In the age of social media, it is not enough to have a pen name. In order to make people believe that such an author is legitimate, the publisher would naturally have to create a digital persona to go along with the pseudonym. Which brings me to today’s review. There is no such writer as Sapphira Olson, and it is pretty obvious. It just took a little digging.
Monday morning, at 3:12 AM EST, I was emailed an amazon gift copy of the eBook Parables by Sapphira Olson. I was connected to Sapphira through Litsy, a literature/book based social media app, one of the very few social media I participate in. I like to support other authors, Sapphira claimed to be interested in getting some publicity drummed up in her book, so I volunteered to get a free copy, read it, and post a review. Based on the premise of the book (parables told to detox us from religion) I was very dubious that I would enjoy the content at all, but I figured I would give it a go. Sounded interesting enough, even if I knew I would disagree with it.
In all fairness to whoever is behind the Sapphira Olson name, I will quickly give my review now. The book is actually fairly well written. It tells a number of seemingly disconnected parables, presented by Dionysius (the god of wine) and Jesus, who are sharing some wine themselves. These stories amble between the classical world and more modern settings, but they all at least touch tangentially on religion (primarily Christianity) in an attempt to reframe our expectations on the way God approaches the universe and human life. And they all come together in the end.
A few of the stories focus on LGBTQ relationships and issues, and they commiserate with those who have been harmed by the church. The largest statement in the book is that, for those of us who have been heavily influenced by the Church and orthodox theology, we must be cleansed of our religious baggage before we can approach God in his reality. What that reality is seems exceedingly vague and certainly subjective, as we are told when we near the end of the book, “Accepting the truth of what you feel is what sets you free.” If that’s the definition of freedom, the basis of freedom changes daily, perhaps more often for hormonal teenagers.
A few more quotes ought to drive the point home:
Over the next week [a man addicted to religion] was forced to attend classes on how the Bible was not inerrant, that imagination and storytelling were more important than factual reality and that diverse beliefs and worldviews were healthy.
The second week was filled with lessons on how Hell was empty and that doubt was crucial for a person’s wellbeing. All of which he found utter nonsense and unhelpful especially the teachings on how Constantine had masculinized the church and how God had allowed two forbidden lovers entry into heaven on a one night pass in a drug-induced dream.
No one is born [blinded by orthodoxy]. That is what your addiction [to religion] and a lack of love produce. You will find your critical thinking and capacity for independent thought have been seriously stunted. I can help you with that. – God
Clearly Sapphira is challenging our perception of religion (which ought to be abolished), God (who ought to be very acquiescing), and ourselves (who ought to never be influenced by anything but our own true self). In many ways, this is the spirit of the age. Let’s get rid of objectivity because it has never done anyone any good, and let us instead make our own truths. In this vein of thought, it is the highest act of barbarism and despotism to even suggest that another person might be wrong or engaged in unhealthy behaviors/beliefs. The fragility of our psyches has reached its height. Self is our god.
This project (regardless of who wrote it) comes from a place of pain, a pain exacerbated by comparing the source of the pain (past experience) with the perception that religion is to blame. By finding a standard in self, the storyteller applies palliative balms to her soul while turning classical myths and an orthodox Christianity on their heads. She suggests that the establishment and everything outside of the self has been led astray by history and culture and that the truth can only be attained by telling fairy tales. This is a tempting line of thought, especially for us who are so enamored with story, but the logic breaks down immediately. The narrator saw this coming, however, and hedged her bets by introducing the book with, “Faith is not an assent of the mind to a set of beliefs, collected as facts and neatly laid out under glass with artefact labels saying Please do not touch. Faith comes as your imagination reaches out beyond the horizon.”
This way of approaching faith may have a certain attraction, but it is faulty from beginning to end. I can certainly agree with bits and pieces, but as a whole, the thesis is non-sensical. But we must ask ourselves, how much of this is the way that people actually think, anyway?
When authors hide behind pseudonyms, it becomes hard to say. Is Parables a horrible book? By no means. The stories are varied and interesting and the entire project is presented in a very unique way. Truly, I congratulate the author. But the core theme is some sort of new age hogwash. It is baseless. And I do not know how many people genuinely approach life this way.
I am not, however, going to get into all of that now, because I want to dive into the mystery of Sapphira Olson.
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After reading the book and thinking about writing a review, I was wondering who this author was. So I began to look over the obvious places on the web. It should be noted that I am no internet sleuth. Beyond a simple Google search, I am useless. But in this case, that’s basically all I needed.
In Parables, the ‘About the Author’ section reads:
Sapphira Zhanna Olson is the author of the bestselling novel Humans (An Assortment of Minor Defects). Born in Bryansk, Russia, Sapphira is half Russian and half American, her father being born in Minnesota. Tragedy struck early in her life with the death of her twin sister when she was only six weeks old and then again with the tragic loss of her father in the Altostratus disaster.
After the global success of Humans, Sapphira withdrew from public life for a number of years and Parables is her first work since then. When not writing she spends her time scuba diving and exploring with her husband the cold wastelands of Antarctica.
This struck me as odd. What is the Altostratus Disaster? Never heard of it. Google gave me nothing at first. I dug a little deeper to find information about Altostratus in Mike French’s novel An Android Awakes. I am definitely not going to take the time to read the book, but it sounds like it goes something like this: robot apocalypse, mind/social control, censorship, human writer, trouble ensues. The follow up is the novel Fictional Alignment, and the description reads:
When Sapphira writes the first human-written fiction in a century, zealot androids vow to eradicate all fiction. They fail – her book is a best seller – so they send a team back in time to realign the historical record with her fictional stories.
Aha! In the Google Books preview, you can find various references to Sapphira. Additionally, the cover features a barely-covered nude profile of a very attractive redheaded woman. As the social media accounts of Sapphira Olson have posted various pictures of attractive redheads (never explicitly claiming to be pictures of the author herself), I do not think this is such a coincidence.
Further, with just a little more digging, I was able to find that all of the social media accounts for Sapphira were created in January 2019 (right before the publishing date of Parables), and nothing can be found about her before then, even though Parables’ author description claims that she is the author of the bestselling Humans: An Assortment of Minor Defects. No information or references to such a book can be found anywhere accept in Fictional Alignment.
So Sapphira Olson is not a real person, nor is her bestseller real. By following thousands of accounts on social media, the author/publisher/publicist was able to get hundreds of follows back. In the few months that there have been Sapphira accounts, hundreds and hundreds of posts have been broadcasted from the accounts: spam essentially. All of this builds from a subtly suspicious pseudonym to an obvious hoax of sorts. Mike French (or an associate) through Elsewhen Press has published a book presumably written by a disaffected ExEvangelical, who goes to some pains to make it clear that she supports #LGBTQ and prefers the pronouns “she/her.”
I have spent an evening reading a book that was fairly well written, ultimately just ok, and frustratingly flawed. I have spent hours researching and digging into this little conspiracy. I have finally realized that Sapphira Olson is a dude. And all of this time could have been saved if I would have stopped at the beginning of the book to read when Humans was published: “Also by Sapphira Olson: Humans (An Arrangment of Minor Defects), Altostratus, 2283.” Oh, also, Sapphira’s illustrator, Umberto Amundsen… also fictional…
There are enough clues that we are dealing with a meta-author/pseudonym, both in the book and now in the social media accounts, but it would be very easy to miss for someone not suspecting that anything is off. I think current and future reviews of the book on the typical sites (Goodreads, Amazon, Google) will attest to the fact that people consider Sapphira to be a real person.
The question is, and I have seen it posed recently in other articles, “What is ethical when it comes to creating a persona to go with a pseudonym? What should readers demand of authors? Is a book that is well written as a hoax still worth reading? Is good art disingenuously produced still good art? Are we as consumers interested in authors being a part of the created fiction?”
These are questions we should all be considering. I for one will not be buying anything from Ms. Olson or Mr. French, either one. As a real independent writer and publisher, the shady social media tactic of following thousands of accounts really rubs me the wrong way. We writers have got it hard enough without having to compete with fictional authors as well. Personally, I have no interest in Mr. French’s concept of reinventing the notion of what an author can be.
And I wonder how social media sites feel about all of this…