Very few people offer assistance to their competition. Doing so is evidence of an exceedingly rare generosity toward one’s fellow man.
Until recently, I’d only encountered one memorable example of this selfless behavior, when, many years ago in an introductory graduate seminar on research skills, I observed one student in the class periodically offer valuable tips to the class at large. His generosity made quite an impression on me at the time, yet I hadn’t thought about that graduate student for a long while until a couple of months ago. That was when I participated in an online book sale promoted by a scientist and inventor who also writes science fiction, Hans G. Schantz.
The idea behind this sale, which Schantz has named the Big Based Book Sale, is that for a designated week, all of the participating authors lower the price of their Kindle eBooks to 99 cents and then promote the heck out of the event. Since the sale is advertised specifically as a “based” book event, the target audience is readers of science fiction and fantasy who’ve had it up to their eyeballs with political correctness and the “woke” narrative.
The books offered are, at the very minimum, void of PC content. Some, like Schantz’s own novels, actually serve up direct counter-arguments to the shibboleths of a PC worldview. In his novels, these might be reflected in the narrative arc or in the dialogue itself. (His young adult trilogy, The Hidden Truth, for instance, is predicated
