Blog Five Books Five SFF Stories Featuring Extremely Bad Parenting Controlling fathers, murderous mothers, and mad scientists abound! By James Davis Nicoll | Published on December 10, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Reactor previously published my thoughts and suggestions on how to manage parents in speculative fiction. Of course, there’s another sort of parent: the irredeemably bad parent. Indifferent, incompetent, even malicious. Such parents are bad for their kids, but great for authors (as evidenced by the fact that we’ve discussed atrocious parenting here before). Many exciting plots result from the child’s effort to escape the parent or to deal with the consequences of a toxic upbringing. Herewith, five works about irredeemably bad parents. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) Victor Frankenstein is wealthy, driven, and brilliant. When Victor sets his mind to creating life (or at least reanimating dead tissue), nothing—social convention, the monumental R&D required, simple prudence—stops him until he finally succeeds in his quest. Victor’s Creature lives! Victor is also shallow and easily repulsed. His Creature being ugly, Victor abandons it to survive or not as fate decrees. When the Creature re-enters Victor’s life, begging Victor to create a female Creature to share the Creature’s life, Victor agrees… only to dash the Creature’s hopes and inflame the Creature’s homicidal fury. The poor Creature must not only deal with an alarming appearance and a dreadful father, but it has the misfortune of having read Goethe’s 1774 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, a ludicrous paean to wretched emotional excess. This was arguably the worst book possible1 (of those available at the time2) to hand to a distraught, socially isolated autodidact. Nevertheless, if Victor had been a better father figure, or a father figure at all, the Creature might well have weathered reading Goethe at an impressionable age. “Absalom” by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (1946) (Collected in Tomorrow, the Stars) Unlike Victor, Joel Locke is no negligent father. A former child genius, Joel is determined to provide his son Absalom with the careful mentoring that Joel’s intellectually inferior, tyrannical father could not supply. Joel controls every aspect of Absalom’s life, guiding Absalom towards fruitful educational avenues and away from subjects for which the ten-year-old is not yet ready. Absalom has a different interpretation of the facts. Absalom is certain that, whether or not Joel is consciously aware of his true motivation, Joel is terrified that Joel will be as overshadowed by Absalom, as Joel’s father was by Joel. Joel is not trying to help Absalom be the best Absalom. Joel is trying to stunt his son. As brilliant as Joel is, Absalom is smarter. Joel is doomed to fail. Star Probe by Joseph Green (1976) In 2011, an alien star probe is detected en route past Earth. The World-Gov opts for prudence. Rather than risk retaliation by the product of an immeasurably superior civilization, World-Gov will not authorize any attempt to intercept or destroy the probe. Harold “Jesus” Hentson’s Rockets International decides to intercept the probe without the formality of official sanction. RI can get a crewed ship to the alien probe. A safe return is impossible unless the astronaut can somehow refuel at the destination. Harold has the perfect candidate for the likely suicide mission. Harold’s dead father Jarl was a skilled astronaut whose mind was very conveniently recorded on tapes. Harold’s son, also Jarl, has a severe cognitive deficit but is otherwise healthy. All that needs to be done is to decant old Jarl into young Jarl, then send a dead man in the body of a young man nobody will miss on a one-way mission to glory. However you are imagining the consent issues had to have been handled, the reality is worse. Old Jarl is too dead to provide informed consent, young Jarl is not capable of giving it, and really, Harold isn’t that interested in what either might say beforehand. He just wants a mission to that alien probe. Shadow of the Batgirl by Sarah Kuhn and Nicole Goux (2020) David Cain was an eminently terrible parent. Determined to turn his daughter Cassandra into a weapon, Cain denied Cassandra access to all but the most rudimentary speech and subjected her to rigorous martial arts training. Result: a girl who could barely speak but to whom body language was an open book. A girl who killed without mercy because she did not know mercy. Cain’s plan worked flawlessly until it failed abjectly. A single word from a victim sent Cassandra fleeing from David Cain. Gotham is a daunting city in which to reinvent oneself, lacking as it does any sort of useful social services. But there are kindly individuals. It was to kindly librarian Barbara Jordan and diner owner Jackie that Cassandra turned. In David Cain’s defense, at least he did not, as X-Bomb Betty’s father did, imbue her with the ability to explode in a 150-megaton explosion… once. Otherwise, Cain was such a comprehensively awful dad that he manages to make the Batman Family (turning damaged kids into violent vigilantes) look good. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (2024) Evangeline demands unquestioning obedience of her daughter Cordelia. Cordelia gives in—not so much because Cordelia wants to please her mom, but because Evangeline is a powerful sorceress who can and often does turn Cordelia into a meat-puppet to ensure her compliance. Having been forced to brutally murder her disappointing lover, Evangeline needs a new, easily swayed, rich benefactor. Squire Samuel Chatham appears an ideal match. Evangeline has no trouble installing herself at Chatham House as guest, then as the Squire’s fiancée. Evangeline has made a fatal miscalculation. Just as Chatham House offers Evangeline a potential husband, it offers Cordelia something she has never had before: allies who could help Cordelia free herself from her evil mother. There are novels whose grand antagonists turn out to have relatable reasons for doing the terrible things that they do. Sorceress is not one of those books. Evangeline has no redeeming features and probably would only see any such features as laughable weaknesses. The above-mentioned characters are only a small sample of the appalling parents I could have mentioned. Perhaps you have your favorites not mentioned above. Feel free to mention them in comments below.[end-mark] Die Leiden des jungen Werthers is famous for having inspired copycat suicides amongst its more excitable fans. Readers may recall that the last thing the Creature does is sail off into the Arctic, planning to burn himself alive. ︎Atlas Shrugged was not available at the time. Even if it had been, the worst-case scenario is that the Creature would have become an evangelical Objectivist, which, while annoying, would still arguably have been an improvement on the trail of carnage that the Creature left in its wake in Frankenstein. ︎The post Five SFF Stories Featuring Extremely Bad Parenting appeared first on Reactor.

A Penny For Your Liberal Thoughts

You do you, Commerson’s dolphins.

Like a bridge over troubled water.

President-elect Donald Trump has hardly kept secret his desire to send FBI Director Christopher Wray packing just as President Bill Clinton gave William Sessions the boot in 1993. Having read the writing on the wall, the FBI director — whose 10-year term is far from over — is reportedly preparing to save Trump the hassle. Sources inside the FBI who are apparently familiar with the director's thinking recently told the Washington Times that Wray wants to end on his own terms rather than get canned by Trump. "He's going to be gone at the inauguration. On or before the inauguration," said one source. The absence will be temporarily filled by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, whose original plan was reportedly to kick around the bureau until summer 2025 so that he could help with the changing of the guard. The FBI told the Times in a statement, "The FBI has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people. Director Wray and Deputy Director Abbate have taken strong actions toward achieving accountability in the areas mentioned in the letter and remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work of the FBI." Wray told NBC News in April that he was "enjoying doing this job." 'Promises made, promises broken has become a recurrent theme under your leadership.' "As long as I think I can do that in a way that adheres to all those rules and norms, I'd like to keep doing it," added Wray. It is now especially clear that Wray is not welcome in the incoming administration. While Trump's Nov. 30 announcement that he would nominate former National Security Council official Kash Patel to helm the FBI was as good an indication as any that Wray's days as director were numbered, Trump once again noted his displeasure with the job Wray has done in an interview Sunday with NBC News' Kristen Welker. "I can't say I'm thrilled with him," Trump told Welker. "He invaded my home. I'm suing the country over it. He invaded Mar-a-Lago. I'm very unhappy with the things he's done." "I have a lot of respect for the FBI, but the FBI's respect has gone way down over the last number of years," added Trump. On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — the incoming Senate Judiciary chair — noted in an 11-page letter to Wray that he had failed in his fundamental duties as director, namely "the prompt and thorough compliance with congressional oversight requests and the protection of whistleblowers." "Rather than turn over a new leaf at the FBI, you've continued to read from the old playbook of weaponization, double standards, and a relentless game of hide-and-seek with the Congress," wrote Grassley. "Promises made, promises broken has become a recurrent theme under your leadership." Grassley listed a number of examples indicating where he felt Wray went wrong, including: the FBI's "inexcusable failure to investigate bribery allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump"; the FBI's apparent eagerness to "act against President Trump based upon sources lacking credibility, such as those behind the Steele Dossier"; the FBI's "unprecedented raid of President Trump's home in Florida to serve a warrant for records," conducted "despite serious questions about the need for it" — the type of raid that President Joe Biden was not subjected to during his classified documents probe and that Hillary Clinton was not similarly subjected to "even though she and her staff mishandled highly classified information while using a non-government server after repeated warnings from State Department security personnel it was a security risk"; the FBI's alleged role "as an accomplice to the Democrats' false information campaign designed to undermine my investigation of alleged Biden-family corruption"; and the bureau's failures to respond to various records requests and inquiries. "For the good of the country, it's time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives," wrote Grassley. "President-elect Trump has already announced his intention to nominate a candidate to replace you, and the Senate will carefully consider that choice. For my part, I've also seen enough, and hope your respective successors will learn from these failures." An FBI source previously told the Times that the expectation following Kamala Harris' landslide defeat was that Wray was on his way out. "It's a countdown for Wray because [people here] don't think he will stay to get fired after what Trump did to Comey," said one FBI source. "Trump will say, 'Yeah, fire his ass. Don't let him take the plane home.'" Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Signs of Valve's Steam Deck OLED getting official refurbished units have just been spotted. This will be the company's first time introducing the OLED model to its refurbished program, where it sells used Steam Decks at a discount. The Steam Deck OLED has quickly become our favorite and the best PC gaming handheld on the market. Despite being beaten in terms of raw power by the competition, this handheld is an overall better system to use, thanks to its use of SteamOS, as we found in our Steam Deck OLED review. Continue reading You could soon get a Valve Steam Deck OLED for a much cheaper price MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best graphics card, Best gaming PC, Best SSD for gaming

If you've been enjoying the world, tension, and anomalies of Stalker 2 but felt isolated exploring The Zone by yourself, Pioner is the game for you. This hard sci-fi and Soviet FPS is all about surviving untold monsters and hunting for the secrets they guard, but in the environment of an MMO. With the Pioner launch now set for 2025 the game also finally has a Steam page and new trailer, so you can get ready ahead of time. Continue reading Pioner is like an MMO version of Stalker 2, and it’s officially coming to Steam MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best apocalypse games, Best MMOs, Best survival games

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