In Which the Cancellers are Cancelled

Worldcon’s death-spiral toward extinction continues apace, as chronicled by Fandom Pulse:

Worldcon used to be the gold standard of science fiction conventions. Creators like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and more would get together every year to share ideas, build community, and help the genre altogether. It’s a good idea, in theory.In its past, of course, it’s also been mired with controversy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen using convention rooms as places to rape children, something that long-stained its history when it came out in recent years.

Beyond this, Worldcon had turned its back on conservatives for an extreme-leftist agenda that reared its ugly head in the mid-2010s with the Hugo Awards, when they prioritized politics over good storytelling to the determinant of the award. It never recovered its prestige. It resulted in 2018 having a protest against pedophilia outside of the convention where, oddly, many of the panelists counter-protested against the protest. The implication is that several of those people apparently stand for pedophilia.

In recent years, they’ve had more controversies, such as having the weapons’ manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the convention, heading to China to have the CCP dictate who could be nominated for their awards, and then using their platform to urge that travel to the United States is somehow dangerous as an attack on President Donald Trump and America—despite the convention being in Seattle this year and Los Angeles in the next.

Now, they have posted a blog that turned their entire leftist community on them, not because of pedophilia or extremist political causes, or supporting weapons manufacturers that bomb children in Middle Eastern countries, or for bowing to the human-rights violating CCP, no, the line they’ve drawn is that ChatGPT was used to vet potential panelists for their ever-shrinking convention, as the science fiction landscape has grown so niche that the con organizers simply didn’t know who most of the people were who applied for spots.

At this point, the “science fiction community” as it was known and loved by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jerry Pournelle is effectively dead. The material being published by the genre publishers is no longer science fiction, the authors are complete nobodies whom nobody either knows or reads, the magazines are no longer being published, and the one healthy subgenre, military science fiction, is entirely written and read by people who have nothing to do with the tattered remnants of what was once a vibrant sub-literary genre.

It’s really remarkable to read Zelazny’s comments on the community in which he lived and the genre he loved, and see how far from his expectations for the future both of them have fallen.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia Ready for NATO

An explanation for the huge increase in troops being mobilized and new arms being produced that have not shown up on the front lines is finally explained by Russia’s preparations for a direct confrontation with NATO:

The U.S. estimates that around 30,000 Russians are signing up each month, up from about 25,000 last summer. Some Eastern European intelligence officials say the ranks are now swelling by some 40,000 soldiers a month. The extra manpower has allowed the military to rotate new troops in and out of Ukraine, and to build new units trained and housed in Russia, according to some European intelligence assessments.

So, not only do they confirm that Russia is regenerating 30,000 men per month, and even 40,000 according to some sources, but the biggest bombshell of all is made which fully redeems my reporting over the past year and a half: Russia is siphoning some of the newly recruited troops into new units stationed in the rear of Russia proper; i.e. reserves.

This should once and for all conclusively put to bed theories around where the Russian 30k+ monthly troops are going: a portion is replenishing hard losses, a portion replacing contract non-renewals, and a portion is going directly to the rear to stand up new armies meant to prepare Russia for a much bigger clash against NATO proper…

And if they do fight NATO, they’ll do so with more than 200,000 North Korean troops fighting with them.

“Our source reports that DPRK soldiers will take part in the war on Ukrainian territory (previously they fought only in the Kursk region) if Trump’s peace case stalls. The source points out that if the war escalates, then by the end of the year more than two hundred thousand North Korean soldiers will be fighting in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces using their own equipment. Such an “infusion” threatens the collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defense.

President Trump would do very well to put leashes and muzzles on Kiev, Brussels, and most of the European leaders and force a peace settlement to Russia’s liking or Russia is going to simply decide the fate of Europe without any input from the USA or anyone else.

DISCUSS ON SG

Heating Up in Kashmir

Pakistan believes India is going to attack this week:

Pakistan has alleged that India is planning a military strike on its territory, signaling a further escalation in tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

“Pakistan has credible intelligence that India intends to launch a military strike within the next 24 to 36 hours, using the Pahalgam incident as a false pretext,” Islamabad’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X on Tuesday evening.

“Any act of aggression will be met with a decisive response. India will be fully responsible for any serious consequences in the region,” Tarar added.

His statement came after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his country’s armed forces “full operational freedom” to determine the mode, targets, and timing of a response to the recent terrorist attack in India’s Jammu and Kashmir union territory, which left 26 people dead, mostly tourists.

It will be interesting to see if any of the lessons of the NATO-Russian war have been understood and applied by either the Indians or the Pakistanis. I tend to doubt it, but we’ll see.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Lessons of War

North Korean troops have gained valuable combat experience in Russia, while NATO simply refuses to admit that it needs to learn anything despite the changing face of the battlefield:

I saw these guys several times in business. And every time I caught myself thinking that they were preparing for another war. Which looked a little strange. Still, North Korea is a military state. For 70 years they have been de facto at war. Huge budget funds go on national defense, and a meeting with the Ukrainian army made Koreans think and reconsider their views on the war.

Very soon, they realized that you can’t stumble, and attacking with a line is not a good idea. And they heard the REB and the UAV, but they did not understand the true meaning.

Once again, I note that in order to learn from the war, you need to lose your soldiers on the battlefield. Koreans have paid their price and will now process this valuable experience. Commanders mouths grow to the generals. And all their careers they will remember the nasty buzzing of the FPV drones, and will do everything to minimize their threat.

All military personnel of this world are watching the SVO. But true conclusions will be available to only a few. Most will make decisions based on objective control materials and dry intelligence reports. And I am sure that most generals will not be able to draw the right conclusions from the experience of the SVO. Which, however, is in our hands. The time is now dashing, and only a few armies can boast of combat experience.

There is an old saying that generals always prepare for the previous war. Which is why the US military is mostly geared up for police occupations and counter-insurgency operations. Neither it nor any of the European militaries are even remotely ready for a war with Russia, with or without popular support.

DISCUSS ON SG

Solar Power = No Power

The worst thing is that solar power is failing in the springtime in one of the sunniest places in Europe:

Spain’s grid operator admitted today that solar power could be to blame for the blackouts that brought chaos to much of the Iberian peninsular on Monday.

Red Eléctrica’s System Operations Chief Eduardo Prieto told a news briefing the electricity system was hit by a dramatic power generation loss in southwestern Spain, that caused instability in the system that led to its disconnection from the French grid. He said it was quite possible that the affected generation was solar, but it was to early to say for sure. Prieto said the system was now stable and working normally.

The partly state-owned operator’s preliminary assessment ruled out cyberattack as the cause of the outage, he added – after officials had tentatively suggested on Monday it was still a line they were exploring. Criticism has been mounting on the Spanish government to explain the blackouts, which saw planes grounded, trains stopped and traffic brought to a standstill in major cities.

It’s long past time to begin discussing the implications of both climate change and clean energy being constructed on fundamentally false assumptions. How much further does civilization have to decline before we start taking on the challenge of shoring up the foundations that have been systematically weakened for the last 50 years?

DISCUSS ON SG

The Ports Shut Down

The once-busy port of Seattle has all but shut down.

The Port of Seattle on Sunday, April 27, 2025: EMPTY. This is the 4th busiest port in the nation. Inbound freight from China has STOPPED. Supply-chain disruption will now begin, nationwide. Anyone who has spent time in Seattle can tell you that these docks are always PACKED and the Puget Sound is usually overrun with waiting cargo vessels.

Here is the Marine-Tracker for Seattle: Waiting ships: ZERO. Inbound ships: ZERO. There are presently ZERO cargo ships docked or en-route. There are ZERO containers in the yard, and there are ZERO trucks waiting to haul cargo.

Even if this global trade war is ended tomorrow, it will take a minimum of 30 to 55 days, but more likely at 7-9 months, to normalize supply chains and have available product again. And that’s if everybody calls it off immediately. 40% of cargo vessels leaving China today (vessels that were already paid to make the journey, whether there is a reason to or not) are traveling completely empty. Inbound Shipping container volume is down 80%.

There were always going to be trade disruptions. This is a good time to get stocked up, top up supplies, and avoid travel and unnecessary expenses.

DISCUSS ON SG

Green Energy Blackout

Spain, Portugal, and parts of France have been without electricity all day:

Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days.

Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty.

Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going.

Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice.

A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’

Madrid’s Mayor urged people in the city to stay where they were as the disaster unfolded, while the president of the city’s regional government called for Spain’s prime minister to activate an emergency plan to allow for soldiers to be deployed.

Power outages gripped Spain at around 12.30 local time, plunging millions into darkness. Spain’s nuclear power plants automatically stopped, but diesel generators were activated to keep them in ‘safe condition’, officials said.

Trains and metro services were shut down in both countries, with people stuck in tunnels and on railway tracks, forcing evacuations.

Portugal’s electricity grid operator warned that it is ‘impossible’ to say when the power supply would be fully restored, adding that while ‘all resources’ were deployed to resolve the issues, it could take up to a week to fix.

The power cuts come just days after Spain’s power grid ran entirely on renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydro power, for a whole day for the first time on April 16. 

Spanish officials are urgently investigating the cause of the outages and have said they are looking into the possibility of the blackouts being triggered by a devastating cyber attack. 

Videos online show railway networks in Spanish cities plunged into chaos, with people being evacuated through tunnels as blackouts hit underground stations and halted trains.

The centralized power grid was always a foolish idea, with little redundancy and a natural tendency to get pushed beyond its limits. But attempting to go entirely to so-called “renewable” energy – as if oil isn’t a naturally renewable resource – was always likely to result in something like this.

DISCUSS ON SG

Spring Library Sale

First, Castalia Library is announcing a surprise Spring Library sale made possible by our finally merging the warehouses and getting an accurate count on our entire stock. We also knew we had some additional books in Alabama, but in the aftermath of losing our good friend at Cryptofashion, we didn’t know how many we had and which books were there until everything was shipped to the current warehouse and counted correctly.

The sale has only been announced here ahead of being announced publicly Monday on VP and elsewhere, so if you want to make sure you obtain one of the less-available books, you should probably take action pretty quickly. All of the books are in stock at the warehouse and available for immediate shipment.

The 11 books that were previously out of stock, all of which are cowhide Library editions, are:

The sale price on all 11 volumes is $79.99 while supplies last. No subscription or coupon is necessary. The sale price includes shipping. It’s a good opportunity to round out your collection if you’re missing anything, or pick up an additional volume of interest or two.

DISCUSS ON SG

Publisher, Not Author

While it’s hard for some to accept that the Bard of Avon didn’t write the plays that are attributed to him, it’s not as if he had no relation to them. But the evidence has been there all along.

I note that the seminal inspiration for the authorship questions was Samuel Astley Dunham’s 1837 biography of Shakespeare, which appeared in the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland. Quoting Dunham:

… we must observe, that in the beginning of his career—for years, indeed, after he became connected with the stage—that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage. Indeed, we are of opinion, that the number of plays which he thus re-cast, as well as those in which he made very slight alterations, is greater than any of his commentators have supposed.

Later in the work, Dunham repeated this claim: “In fact there is no one drama of our author prior to 1600—perhaps not one after that year—that was not derived from some other play.”

Literary geniuses cannot help but write about the types of people, places, and events that have moved them—and their familiarity with their subjects allows them tantalizing insights and intricacies. So, as is inevitably the case, rural geniuses pen rural masterpieces, seafaring geniuses pen seafaring masterpieces, Yukon-wilderness geniuses pen Yukon-wilderness masterpieces, New-York high-society geniuses pen New York high-society masterpieces, etc. This is what all prodigies throughout the history of literature have done. They have written about lands that had dirtied their shoes and got under their fingernails, about climes that caused them to shiver or sweat, and about people whom they loved or hated and with whom they had worked, dined, or fought. No other great literary artist has ever tried to attempt what Stratfordians must believe.

But this classic case against Shakespeare is even stronger than this. While all the evidence suggests that the author of the canon required first-hand experience with the court, law, Italy, and military; it is still not even clear how Shakespeare could have managed even second-hand knowledge of these subjects. The true-crime story of the murder of the Duke of Urbino—which would become the subject of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play that he called The Murder of Gonzago—not only appears nowhere else in English in the 16th or 17th centuries, scholars have been unable to find the murder discussed in any published Italian work either. Stunningly, Hamlet is the first printed work to contain the story. What is more, the Duke’s murder occurred in Villa Pesaro in Urbino, which also had housed Titian’s famous painting of the victim. And the painting is used as both the model for Hamlet’s father and the description of the painting of Hamlet’s Father.

And that is just one of dozens of examples of insider information on Italy that we find in the plays—which includes accurate descriptions of Padua and Venice, the reference to St. Gregory’s Well just outside of Milan, the life-like statues Giulio Romano, etc.

Consider also all the other expertise flaunted throughout the plays. Did Shakespeare really read Plowden’s Reports in Law French just for fun or to seem more lawyerly? Did he really peruse now-lost manuals on falconry to seem more aristocratic? Did he read travelogues on Continental Europe to seem more traveled? Did he, on his own, learn Italian, French, and Spanish, so he could read the original sources of plays he was adapting? Did he study all of the required military pamphlets in order to add esoteric military details to his work? Did he really, while in his early 30s, assume the guise of an old man when writing personal sonnets to friends and lovers? Did the man from Stratford, at the age of eleven, actually manage to sneak onto Leicester’s grounds at Kenilworth Castle and witness the private water pageant and other entertainments that the Earl provided for the Queen, enabling him to work these visions into A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Fortunately, we can now accept the obvious answer to all of these questions and rid ourselves of the wide and troubling gap between the knowledge exposed in the masterpieces and the life of William Shakespeare. As all other analyses clarify, particularly a careful study of title page attributions, contemporaneous references, and satires by fellow playwrights, Shakespeare was not the original author of the masterpieces. He merely adapted them for the stage.

I think it’s very difficult for most people to accept two contrary things.

  • That the historical figures they were told to have been world-class genuises were considerably less exceptional than they were told.
  • That the figures of their time were actually more exceptional than they believe them to be.

I suspect it’s because we know more about the latter, and just as no man is a hero to his wife or his valet, it’s harder for an genuine intellectual to be highly regarded by people of his own time who can’t fully understand what he’s accomplished. Which, of course, is why it’s the frauds that are useful to the modern powers who are celebrated even though their accomplishments are both false and barren.

DISCUSS ON SG

Krynky was a British Op

In case you weren’t entirely sure that any EU/UK attempt to continue a war with Russia will be a complete disaster, it turns out that the appallingly stupid attempt to recreate the Battle of the Bulge in Krynky was planned and operated by the British military:

On the morning of October 30 2023, dozens of Ukrainian commandos on small boats glided across the Dnieper River to control of Krynky, a village in Russian-occupied Kherson. They had spent the prior two months in remote areas of the British isles with similar terrain, running drills under the watchful gaze of UK generals. Now, they believed their hard work was about to pay off. Both British and Ukrainian officials were convinced the operation would turn the tide of the war, creating a beachhead allowing Kiev’s forces to march on Crimea and all-out victory.

Instead, the British-trained Ukrainian marines were led like lambs to the slaughter. The catastrophically planned effort saw a seemingly endless stream of heavily overloaded Ukrainian boats attempt to reach Krynky without air cover, under relentless fire by Russian artillery, drones, flamethrowers and mortars. Marines that made the journey were ill-equipped, resupplying those troops proved virtually impossible, and evacuating them was out of the question.

As the promised missile cover failed to materialize in the ensuing weeks, it became clear the effort had amounted to a disaster. Yet for the next nine months, wave after wave of British-trained Ukrainian marines were dispatched to almost certain death to Krynky. The decision to let the costly quagmire drag on, at a human and material cost no NATO military would ever allow, has come to be seen as one of the worst tactical mistakes of the war — and it appears top British generals are to blame.

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone expose how the British not only presided over the training of the Marines involved, but built from scratch the “Maritime Raiding Force” which would ultimately be sacrificed over the course of the Krynky suicide mission.

The British have been militarily hopeless for centuries. The only reason they weren’t conquered and occupied by Napoleon and by Hitler was the English Channel and the Royal Navy. And now, they can’t even keep out unarmed Africans and Arabs on rubber rafts.

But they’re going to fight Russia? Even after launching an invasion that didn’t get anywhere near its objectives? I’d give better odds to Cuba attacking the United States.

DISCUSS ON SG