The Next Serial

Now that the Castalia Library substack subscribers have completed The Christian Empire in just under one year, it’s time to decide what the next serial will be. I’ve provided a list of five possibilities, and I’ll leave it to the Library community to decide which of the five will be serialized next.

Of course, if you want to be able to take advantage of it most easily, you should consider subscribing to the substack. It’s free, and you’ll be kept up to date on all Library-related matters as well as have the chance to read through the selected book with the rest of us.

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Fake Reviews on Amazon

The traditional publishers are actively manipulating the reviews of their books on Amazon and GoodReads alike:

Every “A-list” author from the major sci fi imprints seems to start out with 100+ “pre-release” reviews (almost all 4 or 5 stars) on Goodreads. Now, this could just be successful ARC promotion. That’s entirely possible.

Another explanation is that they have teams of people willing to pad reviews ahead of release. Idk, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Especially since most of these A-listers see their Goodreads averages plummet once actual readers get their hands on the books. I’m not talking about a gradual decline. I’m talking about books that have a 4.3+ rating pre-release ending up in the 3.5 – 3.6 range within a few months.

If you go back through the Goodreads Choice Awards nominees, the trend jumps out of the data. A huge percentage of these books are extremely poorly rated by readers. Not at the time of release, mind you, but within a few months.

All of which is to say, nobody pulls more shenanigans and manipulates the book-buying public more than trad pub.

No, it’s not possible. While there is an organic element of pre-release review-stoking, the repetitive and reliable nature of the pattern indicates that this is a level of manipulation by favored players that Amazon is willing to tolerate. Amazon is not only confirmed to play favorites, but it habitually indulges in a level of charades and shenanigans much more comprehensive than anyone suspects, and has done so from the very beginning.

Ever wonder why Hugh Howey was never able to follow up on his incredible “success”? Or why his “super-popular” books were so mediocre? He was just a variant on the traditional publisher’s manufactured bestseller.

If it gets big fast, it is fake. Every single fucking time.

If I had more bandwidth, one of the things I would do is design a truly impartial and objective review site that aggressively resisted review-fluffing and review-sinking alike.

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A Chilling Warning

Also, and more importantly, a foolish and futile one:

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a chilling warning on the China threat during a defense summit in Singapore. He said on Saturday that the threat from China was potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo-Pacific to spend more on their own defense.

Hegseth, speaking for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s forum for defense leaders, militaries and diplomats, underlined that the Indo-Pacific region was a priority for the Trump administration.

‘There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent’ Hegseth said, in some of his strongest comments on the Communist nation since he took office in January. He added that any attempt by China to conquer Taiwan ‘would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world,’ and echoed Trump’s comment that China will not invade Taiwan on the president’s watch.

Hegseth is sufficiently educated in military affairs to know better than to spout nonsense like this. The US not only will not win a war with China in the Indo-Pacific, it cannot even put up a serious military challenge to China.

The entire world has been watching as Russia, with only limited assistance from Belarus, Iran, and North Korea, has almost singlehandedly defeated the entire might of the USA and its NATO allies. The result would not be any different even if the USA had attempted to utilize its own forces directly; the Kiev regime has already lost twice as many men as exist in the US armed forces without ever even forcing the Russians to utilize most of its frontline troops, its best hardware, or the greater part of its missile stocks.

The Russians, knowing the possibility of direct NATO intervention, have been keeping very powerful reserves in order to utilize them if necessary. This is why most of the Russian casualties have been from the provincial militaries and the mercenary companies. The Russian air force has lost all of 6 aircraft in 2025; the US Navy lost half that many from a single carrier in a single deployment in the Red Sea.

So I very much doubt that the Chinese are very impressed by the performance of the US military or are afraid to risk a confrontation with it over Taiwan. I also doubt there will be an actual invasion as such; it is far more likely that reunification will be quietly negotiated behind the scenes, then announced one day along with a series of arrests of pro-independence advocates.

It’s a shame that the foreign rulers of the USA have inverted the historical American philosophy coined by Teddy Roosevelt, and instead elect for speaking loudly while carrying a small and fragile stick.

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The Winds of Winter is Complete

And has been, apparently, for nine years already.

A publishing industry insider has told Fandom Pulse The Winds Of Winter was finished and turned in back in 2016. Epic fantasy fans have all but given up on getting the end of A Song Of Ice And Fire, George R.R. Martin’s epic which sprawled out of control with too many perspective characters where the author wrote himself into a corner. On top of it, Martin himself seems to have completely given up on it and published a very angry rant at fan reaction on his blog this week.

However, an insider told Fandom Pulse the thirteen-years-late book actually was finished in 2016 during the filming of season 6 of A Game Of Thrones. The insider, who we confirmed worked in the publishing industry at big companies, said that they have spoken with editors at both Spectra and Voyager, who are Martin’s publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States, to confirm this, with both having a similar story.

That’s another big scoop for Fandom Pulse, following on the heels of the confirmation of its original reporting about Ark Press being part of Peter Thiel’s new publishing empire. . Apparently the reason The Winds of Winter wasn’t published despite being completed is because Martin withdrew the book after the producers of the TV show criticized the ending, which reportedly is much the same ending that was filmed. It’s also interesting that the first mention of an additional book to follow appears to be around the same time that Martin withdrew the book from his publishers.

If these reports are true, it might explain why the two producers abandoned the production so hastily, and why they pretty much just phoned in that final season. They would have known it was going to be a trainwreck long before they started filming it. It would also explain why Martin apparently has no intention of releasing the book, at least, not while he’s still alive to listen to his former fans castigating his swan song. Of course, if you watched Arkhaven Nights last night, you already know all of this…

So, it would appear that Martin lost his writing fastball even sooner than we thought. As Murakami says, once a writer gets fat, it’s over. I’ll be discussing this on the Darkstream tonight, so if you’re interested, tune in.

UPDATE: Ruh-roh…

“The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all,” Martin wrote. “More than you can ever imagine.”

Dany is Daenerys. But apparently George doesn’t realize that now.

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Dual-Citizenship Illegal

The ban on dual-citizenship in Japan was upheld as constitutional by the Japanese Supreme Court:

Japan’s top court has rejected an appeal by a Japanese-born U.S. citizen challenging the constitutionality of the country’s ban on dual citizenship, finalizing lower court rulings.

The decision by the Supreme Court’s First Petty Bench, dated Monday, was on a claim that Article 11 of the Nationality Law, which stipulates the loss of Japanese nationality upon voluntarily acquiring a foreign nationality, infringes on the right to self-determination.

The Fukuoka District Court turned down the initial claim in 2023, noting that the law was appropriate and was not beyond the scope of discretion. The Fukuoka High Court also supported the first decision last year.

According to the ruling, the woman acquired U.S. citizenship in 2004. She applied for a Japanese passport in 2017, but her application was rejected the following year on the grounds that she had lost her Japanese nationality.

This is an interesting rejection of Clown World’s anti-nationalist campaign, particularly because the Japanese constitution was imposed upon Japan by the US occupiers after World War II. It’s a strong indication that the dual-citizenship effectively created by the US Supreme Court decision in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967) was both incorrect and inappropriately utilized in an excessively expansive manner to create a supra-national individual right that does not and should not exist.

Being ruled by foreigners is not only a curse in the Bible, it is a common late stage in empires that usually presages an eventual collapse.

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The Stalwarts of Library

Congratulations to the intrepid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack, as today marks the end of our second serialization. After 315 daily installments and 614 pages covering everything from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to the Teutonic migrations, we have finally managed to accomplish together something I never quite managed to do on my own despite it being one of my prize possessions, which is read every single page of The Cambridge Medieval History Volume I: The Christian Empire.

So, well done, everyone.

To be honest, I’ve been a little shocked at seeing how many people have been reading along; there are usually 1,000 post-reads recorded, so even if three-quarters of those readers are only glancing at each post, that’s a lot more people reading through one of the more advanced historical summaries ever published.

Tomorrow I’ll put up a poll for what the next daily serialization should be. One option is to simply continue with Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire, but perhaps we might do with a break from the Cambridge historians for a while. Feel free to make any suggestions on SocialGalactic, but recall that any work we serialize there must be in the public domain.

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Maximum Pressure

Wow. Sounds serious.

US President Donald Trump is prepared to apply “maximum pressure” on Russia if Ukraine peace talks fail to produce results, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce has told Fox News. Trump could resort to using all the tools at his disposal, including additional sanctions on Moscow.

I think it’s admirable that they were willing to try 18 rounds of sanctions before resorting to “maximum pressure”. I mean, who wouldn’t be intimidated by “all the tools” being used against them. No doubt Putin and the Russian generals are quaking. If this doesn’t have the Russians waving the white flag and withdrawing their 650,000 troops from the Crimea and the Donbass, I wonder what the next rhetorical step will be?

Supermaximum pressure?

I would think Trump would be aware of how the State Department is making both himself and the USA look like a laughingstock on the global stage. He can’t even call off Israel, so how impressed does he really expect the Russians to be?

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AI-Sourcing White Collar Workers

No one cried for all the blue collar workers who were outsourced. Are we supposed to weep for the white collar workers who are soon going to find themselves AI-sourced?

Artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, the CEO of American AI research company Anthropic, Dario Amodei has warned.

In a statement to Axios published on Wednesday, Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic and is a former OpenAI executive, said he hopes to jolt the US government and fellow developers into preparing for the consequences of rapid automation. AI could spike unemployment in the US to 10-20% in the next one to five years, he warned.

AI development companies are already working on systems that could soon replace workers in technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, particularly entry-level positions, Amodei claimed. The public and politicians are still “unaware” that a major shift is about to happen and insisted that companies and officials needed to stop “sugar-coating” what lies ahead, particularly for younger workers.

Also, isn’t this a very strong indication that all those immigrants are no longer necessary and can be safely repatriated? That’s certainly one way to ensure that unemployment in the US labor market doesn’t spike to 20 percent.

The fact is that an awful lot of those jobs are just paper-pushing makework anyhow.

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Everybody Hates George

George RR Martin throws himself a pity party:

I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or THE WINDS OF WINTER. You have given up on me, or on the book. I will never finish WINDS, If I do, I will never finish A DREAM OF SPRING. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me… I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, “A Song for Lya” and DYING OF THE LIGHT, “Sandkings” and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, “This Tower of Ashes” and “The Stone City,” OLD MARS and OLD VENUS and ROGUES and WARRIORS and DANGEROUS WOMEN and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois, You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but WINDS OF WINTER. You’ve told me so often enough).

Thing is, I do care about them.

And I care about Westeros and WINDS as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.

Just, you know, not enough to work on the books and finish them. The thing is, it’s not just that he’s old and fat and has lost his literary fastball. The books are technically flawed, and there is no ordinary solution to the problem, since the heart of the problem is that he cares about all 462 of his perspective characters.

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Haldane vs Kimura

Just to put it on the record, I thought it would be useful to examine the challenge posed by the post-CHLCA genetic distance between Chimpanzee and Human based on the substitution rates estimated by two great evolutionary biologists, JBS Haldane and Motoo Kimura, as published by the latter in his extremely influential 1968 paper, Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level.

In the evolutionary history of mammals, nucleotide substitution has been so fast that, on average, one nucleotide pair has been substituted in the population roughly every 2 yr. This figure is in sharp contrast to Haldane’s well known estimate that, in horotelic evolution (standard rate evolution), a new allele may be substituted in a population roughly every 300 generations.

I’ve summarized their estimates, and the consequences of those estimates, in the same manner that I originally summarized my own estimates in my 2019 post entitled Maximal Mutations. Note that I have, in the interest of accuracy and on the recommendation of DeepSeek, changed the years per generation from 20 to 25, as I am informed that “25 years is a widely accepted average in genetics and anthropology.” Also note that Kimura utilizes the term “substitution” instead of “fixation”, but he means the same thing, which is the establishment of the nucleotide pair, also known as “base pair”, throughout the entire population. And finally, note that due to Haldane’s reference to alleles, not base pairs, the maximum number of fixed mutations for his model needs to be multiplied by 1.4, since that is the realistic weighted average of base pairs per allele.

And remember, literally none of these numbers or estimates are of my invention. All I have done is to apply the relevant math to their estimates, which apparently no one in the entire scientific community has ever bothered to do.

HALDANE
Years: 9,000,000
Years per generation: 25
Generations per fixed mutation: 300 
Years per fixed mutation: 7,500
Maximum fixed mutations: 1,200
Genomic Difference in base pairs: 30,000,000
Genomic Shortfall in base pairs: 29,998,800
Percent Accounted For: 0.004 percent

KIMURA
Years: 9,000,000
Years per generation: 25
Generations per fixed mutation: 0.08
Years per fixed mutation: 2
Maximum fixed mutations: 4,500,000
Genomic Difference in base pairs: 30,000,000
Genomic Shortfall in base pairs: 25,500,000
Percent Accounted For: 15 percent

The problem should be glaringly apparent. Even if we apply Kimura’s insanely fast estimate of an average 2-year population-wide fixation rate for every new mutation entering the gene pool, a rate that is obviously impossible to attain for either humans or chimpanzees, his neutral selection theory can neither explain nor account for 85 percent of the observed genomic differences between modern chimpanzees and modern humans.

It’s even worse for traditional natural selection theory, as the 300 generations per fixation rate provided in Haldane’s 1957 paper, The Cost of Natural Selection, means that Neo-Darwinian natural selection can only account for four-thousandths of one percent of the observed genomic differences.

There is no theory of evolution that is capable of even coming close to accounting for the situation we observe today.

On a related subject, my favorite illustrator had a request. Not, of course, for her benefit, but for the good of others, because she is a very kind individual with a good heart.

Is there an article or something that can explain what a “rate of fixation” is for dumb people? Not me of course, just some dumb people I know. Like a really dumbed down version of what Vox is getting at. I mean, I kind of get it… in my heart… but I don’t understand it enough to paraphrase it.

Rate of fixation = the time it takes for every single member of the same generation across the entire population to be born with the same nucleotide pair after that specific nucleotide pair first appeared as a mutation in a single individual.

Let us imagine that a baby being born with six fingers on his left hand was the result of a unique mutation of a single nucleotide pair. The rate of fixation would be how many years after the birth of that child passed before a generation appeared in which every single child in the entire human race was born with six fingers on their left hand.

There are 30 million or so nucleotide pairs that separate the human genome from the chimpanzee genome, each of which first appeared at some point and propagated through the whole of one of the two populations in the last 9 million years that have passed since the Last Chimp-Human Common Ancestor, according to standard evolutionary theory. This did not happen because it could not have happened.

As I have demonstrated above, whether you apply Haldane’s natural selection or Kimura’s neutral selection, nowhere nearly enough time has passed to account for the current differences between the two genomes because the rate of fixation is far too slow to do so.

UPDATE: It’s not possible to simply divide the 30 million difference between human and chimp and calculate on the basis of 15 million mutations over 9 million years. We have no idea whether the division should be 50/50 or 90/10, and we can’t know where it should be until the LCHCA genome is sequenced.

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