K.W. Jeter's Blog

Pleased to announce that KIM OH 6: REAL DANGEROUS RIDE is now available for the Kindle:

From the description on Amazon:

Kim’s got a delivery to make – if she can survive that long.

 

Hired by a mysterious venture capitalist to transport a sealed backpack from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Kim’s expecting nothing more than an easy ride and a fat payday. But she soon finds herself being hunted down along the way by two different high-tech outfits, both of whom will be happy to kill her in order to get their hands on what she’s carrying.

 

Before she reaches her destination – if she can – Kim will have to deal with murderous muscle cars, deadly drones, and conniving ex-cons. And she quickly starts to suspect that what’s in the bag might be even more explosively lethal than the other threats on the road…

So more lethal fun with our Kim – click HERE and check it out!

The charmingly titled website Girls with Guns takes a look at Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl:

The guilty had better watch out

My favorite line from the review:

Some of the same appeal of “primitivism” that readers find in Burroughs and Robert E. Howard is present here, with a protagonist who’s challenged to make her way in a world where the outward conventions of civilization no longer apply. And she gives voice to the anomie of vast numbers of contemporary Americans in her generation, growing up bereft of community and moral/spiritual guidance…

Yeah, I’ll go with that. Kudos to the GwG folks for catching the drift. Find the ebook here, if you haven’t already —

Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

Remember this?

Fall of Saigon

It’s not actually a photo of American personnel being evacuated from the roof of the American embassy, at the the end of the Vietnam war; they were being evacuated from the roof of the nearby apartment building that housed the CIA. And when it happened, this image meant a lot. It meant that a long period of US foreign and military policy had just collapsed in utter defeat.

We’re this close to the same thing happening in Baghdad:

Five Key Implications if Baghdad Falls to ISIS

One big difference: the North Vietnamese didn’t actually behead anyone left behind, then put the videos on YouTube.

I’ve only recently become aware of Sean Thomas’ writings on the website of the Telegraph, and I’ve been impressed by his pugnacious, anti-PC takes on various matters. This recent piece is particularly notable in that regard:

The self-loathing of the British Left is now a problem for us all

I think Thomas is on to something here, and its application is not just limited to British cultural and political life. In fact, you could delete the word British from the piece’s title, and you’d be approaching, as others have already, a dead-on observation of situations greater than Scottish devolution and the Rotherham scandal — and certainly applicable to things happening on the US side of the Anglosphere’s Atlantic divide.

Compare Thomas’ thoughts with those expressed by Will Self on the BBC News website:

A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity

Could there be a better illustration of Thomas’ point, than Self whining that Orwell’s defense of writing and speaking standard English, in as clear a manner as possible, simply isn’t diverse enough? As Self slags off the admirers of Orwell’s writing: “… the clarity they so admire in his writings is simply another kind of opacity, since in the act of revealing one truth it necessarily obscures many others.” Hmm — apparently, per Self, what gets “obscured” by writing clear, standard English is the sort of “truth” that can be revealed by masquerading in one’s ethnic pretender garb: You feel me?  Yeah, that’s hip, all right. And of course, as Sean Thomas no doubt would be able to predict, any old-fogeyish dissent is to be reviled in the language of the modern, self-loathing Left: “Expose the Orwellian language police for the old-fashioned authoritarian elitists they really are”! Yah, mon.

So the question becomes, in regard to matters such as the Rotherham atrocities, which language is better suited for describing and revealing them for what they are? Orwell’s clear, standard English, with its ruthless stripping away of bureaucratic waffling and fog, or Will Self’s clunky “white boy shamed of hisself” stylings?

And it’s free –

Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

With KIM OH 5: REAL DANGEROUS FUN available now at Amazon, I’m on a bit of a roll — KIM OH 6: REAL DANGEROUS RIDE is already underway, and should be finished (I hope) in a month or so.

In a lot of ways, I suppose Kim and her brother Donnie seem like family to me — I hear more from them than I do from anyone in this, the supposedly real world. I enjoy spending time with them, and I’m glad when readers tell me they do as well. Every time I write about Kim’s adventures and her dogged determination to make a place for herself and her brother, it reminds me of how powerful this notion is, of siblings who look out for each other, against all odds. And how much we all wish our own lives could be like that.

Of course, the dramatic notion of siblings who form a mutually protective bond against a hostile and even lethal environment — “just the two of us against the world” — goes a long way back; you can find traces of it in ancient mythology. Richard Wagner mined it pretty deeply in Die Walküre, with his depiction of the embattled twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. In true operatic fashion, things don’t go to well for that sibling pair, maybe because they got just a little too close to each other.

I remember when I was a kid, back when old silent movies were sometimes shown on television, I saw the great American director D. W. Griffith’s 1921 classsic, Orphans of the Storm, and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. In some ways, it’s a forerunner of the modern dystopic genre that’s become so important in movies and Young Adult fiction, though the dystopia is the historical French Revolution rather than some imagined science-fictional future.

Henriette, played by Lillian Gish, goes through a lot of period melodrama to save her blind sister Louise (played by Lillian Gish’s actual sister Dorothy; this was the last Griffith film to feature the two of them together). The protectiveness shown by Henriette is pretty fierce — there are enough twists and turns in the story that Henriette nearly winds up going to the guillotine, being saved herself only at the last minute. That’s entertainment, as we used to say.

It’s a story of its own period, the very early twentieth century, and it reflects that time’s gentler notion of what female characters were capable of doing. Henriette is strong, and she’s able to save her sister, but her strength is that of moral goodness. We live in tougher times now, and if Orphans of the Storm were to be re-made by a modern action director — Michael Bay or somebody like that — Henriette would probably triumph at the end by pulling out an anachronistic rocket launcher and blowing up Robespierre and the Revolution’s entire Committee for Public Safety. I’m not sure if that’d be an improvement, though it would probably do well at the box office.

A more contemporary version of the mutually protective orphans theme is the 2002 Disney animated feature Lilo & Stitch.

The growling animal noises emitted by the younger sister Lilo is the real tip-off that the eventually redeemed alien monster Stitch is the surrogate id for both siblings. In Jungian terms, he carries the shadow for Lilo and her older sister Nani, performing all the violent, kick-ass action that’s needed to save the little “us against the world” band of orphans.

By the time you get to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, both the 2006 YA novel and the 2012 film based on it, it’s pretty clear that the world we live in has reached the point where a story’s female protagonist doesn’t need a Stitch-like surrogate. If somebody needs killing, the girl can do it herself.

Of course, the protective sibling theme is crucial to the heroine Katniss’ story — she sacrifices herself to protect her younger sister, entering the lethal games in her sister’s place.

My own Kim Oh Thrillers carries on the orphans-against-the-world mythos. Kim’s only family is her younger brother Donnie, and she begins fiercely protecting him at a young age, when she’s a child herself. She’s no Henriette from Orphans of the Storm; she’s perfectly willing and capable to dispense with traditional morality, in order to do what she has to. As one of the books’ reviewers on Amazon noted, the Kim Oh Thrillers address what he felt was still “the lack of female action heroes… without the usual formulaic plot goo of trite romantic subplots.” He’s right about this; even The Hunger Games folds in a rather standard boy-girl relationship, presumably designed to appeal to a readership of teenage girls. My Kim, for better or worse, dispenses with that; her kick-ass-ness is not just a matter of being able to bring the hammer down, violence-wise, but is also her emotional toughness. She has to deal with the consequences that everybody, female and male alike, have to deal with now, of putting their human natures aside in order to survive and protect their loved ones in an increasingly hostile world. We’re all orphans of the storm now, but being Henriette-good won’t save the day for us. If one of my readers looks at Kim and what she’s going through, and says, “Yeah — that’s me; that’s how I feel,” then I’ve hit my target.

The dramatic notion of siblings who form a mutually protective bond against a hostile and even lethal environment — “just the two of us against the world” — goes a long way back; you can find traces of it in ancient mythology.

I remember when I was a kid, back when old silent movies were sometimes shown on television, I saw the great American director D. W. Griffith’s 1921 classsic, Orphans of the Storm, and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. In some ways, it’s a forerunner of the modern dystopic genre that’s become so important in movies and Young Adult fiction, though the dystopia is the historical French Revolution rather than some imagined science-fictional future.

Henriette, played by Lillian Gish, goes through a lot of period melodrama to save her blind sister Louise (played by Lillian Gish’s actual sister Dorothy; this was the last Griffith film to feature the two of them together). The protectiveness shown by Henriette is pretty fierce — there are enough twists and turns in the story that Henriette nearly winds up going to the guillotine, being saved herself only at the last minute. That’s entertainment, as we used to say.

It’s a story of its own period, the very early twentieth century, and it reflects that time’s gentler notion of what female characters were capable of doing. Henriette is strong, and she’s able to save her sister, but her strength is that of moral goodness. We live in tougher times now, and if Orphans of the Storm were to be re-made by a modern action director — Michael Bay or somebody like that — Henriette would probably triumph at the end by pulling out an anachronistic rocket launcher and blowing up Robespierre and the Revolution’s entire Committee for Public Safety. I’m not sure if that’d be an improvement, though it would probably do well at the box office.

A more contemporary version of the mutually protective orphans theme is the 2002 Disney animated feature Lilo & Stitch.

The growling animal noises emitted by the younger sister Lilo is the real tip-off that the eventually redeemed alien monster Stitch is the surrogate id for both siblings. In Jungian terms, he carries the shadow for Lilo and her older sister Nani, performing all the violent, kick-ass action that’s needed to save the little “us against the world” band of orphans.

By the time you get to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, both the 2006 YA novel and the 2012 film based on it, it’s pretty clear that the world we live in has reached the point where a story’s female protagonist doesn’t need a Stitch-like surrogate. If somebody needs killing, the girl can do it herself.

Of course, the protective sibling theme is crucial to the heroine Katniss’ story — she sacrifices herself to protect her younger sister, entering the lethal games in her sister’s place.

My own Kim Oh Thrillers carries on the orphans-against-the-world mythos. Kim’s only family is her younger brother Donnie, and she begins fiercely protecting him at a young age, when she’s a child herself. She’s no Henriette from Orphans of the Storm; she’s perfectly willing and capable to dispense with traditional morality, in order to do what she has to. As one of the books’ reviewers on Amazon noted, the Kim Oh Thrillers address what he felt was still “the lack of female action heroes… without the usual formulaic plot goo of trite romantic subplots.” He’s right about this; even The Hunger Games folds in a rather standard boy-girl relationship, presumably designed to appeal to a readership of teenage girls. My Kim, for better or worse, dispenses with that; her kick-ass-ness is not just a matter of being able to bring the hammer down, violence-wise, but is also her emotional toughness. She has to deal with the consequences that everybody, female and male alike, have to deal with now, of putting their human natures aside in order to survive and protect their loved ones in an increasingly hostile world. We’re all orphans of the storm now, but being Henriette-good won’t save the day for us. If one of my readers looks at Kim and what she’s going through, and says, “Yeah — that’s me; that’s how I feel,” then I’ve hit my target.

What I love to hear…

Z7 Reviews Real Dangerous Fun

Longtime visitors to this site will likely notice some changes. And they’re big changes.

And what those changes reflect is where my writing is now. For the time being, I’m concentrating almost exclusively on my Kim Oh Thrillers series. That’s where my heart is now — I believe those books are some of the best I’ve ever done, and I’m going to be doing a lot more of them.

But – they are undeniably very different from the science fiction and other books I’ve done before. That’s why I’ve decided to do them under the Kim Oh pen name — not to confuse people, but to make it easier for readers to see the difference. They’re faster, funnier, more action-oriented, but with some surprising depth to them. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

I hope you’ll stick around on this blog as well; a lot of what I’ll have to say here is pretty much what I would’ve said in the site’s previous incarnation. But if you decide to unsubscribe or just not check in as you did before, I understand perfectly, and I’m just glad you did choose to spend some time here.

Longtime visitors to this site will likely notice some changes. And they’re big changes.

And what those changes reflect is where my writing is now. For the time being, I’m concentrating almost exclusively on my Kim Oh Thrillers series. That’s where my heart is now — I believe those books are some of the best I’ve ever done, and I’m going to be doing a lot more of them.

But – they are undeniably very different from the science fiction and other books I’ve done before. That’s why I’ve decided to do them under the Kim Oh pen name — not to confuse people, but to make it easier for readers to see the difference. They’re faster, funnier, more action-oriented, but with some surprising depth to them. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

I hope you’ll stick around on this blog as well; a lot of what I’ll have to say here is pretty much what I would’ve said in the site’s previous incarnation. But if you decide to unsubscribe or just not check in as you did before, I understand perfectly, and I’m just glad you did choose to spend some time here.