Tag: books

That Sounds like Anathema

The Dark Herald explains why JRR Tolkien should be forgotten?

The Timeline Where Tolkien Dies
Let’s take a look at what should have happened to The Lord of the Rings without support before we look at how that support changed its fate.

In the 1960s, LotR has cult status among the counterculture. This was its peak.

Along come the 1970s, still riding the paperback boom. LotR stays hot on campuses, word of mouth stays strong. Tolkien is hot… But contained.

By the mid-seventies the boom has tapered off. Sales are still there, but the counterculture is dying off. It’s turning into The Thing Older Guys Are Into.

Now it’s the 80s. Generation X is in college and there has been no real generational handoff. Boomer stuff equals dull and dim. Fantasy has matured and expanded, but Gen X is reading Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Terry Brooks. All of them have been influenced by Tolkien, so there is a certain degree of backtrack—but The Lord of the Rings is becoming a niche, connoisseur’s market.

In the 1990s, the light has distinctly dimmed. Generation X has switched to grim-dark, urban fantasy. Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint are ascendant. Tolkien is still influential, still respected, but has entered pre-obscurity.

With the 2000s come the Millennials. J.K. Rowling is blowing it so far out of the water you can’t see the ocean from space. Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton aren’t doing quite that well, but their impact is felt—while Tolkien’s is not. Sales of The Lord of the Rings are now a few thousand a year, mostly library editions. He’s known to the field, but invisible to pop culture.

He’s the guy Boomers won’t shut up about—like Timmy Hendricks or whoever.

2026—The torch has not been passed for three generations. Tolkien’s publisher dropped The Lord of the Rings a while back. The Tolkien Estate has long ago accepted market reality and self-publishes The Lord of the Rings on Kindle for $2.99 a copy or FREE on Kindle Unlimited.***

The Three Pillars of Tolkien’s Survival
There were three reasons that this alternate history never happened. And Tolkien fans only like one of them.

Hmmm… he does make a few salient points. Certainly the total failure of ARTS AND DARK AND LIGHT to break through to any sort of popular awareness despite the massive popularity of other, lesser epic fantasies tends to support this reasoning.

However, on a related note, I am pleased to be able to say that the German translation of A SEA OF SKULLS by Urs Hildebrandt is now complete, and we’ll be releasing all three AODAL books in German this summer.

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Interview with the SDL

Fandom Pulse interviewed me about Castalia House’s new translation program that has already translated 18 works from Japanese, Spanish, and Italian:

In the book world, some of the most interesting things happening are coming out of the Castalia Library. Over the last year, the company has brought some of the highest quality leatherbound books to market ever printed, doing a mix of classics and interesting modern, overlooked works that many may not have had a chance to read.

Now, the publishing company is expanding and translating works of classic Japanese fiction that have never been read in English before. These classic works have created a new interest in Japanese culture, spearheaded by publisher and editor Vox Day, who has interviewed with us about the work they’re doing.

Castalia Library is doing something no major publisher is doing: systematically translating Japanese classics that have never appeared in English. What was the moment you decided this was worth building an institution around, rather than just releasing one or two titles?

It started when I realized that neither of the translations I preferred for the leather Library edition of Genji Monogatari was readily available for our use. Not that there was anything wrong with the Arthur Waley translation, it’s what I read while studying Japanese literature at university, but it’s woefully outdated and it was already used by Easton Press. As an experiment, I tried a blind comparision of my translation of the first chapter with the six other translations, and out of 120 readers, nearly 50 percent preferred my new translation. This was a tremendous surprise, but after getting good reviews from native Japanese readers and academics as well, I realized that a whole new world of global literature had opened up to us.

So, while I worked on Genji, I asked Kenji to start with a shorter classic that only had one or two older and outdated translations, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. The results were very good, and the reviews of the released novel reflect that. Since then, he’s translated Botchan and Sanshiro; the latter was particularly challenging since there is already an excellent translation by Jay Rubin, who has translated an amount of Haruki Murakami’s work into English. That one took him longer, because he really wanted to hit a similarly high bar.

You’re releasing a new translation essentially every week through the Castalia Library Substack that subscribers get for free before they hit Amazon. That’s a production pace that would strain a traditional publishing house. How did you build the infrastructure to sustain that?

We have a rigorous and highly detailed system that involves multiple AIs as well as some talented multilingual writers working to a well-defined scale of existing translations. It allows us to produce the translations quickly, but at a much higher standard than most English translations, especially from that period from the 1950s through the 1990s when academics were doing most of them. Academic translations tend to be accurate, but excessively dry. One of the reasons I wanted to see Kokoro translated again is because the McClellan translation I’d originally read tended to leave the English reader wondering how it had ever been so popular in Japan.

Read the whole thing at Fandom Pulse.

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THE KAMIGATA SCROLL

The weekly translation is THE KAMIGATA SCROLL by Eiji Yoshikawa. It is available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook or through a paid subscription to the Library substack. And since we find that Gemini tends to be a little too enthusiastic about everything to rely on what it had to say, here is how Grok rated the new translation by your favorite dark lord.

This is an outstanding literary translation of what appears to be an obscure or previously untranslated Yoshikawa Eiji historical novel. It fully deserves publication as a standalone volume and ranks among the strongest English renderings of mid-20th-century Japanese historical fiction I have encountered—comparable in quality to the best work of translators like Charles Terry or William Scott Wilson, though with a noticeably more cinematic, propulsive voice that suits Yoshikawa’s storytelling instincts.

What the translation does exceptionally well

1. Voice and atmosphere (the single strongest element) Yoshikawa’s originals are famous for their moody, almost cinematic Edo-period evocation—night rivers, lantern light, the tension of back alleys and daimyō intrigue. The translation reproduces this with remarkable fidelity. Lines such as

“Against the black sky, one point of lamplight: the fire tower on the Dōjima reclaimed ground, blinking like the last waking eye in the world.”

The extended night-watchman and riverbank sequences feel exactly like Yoshikawa at his best: spare, atmospheric, and quietly ominous. The prose is never purple, yet it is consistently vivid. You have preserved the original’s distinctive blend of lyricism and hard-edged realism.

2. Dialogue Period-appropriate without becoming stilted or “thee-and-thou” fake-archaic. The banter between Gingorō and Taichi, the flirtatious menace of Mikaeri no Otsuna, the terse exchanges among the smugglers, and the courtly-yet-lethal conversations in the Hachisuka villa all ring true to their social stations. The pickpocket Otsuna’s rough-and-ready Edo speech is especially well handled—she sounds dangerous, alluring, and unmistakably Edo, never generic.

3. Action choreography The sword fights, the test-cutting scene, the chaotic rescue at Sumiyoshi, and the final jetty confrontation are all crystal-clear and kinetically satisfying. The translator avoids the common trap of over-describing every cut while still conveying the technical differences between schools (Tanseki, Araki, etc.). The revelation at the climax is perfectly timed and lands with real weight.

4. Cultural and historical texture Terms like harashi, hitoyogiri, komusō, Dutch cards, the sealed Awa domain, the carrier-pigeon network, the spy-prison at Tsurugi-yama, etc., are integrated naturally. The translation never lectures the reader; the world simply is. The political undercurrents are conveyed with subtlety and menace—exactly as Yoshikawa intended.

5. Pacing and structure The chapters breathe when they need to and accelerate when they should (the raid, the river escape, the final duel). What is here is complete, self-contained, and ends on a perfect “to be continued” hook.

Final verdict

This is not merely a competent translation; it is a loving one that respects both the source and the English reader. It captures Yoshikawa’s signature blend of swashbuckling adventure, political intrigue, and melancholy romantic fatalism better than the more famous translations of his better-known works. If the rest of the series maintains this standard, Castalia House will have a genuine classic on its hands.

94/100 — Excellent.

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Truly Hard Science Fiction

A review of SPACE FLEET ACADEMY: YEAR 1 understands the core question being asked by the books:

Space Fleet Academy: Year 1 forces the reader to ask an uncomfortable question: at what point does ensuring humanity’s survival mean we stop being human? The book may be the hardest sci fi I’ve ever read. It is definitely the hardest sci fi I’ve read in a while. Hard sci fi differs from softer sci fi in that it deals with, well, harder science instead of flashy toys. Let me explain the difference in the two.

Soft/Light sci fi asks “what if we had this cool technology?” Star Trek is the most popular example, and it is one that I love (up until the end of Enterprise, and skip the last episode, please). It then explores the adventure and drama that unfolds from faster than light travel and instantaneous transport. But with Star Trek, the driving force has been the story and adventure of meeting alien species and having moral conflict instead of exploring how the warp drive works. Yes, they explain it in places, but there’s a lot of hand waving and techno babble because the point is not that humanity can travel faster than light but the interactions with aliens now that we have faster than light. I write light sci fi along with the fantasy works. I didn’t even work out how the FTL drives work in High Frontier until the third installment! But Year 1 doesn’t hand wave the science. It asks the hard question: what happens when we apply what population genetics teaches us?

Hard sci fi explores the technology, engineering, and, in this case, genetics and takes that to the logical conclusion. Andy Weir, Larry Niven, and Arthur C. Clarke are good examples. Year 1 works with population genetics and says, “Okay. This is how populations evolve. This is how genetic drift works. What happens to a society when it stops drifting? When the genome becomes frozen, what will the powers that be decide to do about it?” Most importantly, how does implementing those policies affect our humanity?

That’s where Year 1 takes us. The cascade drive has given humanity the stars. Dozens of colonies have spread the genome across light years. It is expected for those colonies to have significant losses of life prior to and during the reproductive years of the individuals so that natural selection can select the fittest. In fact, when the childhood mortality rates drop below a certain threshold, the powers that be are disappointed. Read that again.

If you think SFA is hard science fiction, definitely check out the fourth book in the Biostellar series. The Cruel Equations of the book’s title are downright merciless, and they are not only enforced by the

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.

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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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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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SANSHIRŌ by Natsume Sōseki

“You have no nerve at all, do you.”

With those words from a woman he will never see again, Sanshirō’s journey to Tokyo truly begins. Published in 1908, Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō is one of the most subtly perfect coming-of-age stories ever written.

Ogawa Sanshirō is twenty-three, fresh out of his provincial college in Kumamoto, and arriving at Tokyo Imperial University with a head full of vague ambitions and no preparation for what he finds in the city. A stranger on the train tells him Japan is doomed. A woman standing by a pond glances at him once, and that one glance changes his life. He has entered, as his fast-talking friend Yojirō informs him, three worlds at once — the academic, the real, and the imaginary — and he is not sure which world is the one where he belongs.

Sanshirō is a novel about the distance between what a young man sees and what he understands. Sanshirō watches everything and misses everything. He is observant, earnest, paralyzed at every decisive moment, and so thoroughly out of his depth that the reader grasps what is happening to him long before he does. Sōseki handles his hero with a tenderness that never becomes pity and an irony that never becomes contempt.

This new translation by Kenji Weaver, whose acclaimed translation of Sōseki’s Kokoro introduced a new generation of English readers to Japan’s greatest novelist of the Meiji era, captures the novel’s luminous stillness and psychological depth in clean and highly readable English.

This was a more difficult work to translate satisfactorily, since unlike Botchan and Kokoro, Sanshirō already had been translated very well by Jay Rubin, who is best known for translating Haruki Murakami. However, improvements to our translation system and the heroic efforts of Kenji Weaver did, on the fourth attempt, manage to reach the high level of quality we deemed necessary to justify releasing a new translation of the classic 1908 coming-of-age novel.

As I mentioned yesterday, we have now officially launched the weekly translation subscription at Castalia Library. So, if you are either a) a voracious reader or b) interested in supporting what may be the most ambitious program of bringing untranslated works to the English language ever proposed, you can support Castalia’s efforts and receive a newly translated ebook every Monday by signing up for a paid subscription to the Library site.

Of course, we’re just as happy if you prefer to simply buy whichever books happen to appeal to you as they come out. Because I can assure you that the next two series of translations, by Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós, can legitimately be described as absolute bangers. Sanshirō is available in Kindle, KU, and audiobook formats.

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Can it Get Worse?

I’m pretty sure that if the champions of the printing press were given the opportunity to see how their magnificent new device would transform the written word into a means for women to write about their sexual fantasies involving demons, monsters, and the dead, they would have burned every last one of them.

One of its principal attractions was that it had the potential to democratise knowledge. In the past, the high cost of manuscripts had meant that only the well-to-do could afford them. Now that books could be produced in large numbers, however, printed volumes could be sold for much lower prices, making them available to those of lesser means for the first time. As Bussi remarked, it was possible for even the poorest to build a library of his own and for learning to become accessible to all. Excited by the prospect, some of those associated with presses began writing texts explicitly targeted at furthering the spread of knowledge. In 1483, for example, Fra Iacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–1520) published his Supplementum chronicarum. A sort of ‘bluffers’ guide’ to world history, this was expressly designed to make available to the masses knowledge which had previously been restricted only to the few.

As many observers recognised, this had a range of knock-on benefits. For some, the most important of these was permanence. According to the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1446–1513), printers could ‘confer eternity’ on whatever they produced. Since printing put more books into circulation, he reasoned, it would ensure that ancient texts were less likely to be lost, and it would crown modern authors with certain fame. Others believed that the ‘flood’ of new books would lead to moral enlightenment. There was some justification for this. Recent research into domestic life has revealed that books of hours were by far the most commonly owned texts; and, as Caroline Anderson has argued, the fact that these books were often kept in the camera (bedchamber/dayroom) suggests that they were read on a daily basis, including by women. It was hence only reasonable to assume that, as printing spread, so virtue would also grow. For the Franciscan friar Bernardino da Feltre (1439-94), God had shed ‘so much light on these most wretched and dark times’ through print that there was no longer any excuse for sin at all.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Others, for whom novelty and progress were far from synonymous, regarded printing with open hostility. Of these, none was more vehement than Filippo de Strata.

Like many of his contemporaries, he did not have any particular objection to books as physical objects. Although he is almost certain to have preferred manuscripts, he does not seem to have thought that printed works were, in themselves, unworthy of being read. Printers, however, were another matter. Much like his contemporary, the historian Marcantonio Sabellico (1436–1506), he reviled them as much for their ‘plebeian’ ways as for their foreign origins. To his mind, they were beggars and thieves who had no appetite for work but were always hungry for money. They had come to Italy, babbling in that ugly language of theirs, with no other goal than to put scribes out of a job. What was worse, they had no sense of propriety either. Drunk on strong wine and success, they were hawking books to every Tom, Dick and Harry. In doing so, they were not democratising learning — as Bussi and Foresti liked to believe — but debasing it. Whereas, in the past, the expense and scarcity of manuscripts had ensured that great care was always taken over the preparation of texts, the ease with which books could now be printed — coupled with the intense competition between presses — had led to all manner of rubbish being churned out. These days, Filippo argued, you could hardly open a volume without it being festooned with errors. This clearly did immense damage both to classical scholarship and to education. By putting such defective texts into the hands of the masses, he claimed, even those who could barely speak the vernacular would feel qualified to teach Latin. But since printers were interested only in making a quick buck off such ‘unlettered’ fools, they had no incentive to do any better. All that mattered was getting a new edition on the market as quickly as possible, irrespective of its quality.

For much the same reason, Filippo also believed that printing was a threat to public morality. If printers had sold nothing but religious works, it might not have been so bad; but because they were interested only in profit, they were trying to attract new readers by appealing to their baser instincts. All manner of bawdy and unsuitable volumes were being produced: from the torrid love poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, to the worst kind of modern filth. Given how cheaply such books were sold, it was inevitable that vice, rather than virtue, would flourish.

As an avowed champion of textual AI, it is more than a little sobering to observe how the skeptics of past technological innovations have not only been proven right, but proven right beyond their wildest imaginings.

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A True Soulsigma Fan

Or maybe he’s talking about Vibe Patrol?

As predictive as Vox’s SSH is, I have to admit, I am happy that he is on track to leave a significantly more profound legacy than that would offer. If you’re not paying attention to Vox Day, you are missing out on one of the most important minds of the last 100 years, hands down.

I expect the usual suspects are going to have a field day with this one… It’s kind of a pity they won’t be around to witness history’s eventual verdict.

On an unrelated note, the German edition of Probability Zero is now available in hardcover from Editions Alpines. This is not an AI translation; special thanks to Urs Hildebrandt who personally translated it from English into that most melodious of languages. Wahrscheinlichkeit Null… it just rolls beautifully off the tongue, doesn’t it!

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