still more papers floated down from above. The stink of burning things and gasoline hung in the air. I couldn’t run, but had to step over and around the debris.
I almost tripped over what I initially thought was a side of beef. As I dodged it, I realized it was a naked torso without arms or legs. I was too dazed to do anything but register the mangled torso and automatically look for its sex, without absorbing it at all.
Further on, I passed a large tire and then a woman’s delicate hand with a wedding ring on one finger. It was severed at the wrist, lying palm upward, fingers slightly curled. Not one of the polished fingernails was broken. The owner would be happy about that. The stupid thought flitted across my mind like the CNN Headline news items that pass across the TV screen. (page 14)
The first thing you will notice is that this is highly egocentric. The pronoun “I”, or any of its declensions, is used sixteen times. Now, the story is told in the first person, however, most of the sentences begin with the pronoun “I”. It all comes off as rather boring (which is a travesty, considering we’re describing 9/11 here) and repetitive after a few sentences. And yes, the narrator goes on like this for the entire book.
Also, how did Nameless get into the World Trade Center to begin with? From the looks of things, he walked in precisely when the planes hit. How could he possibly not have noticed that it was being attacked? Would he have tried to go up to a higher floor if that policeman hadn’t appeared from nowhere? Ladies and gentlemen, the protagonist is an idiot. Not only is he an idiot, he is also a robot. He is incredibly emotionally detached; he walks into one of the worst tragedies in human history and shows no indication at all that anything is wrong. Now, I have been told that this can happen occasionally, but it just doesn’t seem right to me, especially since the entire book is written like this.
After having the most nonchalant response to a terrorist attack ever, Nameless suddenly realizes that his cousin is trapped in the World Trade Center. The fact that somebody he knows personally is going to die finally gets an emotional reaction from our protagonist. (It is at this point that we learn that his name is John, and I have a suspicion that the only reason his cousin is a victim of 9/11 is so that Rummel can have a cell-phone conversation, so that the audience can finally learn his protagonist’s name.) There is also an inconsistency, as John’s doomed cousin tells him that his cell phone is not working, yet they are having a conversation over the phone perfectly fine.
John sees the second plane hit, and still describes the events as though this were a documentary produced after the fact, and not like someone who is living through one of the greatest tragedies in American history. It is clear that Rummel has ignored the maxim, “Show, don’t tell.” Why do so many people do this?
In any case, John makes it to where his cousin had lived, and tells his cousin’s wife what happened. After several days, he is finally allowed to leave. Really, everything between his cousin’s death and his return to Indiana could have been removed without detracting anything from the story. However, Rummel wanted to show how IMPORTANT his subject is, yet he was unable to really reproduce the horror of a terrorist attack at all. If I sound callous here, and in later parts, it’s because the writing is so bland. I doubt that actual survivors of 9/11 would appreciate this.
Then we have this cryptic and somewhat corny statement:
The terrorists made one serious mistake when they destroyed the World Trade Towers. Timing. A week earlier, a week later would have made a universe of difference. I wouldn’t have been here. (page 18)
First, I think that third sentence could have been phrased a bit better. Second, all John can say about the sheer destruction caused was that the terrorists “made a mistake”? They did their job of terror quite well; their actions were all kinds of evil, but they weren’t a “mistake”. The hijackers knew full well what they were doing. Third, John is implying that the hijackers’ mistake was in committing their crime while he was there to witness it. As if that even matters! It just suggests that if John hadn’t been there in person, but had only heard about 9/11 on the news, that he wouldn’t care enough (admittedly, he doesn’t really seem to care anyway, judging from his lack of reaction) to do what he will later do.
And that’s the end of the chapter, so we’ll just have to wait to find out what it is he does.
Taku on 28 October 2012, 03:51 said:
“Never Again”? Not Even Once. Welcome to II, Brendan.
Creepy.
A common mistake made by people with less experience in the first-person voice. Not excusable, but common. It just shows his lack of skill/experience in non-academic writing.
Tim on 28 October 2012, 04:29 said:
While he’s not on Steve’s level, he has exactly the same problem of writing like a kid filling out their diary.
“I did thing A. Then I walked down the road. It was hot. I got to location X after amount of time T and did thing B.”
Also, perhaps it reflects badly on the amount of hilariously bad porn I read for laughs, but…
The alternate meaning of that transports it to a whole new level of wrong.
What the hell, does he think he’s the an action movie star or something? “Yeah, if I hadn’t been here I wouldn’t have given a shit, but now it’s on, terrorists!”
Licht on 28 October 2012, 04:59 said:
I just skipped and read this part out of context. It sounded great. One of those “couldn’t you have burned down someone else’s house instead?” or: “robbed the bank while I wasn’t there?!” – lines. But I’m afraid that’s not what it is…
Licht on 28 October 2012, 05:01 said:
Oh, and: Hi, Brendan! Nice to see you de-lurked. ;)
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 05:38 said:
This promises to be an interesting spork! I predict a lot of bad and shallow history, with some Cold War propaganda. I bet that they’ll prevent the Russian revolution of 1905 by killing a couple of commies or something.
Kudos for including WWI in the list of Bad Things, though.
Epke on 28 October 2012, 06:55 said:
Heya Brendan!
Ah, but…
… And no one must know that he keeps their severed fingers in jars under his bed, and that sometimes, in the dark of night, takes them out and talks to them. That sentence would not have creeped me out if “lovelies” was replaced with “young coeds” or something. As it is now, I’m getting serial-killer vibes from John van Genericname.
In the large quote, only two exclamation marks are used and it’s by the non-protagonist. I know that you don’t have to use them, but the entire paragraph sounds like a poorly summarized factual text rather than an eye-witness account. There’s not even any emotion in the narration.
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 08:31 said:
I’ve skimmed though the first tome and, partially, though the “Red Terror” one.
The whole plot of the first book is, basically, the main hero and his love interest running around in time bribing moderate politicians to stop whatever bad thing they are going to do, giving large sums of money to liberal-democratic politicians and assassinating various non-moderates, mostly communists and fascists.
In the “Red Terror” tome, a mysterious green-eyed personality also goes back in time and tries to make the Communist Revolution happen, despite our protagonists’ meddling, by giving large sums of money to Rosa Luxembourg and Lev Trotsky. But our protagonists finally manage to prevail by assassinating Lenin and Trotsky.
It also features Russian count Sergei Witte mentally swearing like a sailor.
The whole thingy is full of handing out money and assassination.
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 08:51 said:
Also, this Rudolph Rummel chap sounds like a bit of a political hack-and-shill. I think that even a hack-and-shill can write a powerful work, but his shillery combined with his stilted style results in a mess.
lilyWhite on 28 October 2012, 12:21 said:
So we have a protagonist whose response to seeing dismembered body parts is to essentially think “Does it have bewbs?” and “Good thing those nails aren’t broken!”, and seemingly considers the attack happening when he was there to be worse than the attack happening at all.
And this is supposed to be a book about “love for humanity”?
This is really the biggest indicator of a bad writer: declaring your protagonists to be paragons of virtue when they’re really soulless sociopaths.
Brendan Rizzo on 28 October 2012, 12:44 said:
Actually, I think Rummel did think he was writing an action movie. The later books get real absurd when it comes to physical violence.
Pryotra on 28 October 2012, 14:57 said:
Because that’s not wrong at all!
Also, if you believe some theories about time, this book is more stupid. I’ve read that one reason that changing the past would be completely and totally impossible would be because even if you killed Hitler, the situation that spawned him is still there, and eventually someone else would come and fill in that role, possibly someone worse.
Fair on 28 October 2012, 14:59 said:
Admittedly, this could be really good if it were done right. I’ve always thought it would be really cool to see what would happen if somehow WWI had somehow been prevented. How would it have affected our culture? Would we have advanced as a society as much as we have done?
Alas, this looks like it’s going to be really crappy. Good luck, Brendan. :)
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 15:38 said:
I’ve read that one reason that changing the past would be completely and totally impossible would be because even if you killed Hitler, the situation that spawned him is still there, and eventually someone else would come and fill in that role, possibly someone worse.
This sounds like less of a theory about time and more of an arguable theory of historical contingency.
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 16:04 said:
Because that’s not wrong at all!
Well,the moral conundrum is semi-acknowledged in the end of the first book – the horrified protagonist kills Joy, his love interest when she decides to assassinate a politician she suspects of having communist sympathies. The protagonist, however, still ends up cherishing Joy’s memory.
LoneWolf on 28 October 2012, 16:20 said:
And the second book features a second start of the protagonists’ mission and a third universe (first one – our world, second one – the world they created in the first book), with the protagonist and his life interest alive in it again! The author had devised a creative method of putting out a sequel after sequel!
Apep on 28 October 2012, 16:50 said:
Interesting question. On the one hand, a lot of bad things happened during WWI, but on the other hand quite a few good things happened because of WWI.
Yes, thousands died directly because of the war, and thousands more indirectly (Spanish Influenza comes to mind). And let’s not forget the numerous wars that happened because of both world wars.
But afterwards there positives – agreements prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, advancements in science and technology, and a major change in the popular view of war.
Then again, as a history major, I’ve developed this view that WWI was pretty much inevitable. If you really wanted to prevent the war, you’d have to go a lot further back than 1906. Maybe 1870, to prevent the unification of Germany. But then France would be the major continental power, and Britain and France weren’t all that friendly in the 19th century…
swenson on 28 October 2012, 20:51 said:
This is a good point. He’s a professor of political science, right? Then perhaps his ideas about history and his AU version will at least be interesting, even if the book is poorly written…
This is precisely the sort of question I would like to have explored in about about AU history. Horrible stuff happens all over the place. I don’t think anyone wants bad things to have happened. But at the same time, maybe what happened was the best thing that could have happened. Maybe if World War I hadn’t happened in 1914, we would’ve had a far worse World War I a few years later. As Aslan said, nobody is ever told what would have happened.
(also, though I’m not a history major, I agree that WWI was kind of inevitable. At the very least, there was always going to be a war involving Germany and France. That particular conflict is an old one.)
LoneWolf, you’ve read these (ish), so tell me—does this actually happen? Is the history side of things interesting, or is it all as shallow and stupid as the rest sounds?
Rorschach on 28 October 2012, 22:33 said:
Enjoying this spork so far. I will caution you to be judicious with the amount of text you quote. I understand it’s available free online, but even so, you want to err solidly inside the line of fair use.
Tim on 29 October 2012, 06:57 said:
I don’t think you could really call any time travel ideas “theories” since there’s no way to test them, but yes, killing Hitler wouldn’t change the circumstances that made people want a leader like him. In fact, if you say you can’t change history then your attempt to kill him already happened and failed, so, for example, your attempt to kill him with a bomb turns out to be the actual cause of the Reichstag fire or whatever.
Hm…I’ve heard the opposite, actually. WW1 was so horrible because of three specific pieces of technology; barbed wire, the machine gun, and heavy artillery. The three working together could almost totally prevent any conventional advance, which is what led to the bogged-down warfare in France and thousands of soldiers dying in futile advances. With a few years of development, either the airplane or more agile vehicles could have prevented the static lines of WW1.
Even the worst battles of WW2 never approached the casualties-per-time figure that WW1 managed, because the huge gulf between the ability to defend and the ability to do anything about those defences was gone.
OrganicLead on 29 October 2012, 07:05 said:
That cover makes me sad just looking at it. It looks like a sixth grader’s collage of pictures of boy bands, only using stock photos I can’t make out. Seriously, I can’t tell you if those are from B Hollywood movies or if they’re taken from photographs. Maybe a little of both. Never use lime green for a text color. If you must, don’t outline it in red.
As far as the text is concerned, apparently Rummel decided to throw out any pretense of class or taste as soon as he could. To make sure his readers didn’t get the wrong idea about his book.
swenson on 29 October 2012, 09:32 said:
That’s a good point. I’ve heard similar things, but forgot about it. Still, it’s one of those things where we can never really know, not having easy access to parallel universes in which to experiment.
@organiclead – I hadn’t quite focused on the cover yet, but my word, that is a horrible cover.
Brendan Rizzo on 29 October 2012, 09:59 said:
LoneWolf, I would appreciate it if you would not spoil things in the comments for those who have not read these books. Thank you.
LoneWolf on 29 October 2012, 10:08 said:
I will say, however, that the author subscribes to an extreme version of Democratic Peace Theory, which prevents his alternate history from being to deep.
For an overview of this theory and possible counterarguments, see here:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm
Brendan Rizzo on 29 October 2012, 10:51 said:
I’m actually willing to give him a bit of a pass on that, because Rummel is the one who formulated the Democratic Peace Theory to begin with.
LoneWolf on 29 October 2012, 11:00 said:
Rummel is the one who formulated the Democratic Peace Theory to begin with.
Really? Wikipedia lists him only as “one of early researchers”, along with a chap called Dean Babst.
Tim on 29 October 2012, 16:02 said:
It’s a pretty shoddy theory since it requires that you ignore things like France arming Argentina during the Falklands war.
Mark on 29 October 2012, 16:12 said:
Man, what a disappointment. This book could’ve been so BADASS, but instead it just sounds kinda….meh. I’d say My Little Pony is more badass than this book, but that’s not saying much because MLP: FIM is pretty badass.
Great spork so far!
Fireshark on 29 October 2012, 20:30 said:
I think it holds up all right. If a theory has “never” in it, then of course you must make excuses for exceptions, or just flat-out discard the theory. I wouldn’t defend a “never,” but I think the democratic peace theory is a good, general principle. Coming up with statistics incorporating good, objective definitions of “democracy” and “war” is quite difficult, so I prefer to look at it this way: Without dictatorial asshats, the 20th century would have been a much more peaceful time. We can extrapolate that without dictatorial asshats, the future would be a much nicer time. Not a theory maybe, but seems pretty obvious to me.
Tim on 29 October 2012, 21:55 said:
I believe he says (and says repeatedly in the book) that democracy is best because there has never been a war between two democracies, which is stupid since a) that’s mostly because of nuclear deterrance and b) there have been proxy wars between democracies.
Fireshark on 29 October 2012, 22:10 said:
I’m not defending his version of it, just the basic idea in general.
Zeph on 19 January 2013, 00:32 said:
Damn. I thought the title said “Demonocide” and thought this was going to be an urban fantasy with monsters and demons and stuff. Highly disappointing. Great spork, though.
A Real Libertarian on 16 July 2013, 21:31 said:
By the way if anyone is wondering what the heck “Democide” is, it’s just like genocide except with the standard set at negligent homicide instead of murder. And thus the body-count of Communist governments (and for some reason only the commies) go from horrifically bad in their atrociousness to hysterically funny in their implausibility.