#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Howard Andrew Jones, a fantasy author for Baen Books well known for this Chronicles of Hanuvar series, has passed away, as reported by his close associate Sean Korsgaard.
More details at Fandom Pulse.
Also, director David Lynch died at the age of 78.
It’s really fascinating to see how the manufactured “creative talents” who are inevitably mediocrities falsely proclaimed as geniuses, are prone to committing shameless and easily proven acts of plagiarism. Such as, just to give one example, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Robert Zimmerman:
Beginning with his first album, which contained “House of the Risin’ Sun,” Dylan showed a penchant for lifting other performers’ work. At the time the album was recorded, fellow performer Dave Van Ronk was preparing his own version of the song. Dylan knew this; Van Ronk had even asked him not to record the song before he got his version out, but Dylan went ahead anyway, even using Van Ronk’s arrangement.
Charges of plagiarism only started gaining traction against Dylan around 2003. Around that time, with the Internet having made it easy to directly compare music from different sources, people started to notice how much of Dylan’s work sounded like other people’s stuff.
The melody from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for example, comes from a 19th-century spiritual called “No More Auction Block.” His 1962 song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” turned out to have been lifted wholesale from folk singer Len Chandler. Lyrics from the 2003 album Love and Theft were line-for-line copies from the autobiography of Japanese author Junichi Saga.
In 2006, he released Modern Times, which lifted passages from Classical poetry, 19th-century Confederate verse, and a blues song from 1940. Dylan won two Grammies for the album.
The plagiarism didn’t stop with the music. While much of what Dylan lifted from others without attribution was already in the public domain, and whatever wasn’t got reworked enough to count as Fair Use under copyright law, Dylan’s autobiography includes several passages lifted from novels and plays, and even from early-’60s issues of Time.
JRR Tolkien had these satanic frauds pegged from the start.
The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.
It’s truly remarkable how John Scalzi manages to take one of the most serious sexual assault scandals in the science fiction and fantasy world since the Breendoggle of 1954, and on the basis of his nodding acquaintance with a more successful and more famous colleague, make it all about himself.
If you want to know when I pretty much drew a line though my friendship with Neil Gaiman, it was when Neil acknowledged that he made moves on his early-20s nanny on her first day of employment. This meant that the absolute best case scenario of this whole situation was that he didn’t have the sense or wisdom to understand that making a move on a woman 40 years his junior, economically dependent on him, and whom he had met just literally hours before, was an extremely questionable idea. And by extremely questionable I mean dude what the fuck how do you not understand the actual consent issues involved here. The answer I came to is he probably did understand, and that when all was said and done, the “absolute best case scenario,” which is still very terrible, was not where we would end up. And indeed, that’s not where we are today.
Just what everyone wanted to know, right? Two paragraphs later, and surely he’s going to get to the point, right? Yeah, not so much.
Here are two things about me, one which you know and one which you may not…
Or not. However, he saves what is definitely the funniest part for the end.
Neil’s been a friend, and an important person to me, and someone I’ve been happy to know. But the friendship has been drawn down and done, and at this point, given everything I’ve written above, I don’t think he’ll complain much about that.
More to the point, I don’t think he’ll even notice. Here’s the thing. If you’ve got a friend, an important person to you, someone you consider a pretty good friend, don’t you have their phone number? And if they’re very publicly accused of criminal acts that you believe to be out of character, wouldn’t you, you know, give them a call and talk to them?
This is a nice illustration of the dangers of clout-chasing. Scalzi pursued his nonexistent “friendship” with Gaiman with far more vigor and ardor than he ever pursued his wife. And now that his supposed friendship puts him directly in the line of suspicion – even Gaiman only wrote rapturously and rapaciously about raping nubile young women still in their teens, unlike Scalzi, Gaiman never publicly declared himself to be a rapist(1) – that very important friendship is over, whether the very important ex-friend realizes it or not.
“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually. The details of how I do this are not particularly important at the moment — although I love when you try to make distinctions about “forcible rape” or “legitimate rape” because that gives me all sorts of wiggle room — but I will tell you one of the details about why I do it: I like to control women and, also and independently, I like to remind them how little control they have.”
– John Scalzi, 25 October 2012
(1) Scalzi and his defenders are quick to point out that when Scalzi was declaring that he was a rapist, that he was only doing so satirically. Which not only misses the first point, it misses the second one as well. Because, first, the correct response to satire is more satire. He says something reprehensibly stupid, we pretend to take it seriously. Second, precisely what planet was Scalzi orbiting when he decided that writing rape satire as political commentary was either a) amusing or b) appropriate? What he and his fans believe to be a defense of one offense strikes most normal people as a public confession of guilt concerning a lesser one.
Whether the Gaza war was a genocide, a pyrrhic victory for Hamas, or the most humane invasion and occupation in military history, there aren’t a lot of people who are confident it will last. Simplicius contemplates why Netanyahu suddenly agreed to it after a series of rejections:
We can’t have particularly high confidence of it succeeding, particularly given that top Israeli officials like Ben-Gvir have already expressed their hopes that the deal will fail, and will undoubtedly give their most earnest try in undermining it in any way possible.
It also has little bearing on Israel’s continued strikes on various other surrounding countries, from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen. Israel even stepped up strikes on Gaza today, killing a reported dozen or so—one supposes they needed to sate their fill of bloodlust as consolation for the coming cessation of hostilities.
In fact, a report just earlier claimed that Israel even unleashed its first direct strike on Jolani’s troops: The Israeli Air Force has carried out its first strike on the forces of the terrorist group HTS, which has seized power in Syria.
The attack targeted a convoy of militants in the province of Quneitra to prevent them from getting closer to IDF forces on the ground. This was right around the time that Erdogan issued a loud rebuke toward Netanyahu, calling on him to stop striking Syria as tensions continue rising between Turkey and its Syrian proxies and Israel.
Erdogan: “The aggressive actions of the forces attacking Syrian territory, Israel, in particular, must come to an end as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will cause unfavorable outcomes for everyone.”
We’re left to speculate whether this rising new threat is chief amongst reasons for Netanyahu finally acquiescing to a ceasefire he rejected many times before. With the IDF’s continued dismal performance—in particular its major failure in incurring into Lebanese territory—Netanyahu may have chosen to reduce the burden of the multi-fronted war in order to free up resources to concentrate on the potential new threat from the Turkish-Syria axis.
The immediate situation looks much better for Israel than it has in years, if not decades. While the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah has been a failure, the unexpected success in Syria more than makes up for that. However, trading Syria for Turkey as an enemy would not appear to be strategically advantageous. Especially if – and it’s a big if – Erdogan leads Turkey out of NATO, strikes up an alliance with Iran and Russia, and joins BRICS.
At least at this point, the biggest winner in the Israeli-Palestinian-Syrian war looks like Turkey.
I am, and have been for decades, a fan of Tanith Lee. I absolutely adore Tanith Lee. Her tales of Paradys and the Flat Earth are solidly entrenched in my top ten fantasy series, and while I wasn’t unaware that her work was a major stylistic influence on Neil Gaiman, due to what I observed to be his unoriginal mediocrity, I simply wasn’t well-read enough in Gaiman’s work to realize that Gaiman wasn’t just heavily influenced by Tanith Lee, he appears to have done little more than steal her characters and world-building without attribution in lieu of creating anything himself, as one fan of Lee’s noted:
Neil Gaiman’s THE SANDMAN is a great comic book series. Gaiman modeled his series on Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH. But you wouldn’t know this, because Gaiman has never given her any credit. Despite the fact that the main character — a byronic, pale, otherworldly, deity-like character — is the prince of night and dreams. Despite the fact that every time people see art depicting Tanith Lee’s main character Azhrarn, they think it’s Morpheus from the Sandman. (How bad is this? When people see depictions of her character, they say SHE must have ripped HIM off.)
Despite the fact that the dream lord’s younger sibling is Death.
Despite the fact that other members of his family include Delusion, Delirium…. They are not gods but beings older than gods, and when the gods die, Dream, Death, Delusion, and Delirium will remain. This family of immortal, eternal, unchanging beings, who each embody an eternal abstraction starting with the letter D.
Someone else on the internet, noticing the similarities, flipped open the third book in Tanith Lee’s series to a random page, and lo and behold, there’s a description of a character who was clearly the inspiration for Gaiman’s Mazikeen. The prose, the characters, the narrative strategies, the mythology, the story structure, all of it: Gaiman found it all in Tanith Lee‘s writing and never gave her any credit.
He became rich and famous profiting from her ideas. People effused over his amazing imagination, when the ideas they praised him for were actually created by Tanith Lee. And, while he was building his name and fame, she was struggling. In the 1990s, toward the end of her life, she complained in an interview that magazines weren’t buying her stories anymore.
A simple “If you like The Sandman, you should really read Tanith Lee’s books!” from Neil Gaiman would have meant so much to her career. To the livelihood of a struggling, less-privileged writer, whose amazing imagination Gaiman was actively ripping off. People praised The Sandman comics for their depiction of gay and trans identities. But in the original material, Tanith Lee was far more progressive about lgbtq+ identities, and that was twenty years earlier.
I first read Tanith Lee’s book NIGHT’S MASTER (the first in the FLAT EARTH series) in maybe 2005, about 10 years after first reading The Sandman. I looked to see if Gaiman had credited her for “his” ideas; as far as I could tell, he never had. And for the subsequent 19 years, whenever I see a new Neil Gaiman interview, the first thing I do is ctrl-F to search to see if he mentioned Tanith Lee. And he never has, that I’ve seen.
I have no difficulty believing the accusations against him.
Because I know — KNOW — that he has felt entitled to take what he wants from a woman, without her permission, and without any acknowledgement of her contributions.
And, finally: If you loved Neil Gaiman’s stories, if you are heartbroken to learn the storyteller you loved is apparently an abuser, here is my suggestion: track down Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH books. Her prose is more exquisite and imaginative, her ideas more original, her empathy real.
Not only that, but a personal acquaintance of Lee, Liz Williams, points out that Lee herself believed Gaiman plagiarised her work and had “considerable disdain for him.”
Tanith was my friend, as many writers in the UK will attest, especially on the south coast. I did know this, because she told me. We were at a convention – IIRC Orbital 8, in 2008 – at which both Neil and Tanith were guests. She told me that she was trying to avoid him because he’d plagiarised a large chunk of her work: not just a bit, but entire paragraphs. She didn’t say which book it was from. And she had considerable disdain for him.
A well-read reader on r/neilgaimanuncovered confirmed the charge.
He basically stole Sandman from Tanith Lee’s “Tales of the Flat Earth“ and his “Snow, Glass, Apples” from her “Red as Blood” with zero credit whatsoever, never even a recommendation that others read her work (a major sign of insecurity and guilt, right there). He also stole Coraline from Clive Barker’s ”The Thief of Always.” He’s a fraud as well as a monster.
I never read Snow, Glass Apples but I do recall thinking its description sounded an awful lot like Red as Blood. All of his revised fairy tale stories struck me as very similar to Lee’s White as Snow, but again, I never bothered reading any of Gaiman’s short stories until very recently. And since I’ve never read Coraline or anything by Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware of the relationship between those two works either.
But it is very satisfying to see the literary world finally coming out and telling the public the obvious truth about Neil Gaiman’s mediocrity and total lack of creativity. He’s never been a great writer, he’s never been a great storyteller, he is instead, as Terry Pratchett suggested, “an incredible actor” playing the role of a great storyteller. In my opinion, these charges of stealing without attribution and plagiarism tend to further support my hypothesis that “Neil Gaiman, Bestselling Author” was a literary fraud manufactured by the much the same people who made L. Ron Hubbard a bestselling author.
The conclusion appears to be as apt as it is succinct. “He’s a fraud as well as a monster.”
So finally, we have the answer that we’ve suspected for months. Robert Rankin indicates that Terry Pratchett had more than an inkling that his Good Omens co-writer and supposed good friend was not “a very nice, approachable guy” but an actor hiding his true self.
“Terry told me he wished he’d never worked with him, but I never found out why.”
If you’re not willing to remove your invaders, you fully merit the subsequent occupation and eventual loss of your property.
A theatre in Paris which is known for its radical shows and exhibitions has been occupied by more than 250 African migrants after they were let in for a free event five weeks ago.
The Gaîté Lyrique theatre in Paris staged the conference, entitled Reinventing the welcome for refugees in France, on December 10. It involved talks hosted by academics from top universities and Red Cross officials, and saw activists welcome in the migrants. But when the conference was finished, the migrants, who mainly come from France’s former west African colonies, refused to leave the venue.
Still occupied, the leftist theatre now faces going out of business after weeks without revenue from ticket sales, and has had to cancel all performances until at least January 24. Its management said in a statement last week that the number of people taking shelter in the theatre is ‘continuing to increase’ and has swelled to around 300 people. ‘The sanitary conditions are deteriorating day after day and the teams are facing this situation alone,’ it said as it called for the local authorities to find a housing solution for the occupiers.
‘Although this occupation is forced, it is unthinkable for the Gaîté Lyrique to throw these people out onto the street in the middle of winter,’ the statement added.
This is a metaphor for Europe and the USA writ small. Like the gods, the governments only help those who help themselves. When they’re not actively obstructing the way, of course.
I read 66 books to completion in 2024. The best novel was Before the Dawn by Toson Shimazaki, the best non-fiction book was a draw between Princes of the Yen by Richard Werner and Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami. The worst novel was an easy decision this year as John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was a long and tedious waddle through an extraordinarily unpleasant Gamma’s perspective. The best new-to-me author was Rika Ondu, as her Honeybees and Distant Thunder was very good indeed.
I’m hoping to actually write a few book reviews in 2025, starting with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami’s latest, which I’ve just finished.
The WoW Diary, John Staats
50 Years of Text Games, Aaron A. Reed
Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov
Shitamachi Scam, Michael Pronko
The Final Curtain, Keigo Higashino
Disintegration, Andrei Martyanov
The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami
Monster Hunter: Vendetta, Larry Correia
Monster Hunter: Nemesis, Larry Correia
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever, Jason Cordova
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, John Ringo
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners, John Ringo
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints, John Ringo
People From My Neighborhood, Hiromi Kawakami
Dragon Palace, Hiromi Kawakami
Practicing History, Barbara Tuchman
House of Assassins, Larry Correia
Destroyer of Worlds, Larry Correia
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
The Viceroys, Federico De Roberto
Beer in the Snooker Club, Waguih Galil
La Fleur de Illusion, Keigo Higashino
Princes of the Yen, Richard Werner
The Aosawa Murders, Riku Onda
Dappled by Sunlight, Riku Onda
Honeybees and Distant Thunder, Riku Onda
The Jack Vance Treasury, Jack Vance
How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Araminta Station, Jack Vance
Ecce and Old Earth, Jack Vance
Throy, Jack Vance
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
Death’s End, Cixin Liu
Shogun, James Clavell
Gai-Jin, James Clavell
Noble House, James Clavell
Gai-Jin, James Clavell
Tai-Pan, James Clavell
Disintegration, Andrei Martyanov
Margin of Victory, Douglas MacGregor
N.P.: a novel, Banana Yoshimoto
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe
The Last Yakuza, Jake Adelstein
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
The Speculative Short Fiction, John M. Ford
The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima
The Land of Blood and Honey, Martin van Creveld
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
Absolutely on Music, Haruki Murakami
The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, Matthew Carl Strecher
After Dark, Haruki Murakami
The Complete Stories, Evelyn Waugh
Newcomer, Keigo Higashino
Before the Dawn, Toson Shimazaki
Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 1, Christopher Ruocchio
Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 2, Christopher Ruocchio
Demon in White, Christopher Ruocchio
City of Refuge, Kenzo Kitakata
Invisible Helix , Kenzo Kitakata
The Silent Cry, Kenzaburo Oe
A New York Times article about Neil Gaiman’s first public response to his accusers draws some much-needed attention to the non-response from his various publishers:
HarperCollins, which has published many of his most notable works, and Marvel, the comic book publisher, have no new books forthcoming with Gaiman, according to representatives from the companies.
His literary agent at Writers House, which represents blockbuster authors like Dav Pilkey, Nora Roberts and Ally Condie, did not respond to requests for comment about whether the agency would continue to represent him. Norton, which published an illustrated edition of Gaiman’s “Norse Mythology” last November, did not respond when asked whether the company would publish Gaiman’s works in the future. DC Comics, which published his blockbuster comic book “The Sandman,” along with other works, declined to comment when asked whether DC would continue to publish him.
For some of the women who have accused Gaiman of misconduct, the muted responses from his publishers and collaborators are a bitter disappointment…
In an interview with The Times, Kendall described the “culture of secrecy” around Gaiman. “Neil’s works were his bait, and promotional events were his hunting ground,” she said. “As long as his publishers and professional collaborators remain silent, Neil will continue to have unrestricted access to vulnerable women.”
“The silence of the community around him — his fandom, his publishers — is loud and disturbing,” Stout said in an interview with The Times. “I’ve heard that it was an open secret that he was a predator, but that whisper network did not reach me.”
I think it is unfair, unreasonable, and wrong for anyone to fault the bookshops for ordering books that their customers come in and request. The books are published, they are in the system, and the whole purpose of the bookstore is to satisfy their customer’s preferences. And as one executive at a very large book distributor once told an SJW employee who was complaining that they were distributing Milo Yiannopoulos’s books: “seeing how we carry 50 different editions of Mein Kampf, where do you propose we draw the line? We’re a distributor, we’re not the Book Police.”
However, it is absolutely fair, reasonable, and correct for people to be holding the book publishers accountable. The publishers make it very clear that they stand for certain principles and oppose other principles; unlike Castalia, most of them even have mission statements that they claim defines their very purpose. And precisely none of those statements are in line with publishing an author who is quite credibly accused of having committed a series of rapes and sexual assaults over a period of more than 25 years.
When publishers are deplatforming and refusing to publish authors whose politics they don’t like, they really have absolutely no room for continuing to publish serial sexual assailants and sexual harassers simply because they approve of their politics. This isn’t something that is simply going to blow over and go away because the alleged crimes are too serious and the hypocrisy is too blatant.
We’ll be holding an early Arkhaven Nights tonight to discuss both the latest developments in #GaimanGate and the bankruptcy of Diamond, the comics distributor.
The man accused of sexually assaulting and/or raping 8 women and counting finally breaks cover to issue a denial that directly contradicts his previous dictate to believe all women. Fandom Pulse provides the text and the context:
Over the past many months, I have watched the stories circulating the internet about me with horror and dismay. I’ve stayed quiet until now, both out of respect for the people who were sharing their stories and out of a desire not to draw even more attention to a lot of misinformation. I’ve always tried to be a private person, and felt increasingly that social media was the wrong place to talk about important personal matters. I’ve now reached the point where I feel that I should say something.
As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.
I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides.
And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people’s hearts and feelings, and that’s something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people’s.
I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel.
Like most of us, I’m learning, and I’m trying to do the work needed, and I know that that’s not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I’ll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers.
At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don’t accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.
Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can’t accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn’t do.
And once more, we see conclusive evidence that Neil Gaiman is a mediocre writer of fiction. I very much hope that some of his accusers will take him to court for defamation, because his absurd statement literally stinks of evasiveness, Machiavellianism, spin, ex post facto revisionism, and lies.
Perhaps the most amusing claim is that the objectively biggest fame-whore in BOTH comics and science fiction over the last four decades has “always tried to be a private person”. Think about the massive scope and scale of that obvious and so easily disproven lie, think about the chutzpah required to conclude that your naked assertion will outweigh the literally tens of thousands of items of evidence to the contrary, and then consider the probability that he is telling the truth about anything else.
I think Reddit might actually melt down in response to this. I cannot believe either his legal team or his PR team thought this was a good idea, no matter how completely the news of his alleged crimes has broken contain.
UPDATE: Even his biggest fans from the subreddit devoted to him aren’t buying this. They’re not buying ANY of it at all.
When Arkhaven Comics launched, we made a non-obvious decision to stay out of the comic stores and the traditional distribution system. This significantly slowed our growth and our exposure to potential customers, but it has proven, over time, to have been the right decision. The reason we can say that is because, as Fandom Pulse reports, the primary distributor of comics to the comics stores, Diamond Comic Distributors, filed for bankruptcy today:
Diamond Comic Distributors has been on the decline for years as the former monolith in comic book store distribution, but now a message from their CEO revealed the company is filing chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Dear Valued Customer, I’m writing to share one of the most challenging messages of my career. Earlier today, Diamond made the difficult but necessary decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This step is intended to stabilize our financial foundation and protect the most vital aspects of our business. This decision was not made lightly, and I understand that this news may be as difficult to hear as it is for me to share. The Diamond leadership team and I have worked tirelessly to avoid this outcome but the financial challenges we face have left us with no other viable option. Chapter 11 will provide us with the opportunity to restructure and address our financial obligations. This process will likely include the sale of key assets of Diamond Comic Distributors.
This means that there are a lot of publishers who are wondering if they are going to get paid for the comics they delivered to Diamond over the last six months. Fortunately, Arkhaven is not one of them.
