A review I enjoyed and for those of you who weren’t sure if they wanted to read Softbone, here you go
Who has the cojones to play with modern emasculation in fiction? RA Stone, evidently. This satirical venture into sci-fi starts with a softbone named Jake Long or Jakov Luonghaus, a seeming reference to the Longhouse, something I suspect is either a Native American-style matriarchy or a figurative female body part.
Jake, we quickly find out, has trouble holding eye contact with men, generally acts timid and awkward, and stares at women's breasts with an involuntary compulsion. In other words, he’s just like the stereotypical twenties/early thirties male techno-drone, subjected to the cultural demands of any one of our Western corporations/government organizations.
Jake, like many boys raised in the infantilizing atmosphere of the West, has no clue how anything works, how anyone does anything, or how anyone gets anything. Girls, jobs, status, etc. are all left as a mystery, to be attained by someone else, but not them.
It’s a godforsaken tragedy. Guys who repress their emotions and their consciences face the emotional abuse Jake deals with every day: Cindy, his nominal and very temporary wife, hen-pecks him as if he’s a child. He responds with the wimpiest, cringiest, most stereotypically reddit-like behavior you’ve ever seen.
Stone treats the married dynamic between the two not only as normal, but ubiquitous. Stockholms, the guys are called. His world treats “Fem-law” as responsible for men ceding status, space, and opportunity to women while they grind their lives away on technological or service jobs, the natural consequence of which is that Jake's wife does not love him. Following Fem-law to the letter of the law has made Jake physically unattractive to his wife, Cindy. To even feel like a normal guy, he has to take testosterone supplements.
Stone takes that betrayal and plays with all of it, without the bitterness that could taint the novel. But what about his writing in general? Does it hold the same intellectual gravity as the published novels of our day, the ones winning all the illustrious literary awards?
No, but he doesn't need to. He doesn’t have to compete with the published authors to write this story because they have been too afraid of their own feelings to channel any of this energy. He barely has to compete with any pulp writers due to the ongoing veto of the average male emotional experience. As such, he has free reign to let loose and roll.
So is R A Stone the one to trigger the reformation? Is Jake Long the man destined to haul us past fem-law and remake the world? Are we going to enfirm our shafts enough that we can finally pierce the velvety simulacra of these falsehoods? Will we rejoin the natural humanity of our ancestors? Is Western society about to undergo the most profound cultural, spiritual, metaphysical reawakening and rejuvenating resurgence of the past half century?
Who knows. Stone is a fan of Hemingway, and I am, too. Softbone can loosely be interpreted as sci-fi, but it’s also the truth. New pulp. Why not? It’s better than the plotless, soulless lies dressed up as emotional truth. It’s certainly better than the bitter unlived lives our “writers” spit on the page.
With a deep understanding of the observable behavioral dynamics between men and women, Stone finishes up the novel with a very happy ending. Five stars for what it is, but I do wish he had more editors and further cleaned up his prose.
Overall, it's new fiction for the boys. Reproduce. Make women respect you and be attracted to you. Once they are, treat one with love. And who knows? Maybe we’ll turn out all right.
Alright I FINALLY finished the book my good sir. Job well done. I do have small criticism but I don't wanna inundate you with a long comment (as if this isn't verbose enough lol).
In a nut shell very entertaining read especially for those with a trained Red Eye.
Hell ya.
Going back to look up some of his words tho’