My Life As A Writer: "Justified" & The Pulp Reformation

Friend of the blog Wolfman At Large posted this review of Jon del Arroz's new Space Opera novel Justified today. It's under five minutes, so give it a listen.

With the massive success of this book's debut--hitting #1 in its category at Amazon--came the recognition of an emerging genre to satisfy a long-unmet demand. Brian Niemeier took a shot at naming it.

We're seeing the birth of a new scifi subgenre. Exciting times! Lots of folks racking their brains to name this new brand of masculine Christian adventure. The answer is obvious.

Cruciform Sword & Planet

You're welcome.@jondelarroz @TheBrometheus @ArchivistPulp @DaddyWarpig pic.twitter.com/Em2ff9Ry1U

— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) September 12, 2019

I'll take it.

And if you don't think there's something to it, go to Amazon and search for "Deus Vult In Space". Jon's book isn't the only one that comes up. Mine does also. This is not just the return of the Pulps, but their full restoration. Read the old stuff and you'll see the very Christianity on display, but not explicit as having a Templar as the hero. All of the morality, the conflict, the temptations, and so on are built off of a robust and thriving Christianity assumed as the norm for Civilization. Yes, even my own far-future favorite of the Lensmen series does exactly this, with equally implicit showings of how deviating from those norms becomes the vectors for barbarism and savagery that is all about Boskone despotism.

Yes, this does--believe it or not--include the Cimmerian himself; skeptical as he was, Two Gun Bob was no less a man of Christendom and wrote informed by those norms. You see it far more explicitly in his tales of the Crusaders and other historical fiction than with the Hyborian Age stuff he's famous for- especially with Solomon Kane. What's coming is the next step, where Kane leaves off--where a lot of implicitly Christian fiction leaves off--and becomes explicitly so in uncompromising, earnest ways heretofore unseen since the Reformation.

Congratulations, shitlords. You've memed Deus Vult one step closer to reality. Soon you'll have plenty more fodder for your meme machines to remix into better quality memes, and you're going to get more and more fantastic fiction that doesn't suck to inspire you to do so. Pick up Jon's book, pick up mine, and everyone else putting out stuff like this that is available. There's something inspired going down, and you want to be there for every moment.