C. Alex Smith's Blog

  “This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials. Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”   Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Libraries Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom The Literary Community comes together each year in the last full week of September to honor our freedom to read and share ideas — even unpopular ideas.  Banned Books Week  spotlights historic and current attempts to  censor  literature in schools and libraries. Every year  Flagstaff Writer's Connection  and I join the  American Library Association  to celebrate banned books by reading banned books, and making the public more aware of the problem of censorship. Despite this annual event, book banning has become more prevalent in the last few years. This year, I will be bringing you dai...

Welcome to Gilead There's a reason Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale ,  set Gilead in the United States instead of her native Canada. America has a long history of sexism and misogyny. Studies show the MAGA movement draws on those deep seated feelings of contempt. One study shows that  voters’ measures of hostile sexism and actual racism correlated much more closely with support for MAGA than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology: Another study   found that measures of chivalrous sexism — more traditional, views of women and men’s proper roles in society — didn’t correlate closely with support for Trump. But measures of hostile sexism did. This suggests that MAGA sexism is more about hostility toward women than old-fashioned views of gender roles. That seems to correlate with how the conservative extremist justices on the Supreme Court see women. Idaho vs. United States The Supreme Court just posted...

  Introducing My New Vella Empire is a story told in episodes about a nationalist take over of the United States. I'll be creating episodes into November. The First 10 episodes are free.  Come by, read an episode, and leave me your thoughts.

An Arctic Climate Fiction Boiling Over with Tension For decades the sea ate the land, causing the collapse of human society. In the absence of governance, humans turned to new mind-numbing drugs, human experimentation, and bloodshed.  Lots of bloodshed.  What survives from those days is a disease nicknamed “the breaks,” a universal hatred for the survivors of The Hive Project, and Qaanaaq–home to a melting pot of a million refugees. Qaanaaq is a new city built on oil rig scaffolding over the deep waters of the Arctic north of Iceland and east of Greenland. It sits over a geothermal vent which warms the city. Glaciers provide fresh water and human waste is cycled into methane that lights its lamps. Currently, it's struggling against an epidemic of the breaks, a disease that fills the victim’s heads with the memories of its previous casualties until the sick lose themselves in hallucinations and madness. A survivor of the Hive Project has just arrived in Qaanaaq. Unaware of th...

Canailles Commit a Wicked Caper Leigh Bardugo’s characters are as layered and complex as her worldbuilding. This set of books takes place in Ketterdam, a city of canals, immigrants, mob bosses, gambling, human trafficking, and thieves—the Las Vegas of the Grishaverse. Just like Las Vegas, it’s populated by characters with deep history (baggage). Kaz “Dirty Hands” Brekker has a reputation for getting the job done, no matter how illegal. He does this by scouting out the best talent in the city. Inej was chosen because she was raised in a Suli circus to be their knife throwing and acrobatic act. Now she works as Kaz’s body guard and spy. Jesper is a sharp-shooter with a gambling problem and a secret. Nina can crush a man’s heart by looking at him, but she can also heal and alter your appearance. Wylan has skill with explosives. And Matthais was a member of the drüskelle (or witch killers) until he fell in love with Nina. But is his love strong enough to make him betray his beloved nation ...