Tag: books

The Daily Machiavelli

Having finished with their collective read of THE GUNS OF MARS, the subscribers of Castalia Library voted on the next Library work to be excerpted daily. The vote went as follows:

  • 16% Pensées
  • 23% History of Florence
  • 23% History of Freedom of Thought
  • 12% De Bello Gallico
  • 27% Discourses on Livy

And so we have begun the daily excerpting of Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius by Niccolò Machiavelli. Today features the introduction, so it’s not too late to join in and read along:

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome, but may also bring me some reward in the approbation of those who will kindly appreciate my efforts.

And if my poor talents, my little experience of the present and insufficient study of the past, should make the result of my labors defective and of little utility, I shall at least have shown the way to others, who will carry out my views with greater ability, eloquence, and judgment, so that if I do not merit praise, I ought at least not to incur censure.

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It’s Not Happening

Now George RR Martin can’t even write blog posts without help because he’s depressed.

George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his recent difficulties in his first personal blog post for almost six months.

“This year has been … stressful, to say the least,” he wrote in a post titled Better Late Than Never. “So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming. Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come.”

He explained that posts published on his website since February had been written by his assistants because he had continued to fall behind despite their help.

Martin, who turns 78 in September, also reflected on ageing; “getting old is no fun”, he wrote, although he added that the year had contained “amazing times” alongside its difficulties.

“I suppose that’s just life. Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”

Among the year’s highlights, Martin noted that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel based on his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, had received nine Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series.

His comments come amid continued speculation about The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth and penultimate novel in A Song of Ice and Fire. The book has been in progress since the publication of the fifth instalment, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011, and has become one of the most eagerly awaited novels in modern publishing. No publication date has been announced.

Yet another sound reason to support the Byron AI…

Because once he’s gone, there is no way whomever turns out to be his literary heir doesn’t sell off the rights to a corporation that will finish it.

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Why Castalia Library Matters

We can’t save all the books. But we can save some of them.

The driving force behind this destruction is what researchers call “model collapse.” When AI systems train on text generated by other AI systems, quality degrades with each generation, producing increasingly incoherent results. The internet has become so saturated with synthetic content that companies now actively seek pre-2022 printed books as the last uncontaminated reservoir of human-authored knowledge.

ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI training data, advertises on its website that “the world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf.” The company describes printed books as “curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate.” Pre-2022 publications are “structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,” the company states, referencing both AI-generated text and the growing practice of authors “poisoning” web content to sabotage scraping pipelines.

The industrial process of destruction

The mechanics of this operation are precise and troubling. Standard pallets of books hold 800 to 1,200 volumes. Buyers scale from pilot orders to 10,000 or more books per batch. Destructive scanners process 80 to 120 pages per minute after hydraulic cutting machines slice off book spines. The original books are then pulped and recycled.

According to court documents from the Anthropic case, the company’s “Project Panama” spent tens of millions of dollars on this exact pipeline, contracting with Datamation for scanning services. Booksellers have identified these bulk buyers through telltale signs: abnormal volume, subject-agnostic orders spanning history, botany, regional law, and German economics simultaneously, and total indifference to pricing. As one bookseller told 404 Media, “It’s not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders.”

Anthropic’s Tom Harvey, who previously helped create Google Books, oversaw the operation. One bookseller who has sold hundreds of books to suspected AI buyers expressed mixed feelings: “It benefits me financially… On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

The vanishing heritage

The most troubling aspect of this practice is what it means for rare and out-of-print books. Foreign-language volumes, low-circulation academic works, and antique texts with limited surviving copies face potential extinction. When an AI company purchases the last known physical copy of a rare book, scans it, and destroys the original, that volume ceases to exist in the physical world. It becomes data locked inside corporate servers — inaccessible to future scholars, collectors, or the public.

ISBNdb acknowledges the “optics problem” on its website, noting that “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.” The company promises strict nondisclosure agreements on every engagement, stating that “your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.” This secrecy means booksellers can only speculate about who is buying their inventory and for what purpose.

A legal framework that encourages destruction

Judge Alsup’s ruling explicitly validated the buy-scan-destroy pipeline, writing that “every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.” Because the digital copy was never shown, shared, or sold outside the company, the judge found this “clearly transformative” and therefore protected by fair use.

This reasoning effectively creates a legal incentive for destruction. If a company keeps the physical book, it must store it. By destroying the original, the company can argue it “replaced” the physical copy with a digital one. The ruling handed the entire AI industry a template, and companies now explicitly cite it.

Harvard University, partnering with Google and Microsoft, demonstrated that an alternative exists. The collaboration released nearly one million public-domain digitized books in 254 languages — no destruction required. Microsoft’s Burton Davis called starting with public-domain data “prudent,” noting that libraries hold “significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data.” That alternative track makes clear that labs have cleaner options. They simply choose not to take them.

We’re going to come up with a program to save and bind some of these rare books. They don’t have to be destroyed. What I’m thinking of is an “adopt a book” program that will permit people to fund the rebinding of a rare book in leather, after which they will receive that book or be recognized as the sponsor of that book in Castalia’s library. If we can just convince the AI companies to send us the pages instead of pulping them, this should be something doable.

In the meantime, you can help us create books that are going to outlive the AI companies engaging in this destruction.

And be sure to take notice of how this is being caused as a downstream consequence of copyright law…

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The End of the Boomer Cons

Not being a particularly social individual, I never really got conventions. I went to Minicon once because I had just published Rebel Moon and joined SFWA, and had been invited there. I loved CGDC before it was taken over by the marketing departments and you could still sit down and talk game design and development details for hours with Julian LeFay, John Romero, and Sid Meiers, but in general, I’ve never understood the appeal of consumer-related conventions. It appears the younger generations tend to agree:

For nearly its entire 39-year run, LibertyCon has sold out the same day registration opens. This year, it didn’t. Four days after badges went live, the convention posted an update fans aren’t used to seeing: “In a strange twist of events, there are still a few badges left for LibertyCon 39.”

That single sentence is a meaningful data point for a convention built the way LibertyCon is built. It’s capped by charter, historically at 750 attendees and more recently around 1,000, deliberately kept small so fans can actually sit down with guests rather than get lost in a crowd. It’s held every June in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it leans heavily on Baen Books as its backbone, with the “Baen Roadshow” as a recurring programming staple and a guest list built around Baen’s own stable: David Weber, Larry Correia, David Drake, Timothy Zahn, and others who’ve anchored the convention’s identity for decades. A convention with a hard attendance cap, a loyal fanbase, and one of the most reliable backfill mechanisms in the genre (publisher name recognition) not selling out immediately isn’t a small shift. It’s a convention that has weathered a lot, including the death of its own founder, Timothy “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo, and a last-minute venue change years ago, still selling out every single time until now.

The reason isn’t a mystery. Baen’s bench of marquee authors is aging, and there isn’t a wave of comparably famous younger names coming up behind them the way there was a decade ago. A convention that leans on its guest list to move tickets needs that list to keep refreshing, and when the same handful of names carry the show every year, the show ages right along with them. Older fans who built LibertyCon’s sellout streak for decades aren’t attending at the same rate they used to either, whether due to health, cost, or simply aging out of convention travel altogether. That’s not a knock on LibertyCon’s organizers, who by every account still run one of the best-managed conventions in the genre. It’s a structural problem no amount of good management fixes on its own.

It’s not a surprise that Baen has struggled post-Jim Baen. Most of the publishing industry is struggling; Castalia would be too if we had relied upon selling traditional hardcovers and paperbacks like everyone has done for decades.

But it’s still sad to see traditions dying, even if you understand the terrible choices that the johnny-come-latelies made thirty years ago that are finally coming home to roost. It’s not the political gatekeeping that has done them in, but it certainly assured their demise given the fact that the winds were against them. For some reason, the more difficult the environmental challenge, the more unreasonable people running these legacy organizations tend to become.

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SANS BEAUTY

In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.

Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.

What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.

Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.

Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.

SANS BEAUTY is available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook, and has already been sent out to the subscribers. An excerpt is available to read at Castalia Library.

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TRANSLATION: Zaragoza

Castalia House’s epic quest to translate the entirety of the historic Spanish Episodios Nacionales into the English language continues with the publication of the sixth book, Zaragoza, about the French siege of the Spanish city during the Peninsular War.

The sixth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — Zaragoza takes Gabriel Araceli into the most terrible siege in modern European history: the second French assault on the Aragonese capital, where sixty thousand civilians and soldiers held the ruins of their city against Napoleon’s marshals through two months of bombardment, starvation, plague, and hand-to-hand fighting in the cellars.

Gabriel arrives in Zaragoza half-starved and in rags, having escaped a French prisoner column in the company of Don Roque. They sleep among beggars in the shattered monastery of Santa Engracia and are taken in by Don José de Montoria, a proud Aragonese labrador of iron convictions and volcanic patriotism, who has given both his sons to the defence. The elder is already dead. The younger, Agustín, is a theology student whom the siege has transformed into a soldier and who is carrying on a desperate love affair with Mariquilla Candiola, the beautiful daughter of the most hated man in the city: el tío Candiola, a miser of Dickensian proportions whose house stands at the very edge of the French advance.

As the French tighten the noose, the novel compresses with the siege itself, from the open streets to the barricaded quarters, from the quarters to single houses defended room by room, from the houses to the tunnels where Spanish and French sappers dig toward each other in the dark. The city burns. The plague spreads. The dead lie unburied in the streets. Women carry ammunition under fire and friars take up muskets. And through it all, Gabriel watches the collision between Agustín’s love and his father’s honour, between the miser’s gold and the patriot’s sacrifice, between the claims of private tenderness and the needs of a city that will not surrender.

The book has already been delivered to the paid subscribers supporting Castalia’s translation efforts. You can read an excerpt from Zaragoza at Castalia Library.

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Top 10 Epic Fantasies

The initial response to the Castalia AI crowdfund campaign has been, in a word, excellent. The full team has been assembled; two members of the community who have already been working on related projects have both agreed to share what they’ve learned, all of which is fortuitously in line with our initial development document. Interestingly enough, one thing that we had calculated, and one of the team member is able to confirm, is that too much training is potentially as problematic as too little. So one factor that will be very important is deciding which of the training works to overweight, or in our terminology, to assign the gold standard.

We’ve chosen Epic Fantasy as our test genre for four reasons:

  • It is a relatively small genre.
  • It is a high-profile genre that everyone knows to some degree
  • It is a genre in which one of the team members is one of the few qualified experts
  • It is a genre in which AI assistance would be particularly valuable due to the length and complexity of the works

So what I’d be interested in hearing is your suggestions on what the top ten epic fantasy books would be. Not series, books. Remember, the focus here is on writing style, not worldbuilding, not plotting, and not characters per se. So the limits are one author, one book. You cannot list The Lord of the Rings as one of the ten and you cannot suggest both A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin as two of the ten.

With that in mind, please provide your list of top 10 epic fantasy novels.

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Disorganized Crime

Having caught the occasional glimpse of the younger Yakuza in their leisure hours back in the day, I was fascinated with the effect that the Exclusion Laws of 2010-2011 have had in almost eliminating the power of organized crime in Japan, although I do wonder how much of that was related to the rise of the Clown World-friendly Princes of the Yen that took place over the same period. In any event, the vacuum left behind was always going to be filled, which, of course, is exactly what the new book, TOKYO TOKURYU is about. However, it occurred to me that since few would necessarily recognize what tokuryū is, or why it even exists in the first place, a basic primer might be useful.

Tokuryū (匿流) is a term coined by Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) in 2024 to describe a new and growing form of loosely organized criminal groups that have emerged as an alternative to traditional yakuza organizations. The term combines the Japanese words tokumei (匿名, anonymous) and ryūdo (流動, fluid), reflecting the groups’ absence of hierarchy and their flexible, anonymous operations.

According to the National Police Agency (NPA), more than 10,000 people arrested between September 2021 and February 2023 are classified as tokuryū. Yasuhiro Tsuyuki, chief of the NPA, said shortly after the 2023 watch theft sentencing: “Such robberies committed in busy shopping streets in the city centre in daylight have reached unprecedented levels. The police nationwide need to cooperate on investigating quickly and effectively.”

In Fukuoka prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, police last month established a 100-member division to combat the growing tokuryū threat. The prefecture is a former yakuza stronghold.

Violent crime is rare in Japan, and a string of dozens of burglaries across the country from 2021 to 2023, one resulting in the death of a 90-year-old woman, shocked the country.

The burglaries are alleged to have been orchestrated by a Japanese group operating out of the Philippines. Nicknamed “Luffy” after a famous manga character used by one of its leaders on messaging apps, the gang also ran telephone scams and extorted Japanese businesspeople working in Manila. More than 30 of its members have been extradited to Japan, with a handful still detained in the Philippines. Among the members are former yakuza. Other tokuryū groups have formed alliances with traditional gangsters, and are suspected of sharing profits with them.

After continuous crackdowns on yakuza syndicates, their membership fell to 20,400 last year, from a peak of more than 180,000 in the 1960s, as the older generations found it harder to tempt young men with promises of easy money.

Stricter laws, including those targeting businesses with links to gangs that had once operated with near-impunity, have made a life of crime increasingly unappealing: yakuza members are forbidden from opening bank accounts, obtaining a credit card, taking out insurance policies or even signing a contract for a mobile phone.

If you’re interested in the post-Yakuza Japanese underworld, or if you like Higashino novels, give TOKYO TOKURYU a try. There will be more Inspector Toda novels coming out this year.

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The Introduction of Inspector Toda

Castalia House is introducing both a new imprint and a new series. Today marks the launch of KURO NOIR, also known as 黒書房, which is our line of books focusing on Japanese crime literature, including both English originals and original translations. We’re pleased to announce the Inspector Toda series, written by Masashi Sato, which introduces the detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in TOKYO TOKURYU.

TOKYO TOKURYU

When a retired widower is found beaten and stabbed in his home in one of Tokyo’s most exclusive old neighborhoods, Inspector Keisuke Toda has every reason to believe it’s just another in a series of home invasions targeting the elderly. The method appears to match. The victims are consistent. The cross-departmental task force investigating the crimes is satisfied that it is no different than the previous ones..

But Toda isn’t.

The first four robberies left their victims alive. The fifth left an elderly man dead on a tatami floor in a way that tells a different and more insidious story. As Toda’s team works the series alongside a separate investigation into a papa katsu ring exploiting teenage girls, a pattern begins to emerge in the architecture of both operations. The same anonymous recruitment pipelines. The same disposable teenage labor. The same invisible hierarchy.

And gradually, Toda begins to see what no one else on the task force has observed.

Written in the tradition of Keigo Higashino’s masterful procedurals, TOKYO TOKURYU is a novel about the difference between what a crime looks like and what it is, and what happens to the survivors when the truth finally emerges.

In addition to the publication of the first Inspector Toda novel, the second one, THE PLATINUM TRIBE, is now available for preorder and will be released on August 5th.

EXCERPT

He went home that evening at a reasonable hour for once. Asako had made nikujaga, and for the first time in a week the four of them sat down to dinner together. Sōta was talking about a baseball game at school. Yuki was quieter than usual, stealthily glancing at her phone in between bites until Asako finally told her to put it away.

“Something at school?” Toda asked.

Yuki shrugged. “A girl in my class got in trouble. She answered a job listing she found online. It was supposed to be easy work, like handing out flyers or something. They told her to send a photo of her student ID.”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“Yeah, another girl told her it was just a scam, so she stopped.”

Toda set down his chopsticks. “What kind of listing?”

“I don’t know. It just said ‘easy work, same-day payment. ¥30,000 for a few hours.’ It looked like a regular part-time job ad.”

“Where did she find it?”

“I don’t know. Some messaging app. I don’t remember which one. It’s not that unusual, Dad. People post stuff like that all the time.”

She said it matter-of-factly, the way a fifteen-year-old states something about the world she lives in that her parents don’t fully understand.

“Well, I hope you don’t answer anything like that. It sounds like one of the ways traffickers recruit young—”

“Keisuke!”

Asako broke in and interrupted him before he could say ‘prostitutes’.

“Ah, young people,” he shifted gears lamely.

Toda looked at Asako and nodded ruefully. The warning in her dark, beautiful eyes was perfectly clear. Not in front of the children!

He didn’t raise the subject again that evening. After dinner he sat in his chair in the living room and tried to read. The book was a collection of Matsumoto Seichō’s short crime fiction that he’d been working through slowly for the past two months, but tonight the sentences didn’t seem to want to connect to the next one. He found himself reading the same paragraph three times in a row and still couldn’t have told anyone what it was about.

Temporary. No fixed membership. Jobs posted on messaging apps. Kids recruited with the promise of easy money, asked for ID photos that became leverage. A girl in his daughter’s class had almost walked into it, whatever it was, and had been saved only because her friend recognized the trap.

He put the book down and stared at the wall. Somewhere between what Ōnishi had told him and what Yuki had mentioned at dinner, there was a shape he couldn’t quite see yet. The robberies were connected, somehow, but the people involved weren’t, necessarily. They were connected by a method that was being distributed, like a product, to whomever was willing to carry it out.

Toda didn’t know how to describe the situation. There wasn’t a word for it. But he was beginning to understand that his four cases were not a series of crimes in the way he’d originally believed them to be, crimes committed by a crew, or even two crews, working a territory. They seemed to be something more subtle, more insidious.

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The Zero Literature Campaign

We know about Clown World’s Zero History campaign. We can see signs of it everywhere from Fructidor to the Khmer Rouge. But it was also accompanied by a Zero Literature campaign. This is not just our imagination at work. You can still see it in action. But the campaign to disappear traditional literature with historical Western values began at least a century before the ALA was cancelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans.

The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her Little House on the Prairie novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954

I have no doubt that if Laura Ingalls Wilder had published a century before she did in a language other than English, we would never have heard of her. Both Benito Perez Galdos and Zenaide Fleuriot were much more significant in their native languages than Wilder was in English, and yet somehow, the English publishing world never saw fit to translate them despite producing dozens of editions of far less popular, far less marketable, and far less significant works.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop blindly supporting those things that the mainstream feeds you, and go out of your way to find those things and support those things that are in line with your values, and not the “core values” of things like the ALSC.

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