"Yes, Jon Gold, it IS a conspiracy. A small band of we fine-literature-appreciating activists are hell-bent on trashing poorly written novels regardless of theme."

I spit out my food onto the keyboard and monitor - I laughed so hard.

With you in the struggle,
Bruno
WeAreChangeLA - http://www.wacla.org

The same person who accused me of being "sayanim?" He has no credibility. Referencing my own person psyop doesn't give you any credibility either. Which user of that site are you? We already had Keenan (Eleuseus).

...but I always seem to compare contemporary authors to the old prose stylists like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene or Steinbeck. I thought Gabriel Garcia Marquez was an enormous talent. One well-written novel I really enjoyed was John Nichols' "The Milagro Beanfield War" (actually this was a trilogy) but he didn't write much of anything else. I read "Atonement" by Ian McKewn before it was a movie. He's a great writer. I'll second John Le Carre as a great writer. I am by no means an expert on prose style and story construction, but those authors are true artists.

The only reason I bought and read "The Shell Game" was because it dealt with 911 and was hyped so much here on 911blogger. Steve Alten just USED the 911 Truth Movement to try to sell his crappy POS. His novel was an abysmal work on every level - style, plot... everything. Nothing redeemable about it (except the cover art ).

I wrote this about it over at Dissident Voice:

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I’m fascinated and well-read in 911 Truth and Peak Oil subjects both, but ‘The Shell Game’ is nothing more than a shoddy, thrown-together pulp. It is instantly forgettable. The tone of the writing is very low-calibre. The essential ideas involved in 911 Truth and Peak Oil are not explored well at all. The novel completely fails to warn, educate or prompt the reader’s deeper reflection.
In comparison to well-crafted literature, Alten’s plot and style are little more than script-jottings for a second-rate TV show proposal.

Each “chapter” is no more than about 2-3 pages. Short as they are, chapters are even further broken up into widely seperated scenes of a few short sentences, each one irritatingly written in the present tense (the constant one-dimensional drone of present tense is what makes this pulp read like a template for a cheap TV show). A fragmented, jumbled story-style actually works in literature when each of the segments has enough crafted personality to survive for more than a few milliseconds in the reader’s mind. When crafted properly, the reader is able to slowly piece together the fragments like a puzzle being solved – until the denouement when suddenly everything becomes clear. However, Alten abuses this writing style to extremes. He doesn’t even bother to create a puzzle, instead he produces a kaleidoscopic shattering of broken story shards that fails to live up to its promise as a “window” through which readers may examine the murk of our mysterious recent political history. The fractured style of the novel itself creates a horribly crippled narrative that buries any hope for clearer perception of the deep politics behind 911. I surmise that Alten employed this fragmented style in order to hide his inability to create a sense of authenticity.

“The Shell Game” is touted as a “political thriller” but the novel does not possess any political intelligence – nor wit, nor any superior background knowledge of how the real military industrial complex works, nor of how a shadow government MIGHT have conceivably conducted a false-flag psyop on American soil.

But, you know what? The book DOES have excellent cover art. The picture on the cover with the words “The Shell Game” emblazoned over it, is about the most politically intelligent thing in (or on) the novel. One doesn’t need to crack it open to learn much more than what the graphic designer accomplished. Alten merely pastes several well-known 911-related quotes at the head of each fragmented 2-page "chapter". The meager chapter content to follow has nothing much to do with the quotations. I guess the use of 911-related quotations is supposed to qualify the book as some sort of "political" work. Lame!

Let’s look at one of “The Shell Game’s” fragments. At one point, the protagonist, Ace Futrell, takes a plane to Riyadh, SA in order to enter a large bank. He plans to surreptiously insert a CD-ROM containing Promis software into an ordinary desk computer found on the the bank’s main customer service floor. This Promis software on the CD-ROM will infiltrate the bank’s money centers around the world (and those of other banks too), stealing billions (even trillions) of dollars (from only the bad guys’ accounts, of course) for the express purpose of funding clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels thereby defeating the evil US political establishment, American oil cartels and other bad actors. This is the kind of plot one might find in a cartoon! Especially since none of the prior story dealt with Ace’s ability to program the Promis software to do what he desired it to do.

When Ace gets into the bank in Riyadh, he is greeted by a Saudi bank manager who queries Ace about his business objectives in the country. Ace says that he is engaged ina $2 billion/yr sports memorabilia business and produces one of his company’s latest products – a piece of gum “that will give you the freshest breath in the bank”. He urges the bank manager to try a piece.
“Al-Kuwaiz unwraps it. Hesitates, then pops the yellow rectangle into his mouth. The gum is laced with Burrundanga, a soluble powder better known in Columbia as Zombie Dust. Made from the Borrachera plant, Burrundanga has been called the world’s most dangerous drug as it leaves its victims in a virtual coma, preventing the brain from recording any and all memory until it wears off hours later.”

Make no mistake, there had been no previous reference to Burrundanga poison or Ace’s ability to obtain such a substance or incorporate it into a piece of gum! Ace is just somehow able to produce it right there in the story! It’s like Looney Toons cartoons, where Dawg has the uncanny ability to suddenly produce a shotgun from behind his back to blast ol’ Foghorn Leghorn’s face off, spinning his beak around his head. This is just one bloody awful example of bad story construction in Alten’s trashy novel.

“Ace removes the CD-ROM from the John Lennon’s Greatest Hits case, along with the Yankee’s yearbook. Sliding his chair next to Al-Kuwaiz, he feigns reading the yearbook to the comatose manager as his eyes dart to the monitor. Casually, he leans under the desk, opening the computer hard drive’s CD tray. He quickly positions the CD-ROM containing the Promis worm inside, then closes the drawer.

A command pops up in Arabic, Using the mouse, he double-clicks on the prompter, his heart pounding as the timer bar pops up, signalling that the worm is downloading. Ace checks his watch: 10:38 a.m. Referring again to the yearbook as if it is the Koran, Ace pretends to point out passages to his Saudi Arabian zombie, silently urging the downloading bar to move faster––unaware that above his head, mounted in the ceiling behind a mirrored decoration, the bank’s security camera is recording everything.”

Later in the story, billions of dollars start disappearing from villainous huge bank accounts all over the world because of the Promis worm that Ace loaded onto the bank manager’s desktop PC – to benefit clean energy industries, notably E85 corn ethanol! One thing is for sure: with authors like Alten around, we’ll never run short of corn! and we all know how bloody awful a solution E85 corn ethanol is to our energy problems! How very thoughtful of Alten to pull that already-proven-worthless solution out of his ass for us.

Sorry 911 Truthers, “The Shell Game” is a worthless book, useless to your cause. It most probably is just Alten's scheme to sell his wretched scribblings to a growing body of earnest truth-seekers. Alten merely hopes you'll buy it because of its supposed subject matter. Maybe someday a more inspired writer will step up and produce a more worthy piece of historically-based fiction that explores the genuinely interesting and ominous piece of history we have been living through since the year 2000.

Before reading it, I wrote an email to George Kenney of ElectricPolitics.com suggesting that he contact Steve Alten to do an interview. Kenney has done programs covering both 911 and Peak Oil in the past. However, Kenney wrote back saying essentially the same thing – that he had bought a copy of “The Shell Game” and found the writing style “not his cup of tea”. So I hardly think that I am alone in my criticism.

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Fred W,

read Anatoliy Golitsyn's "New Lies for Old" and "The Perestroika Deception" (see link immediately below) on the "collapse" of the USSR. Until one reads those books, one is in the dark on the Soviet Union.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-ke...

The "Western" version of the Cold War certainly was a lie, but not the type of lie you're intimating.

By the way, do you believe the current "Western" version of what is going on in the "former" USSR? Do you believe the "official" government version of 9/11? Other than the USSR, when in history has a government simply thrown in the towel and disparage its philosophy?

Why do you think NORAD and NATO weren't disbanded in 1992? Why do Russian bombers still buzz us in the ADIZ? Why was the United States trying to place a missile defense shield in Poland/Czech Republic, the reason given being to protect us from Iran! Why would the Russian electorate elect a "former" KGB officer as their President, and before Putin elect another "former" communist as President?

Also rent/buy the PBS drama Reilly: Ace of Spies (http://www.amazon.com/Reilly-Ace-Spies-Sam-Neill/dp/B000742FZW/ref=sr_1_...).
It's a true story of MI6 suspecting that the Trust (an unofficial assembly set up by the Cheka to fool the West into believing that the Bolsheviks were in such turmoil that they weren't in control of Russia; that the Trust was the only body in Russia that could get things done, and therefore the West should support the Trust. The Cheka called this deceptive program Operation Trust.) was a front being used by the Bolsheviks to fool the West and White Russians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Operation).

One last troubling fact: Why is it that Anatoliy Goitsyn is the only defector from the Soviet intelligence community who hasn't been seen on television or doing the lecture circuit since the "collapse" of the Soviet Union in December 1991? Golitsyn was the only defector who forewarned the West about the Soviet Union's long-term strategic deception program, correctly prognosticating the rise of dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain (as if that would be allowed to happen in a totalitarian society!), Perestroika, etc.

Golitsyn was so accurate (Golitsyn's description of controlled democratization and liberalization in Russia was so close to the actual events, which occurred from late 1989 through 1991, that researcher Mark Riebling, author of "Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA," credited Golitsyn with 94 percent accuracy. Since that time Golitsyn's accuracy has increased further. His prediction that Russia and China would unite into "one clenched fist" at the end of the final phase of the long-range strategy has come true. Now Golitsyn has proved correct in 140 out of 145 predictions.) that on page 229 of Golitsyn's book, "The Perestroika Deception," Golitsyn predicts how a war in Chechnya would be used by Kremlin strategists to accomplish a leadership change. Golitsyn writes of "the military/nationalist option as the third course upon which the Kremlin strategists might embark in (the) future to adjust the style and leadership of a new government if, for example, Yeltsin was considered to have exhausted his usefulness in extracting concessions from the West." Now Golitsyn wrote this on February 1, 1995, under the sub-heading, "The Kremlin's Objectives and the Chechnya Crisis." Let's fast forward and see what happened......

Well, in a series of military mobilizations under the cover of the crisis in Dagestan and Chechnya, at the outset of this crisis Yeltsin appointed a new prime minister in 1999 -- Vladimir Putin, chief of the Russian secret police. The war in Chechnya would be Yeltsin's downfall, and Putin became President in 2000. Golitsyn was right on target. Incredible!

Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org
Washington, DC