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What's Fair: And Other Short Stories
Ben Shapiro releases his first book of short stories!
In "What's Fair," an incredible invention leads to bloody brutality when an unsatisfied brother decides he hasn't received what he's owed.
In "From The Pit," an adventurer shrinks to microscopic size to clean up the environment -- but finds himself targeted for murder when he is accidentally ingested into the body of his mysterious employer.
In "Utopia," a man abandons paradise when he realizes that paradise isn't all that it's cracked up to be -- but his escape poses a threat to that paradise.
From science fiction to parable, from love to violence, Shapiro's exciting stories capture the imagination.
In "What's Fair," an incredible invention leads to bloody brutality when an unsatisfied brother decides he hasn't received what he's owed.
In "From The Pit," an adventurer shrinks to microscopic size to clean up the environment -- but finds himself targeted for murder when he is accidentally ingested into the body of his mysterious employer.
In "Utopia," a man abandons paradise when he realizes that paradise isn't all that it's cracked up to be -- but his escape poses a threat to that paradise.
From science fiction to parable, from love to violence, Shapiro's exciting stories capture the imagination.
- GenresScience FictionPolitics
37 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 15, 2015
13 people are currently reading
329 people want to read
About the author
Ben Shapiro
37 books2,508 followersBenjamin Shapiro was born in 1984 and entered UCLA at the age of 16, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in June 2004 with a BA in Political Science. He graduated Harvard Law School cum laude in June 2007. Shapiro was hired by Creators Syndicate at age 17 to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S.
His columns are printed in major newspapers and websites including Townhall, ABCNews, WorldNet Daily, Human Events, FrontPage Mag, Family Security Matters, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Conservative Chronicle. His columns have also appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Sun-Times, Orlando Sentinel, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, RealClearPolitics.com, Arizona Republic, and Claremont Review of Books, among others. He has been the subject of articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Associated Press, and Christian Science Monitor; he has been quoted on "The Rush Limbaugh Show," "The Dr. Laura Show," at CBS News, in the New York Press, in the Washington Times, and in The American Conservative magazine, among many others.
The author of the national bestsellers, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (WND Books, May 2004), Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future (Regnery, June 2005), and Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House (Thomas Nelson, 2008), Shapiro has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows around the nation, including "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "Fox and Friends" (Fox News), "In the Money" (CNN Financial), "DaySide with Linda Vester" (Fox News), "Scarborough Country" (MSNBC), "The Dennis Miller Show" (CNBC), "Fox News Live" (Fox News Channel), "Glenn Beck Show" (CNN), "Your World with Neil Cavuto" (Fox News) and "700 Club" (Christian Broadcasting Network), "The Laura Ingraham Show," "The Michael Medved Show," "The G. Gordon Liddy Show," "The Rusty Humphries Show," "The Lars Larson Show" (nationally syndicated), "The Larry Elder Show," The Hugh Hewitt Show," "The Dennis Prager Show," among others.
His columns are printed in major newspapers and websites including Townhall, ABCNews, WorldNet Daily, Human Events, FrontPage Mag, Family Security Matters, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Conservative Chronicle. His columns have also appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Sun-Times, Orlando Sentinel, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, RealClearPolitics.com, Arizona Republic, and Claremont Review of Books, among others. He has been the subject of articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Associated Press, and Christian Science Monitor; he has been quoted on "The Rush Limbaugh Show," "The Dr. Laura Show," at CBS News, in the New York Press, in the Washington Times, and in The American Conservative magazine, among many others.
The author of the national bestsellers, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (WND Books, May 2004), Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future (Regnery, June 2005), and Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House (Thomas Nelson, 2008), Shapiro has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows around the nation, including "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "Fox and Friends" (Fox News), "In the Money" (CNN Financial), "DaySide with Linda Vester" (Fox News), "Scarborough Country" (MSNBC), "The Dennis Miller Show" (CNBC), "Fox News Live" (Fox News Channel), "Glenn Beck Show" (CNN), "Your World with Neil Cavuto" (Fox News) and "700 Club" (Christian Broadcasting Network), "The Laura Ingraham Show," "The Michael Medved Show," "The G. Gordon Liddy Show," "The Rusty Humphries Show," "The Lars Larson Show" (nationally syndicated), "The Larry Elder Show," The Hugh Hewitt Show," "The Dennis Prager Show," among others.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 11, 2022
Where to begin with this dumpster fire....
Grammatical errors, stories that lack basic structure, and advertising a book with 3 short stories as a collection. What's fair has all these and more crimes against literature to boot.
Ben Shapiro's abuse of punctuation is a egregious as his lack of attention to detail. Google any specific information underpinning his stories, he didn't bother to google tractors or dust mites, both of which are central to different stories.
The "writing" is high school assignment quality. Even the basics of of writing such as understandable prose & stories with pay-offs seem to be beyond his capacity as a writer. Random details are inserted which have no bearing on the story frequently, action occurs which doesn't further the plot.
Lazy, boring, embarrassing. The only interesting thing about this skid mark on the underpants of fiction is that it's a measure of Ben's writing ability - that of an unskilled 15 year old. Yet, he persists with the delusion he's not a Hollywood screen writer because of his political views. Oh the hubris!
Grammatical errors, stories that lack basic structure, and advertising a book with 3 short stories as a collection. What's fair has all these and more crimes against literature to boot.
Ben Shapiro's abuse of punctuation is a egregious as his lack of attention to detail. Google any specific information underpinning his stories, he didn't bother to google tractors or dust mites, both of which are central to different stories.
The "writing" is high school assignment quality. Even the basics of of writing such as understandable prose & stories with pay-offs seem to be beyond his capacity as a writer. Random details are inserted which have no bearing on the story frequently, action occurs which doesn't further the plot.
Lazy, boring, embarrassing. The only interesting thing about this skid mark on the underpants of fiction is that it's a measure of Ben's writing ability - that of an unskilled 15 year old. Yet, he persists with the delusion he's not a Hollywood screen writer because of his political views. Oh the hubris!
February 2, 2022
Incredible insight into just how stupid and shallow Ben’s thinking is. Hilariously bad, highly recommended.
December 10, 2024
Editors are important.
September 21, 2023
This was a lot shorter than I expected, for as far as anthologies go, it was only three short stories. I guess it does count as a collection, but not by much.
Firstly, Shapiro is still a terrible writer and all three stories are just bad. Second, it’s fairly obvious nobody edited this book, as there’s at least one bad typo in each story. Thirdly, it’s just really short and doesn’t offer up too much to even enjoy ironically.
Regardless, I’ll break down the three stories and then analyze the simply incredibly profound(ly awful) meaning behind each.
The three stories are:
From the Pit
What’s Fair
Utopia
That’s the order of my favorite to least favorite by the way.
I’ll discuss them in that order as well :)
Alright, the first one up is Utopia, the most boring and nonsensical one. 0/10. Not even ironically enjoyable. It’s a story about a guy who lives in a socialist “utopia” before suddenly being awakened by seeing a comet (Halley’s Comet) one night. Of course, since it’s a SOCIALIST utopia, people aren’t allowed to have friends or loved ones or do things they enjoy or anything at all without getting arrested and/or killed. The main character’s job is to flip a switch all day at work, because that’s the end goal of socialism, obviously. Regardless, he has his self-actualization moment by seeing a comet and then is immune to the mental weaponry of the evil socialist government. He uses this immunity to run away to a random mountain and finds some old man with books. Now that he has this knowledge, he thinks about how smart and special he is because he dislikes big government now. Wow, I haven’t the slightest idea who this character is supposed to be a very subtle representation of.
Favorite quote: “Soon, he knew, his legs would give out, his head fry from the Pulse. But it didn’t”
The grammar is so bad. How do you publish a book where a sentence and a half can have improper tenses, comma splices, starts a sentence with a conjunction, and can randomly change subject (or just use the wrong pronoun). Then again, I guess Ben Shapiro isn’t very good at respecting pronouns, is he?
Next up is the title story: What’s Fair. The main character is named Tommy, and he’s a rootin tootin cowbay who lives in bumfuck nowhere with his brother, Jim, and his aging mother who does not get the privilege of a name. Tommy is jealous of Jim because Jim has a nice watch and seems to have everything fall straight into his lap. While Jim goes to college, Tommy is building up to be a football star in high school before he gets injured. His girlfriend, Emily (called Em) is the head cheerleader but leaves him for Jim in a brilliant scene (see my favorite quote below). Emily married Jim and Jim comes back to the farm with a college degree while Tommy is an unskilled laborer. Their mother tries to drown herself for some reason, then commits arson on their house after receiving brain damage from he failed suicide. Tommy and Em manage to put the fire out while Jim is working on something in the garage and Tommy goes to confront him for not being there. Jim absolutely lays his ass out verbally and flips the script, showing that he’s actually a genius and has a million dollar idea that he intends to use to lift his idiot brother (Tommy) and their mother from poverty. After this. Tommy runs into the woods, finds a knife that he dropped there 15 years earlier (in mint condition somehow) and crafts a plan. When he returns to the farm, Jim has just cut a deal with his new farm invention and is ready to help Tommy with all his money needs. Obviously thankful, Tommy stabs Jim in the stomach with the knife, killing him instantly. Somehow getting away with this flagrant murder, Tommy gets his dose of karma when the invention breaks and he has no idea how to fix it. As such, he is now destitute and must watch as his remaining family die and his farm is repossessed. Brilliant writing. -5/10 Ironically pretty okay. Not the worst thing ever because it’s so bad.
Favorite quote: (This is a direct quote): “And that’s when Jim opened the door. He was back from State, where he was studying agricultural engineering, and he looked at me, laughing with his eyes, and said, ‘Hey brother. I’m home.’ When I turned back to introduce Em, she was looking at him. They were married six months later.”
Oof, that sucks buddy. Your brother stole your girlfriend after she looked at him because, of course, that’s how women work. I’m glad Ben Shapiro can share his experience of being so hilariously pathetic that anyone around him will switch teams the instant another option presents itself. Truly the modern Socrates.
Lastly is From the Pit, and boy did I save the best for last. This is a sci-fi story where a rich guy shrinks a bunch of hired soldiers and mercenaries to sub-millimeter size so that they can effectively go to war with… dust mites… Right, with that very logical and reasonable plan underway, the main hero, Kemp. After some hijinks, Kemp ends up in the stomach of his employer, trapped. So the main character is stuck in the belly of his boss- say, what’s the boss’s name? It’s “The Whale.” Kemp is stuck in the belly of his boss, the Whale. Subtle. Benny Boy’s great use of allusion aside, Kemp lets his friend, named Jensen, know he’s trapped and Jensen tries to get him out. The Whale, reasonably, wants Kemp to not be in his stomach, so he swallows robotic dust mites that they apparently had the whole time to kill him. Meanwhile, Kemp has reversed his shrinking, so he’s slowly growing back to normal size. His plan is to grow and eventually just burst out of the Whale like a scene out of Ridley Scott’s Alien. However, he abandons this ingenious plan when he remembers that he could just climb out the Whale’s esophagus. The Whale won’t have this however, still sending in the robots and trying to have Kemp killed even more. Kemp loses a leg and is about to die in stomach acid when he punches an ulcer that the Whale has and “forces” a doctor to start instant surgery. He escapes during this surgery and Jensen kills the doctor doing the surgery. The Whale presumably dies from blood loss or something. Naturally, this is a hit piece on abortion. Thanks Ben Ten. -10/10 This would be gold, but it’s actually pyrite. Geology jokes rock.
Favorite quote: “Two years. That was the length of that damnable contract. I though the money would enough - a guaranteed pension for life, an endless income, a nice house above the bay with the wind blowing off the sea, Amy in my arms. She warned me against this. She was right. I was wrong.”
Besides the melodrama, there’s the hilariously bad grammar, including “I though the money would enough” and many sentences that are just too short next to a run-on monster. Hilarious. Thanks Ben.
Bonus quote from this one: “‘Sir,’ he (Jensen) says, ‘that would be pure murder.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Whale. ‘But it’s my body. And what’s in it is my purview. That’s the law. Look it up.’”
S U B T L E
Nice one Benson. You’re a shit author. Can’t wait to read more of your shit. That’s exactly what it is though: a huge steaming pile of shit.
Fuck you.
XOXO
Firstly, Shapiro is still a terrible writer and all three stories are just bad. Second, it’s fairly obvious nobody edited this book, as there’s at least one bad typo in each story. Thirdly, it’s just really short and doesn’t offer up too much to even enjoy ironically.
Regardless, I’ll break down the three stories and then analyze the simply incredibly profound(ly awful) meaning behind each.
The three stories are:
From the Pit
What’s Fair
Utopia
That’s the order of my favorite to least favorite by the way.
I’ll discuss them in that order as well :)
Alright, the first one up is Utopia, the most boring and nonsensical one. 0/10. Not even ironically enjoyable. It’s a story about a guy who lives in a socialist “utopia” before suddenly being awakened by seeing a comet (Halley’s Comet) one night. Of course, since it’s a SOCIALIST utopia, people aren’t allowed to have friends or loved ones or do things they enjoy or anything at all without getting arrested and/or killed. The main character’s job is to flip a switch all day at work, because that’s the end goal of socialism, obviously. Regardless, he has his self-actualization moment by seeing a comet and then is immune to the mental weaponry of the evil socialist government. He uses this immunity to run away to a random mountain and finds some old man with books. Now that he has this knowledge, he thinks about how smart and special he is because he dislikes big government now. Wow, I haven’t the slightest idea who this character is supposed to be a very subtle representation of.
Favorite quote: “Soon, he knew, his legs would give out, his head fry from the Pulse. But it didn’t”
The grammar is so bad. How do you publish a book where a sentence and a half can have improper tenses, comma splices, starts a sentence with a conjunction, and can randomly change subject (or just use the wrong pronoun). Then again, I guess Ben Shapiro isn’t very good at respecting pronouns, is he?
Next up is the title story: What’s Fair. The main character is named Tommy, and he’s a rootin tootin cowbay who lives in bumfuck nowhere with his brother, Jim, and his aging mother who does not get the privilege of a name. Tommy is jealous of Jim because Jim has a nice watch and seems to have everything fall straight into his lap. While Jim goes to college, Tommy is building up to be a football star in high school before he gets injured. His girlfriend, Emily (called Em) is the head cheerleader but leaves him for Jim in a brilliant scene (see my favorite quote below). Emily married Jim and Jim comes back to the farm with a college degree while Tommy is an unskilled laborer. Their mother tries to drown herself for some reason, then commits arson on their house after receiving brain damage from he failed suicide. Tommy and Em manage to put the fire out while Jim is working on something in the garage and Tommy goes to confront him for not being there. Jim absolutely lays his ass out verbally and flips the script, showing that he’s actually a genius and has a million dollar idea that he intends to use to lift his idiot brother (Tommy) and their mother from poverty. After this. Tommy runs into the woods, finds a knife that he dropped there 15 years earlier (in mint condition somehow) and crafts a plan. When he returns to the farm, Jim has just cut a deal with his new farm invention and is ready to help Tommy with all his money needs. Obviously thankful, Tommy stabs Jim in the stomach with the knife, killing him instantly. Somehow getting away with this flagrant murder, Tommy gets his dose of karma when the invention breaks and he has no idea how to fix it. As such, he is now destitute and must watch as his remaining family die and his farm is repossessed. Brilliant writing. -5/10 Ironically pretty okay. Not the worst thing ever because it’s so bad.
Favorite quote: (This is a direct quote): “And that’s when Jim opened the door. He was back from State, where he was studying agricultural engineering, and he looked at me, laughing with his eyes, and said, ‘Hey brother. I’m home.’ When I turned back to introduce Em, she was looking at him. They were married six months later.”
Oof, that sucks buddy. Your brother stole your girlfriend after she looked at him because, of course, that’s how women work. I’m glad Ben Shapiro can share his experience of being so hilariously pathetic that anyone around him will switch teams the instant another option presents itself. Truly the modern Socrates.
Lastly is From the Pit, and boy did I save the best for last. This is a sci-fi story where a rich guy shrinks a bunch of hired soldiers and mercenaries to sub-millimeter size so that they can effectively go to war with… dust mites… Right, with that very logical and reasonable plan underway, the main hero, Kemp. After some hijinks, Kemp ends up in the stomach of his employer, trapped. So the main character is stuck in the belly of his boss- say, what’s the boss’s name? It’s “The Whale.” Kemp is stuck in the belly of his boss, the Whale. Subtle. Benny Boy’s great use of allusion aside, Kemp lets his friend, named Jensen, know he’s trapped and Jensen tries to get him out. The Whale, reasonably, wants Kemp to not be in his stomach, so he swallows robotic dust mites that they apparently had the whole time to kill him. Meanwhile, Kemp has reversed his shrinking, so he’s slowly growing back to normal size. His plan is to grow and eventually just burst out of the Whale like a scene out of Ridley Scott’s Alien. However, he abandons this ingenious plan when he remembers that he could just climb out the Whale’s esophagus. The Whale won’t have this however, still sending in the robots and trying to have Kemp killed even more. Kemp loses a leg and is about to die in stomach acid when he punches an ulcer that the Whale has and “forces” a doctor to start instant surgery. He escapes during this surgery and Jensen kills the doctor doing the surgery. The Whale presumably dies from blood loss or something. Naturally, this is a hit piece on abortion. Thanks Ben Ten. -10/10 This would be gold, but it’s actually pyrite. Geology jokes rock.
Favorite quote: “Two years. That was the length of that damnable contract. I though the money would enough - a guaranteed pension for life, an endless income, a nice house above the bay with the wind blowing off the sea, Amy in my arms. She warned me against this. She was right. I was wrong.”
Besides the melodrama, there’s the hilariously bad grammar, including “I though the money would enough” and many sentences that are just too short next to a run-on monster. Hilarious. Thanks Ben.
Bonus quote from this one: “‘Sir,’ he (Jensen) says, ‘that would be pure murder.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Whale. ‘But it’s my body. And what’s in it is my purview. That’s the law. Look it up.’”
S U B T L E
Nice one Benson. You’re a shit author. Can’t wait to read more of your shit. That’s exactly what it is though: a huge steaming pile of shit.
Fuck you.
XOXO
October 19, 2015
This was better than I thought it would be, but Shapiro is still better off sticking to his day job.
The stories aren't bad, but they're trotting out well-worn science fiction plots and he isn't doing anything much with them. Shapiro seems to have put this out as a lark (he announced this out of the blue on his Twitter feed at 8 PM on a Friday night) and I don't really think he's looking for a second career at this point. Still, it's entertaining enough for what it is.
The stories aren't bad, but they're trotting out well-worn science fiction plots and he isn't doing anything much with them. Shapiro seems to have put this out as a lark (he announced this out of the blue on his Twitter feed at 8 PM on a Friday night) and I don't really think he's looking for a second career at this point. Still, it's entertaining enough for what it is.
July 28, 2017
Love Ben's political writing and I was very surprised by how well he writes science fiction.
February 23, 2022
This book is, to be brutally honest, awful. There are several reasons I could name that I've given such a bad rating, such as the persistent typos ("I though the money would enough" being the most egregious example), but there are bigger problems here that the occasional grammar mistake. I took particular issue with the ham-fisted attempts at political messaging, with "From the Pit" delivering its anti-abortion message with all the subtlety of a Ken Del Vecchio film. It's not even a good comparison: Shapiro attempts to compare an adult man shrunk to the size of a dust mite and accidentally swallowed to an early-development foetus. Important plot points are completely forgotten about when they become inconvenient (the climax of "From the Pit" is a good example of this), but the absolute nadir of the book has to be the third story, "Utopia". Basically, a nameless man living under a Communist dictatorship has a sudden awakening. He flees the city, enters a cave in a nearby mountainside, murders an elderly man revealed to be this society's founder, and escapes. Most major events in the story occur without explanation for the sake of driving the plot. At one point, the protagonist is shot with what appears to be some kind of sonic gun designed to fry his brain. For absolutely no discernible reason, it doesn't work, and he escapes. No explanation is given as to why it doesn't work, leaving me to assume that Shapiro was simply unable to find a way out of the problem he had just written other than ignoring it. The plot itself is kicked off by similarly unexplained conveniences. The protagonist is somehow inspired to escape by seeing Halley's Comet, despite having no idea what a comet is. He knows to flee to the mountain where the main villain lives, despite the story itself acknowledging that he has never seen the mountain and didn't even know the mountain existed. A doorway opens in the dome around the city and allows him to leave, with no explanation as to why it opens. The messages are just as heavy-handed as in "From the Pit", with the socialists themselves describing socialism as "the creed of ignorance". Worst of all, the story seems to imply that eugenics actually work, with the old man stating that the "intelligent" have been successfully removed via selective breeding. The only thing saving this book from a one-star rating is the first story, "What's Fair", being better than the others to the point of actually being passable. I would not recommend this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 25, 2023
Another hate-read. Even for Ben Shapiro this is atrocious writing down to misunderstanding basic syntax and the 3 stories might as well be episodes from a John Birch 'Twilight Zone'
December 14, 2024
My Immortal is cultural heritage compared to this that grown ass man wrote. The man, mind you, that proudly criticises and insults others for much less than this incompetency he produced.
August 27, 2025
What's fair? Nothing in this book. One star.
November 11, 2023
it's not the greatest short stories book, but it is something.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews