Tuesday, 21 November 2017

The New Subnormal



I just published Stan Goff’s new antiwar novel Smitten Gate. Although it is made of pulp, weighs less than a pound and flies only as fast as you can throw it, its payload is guaranteed to penetrate even the thickest action-hero-wannabe skull. Please order a copy.

After a four-week period which I mostly spent heads-down on getting this book into print I looked up and noticed that the world has changed. The trick of looking away, then looking back is often a good one if you are interested in how situations evolve. And here I looked back at what has been happening in the US, specifically, over the past few weeks, and thought, Which interesting new stage of collapse is this?

And then I thought, I really ought to try to answer this question. After all, I’ve already described the five stages of collapse in a book-length treatment, and apparently people are still finding it useful. For example, the Japanese edition of the book found its readers because my treatment of financial and political collapse dovetailed so neatly with Japan’s headlong rush into infinite debt and its desperate, last-minute fling with militarism. And now that Paris is turning into a tent city bum squat infested with roving gangs of troglodyte migrant youths and the banks of the Seine are becoming encrusted with human feces—ah, that sweet smell of social and cultural collapse!—the French edition is flying off the shelves almost frighteningly quickly for such a specialty subject. (As I’ve warned my readers before, when you notice that my message has gone mainstream, it’s time to grab the duffel bag of spam, gold bullion and shotgun shells, gas up the pickup truck and head for the hills.)



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