Author: VD

An Inauspicious Start

As everyone suspected, all of Short Fake Trump’s posturing about a ceasefire and positive negotiations appear to be nothing more than yet another attempt to catch Iran with its guard down. If the IRGC reports are anywhere close to accurate, he appears to have gone to that particular well one too many times.

The IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, they said that they carried out a composite attack or complex attack targeting the Zionist and American terrorists in al-Kabir port as well as the coast of Port Dubai where American soldiers and their tactical equipment were precisely struck within wave 84.

The operation was executed using ballistic and cruise missiles of the 380 type. Six American combat landing craft of the LCU type were targeted in the al-Kabir port. Three of them sank after being hit while the rest are ablaze. We targeted the gathering centers of the US Army drone unit officers on the coast and one of Dubai’s hotels with loitering drones and they were precisely struck. The operation resulted in the sinking of the tactical boats and killing a large number of Americans.

That is officially coming now from Iran. That means Trump already made the deployment. Okay, they’re talking about extension. They’re trying to play this game. Iran is aware of this whole game and it’s already happening. The United States is deploying secretly. Well, they said they might, but they’re they sent some troops clearly already.

And now it’s happening. They’re actually sending troops. The United States and Marco Rubio of course talking about deescalation but they are you know pathological liars.

Now, this may or may not be true. But keep in mind that Iran is not Iraq. We actually have more reason to believe the daily Iranian reports than either the US or the Israeli accounts, because we know the latter two to be absolutely false given the continued scale of the Iranian missile and drone strikes. Whereas Iran has not falsely reported any attack waves that were not actually launched; keep in mind that damage assessments are always wildly exaggerated by everyone on every side.

LCUs are not ships, they’re landing craft designed to bring the Marines from ship to shore. However, the fact that they’re already in the region and being targeted by Iran tends to indicate that the deployment of the Marine Expeditionary Units has already moved ahead of the schedule reported by the mainstream media.

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Literary Relevance is Not Guaranteed

The Dark Herald explains how the modern exploitation of the Tolkien legendarium is likely to reduce the chances of JRR Tolkien’s future literary relevance, and provides a rather devastating example of how that decline in relevance takes place:

In his prime, Roger Zelazny wasn’t some niche cult figure, he was one of the biggest names in speculative fiction, standing shoulder to shoulder with the New Wave heavyweights of the 1960s and 70s. His novel Lord of Light is often remembered as his breakout, and it was certainly his most decorated, winning the Hugo (when it meant something) and cementing his reputation, but Zelazny’s real impact was broader and more sustained. He was a constant presence in the major magazines, a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the few writers equally comfortable blending myth, science fiction, and fantasy into something distinctly his own. By the time The Chronicles of Amber hit in the 1970s, he wasn’t emerging… He was already established, and Amber became the work that proved he could translate that critical acclaim into lasting popular success.

Except it didn’t last.

Roger Zelzney’s old hard covers frequently go for three digit figures and I’m not talking Easton Press editions either. But his works are mostly published directly by his estate on Kindle.

Roger Zelzny is moving from the thing everyone knew about to the guy who is studied by writers. Most of his works have six figure sales ranks on Amazon.

And when Gen X is gone, he’ll be forgotten.

Zelazny, at his best, was very good. He wasn’t a first-rank SF/F author, but he was at the top of the second rank. And it’s true, he has been largely forgotten today, which is deeply unfortunate.

As an author, I’m aware of this phenomenon, which is why it has been my intention to release my books into the public domain upon my demise. The advent of AI and the lowering of barriers to entry in the video market may inspire me to rethink that, but at present, the way in which copyright guarantees that all literary properties are eventually acquired and controlled by corporate interests inimical to the long-term interests of an author’s literary legacy means that the best way to combat that is to put one’s works into the public domain immediately upon one’s death.

The problem isn’t that the corporate interests can alter the original works, but rather, the way in which they alter the common perception of the author’s works. How does the average Gen Alpha individual distinguish between The Hobbit and The Rings of Power, or between The Two Towers and whatever abomination Stephen Colbert and Peter Jackson end up concocting?

The only way to level the playing field between the community that loves the literary creation and the corporate interests is the public domain. Indeed, the public domain is the only reason that classic, but hitherto unknown works from the likes of Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós are able to be published in English, which is a project you can support via the Castalia Library. We’ve already translated nine works by these two authors, in addition to other amazing novels by Ozaki Koro, Oguri Mushitaro, Naoki Sanjūgo, and Luigi Capuano.

Who are they, you ask?

Exactly…

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The Next Event

There won’t necessarily be one. One certainly hopes there won’t. But as things in the Middle East appear to be getting a) increasingly difficult for Israel and b) Trump appears to be desperately seeking an off-ramp before committing the US military to ground combat, the stage is set for an event designed to provide some additional motivation for Americans to support the Israeli war on Iran.

Based on various dark hints in the media, to say nothing of Laura Loomer’s mysterious and inexplicable sensory-based prediction, it would appear to be something happening on the West Coast, presumably in California, involving an iconic building a major city. So, I’d stay away from both U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Especially since it turns out that the building in LA just happens to be owned by the same company that owned the World Trade Center in 2001.

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Yeah, It’s Going Great

The inevitable blame game for what appears to be a historic US-Israeli military defeat in the making heats up.

JD Vance confronted Benjamin Netanyahu in a tense phone call, accusing the Israeli leader of being overly optimistic about the chances of regime change in Iran. The Vice President told the Israeli leader on Monday that many of his predictions about the war which he had sold to Donald Trump had not materialized. Despite the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hardline factions have tightened their grip on power and the regime remains firmly in control.

‘Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the President as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements,’ a source told Axios.

Vance, who reportedly advised Trump against going to war with Iran, was appointed by the President to help lead negotiations to end the conflict.

A day after Vance’s call with Netanyahu, a Right-wing Israeli news outlet owned by GOP donor Miriam Adelson reported that the Vice President had yelled at Netanyahu over Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. White House officials, who described the story as false, began suspecting that Israelis planted it to try to smear Vance. An Israeli official denied that Netanyahu had planted the story and said his office issued a full denial when approached by reporters.

JD Vance was never likely to become president in the first place. But being second-in-command in an administration that has lost a totally unnecessary war in humiliating fashion to a third-rate power should suffice to ensure that he never wins a presidential election, even though the blame quite rightly falls on Netanyahu. The Israeli leader has been lying for decades, so it’s not really much of an excuse to claim that you took him at his word.

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3GW vs 5GW

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump and his generals think they’re fighting World War II. Col. Macgregor observed that they appear to be preparing for a massive 96-hour bombing operation next week to provide cover for the insertion of a few thousand light infantry. What this could possibly accomplish appears dubious; the plan is being compared to Operation Market Garden, or worse, Gallipoli.

No one in either Tel Aviv or Washington DC appears to have learned any lessons from watching the Ukrainian war. They’re trying to apply centralized WWII strategies while Iran is utilizing indirect asymmetric 5GW strategies. And it’s pretty clear that Iran is winning, since everything that was being reported about Iran’s missile stocks running out and its missile launchers being destroyed is observably false.

There were close to 40,000 U.S. troops in the region when the war started, and Central Command has dispersed thousands of them, some to as far away as Europe, American military officials said. But many have remained in the Middle East, although not on their original bases, military officials said… Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable, with the ones in Kuwait, which is next door to Iran, suffering perhaps the most damage. 

This is what is historically known as a “defeat” followed by a “retreat”. As Simplicius notes, this is the most infrastructure damage that the US military has ever suffered at the hands of any enemy, with the possible exception of Pearl Harbor and losing the Philippines to Japan in WWII.

There are also what appear to be Chinese reports that the Kirya, Israel’s Pentagon, has been hit and that its command structure has been disrupted. If true, the fact that Iran is now successfully striking Israel’s nuclear operations, its primary airport, and its central command indicates that the air defenses are now degraded to the point that Iran, not Israel, has airstrike superiority.

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Dimona and Ben Gurion

The mainstream media is silent. The Internet is reporting three strikes on Dimona, including by a Khorramshahr-4 deep penetration missile, as well as a third strike on Ben Gurion that demolished the repairs that were just about completed from the previous two strikes.

I don’t think we can conclude that the reports are necessarily accurate, but it does appear that Iran is ending Israel’s nuclear program, if it ever actually existed in the first place.

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Arkhaven Nights

It’s going to be lit tonight on UATV and JDA’s YouTube channel. In the aftermath of the inevitable Star Fleet Academy cancellation, Robert Picardo has been attacking both JDA and Space Fleet Academy even as two new books in the Biostellar universe are released and a third new one – Space Fleet Academy: Year Three – is announced.

If you’re not subscribed yet to UATV, you’re going to want to do so soon as we are back in feature-adding mode now that the back-end work is complete. Also, I can announce that the fifth Biostellar novel, THE CRUEL OBLIGATIONS, will be out in May. Our objective is to turn Biostellar into a universe that is bigger than Star Trek, more epic than Dune, and harder science than KSR’s Mars series.

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THE CRUEL EQUATIONS

The science is real. The math is remorseless. The choices are impossible.

When Federation inspectors walk through a children’s hospital on the colony world of Verlaine and frown at the survival rates, Deputy Health Minister Jean-Marc Bergeron knows what’s coming. The numbers are too positive. Too many children are surviving to adulthood. And the Human Genome Mandate, the iron law that has governed humanity’s expansion across the stars for four centuries, demands change.

The Federation’s demand: raise Verlaine’s mortality rate from 2 percent to 15 percent. Let two and a half million people die every year. Dismantle the advanced medical system that three generations of colonists bled to build. All of this must be done to satisfy a statistical coefficient on a spreadsheet in an office on Earth.

The reason is non-negotiable: the human genome is degenerating. Natural selection stopped operating over five hundred years ago, and every generation since has accumulated mutations that cannot be purged. The math is not speculation. It is not a theory. It is a measured, validated, ticking time bomb of extinction, and the only proven solution demands that someone’s children pay the price.

The people of Verlaine say no.

What follows is a masterwork of hard science fiction: a blockade that strangles a world by degrees, an assassination that serves someone else’s agenda, an orbital strike that intentionally targets a defenseless world, and one man’s agonizing journey at a cost that mathematics can calculate but the soul cannot bear.

Set in the same BIOSTELLAR universe as the bestselling Space Fleet Academy series.

The Cruel Equations shows the other side of the universe that cadets like Constantine Ramsey are being trained to defend. The Academy teaches its students to make the hard choices. The Cruel Equations shows what those choices look like when they land on a world of 340 million people who never asked to be a test case for humanity’s survival.

The hardest science fiction you will ever read.

The Frozen Genome crisis at the heart of the BIOSTELLAR universe is not invented. It is drawn directly from cutting-edge population genetics, including problems with foundational assumptions in evolutionary biology that the scientific establishment has not yet confronted. The Cascade Drive is fiction. The Frozen Genome is not.

In addition to THE CRUEL EQUATIONS, SPACE FLEET ACADEMY: YEAR TWO was also released and SPACE FLEET ACADEMY: YEAR THREE is now available in preorder, bringing the number of books in the new Biostellar series to four.

If you didn’t understand the significance of science brought to light in THE FROZEN GENE, then THE COLD EQUATIONS should suffice to do so. While we can certainly hope that one of the more static scenarios are in play, there are more than a few indications that humanity’s fertility is not falling due to various external measures, but because of the mutational degradation of the human genome.

This is true hard science fiction in the original sense of the genre, albeit the science is population genetics rather than physics.

UPDATE: As a bonus, a copy of THE CRUEL EQUATIONS was also sent out to the Library substack supporters. Next Monday’s book will be THE KAMIGATA SCROLL by Yoshikawa Eiji.

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The Pipelines are Not the Police

This is a very sensible ruling by the US Supreme Court. The RIAA is one of the more rapaciously evil organizations out there, and speaking as someone who is nominally represented by them, they don’t do much to make sure the musicians actually get paid.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday (March 25) rejected a billion-dollar music piracy lawsuit filed by the major labels against telecom giant Cox Communications, ruling that the internet service provider cannot be held responsible for infringement by its users.

In a decision against Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music, the justices unanimously overturned an earlier ruling that held Cox liable for thousands of songs illegally shared by its users — a decision that led a staggering $1 billion infringement verdict in 2019.

“Countless people use the Internet for legal activities, but some use it to illegally share copyrighted works, such as songs and movies,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

In a statement, the Recording Industry Association of America said it was “disappointed” in the ruling, saying there had been “overwhelming evidence” that Cox “contributed to mass scale copyright infringement.”

“To be effective, copyright law must protect creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling,” RIAA chairman Mitch Glazier said, though he stressed that the “narrow” ruling would apply only to internet service providers and not to websites that host infringing content.

In its own statement, Cox said the ruling was a “decisive victory” for internet providers and their users: “This opinion affirms that Internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers — and after years of battling in the trial and appellate courts, we have definitively shut down the music industry’s aspirations of mass evictions from the internet.

Copyright law is a joke that protects gatekeeping corporations instead of the financial interests of the creators. It hurts more than it helps, especially given the limited viability of the average creative product, which is mostly measured in weeks, if not days.

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Now in Print

THE SECRET GUIDE TO WORD MAGIC

Owen Benjamin grew up hiding under a cardboard desk to survive a nuclear blast, eating margarine because the food pyramid said so, and learning about heroin from a cop who made him act out an overdose in school. He was taught he descended from a primate through random mutation, that he was spinning on a ball of liquid nickel inside an explosion that came from nothing, and that the stars he saw at night were already dead.

How to Slay a Wizard is about the people who run the tricks, the tricks themselves, and the one lie at the root of every spell ever cast on a living man or woman. It is not a political book. It is not a religious book. It is a book about manipulation, who does it, how it works, and why it requires your participation to be effective.

Once you see the secret spells, you will never stop seeing them.

And then the wizards can no longer deceive you.

HOW TO SLAY A WIZARD is now available in hardcover and paperback editions at Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, and at your local bookstore.

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