Will streaming save Hollywood?

These are tumultuous times for the entertainment industry. Not wanting to be outdone by tradpub's contraction from the Big Five to the Big Four, Hollywood is heralding its demise with the announcement of two huge mergers in the last 2 weeks.

First, AT&T merged WarnerMedia (i.e., HBO Max) with Discovery and spun it off, effectively washing its hands of show business. Then Amazon (Prime Video), the fourth-largest company in the world, bought MGM.

With 200 million Prime subscribers, a (blasphemous) Lord of the Rings series on the way, and a newly acquired library and IP list that includes Stargate, Rocky, Robocop, and James Bond, Amazon is poised to become a major player in the streaming wars. It's hard not to see them rocketing to top-dog status. None of their competitors have the ability to lure viewers with free 2-day shipping of everything you can buy under the Sun.

Expect more consolidations and acquisitions over the next year or so. It wouldn't surprise me if one or both of the little fish on this chart get gobbled up. ViacomCBS's mismanagement of Star Trek is the ultimate cautionary tale, and the company's contraction is already underway after it sold Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House. Meanwhile, WarnerMedia's decisionmaking in the last 10 years has been less reliable than a coin toss.

The AP article about MGM's sale to Amazon contains this nugget:

Sucharita Kodali, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said streaming companies need shows people can’t watch elsewhere in order to stand out and be competitive.

“There is an arms race to get what you can while the window is open,” she said.

The highest-profile casualty of this arms race was the theater business, which as you know received a mortal wound last year. The studios chose not to resuscitate it and started pushing new movies on their streaming platforms, backed by a phalanx of legacy content. Think how much more justified that monthly subscription fee becomes if studios stop selling DVDs and Blu-Rays. Would you put it past them?

Tell me if this sounds familiar: "Back in my day, Best Buy had rack after rack of every movie and album. Now there's nothing but Star Wars, Marvel, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift." I have to go to Half Price Books or Amazon if I want anything that came out before 2015 and/or that didn't gross $800 million.

This is one reason among many you should be assembling a physical media library. Because the corporations are looking forward to the day they will shut off your at-will access to entertainment and start charging you for it. It's the only way they can survive.

Don't subsidize this anti-consumerist agenda. Reject the mainstream and patronize indie creators instead. Get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. You have a choice.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

The problem of air

The reason you're seeing inflation is that a lot of money is going into consumers' pockets without a commensurate increase in production. That's what happens when you pay people to stay home, as has been happening on Earth for almost a year now. The ostensible reason for these payments is a problem that will face off-world colonists more directly: the problem of air. Air is a common resource, and as the tragedy of the commons illustrates, common resources suffer from lack of stewardship. This is especially true where societies lack social cohesion, like the United States.

Our answer to the tragedy of the commons has been private ownership or appointing someone with authority to direct private resources to address public needs (e.g., a government official). On Earth, privatizing air is unthinkable. But we've seen air stewardship quickly become a thing, and not just because people want to avoid crossing the authorities. Cultural practices have sprung up surprisingly quickly to pressure people into self-regulating what they breathe into the air.

While pathogens floating through the air now dominates the public consciousness on Earth, I can only imagine how it will dominate decisionmaking in off-world colonies. Colonies will have to be hermetically sealed to keep out the vacuum of space. Air will have to be shared, oxygen continuously pumped in as carbon dioxide is scrubbed out. Sick people will have to wait out their illness in quarantine. Since air will be classed as a good that is the product of someone's labor, whether that be public or private, the very act of breathing will be an economic transaction.

Meaning, unlike post-2020 Earth, it will not be possible to pay people to stay at home, at least not at first. You will have to produce something to earn your air. To paraphrase Paul, if anyone will not work, neither will he breathe.

Anyone leaving Earth with ideas that they'll be free to do as they please away from all those people are gravely mistaken. On the freedom scale, they'll fall somewhere between an enlisted soldier deployed overseas and a convict doing time in a max security prison. For what reason would anyone leave Earth? I think of the Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic fleeing religious persecution. The compact they signed while anchored off Cape Cod, pledging "all due submission and obedience" to the colony, approximates what I imagine the first wave of off-world colonies will look like.

Social cohesion and the putting of others before self will be paramount. Contemporary notions of autonomy and expressive individualism will be shunned. If cohesion fails, or the colony fails, it will devolve into a cult of unreason because running away won't be an option.

The first wave's children and grandchildren will pose the greatest internal threat to the colony's longevity. They didn't sign up to live like this and may come to resent colony life. Defections should be kept to a minimum if succeeding generations are fulfilled and have a sense of progress towards a worthy goal. This is the social importance of faith, but it's also how faith becomes a tool of manipulation.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If lunar colonization interests you, check out my book Tendrils to the Moon. You can find an extended preview for it here.

Total Recall appreciation post

As a youngster growing up without cable, it was a special occasion when a new movie found its way onto network TV. Over the years I compiled a decent-sized collection of heavily edited action-adventure movies. My tape of Total Recall featured in a rotation that included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Tremors, Die Hard, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Tango and Cash. Between 1997 and '98 my parents signed us up for cable and Internet. With those new leisure time offerings and my burgeoning interest in video games and books, my tape collection was all but forgotten.

Until this past week I hadn't seen Total Recall in over 20 years, maybe 25. My memory of the story was fuzzy, but some parts stood out as clear as if I'd been there: the buggy female disguise, the conjoined twin/psychic, the famous pill scene, and Sharon Stone in a leotard.

As I watched Total Recall with fresh eyes, I was gobsmacked. Clocking in at just under 2 hours, the pacing is perfect, leaving not a single minute for your mind to wander, but at the same time not overwhelming you with exposition. The diversity of content on offer boggles the mind, and none of it feels forced or out of place. There are enough ideas for five movies here, and they cohere marvelously. Let's run through them:

• Futuristic Earth society
• Memory implants ("Your brain will not know the difference, or your money back.")
• Agents, double agents, and triple agents
• Advanced Martian colony
• An evil dictator depriving citizens air
• Psychic mutants
• Ancient alien reactor designed to terraform the atmosphere

Add to all that Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Arnold Schwarzenegger things, Paul Verhoeven's unique take on violence, and Jerry Goldsmith composing the score, and you have arguably the best science fiction movie of all time. It's an entertainment masterpiece!

I won't get into whether the fantastical plot is the very simulation Arnold's Quaid character paid Rekall to implant in his memory. That's a fun conversation with no right or wrong answer. What's clear from the movie's opening scenes is Quaid's reason for going to Rekall is a nagging feeling that a lot of men can relate to. "I feel like I was made for something more than this," he tells his wife. "I want to do something with my life, to be somebody." Perhaps you think this line is ironic coming from someone who looks like Arnold and who's married to someone who looks like Sharon Stone. I think it just goes to show you even men who "have it all" have fantasies of being the hero.

So, much like Die Hard which came out 2 years earlier, Total Recall is a full-throated apologia for heroism in a world that devalues the untamed virtues of men. They simply don't make movies like this anymore. They will again if I have anything to say about it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

What killed the pulps

King Solomon said it's foolish to long for the old days, but I say it's doubly foolish to idolize the present. The fact of the matter is we have made mistakes and our world is worse because of them. My running hypothesis is the Boomers were the first generation to be raised in the epistemological shift after the two world wars and the Great Depression. The theology of the reconstructed man spread like a virus in the '60s. By the '70s the foundation was completely unearthed and was beginning to erode. The cultural superstructure that stood upon it would come next.

Not by accident, art was among the first endeavors to experience the decline. (See "Relativism sucks") The effects of this colonization are examined in part by Jeffro Johnson in his terrific book, Appendix N:

Back during World War II, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, "We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." From a cultural standpoint, we've been laughing and sneering for a long time. These now utterly predictable mutilations of classic adventure fiction are a direct result of decades of this sort of mentality. And what are the scriptwriters and directors laughing at when they foist these revisions on us?

...

Of course, the best days of this type of story [planetary romance] are long gone by now. It was practically ubiquitous up through the sixties, but today it's shocking to see it delivered with not even a hint of snark or irony. Mentioning the very idea of this sort of thing in mixed company is liable to produce a whole raft of negative responses. We live for the most part in a culture where people are primed to turn up their noses at this sort of thing.

Pulp fiction that comprised the bulk of Gary Gygax's literary influences, no matter how popular, was anathema to the new regime. It could not be published anymore without the publisher paying a steep social cost. New art had to portray man as his own creation, with "modern" values. Old values are unevolved, unrefined, illiberal, and other euphemisms for "bad."

As if trying to prove his point, negative reviewers of Johnson's book predictably attack it on ideological grounds. They're not just "turning up their noses"; they're murdering the past with slander.

To be sure, good science fiction and fantasy stories continued to be written after the '60s, but the tide, as they say, was going out. A big reason Star Wars, released in 1977, was a smash hit was it mimicked popular entertainment that wasn't yet a distant memory for its target audience.

There was another factor in the sharp decline of Burroughs-style planetary romance, and it coincides so well with the '60s revolution that it's easy to miss. I'm talking about the Apollo 11 Moon landing. This moment became so stamped in the public consciousness that people were unwilling to entertain the unrealistic aesthetics of a setting like Barsoom or the planets in Lewis's Space Trilogy.

No two properties illustrate this dichotomy better than the movie adaptations for A Princess of Mars (2012's John Carter) and The Martian 3 years later. The former you know is an epic, swashbuckling adventure where the hero saves the world and gets the girl. The latter is basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a nuts and bolts survival story where bagging your poop and counting calories were plot elements. One of these movies flopped. The other was a hit and received Best Picture nominations.

I'm not saying The Martian or its movie adaptation sucks. I liked the book very much. I'm saying it owes its popularity to being a product of its time. It leverages what the audience knows about the limitations of space travel, the forbidding environment of Mars, and man's overreliance on technology. Those things weren't commonly understood a hundred years ago. Alien races, a breathable atmosphere, and jumping around like the Incredible Hulk all seemed plausible.

Which leads me to infer two things about the science fiction market:

1. People's imagination is inversely correlated with their knowledge.
2. People really don't hunger for heroes like they used to.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

The thief of Philippi

I wrote this dramatization of Acts 16:25-31 on the eve of my baptism 8 years ago. I had been studying the Bible for 6 months, and had long since made the decision to be baptized. But I didn't feel a sense of urgency to go through with it. When I wrote this, the eternal and inescapable truth of the gospel clicked for me emotionally. The next day I became a Christian.

As I was awaiting trial, on the third night of my internment in Philippi, the jailer added two men to our number. I discerned through the lamplight their clothes were of foreign origin and stained with blood, their faces cut and bruised. Clearly they had committed some heinous crime, for the jailer took them straight to the innermost cell, out of the prisoners’ sight, and fastened their feet in the stocks.

“What are you in for?” I called out after the jailer had left.

“We have committed the crime of turning a slave-girl’s heart against the chains of the oppressor,” one of them said.

“You have a funny way of talking. Where are you from, anyhow?”

“We recognize the sovereignty of no earthly kingdom, but if you must know, Silas and I hail from Antioch in Syria.”

“And who are you?”

“Paul, your humble servant.”

“You’re a long way from home, Paul.”

“Home is where the Spirit guides us.”

The prisoners whistled and jeered. “What are you in here for, really?” I asked.

“Theft. And you?”

“Theft also,” I said. “I was accused of stealing an ivory statue, dedicated to Apollo, god of the sun. What did you steal?”

“As I said before, we stole a slave-girl’s heart from this world and committed it to salvation in Christ Jesus our savior in eternity.”

“Who is this Christ Jesus?”

“He is the Son of the one true God and the forgiver of all sins.”

Upon hearing this, my eagerness for conversation with these newcomers waned. All my life I had watched the strong trample the weak, all in the name of this god or that. The world’s ways proved there was no such thing as sin. Who were these men but petty salesmen trying to profit from the divine favor of yet another jealous, conniving deity?

“Are you still awake, friend?” Paul said.

“I’m awake. I just don’t feel like talking, that’s all.”

“Then hear what I have to say. Silas and I have been walking through the city, preaching the Word of God and the loving sacrifice of Christ Jesus, by whose blood we are saved from this world. A slave-girl followed us for three days, shouting after us, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ She wanted—”

I snickered. “She was right, you know.”

“About what?”

“You who choose slavery and brag about it make the worst spokesmen for freedom. Is it not hypocritical to offer salvation by this ‘Jesus’ on the one hand and servitude to God on the other?”

“That is an interesting question, coming from a thief locked in a prison cell.”

My cheeks burned at the slight. “What did you say?”

“We serve the master we fix our eyes on. Servitude to your lust for other people’s wealth has worked out well for you, clearly. Forgive me for not seeing straightaway the success of your criminal career. It is difficult to discern in this darkness.”

I reached through the bars of my cell, imagining wringing this fool’s neck. “What does your imprisonment tell you about your servitude?” I spat.

“What is this prison to me but one of infinite trials I would have had to endure anyway? What is this particular suffering but the temporary convergence of changing circumstances?”

There was a pause. Paul continued, “The slave-girl wanted freedom from her masters. God can give her that, but not on condition of her acceptance of Christ Jesus. Where would it end? For, though she would not admit it before, she is bound by more than her earthly masters. Just as you are bound by more than your prison cell. Just as I am bound by more than these chains.”

The prison went quiet. My foolish mouth searched desperately for something to say, but words escaped me.

Faced with Paul’s blunt analysis of the inadequacy of my decisions, I slumped to the floor and wept. Whom did I serve? To what was my life oriented? These questions rattled inside my mind, confines I now considered worse than any prison cell I had occupied.

Suddenly the ground began to shake. I heard it in the stonemasonry first, in the jostling between the loosed stones. Then the ground began to heave. Dust fell from above and clogged my eyes and throat. Wiping away tears, I was astonished to find my prison door hanging open.

After the shaking had stopped, I walked through the door. I saw the other prisoners doing the same. We looked at each other in disbelief. We were free! We cheered and headed for the outer door. However, Paul and Silas, emerging from the innermost cell, caught up to us and told us to wait.

“Don’t go,” Silas said.

“What?!” I whispered, incredulous. “The jailer will be here any moment! We have to leave now!”

“Don’t go,” Paul echoed his companion. “Hide in the shadows and wait.”

I looked at the other prisoners, hoping they would see this for the folly that it was. But they looked hesitant and uncertain. They had fallen under the strangers’ spell!

“What are you up to?” I demanded, sticking my finger in Paul’s face. “Why are you refusing to let these men go free?”

Paul smiled and touched my shoulder. “Friend, it is I who should be asking you, why would you let these men exchange one prison for another?”

Understanding blinded me like the dawn. In my mind’s eye I saw two prisons. One looked just like the one I was standing in now, where men waited for death to consume them, hungry and haggard. The other was larger, brighter, but just as lonely and just as hopeless.

It doesn’t matter, I realized. The real prison was my mind and my soul, conformed to my propensity to sin.

I looked at the prisoners and saw the same truth in their faces.

“All right,” I said. I led the other prisoners into the shadows of one of the opened cells. Paul and Silas retreated to the other side of the prison.

Yawning, the jailer threw open the outer door and stumbled into the prison. He started when he saw the empty cells.

“By Jupiter!” he cried out, unsheathing his sword. I watched with alarm as he turned in our direction. His eyes passed over me as if I were invisible. Then, he lifted up his arms and positioned the tip of the blade between the plates of his armor.

“So simple a task to keep watch through the night, yet I have failed even in that,” he cried, distraught. “I would rather die than endure this dishonor!”

“Stop!” Paul’s voice boomed from the prison’s bowels.

The jailer looked around, eyes wide with terror. He dropped into a defensive stance. “Where are you? Show yourself, you devils!”

“Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”

Paul and Silas stepped out of the shadows. The prisoners and I did the same. A sudden and dramatic change came over the jailer. He dropped his sword and fell to his knees before Paul and Silas, clutching their tarttered robes.

“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

Silas lay his hand on the jailer’s head. “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

“I believe,” the jailer said in a tremulous voice.

Overwhelmed, I fell to my knees beside the jailer. “I believe.”

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Time skips

In both of my books, the part of the story I had the most trouble executing was the time skip. They were challenging because I had set up tension and couldn't resolve it until certain conditions some distance in the timeline were met. This was the result of me not really knowing what I was doing and/or being a poor outliner. Regardless, winding up my characters and leaving them in the lurch did not sit well with me, and I felt like I couldn't just cut to the resolution without giving readers narrative whiplash.

For Tendrils to the Moon, I tried to mitigate the problem with filler content, showing the colonists' progress in building a communal lunar habitat. The downside is you can cut many of the scenes from chapters 8 and 9 and you wouldn't hurt continuity.

I handled the problem better with Seeds of Calamity, employing pharmaceuticals as a plot device to make time whip past for the hero. This also involved some structural reworking of the second act that set me back over a month. I have no regrets, though, because it paid off. Despite a huge 5-week gap bookended by events that span mere days, the story doesn't slow down at all.

David V Stewart used a time dilation device in The Water of Awakening, where the heroine enters a sort of magical realm where time outside passes very quickly. This allows for the people and places she encountered on her journey to be quite advanced in their respective conflicts as she's headed home. Time dilation is also used to great effect in Interstellar, where the hero's proximity to a black hole creates a situation where he and his kids are practically the same age. The scene where he watches them grow up in a series of video diaries is a tearjerker.

I recently finished reading Seveneves, which involves a whopping 5,000-year time skip. I liked this book a lot, but this time skip I believe is impossible to pull off. None of the characters or plot tension carry over from the book's first two acts. There are strong narrative connections to what happened before, but they serve less the story than Neal Stephenson's worldbuilding exercise. There's a bagful of kernels of a whole 'nother book in that third act, which is a shame because it would have made a terrific duology, with the first two acts standing on their own. Putting it all in one book may have been a business decision, not an artistic one.

Good time skip execution synchronizes with the human experience and focuses on what stands out from characters' routines. The difference between any given hour or month is arbitrary, but days, weeks, and years have an inherent structure. A day in the field looks different than a day at the office. A week in the mountains looks different than a week at home. A year in Okinawa looks different than a year stateside. If a plot has enough interesting beats, it'll condense the mundane, and the reader won't even notice the stretches where nothing's happening.

Among the many things the Harry Potter books do really well, this is one of them. Can you imagine what those books would look like if JK Rowling hadn't skipped over days, weeks, or sometimes months in the course of a year at Hogwarts? It would have bored children to tears.

In a fictional space setting, which I've used twice now, you can throw out most human experience of time. It does not apply. Outlining may be more important to pace out the building of tension because the environment imposes an entirely different set of constraints.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

The competition for authority

When you hear cancel culture apologists say "It's just a song" or "It's just a statue," understand that works both ways. If it's just a song, why the uproar in the first place?

The cancel mob chooses its targets to make the public's compromise, and eventual capitulation, as painless as possible. They want the authority to issue decrees, authority which can only be granted by public consent. The idea is to convince people they're consenting to something small, when in fact they're consenting to being controlled. Have you noticed the ubiquitous statement about "more work to be done" is attached to every announced compromise? It's another way of saying the mob's next maneuvers are to be determined.

The object of the mob's wrath is irrelevant, so a debate on the merits of whether something is "bad" also is irrelevant. When someone makes a factual claim in the form of an accusation, just say "I don't believe you." It disarms them of their claim to authority.

In the long run, I expect the University of Texas to capitulate to activists calling the alma mater racist. The only reason they haven't yet is many rich alumni have put their foot down and said the alma mater is not racist. The presence of a competing truth claim, backed by money, has left UT in limbo. The administrators are waiting for either side to relinquish their claim. This is narrative warfare's version of cold war. Who can bear the social costs of their claim longer will win. If, or when, UT gives up its alma mater, it will admit that it is a racist institution that requires works of redemption to be saved. The activists will dictate what those works look like.

Universities are notoriously weak. Against individuals the mob is hit and miss. Comic book artist Jeffrey Scott Campbell clapped back against people who criticized his drawings on ideological grounds. The hysteria he generated by disagreeing with the grounds for criticism was something to behold. Denied authority over Campbell's artistic style, Kevin Norman posted a lengthy thread justifying himself.

As silly as cutting off people over so small a thing looks, I believe no one is above this sentiment. There's nothing in our nature that compels us to share space with people we disagree with. I don't mean minor disagreements; I mean the kind of disagreement where one person calls the other a bigot. No friendship or union can withstand that level of enmity. When that happens, it's practical to retreat to opposite corners. Free men must be allowed to associate with whom they want.

Where options proliferate in a large, competitive space, the sorting is easy. Campbell draws his comic books and readers buy them or they don't. If someone doesn't like him, there are other artists to patronize. Where options are limited in a small, noncompetitive space, pray for God's mercy and His glory to be revealed to all.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Authors, moral purity, and freedom of association

I never met someone who read a Philip Roth novel, let alone liked one. But I've never been to cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, either. Roth wrote neurotic, self-absorbed books steeped in the post-war era's listlessness and secular disfunction. As with many books that fly high on the back of the temporal zeitgeist, his aged terribly.

Vanity Fair reports on a rape scandal embroiling Roth's biographer, his publisher, and The New York Times. Anyone with passing knowledge of the way the Times functions as cheerleader for academia and the literati shouldn't be surprised.

Last week The New York Times advanced upon allegations of sexual harassment and assault in The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate and the Los Angeles Times against Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey with an account from Valentina Rice, a 47-year-old publishing executive who alleges Bailey raped her in 2015 while they were both staying at the home of Times book critic Dwight Garner. The story raised eyebrows, and not just because W.W. Norton, Bailey’s publisher, had halted the shipping of the long-awaited book in response to the allegations leveled against the author by Rice and several former students (Bailey denies any wrongdoing).

It was particularly striking that one of the alleged sexual assaults took place at the home of one of the most prominent book critics in America, one employed by the very paper disclosing the previously unreported accusation. All of which came after weeks of its copious—and often, though not always, glowing—coverage leading up to Bailey’s release. The Times’ level of promotion wasn’t unusual for a book positioned as a serious literary biography—and especially one about the late Roth, who represents a kind of fantasy of what it meant to belong to a certain generation of American male novelists—but the paper’s own scoop inevitably raised questions of who knew what and when.

If this excerpt of Portnoy's Complaint's Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, I firmly reject what it means to belong to Roth's generation of American male novelists:

Roth had begun work on Portnoy's Complaint in 1967, before publication of his novel When She Was Good that year. The piece had its genesis in a satirical monologue Roth had written to accompany a slide show proposed for inclusion in the risqué revue Oh! Calcutta! that would focus on the sexual organs of the rich and famous.

While the slide show would never come to fruition, Roth found part of the accompanying monologue about masturbation salvageable. Roth re-fashioned the material for the novel and sold a chapter of the book, entitled "Whacking Off", to Partisan Review. Progress on the novel was slow because Roth was suffering from writer's block relating to his ex-wife, Margaret Martinson, and the unpleasant notion that any royalties generated by the novel would have to be split equally with her. In May 1968, Martinson was killed in a car crash in Central Park. Roth's writer's block lifted and, following Martinson's funeral, he traveled to the Yaddo literary retreat to complete the manuscript.

This is what passes for erudite entertainment to the gatekeepers of popular entertainment, at least at the time. Protective of its legacy, the NYT spares no expense boosting Roth and acolytes like Bailey with gusto.

One of the hundreds of people who bought the book before the ban hammer dropped took to Twitter to ask whether it was permissible to read it.

Start with asking why you're reading the book in the first place. If it's because you want to ingratiate yourself to a certain crowd, spare yourself. That world is leaving Roth behind.

As for the issue of whether you should engage in commerce with someone who did something bad, this is one of the great quandaries of our time, isn't it? If you're looking for a writer who passes a moral purity test, stop looking. He doesn't exist. To read anything, you must reconcile yourself to reading the works of sinners, including yours truly. On this, as usual Paul had a wise take:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.

The key difference being a brother in Christ has heard the gospel and assented to its teachings. He knows better yet continues to live in sin, wilfully opposing the truth. I would say if Bailey shows wilful opposition to what he knows is right, as opposed to the occasional moral failings of a man whose flesh predisposes him to sin, it's permissible to refuse to read him on those grounds.

On the other hand, we saw "she who must not be named" almost lose her book deal because of her studied observation of the immutability of sex. Her defense of her stance was definitely wilful. People with a different epistemological view of reality were justified in refusing to engage in commerce with her.

That doesn't mean I think they're right or that I don't want their minds to change. All it means is they appropriately applied their conscience in accordance with what they believe, as I also reserve the right to do.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi that is most assuredly not like Philip Roth, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.