Tag: books

Baen is the New Tor

We’re seeing the old aphorism about conservatives being liberals from 20 years ago play out in the science fiction genre:

Earlier this year, Fandom Pulse reported how Larry Correia saw the writing on the wall at Baen Books, a company that’s struggled to retain its identity in science fiction ever since the Sad Puppies controversy of the Hugo Awards in the mid-2010s. While corporate wanted to distance themselves from the event as much as possible, the fanbase actually loved it.

A seminal event in Baen history was when Toni Weisskopf actually shut down the forum “Baen’s Bar” for a time after serial trolls from the mainstream publishing industry were talking about how they might have “liability” because of January 6th, a false flag operation where the left claimed Trump supporters were rioting, but as we now know was an FBI-coordinated psyop.

Since this point, the company seemed to lose its identity and what made it what it was. Baen Books was seen as the alternative to much of the Pink Sci-Fi of the mainstream industry being put out by Tor Books and others. However, their staple of male-driven military science fiction quickly got eaten up by the Amazon algorithm riders who topped charts with rapid-release books that an old publishing company couldn’t compete with.

The company didn’t really develop a next generation of stars to take over from their aging stable of John Ringo, David Weber, David Drake and others. While several of their authors sadly passed away, the company mostly milked their remaining living authors and attached younger co-writers to projects. These books invariably don’t sell as well as the main series, but they also didn’t really bring forth any stars who could sell on their own right.

The result was the state the company is now: their biggest star author flirting with other companies, while they’re trying their hardest to keep the co-written books going. Newer authors tend to be pushing toward the exact Pink SF that Baen Books used to be the alternative to, as increasingly the Baen catalog is publishing exactly that.

It doesn’t get much more turn-of-the-century Tor than publishing a) Catharine Asaro and b) Mercedes Lackey ruining an Ann McCaffrey franchise. At this rate, Baen will be publishing John Scalzi before 2030 rolls around.

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The Charlatan’s Veil

Another Gaiman fan realizes that his literary hero was never all that good in the first place.

Gaiman’s approach to fantasy is a bit shallow. What I’m trying to say here is that Gaiman has a talent for creating mood pieces, but beyond that, his work falls apart.

For example, his stories often unfold as tableaux of strange and evocative moments: a forgotten god hitchhiking through America, a girl wandering into a mirror-world, a dream king brooding over his endless domain. These scenes are drenched in mythic suggestion, as if each image wants to convey some timeless meaning. But if you step through it, you often find he idea of profundity rather than the thing itself. His imagination operates like a collage: history, folklore, and pop culture are cut and pasted together to form something instantly atmospheric, yet curiously weightless. You can clearly see this in many of this Sandman tales: they have a strong opening/hook, but the ending is like “wasn’t that totally random fantastic happenstance neat?” And that’s pretty much it.

Part of the issue is that Gaiman’s relationship to myth feels archival rather than interpretive. He borrows freely from Norse sagas, biblical apocrypha, and fairy tales, but mostly to signal that we are in the presence of something “meaningful.” Rarely does he twist those sources into new psychological or philosophical insight. For example, this can be clearly seen in Season of Mists: The gathering of gods from different cultures is amusing and humorous, but if you look back upon it, the only real depth the whole storyline had was allusiveness. The gods were nothing beyond amusing or humorous curiosities. He’s a curator of myths, not a renovator of them. His most powerful tool is the reader’s own cultural memory; he relies on our preexisting reverence for myth to supply the emotional depth his narratives often lack.

If you strip away the mythic coating and what remains is often a rather simple moral fable or an exercise in mood: a cliched story about the endurance of stories, or the melancholy of immortality, or the faint shimmer of magic behind the mundane. It’s not that these are unworthy themes, but that they are presented through affection rather than argument. It’s basically “style over substance”. The result is fiction that feels “trippy” and profound in the moment, but evaporates upon reflection, leaving behind little more than a pleasant aftertaste of mystery.

Of course, he has certain gifts as a writer. He has a very good ear for rhythm (his prose is a goldmine for making pleasant audiobooks), a flair for genuinely striking imagery, and a knack for making the strange feel intimate. But too often, his fantasy reads like a spell cast for its own beauty, a shimmer of enchantment that delights the senses while concealing the absence of real substance beneath. His worlds are wondrous, yes, but their wonder tends to circle back on itself, never quite touching the ground of genuine insight.

He’s absolutely right. Neil Gaiman isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad or untalented writer. But he’s barely a good writer and he isn’t anywhere close to the great one that his fans, his publishers, and his press once would have had everyone believe. He’s always been a 7/10 in my book, and I’d drop that a point to 6/10 in light of his shameless ripoffs of other, much better writers, by far the most egregious and disgusting being the short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” which doesn’t even attempt to hide its overt imitation of Tanith Lee’s much better “Red as Blood”.

Ironically, although “Snow, Glass, Apples” is supposedly significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page, that page rather gives away the game with its “See Also” reference to the page about Tanith Lee’s short story collection, of which “Red as Blood” is the titular story.

But as manufactured creatures go, at least Gaiman did possess an amount of talent which he utilized to reasonable effect before he devoted himself to playing the public part of an Important Author and what is alleged to be his tubcuddling hobby.

The amusing thing is the way in which the fans pretend that Gaiman being off wasn’t always obvious to the sufficiently observant.

It’s annoying how some act like they’re these know it all sages, like they were always a few steps ahead of everyone else. Saying they always knew he was a sicko in real life based on the topics he wrote about. If they really knew, why didn’t they say something sooner, instead of showing up after the damage is done?

They did. But they were shouted down by fans who refused to either listen or see the obvious for themselves.

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THE MEDITATIONS available

Castalia Library is making 140 copies of its Bindery Test edition of THE MEDITATIONS by Marcus Aurelius available to interested parties at a reduced price. Please note that this edition lacks both a) gilded page edges and b) spine hubs. It is further identified with a Chateau Castalia logo on the pre-title page and “A Test Run of 200” on the title page.

For more information about the Bindery Test edition, pictures, and a very cool video of our new laser in action, please visit the Castalia Library substack.

You can also purchase copies of THE MEDITATIONS (Bindery edition) from NDM Express.

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Superluminary Serial

Fandom Pulse has launched a new weekly serial with a serious bang.

John C. Wright is one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of our time, with writing abilities that are of the level of a Grand Master. His Superluminary was designed as a serial, and, with his permission, we will reprinting it here on Sundays as a new feature. Enjoy great science fiction!

Episode 01: Assassin in Everest

Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, the youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer’s attack.

But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

But betrayal from within was another matter.

An excellent choice, even if I say so myself as its erstwhile publisher. If you haven’t read it already, be sure to bookmark Fandom Pulse for Sunday readings.

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Baseless Con

Castalia doesn’t support any con that treats people this way, particularly not one of our authors:

For the last five years, Libertarian author Robert Kroese has been running an alternative convention to the mainstream industry-run cons such as WorldCon, with the intention of making it an alternative. Unfortunately, the convention has turned into much the same liberal gatekeeping as those conventions, as the convention banned me after Kroese could not handle my calling modern woke D&D “Satanic” (rightfully in my opinion), and proceeded to cancel me over my journalism calling out problems in the gaming industry.

There’s much more to the reason robkroese went full-cancel that has to do with his personal ego with the convention rather than anything I’ve done, which is why his continued actions have been beyond absurd, and it’s been a debate of whether Fandom Pulse should address this matter at all.

I’m chosing to for two reasons: 1. Fandom Pulse provides the best comprehensive coverage of conventions with bad behaviors, and this is no different despite my being the focus of the story, 2. because at the convention, Kroese is taking the stage dedicating an entire panel to personally attacking me, which I’ve never heard of a convention doing in the history of cons, making this an incredibly exceptional situation. Despite saying there’s no panel, what is giving a 20-minute talk from a stage of a convention if not a panel?

Below is the history of what transpired and why this is simply a mockery of the name “BasedCon.”

The cucks and cons who act as if they’re any sort of alternative to the SJWs in genre fiction, while attempting to police ideas, politics, and tone in exactly the same manner as those to whom they purport to be an alternative, are as useless and ultimately ephemeral as the Bush Republicans.

They’re just another form of gatekeeper, and they are always opposed to anything that isn’t more of the status quo, only with a conservative varnish. But they’ll cancel people over insufficient enthusiasm for the Gazacaust as readily as the SJWs will cancel someone for insufficient enthusiasm for transgender children.

Anyhow, this is why we don’t support BasedCon, although since we’re not into the business of socially policing anyone, we don’t have any problem with those who choose to attend it, or WorldCon, or ComicCon, or any of the various other events that we ignore as we continue to build infrastructure that will not only last generations, but hopefully, centuries.

Before the end of October, we’ll have the ability to produce mainstream-sized print runs, but in leather. It’s taken a very long time for all of the pieces to come together, but we’re finally getting to where we knew we needed to be. And there will very likely be some developments well beyond what anyone is imagining is possible in the next few years, as our strategic plan for the next stage will take most people by surprise.

Which is why I’m making it clear now that we will work with anyone who simply wishes to do business in a professional manner, regardless of whatever their past antics may have been. We are focused on producing the best and most beautiful books in the world, and while there is certain content we will not publish, we don’t concern ourselves with policing the opinions of our current or prospective partners.

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Most Authors Will Get Nothing

A lot of authors are very excited about the announcement of the Anthropic settlement that promises to pay out about $3,000 per work to the authors whose work was pirated.

There’s just one problem: the settlement excludes 92.8 percent of the pirated works, including pretty much all foreign authors, foreign publishers – including Castalia House – and self-published authors. Even worse, there is absolutely no path to legal redress for them in the US courts.

AI Central explains why.

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The Last Day

Today is the last day for the first three Signed First Editions from Castalia Library:

  • GUNS OF MARS
  • OUT OF SHADOWS
  • DEATH AND THE DEVIL

The interest in the first three Signed First Editions and the support for the bindery that has been provided through them has been exceptional and very much appreciated. The level of support we’ve been given means that we can not only pay for the new machine that has been ordered and is being tested with an entire print run this week, but also for the tool sets for all of the hub sizes that we’re doing to need from Promethean to Plutarch.

However, we have to stop selling the books before we can start making them, so both Arkhaven and NDM Express are going to stop selling all three at midnight tonight. Until then, you can order from either store.

Thanks to the stronger-than-expected level of interest, we’ve also arranged to provide original chapter-heading artwork for all three books by MIDNIGHT’S WAR illustrator Ademir Leal. I’ve also added a thirteenth story to DEATH AND THE DEVIL, called “Death and War,” which should increase the size of the book to around 175 pages.

On a related note, if you are a Libraria subscriber, PLEASE EMAIL US and tell us which of the three books you would like. About half of you have responded to my initial email, and I will send another one now to bring it to the top of your inboxes.

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OUT OF THE SHADOWS

An excerpt from my forthcoming novel, now available as a Signed First Edition from Castalia Library. For more details, visit the substack:

The Wall Street Journal

BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY

In an exclusive interview, CEO Elliott Grahame reveals that his biotech startup plans to extend human lifespan by up to 25 years—and how 20,000 people will receive the treatment within the next 12 months

By David Porter

SAN FRANCISCO—The conference room on the top floor of HemaTech’s gleaming South San Francisco headquarters offers a panoramic view of the Bay Area’s biotech corridor, a fitting backdrop for what is almost certainly the most significant medical announcement of the 21st century. Elliott Grahame, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of HemaTech, sits across from me, looking remarkably composed for someone about to reveal that his company has cracked one of humanity’s oldest challenges: extending the human lifespan.

“We’re not talking about marginal improvements,” Grahame says, his voice carrying the careful precision of someone who understands the weight of his words. “We’re talking about adding 20 to 25 healthy, productive years to the average human life.”

It’s a claim that would sound like pure science fiction if it weren’t backed by years of rigorous research, a panoply of successful human and animal trials, and the backing of some of Europe’s most prestigious investment firms. HemaTech, which just six months ago withdrew from a highly anticipated IPO, has been operating in relative secrecy while perfecting what Grahame calls “the most significant advancement in human biology since the discovery of antibiotics.”

The Science of Longevity

The technology behind HemaTech’s breakthrough centers on what the company terms “Selective Cellular Regeneration Therapy” or SCRT. Without diving too deeply into the proprietary details, Grahame explains that the treatment involves a combination of modified mRNA sequences that reprogram certain cells to maintain their younger characteristics for extended periods of time.

“Think of it like this,” Grahame explains, leaning forward with the infectious enthusiasm that has characterized his career since his days at Stanford’s bioengineering program. “Every cell in your body has a built-in timer—telomeres that shorten with each division, accumulated damage from oxidative stress, genetic mutations that build up over time. Our therapy doesn’t just slow these processes; it reverses some of them and prevents others from occurring in the first place.”

The science builds on decades of longevity research, from the discovery of telomerase to recent breakthroughs in cellular reprogramming. But where others have achieved incremental success in laboratory settings, HemaTech claims to have developed a scalable, safe, and effective treatment suitable for human application.

Dr. Elodie Mitchell, a leading geneticist at Johns Hopkins who is not affiliated with HemaTech but has reviewed their published data, calls the achievement “paradigm-shifting.” She notes, “If their clinical data holds up under broader application, we’re looking at the biggest revolution in human health since the discovery of penicillin. The implications are staggering.”

A Grandiose Vision

As our interview concludes, I ask Grahame about HemaTech’s ultimate vision. Where does this all lead?

“In the immediate term, we’re focused on our 20,000-patient rollout and gathering the necessary data to support our campaign for broader regulatory approval,” he says. “Medium-term, we want to drive costs down and access up—our goal is to make this affordable and available to anyone who wants it within 30 years.”

“And long-term?” I press.

Grahame looks out at the Bay Area sprawl, seeming to see something beyond the immediate landscape. “Long-term, we’re talking about a fundamental redefinition of human existence. When death becomes a choice rather than an inevitability, everything changes—our relationships, our ambitions, our entire social structure. We’re not just extending life; we’re transforming what it means to be human.”

It’s a grandiose vision, but sitting in HemaTech’s offices, surrounded by the evidence of their achievement, it doesn’t seem impossible. The company has already done what many thought couldn’t be done—developed a practical, effective means of significantly extending human life. The question now isn’t whether life extension is possible, but how quickly it will reshape our world.

David Porter is a senior technology and business correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He has covered the biotech industry for fifteen years. HemaTech expects to begin its expanded treatment program in January. For more information about their technology and treatment protocols, visit www.hematech.com.

OUT OF THE SHADOWS can be purchased in the two usual locations.

Also, if you’re a Libraria subscriber, please check your email and respond.

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