Tag: books

“Considerable Disdain for Him”

I am, and have been for decades, a fan of Tanith Lee. I absolutely adore Tanith Lee. Her tales of Paradys and the Flat Earth are solidly entrenched in my top ten fantasy series, and while I wasn’t unaware that her work was a major stylistic influence on Neil Gaiman, due to what I observed to be his unoriginal mediocrity, I simply wasn’t well-read enough in Gaiman’s work to realize that Gaiman wasn’t just heavily influenced by Tanith Lee, he appears to have done little more than steal her characters and world-building without attribution in lieu of creating anything himself, as one fan of Lee’s noted:

Neil Gaiman’s THE SANDMAN is a great comic book series. Gaiman modeled his series on Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH. But you wouldn’t know this, because Gaiman has never given her any credit. Despite the fact that the main character — a byronic, pale, otherworldly, deity-like character — is the prince of night and dreams. Despite the fact that every time people see art depicting Tanith Lee’s main character Azhrarn, they think it’s Morpheus from the Sandman. (How bad is this? When people see depictions of her character, they say SHE must have ripped HIM off.)

Despite the fact that the dream lord’s younger sibling is Death.

Despite the fact that other members of his family include Delusion, Delirium…. They are not gods but beings older than gods, and when the gods die, Dream, Death, Delusion, and Delirium will remain. This family of immortal, eternal, unchanging beings, who each embody an eternal abstraction starting with the letter D.

Someone else on the internet, noticing the similarities, flipped open the third book in Tanith Lee’s series to a random page, and lo and behold, there’s a description of a character who was clearly the inspiration for Gaiman’s Mazikeen. The prose, the characters, the narrative strategies, the mythology, the story structure, all of it: Gaiman found it all in Tanith Lee‘s writing and never gave her any credit.

He became rich and famous profiting from her ideas. People effused over his amazing imagination, when the ideas they praised him for were actually created by Tanith Lee. And, while he was building his name and fame, she was struggling. In the 1990s, toward the end of her life, she complained in an interview that magazines weren’t buying her stories anymore.

A simple “If you like The Sandman, you should really read Tanith Lee’s books!” from Neil Gaiman would have meant so much to her career. To the livelihood of a struggling, less-privileged writer, whose amazing imagination Gaiman was actively ripping off. People praised The Sandman comics for their depiction of gay and trans identities. But in the original material, Tanith Lee was far more progressive about lgbtq+ identities, and that was twenty years earlier.

I first read Tanith Lee’s book NIGHT’S MASTER (the first in the FLAT EARTH series) in maybe 2005, about 10 years after first reading The Sandman. I looked to see if Gaiman had credited her for “his” ideas; as far as I could tell, he never had. And for the subsequent 19 years, whenever I see a new Neil Gaiman interview, the first thing I do is ctrl-F to search to see if he mentioned Tanith Lee. And he never has, that I’ve seen.

I have no difficulty believing the accusations against him.

Because I know — KNOW — that he has felt entitled to take what he wants from a woman, without her permission, and without any acknowledgement of her contributions.

And, finally: If you loved Neil Gaiman’s stories, if you are heartbroken to learn the storyteller you loved is apparently an abuser, here is my suggestion: track down Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH books. Her prose is more exquisite and imaginative, her ideas more original, her empathy real.

Not only that, but a personal acquaintance of Lee, Liz Williams, points out that Lee herself believed Gaiman plagiarised her work and had “considerable disdain for him.”

Tanith was my friend, as many writers in the UK will attest, especially on the south coast. I did know this, because she told me. We were at a convention – IIRC Orbital 8, in 2008 – at which both Neil and Tanith were guests. She told me that she was trying to avoid him because he’d plagiarised a large chunk of her work: not just a bit, but entire paragraphs. She didn’t say which book it was from. And she had considerable disdain for him.

A well-read reader on r/neilgaimanuncovered confirmed the charge.

He basically stole Sandman from Tanith Lee’s “Tales of the Flat Earth“ and his “Snow, Glass, Apples” from her “Red as Blood” with zero credit whatsoever, never even a recommendation that others read her work (a major sign of insecurity and guilt, right there). He also stole Coraline from Clive Barker’s ”The Thief of Always.” He’s a fraud as well as a monster.

I never read Snow, Glass Apples but I do recall thinking its description sounded an awful lot like Red as Blood. All of his revised fairy tale stories struck me as very similar to Lee’s White as Snow, but again, I never bothered reading any of Gaiman’s short stories until very recently. And since I’ve never read Coraline or anything by Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware of the relationship between those two works either.

But it is very satisfying to see the literary world finally coming out and telling the public the obvious truth about Neil Gaiman’s mediocrity and total lack of creativity. He’s never been a great writer, he’s never been a great storyteller, he is instead, as Terry Pratchett suggested, “an incredible actor” playing the role of a great storyteller. In my opinion, these charges of stealing without attribution and plagiarism tend to further support my hypothesis that “Neil Gaiman, Bestselling Author” was a literary fraud manufactured by the much the same people who made L. Ron Hubbard a bestselling author.

The conclusion appears to be as apt as it is succinct. “He’s a fraud as well as a monster.”

So finally, we have the answer that we’ve suspected for months. Robert Rankin indicates that Terry Pratchett had more than an inkling that his Good Omens co-writer and supposed good friend was not “a very nice, approachable guy” but an actor hiding his true self.

“Terry told me he wished he’d never worked with him, but I never found out why.”

DISCUSS ON SG

Reading List 2024

I read 66 books to completion in 2024. The best novel was Before the Dawn by Toson Shimazaki, the best non-fiction book was a draw between Princes of the Yen by Richard Werner and Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami. The worst novel was an easy decision this year as John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was a long and tedious waddle through an extraordinarily unpleasant Gamma’s perspective. The best new-to-me author was Rika Ondu, as her Honeybees and Distant Thunder was very good indeed.

I’m hoping to actually write a few book reviews in 2025, starting with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami’s latest, which I’ve just finished.

The WoW Diary, John Staats
50 Years of Text Games, Aaron A. Reed
Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov
Shitamachi Scam, Michael Pronko
The Final Curtain, Keigo Higashino
Disintegration, Andrei Martyanov
The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami
Monster Hunter: Vendetta, Larry Correia
Monster Hunter: Nemesis, Larry Correia
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever, Jason Cordova
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, John Ringo
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners, John Ringo
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints, John Ringo
People From My Neighborhood, Hiromi Kawakami
Dragon Palace, Hiromi Kawakami
Practicing History, Barbara Tuchman
House of Assassins, Larry Correia
Destroyer of Worlds, Larry Correia
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
The Viceroys, Federico De Roberto
Beer in the Snooker Club, Waguih Galil
La Fleur de Illusion, Keigo Higashino
Princes of the Yen, Richard Werner
The Aosawa Murders, Riku Onda
Dappled by Sunlight, Riku Onda
Honeybees and Distant Thunder, Riku Onda
The Jack Vance Treasury, Jack Vance
How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Araminta Station, Jack Vance
Ecce and Old Earth, Jack Vance
Throy, Jack Vance
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
Death’s End, Cixin Liu
Shogun, James Clavell
Gai-Jin, James Clavell
Noble House, James Clavell
Gai-Jin, James Clavell
Tai-Pan, James Clavell
Disintegration, Andrei Martyanov
Margin of Victory, Douglas MacGregor
N.P.: a novel, Banana Yoshimoto
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe
The Last Yakuza, Jake Adelstein
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
The Speculative Short Fiction, John M. Ford
The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima
The Land of Blood and Honey, Martin van Creveld
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
Absolutely on Music, Haruki Murakami
The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, Matthew Carl Strecher
After Dark, Haruki Murakami
The Complete Stories, Evelyn Waugh
Newcomer, Keigo Higashino
Before the Dawn, Toson Shimazaki
Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 1, Christopher Ruocchio
Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 2, Christopher Ruocchio
Demon in White, Christopher Ruocchio
City of Refuge, Kenzo Kitakata
Invisible Helix , Kenzo Kitakata
The Silent Cry, Kenzaburo Oe

DISCUSS ON SG

Calling Out the Publishers

A New York Times article about Neil Gaiman’s first public response to his accusers draws some much-needed attention to the non-response from his various publishers:

HarperCollins, which has published many of his most notable works, and Marvel, the comic book publisher, have no new books forthcoming with Gaiman, according to representatives from the companies.

His literary agent at Writers House, which represents blockbuster authors like Dav Pilkey, Nora Roberts and Ally Condie, did not respond to requests for comment about whether the agency would continue to represent him. Norton, which published an illustrated edition of Gaiman’s “Norse Mythology” last November, did not respond when asked whether the company would publish Gaiman’s works in the future. DC Comics, which published his blockbuster comic book “The Sandman,” along with other works, declined to comment when asked whether DC would continue to publish him.

For some of the women who have accused Gaiman of misconduct, the muted responses from his publishers and collaborators are a bitter disappointment…

In an interview with The Times, Kendall described the “culture of secrecy” around Gaiman. “Neil’s works were his bait, and promotional events were his hunting ground,” she said. “As long as his publishers and professional collaborators remain silent, Neil will continue to have unrestricted access to vulnerable women.”

“The silence of the community around him — his fandom, his publishers — is loud and disturbing,” Stout said in an interview with The Times. “I’ve heard that it was an open secret that he was a predator, but that whisper network did not reach me.”

I think it is unfair, unreasonable, and wrong for anyone to fault the bookshops for ordering books that their customers come in and request. The books are published, they are in the system, and the whole purpose of the bookstore is to satisfy their customer’s preferences. And as one executive at a very large book distributor once told an SJW employee who was complaining that they were distributing Milo Yiannopoulos’s books: “seeing how we carry 50 different editions of Mein Kampf, where do you propose we draw the line? We’re a distributor, we’re not the Book Police.”

However, it is absolutely fair, reasonable, and correct for people to be holding the book publishers accountable. The publishers make it very clear that they stand for certain principles and oppose other principles; unlike Castalia, most of them even have mission statements that they claim defines their very purpose. And precisely none of those statements are in line with publishing an author who is quite credibly accused of having committed a series of rapes and sexual assaults over a period of more than 25 years.

When publishers are deplatforming and refusing to publish authors whose politics they don’t like, they really have absolutely no room for continuing to publish serial sexual assailants and sexual harassers simply because they approve of their politics. This isn’t something that is simply going to blow over and go away because the alleged crimes are too serious and the hypocrisy is too blatant.

We’ll be holding an early Arkhaven Nights tonight to discuss both the latest developments in #GaimanGate and the bankruptcy of Diamond, the comics distributor.

DISCUSS ON SG

The January Books

Castalia Cathedra #1: THE EVERLASTING MAN by G.K. Chesterton (Jan-Jul)

Castalia History #8: COMMENTARII DE BELLO GALLICO by G. Julius Caesar (Jan-Mar)

Castalia Library #32: THE OLD NORSE EDDA by Tamburn Bindery (Jan-Feb)

For more information about the newly announced Castalia Library and Castalia History books, please visit the Castalia Library substack. This is a very good time to start a subscription, as no catchup payments are necessary.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Self-Destruction of Brandon Sanderson

Fandom Pulse has chronicled Brandon Sanderson’s descent into ticket-taking and social justice convergence, but Sanderson has been creating some additional problems for his fiction writing as well, technical problems that no one but a better epic fantasy author is likely to notice.

Re: Brandon needs to be edited more. I assure you, I’m edited more now than I ever have been–so I don’t believe editing isn’t the issue some people are having. Tress and Sunlit, for example, were written not long ago, and are both quite tight as a narrative. Both were edited less than Stormlight 5. Writing speed isn’t the problem either, as the fastest I’ve ever been required to write was during the Gathering Storm / Way of Kings era, and those are books that are generally (by comparison) not talked about the same way as (say) Rhythm of War.

The issue is story scope expansion–Stormlight in particular has a LOT going on. I can see some people wishing for the tighter narratives of the first two books, but there are things I can do with this kind of story I couldn’t do with those. I like a variety, and this IS the story I want to tell here, despite being capable of doing it other ways. Every scene was one I wanted in the book, and sometimes I like to do different things, for different readers. I got the same complaints about the way I did the Bridge Four individual viewpoints in Oathbringer, for example. There were lots of suggestions I cut them during editorial and early reads, and I refused not because there is no validity to these ideas, but because this was the story I legitimately wanted to tell.

This is more than a little ironic, given the way in which Sanderson was brought in to fix a similar problem that the late Robert Jordan had created for himself, and especially in light of how George R. R. Martin has apparently facing the end of his literary career without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire for the very same self-indulgent reason that Sanderson gives for the way in which his readers have perceived a decline in the quality of his books.

The reason that Sanderson gives, story scope expansion, is correct, but it is too general for the average reader or writer to understand the true root of the problem. Now, this is just a surmise, because I have only read two Sanderson novels and part of another, and I regard him as the epitome of boring mediocrity when it comes to epic fantasy. I’d rather read The Sword of Shannara, the most incoherent of Erikson’s Malazan books, or anything by Joel Abercrombie than another chapter of Sanderson’s tedious meandering.

But if any Sanderson fans here would like to check, I am confident that if you count up the number of perspective characters he’s utilizing, you will find that they are increasing from book to book. Just as George Martin did before him, Sanderson has been expanding the scope of the story by introducing new perspective characters and promoting minor characters to perspective characters, and that means he has been getting distracted by tangents taking his focus away from the larger story. By doing so, he is running a very serious risk of not only rendering his story incoherent and unreadable, but impossible to finish in a manner that will be reasonably satisfying to the reader. If anyone would care to count up the number of perspective characters in each book and report them to me via email or on SG, I will update the post with the perspective character count by book. That should tell us how grave the problem is.

UPDATE: It will probably surprise no one here to learn that the diagnosis was correct. An SG reader provided a perspective character count for the Stormlight Archives, in which he bundled a few small group perspectives that appear in the last three books into one for the purposes of comparison. Anyhow, Sanderson has clearly committed the same technical blunder that Martin did in expanding the scope of his story.

  • SA1: 6
  • SA2: 6
  • SA3: 14
  • SA4: 14
  • SA5: 23

This is the sort of thing of which the average novelist or editor isn’t aware, because writing an epic, be it fantasy or science fiction, is a very, very different thing than writing a novel. An epic bears about the same relationship to a novel that a novel does to a short story or a novelette. Indeed, each chapter of A Throne of Bones and A Sea of Skulls, essentially functions as a novelette and many of them could be reasonably published as stand-alones without the average reader noticing it was part of a larger work.

I described the way in which story scope expansion creates the technical problem faced by Martin in a post last year.

Consider the POV breakdown of A Game of Thrones, the first book of ASOIAF. Eight perspective characters, with Ned accounting for 15 chapters and 18.3 percent of the focus. Only Ned was eliminated by the end of the book, so Martin entered the second book of the series with a very manageable seven characters. He adds three characters to reach 10, then two more in the third for 12, however, he only continues the stories of three of those 12 characters as he introduces 10 more in the fourth book. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Martin had divided up his increasingly out-of-control story amidst 18 perspective characters and entered The Winds of Winter with up to 30(!) potential perspective characters whose stories require at least some degree of resolution!

Dividing 300k words among thirty characters means devoting the equivalent of one novelette to each character’s perspective, while somehow trying to tie them all together in a coherent manner. While it’s theoretically possible, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish anything even close to that degree of literary difficulty. Some readers might find it interesting to know that in addition to predicting Martin’s inability to finish his series, last year I also pointed out that Brandon Sanderson would not be able to fix the technical problem with ASOIAF and bring it to a proper conclusion.

Given that Sanderson has blundered into the same problem that did in Martin’s series, it appears that my observation was correct. And it also tends to confirm my opinion that despite his massive sales success, Sanderson is not in my league as an author of epic fantasy; that may well sound arrogant, but it’s not as if the sample size of works that, while unfinished, exceed the length of The Lord of the Rings, are insufficient for a determinative comparison.

As any look at the forgotten bestsellers of 100 years ago will tell you, the best books are the ones that survive to be read by future generations, not those that sell best in their own day. And as Deng Xiaoping once said of the French Revolution, it’s just too soon for us to tell.

DISCUSS ON SG

Introducing Castalia Cathedra

G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th century… this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian.

After more than three years of requests, Castalia Library will be publishing a G.K. Chesterton book. However, we’re doing more than that, we’re using it to launch a new line of leatherbound Christian literature, beginning with The Everlasting Man. You can read more details about what we’re calling Castalia Cathedra at the Castalia Library substack, or you can dive right in and make sure that you receive the first edition of what we anticipate to be a very long and significant series.

DISCUSS ON SG

Always Mid, Now Gay

It turns out Brandon Sanderson wasn’t merely mediocre, it appears he has been a ticket-taker all along:

Brandon Sanderson was what many considered to be the last, best hope for the epic fantasy genre after his Mistborn series and finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time, but in recent years, the Tor Books author has gone woke, and fans say the current The Stormlight Archive novel, Wind and Truth has gone too far.

Many fans complained about a main plotline of a gay romance between two men, promoted in the book as if it is a positive lifestyle instead of the sexual sin that it is. Moreover, it’s noted the scenes are forced and out of place in a medieval fantasy setting where it feels ham-fisted and modern.

Wind and Truth comes after a blog post updating his stance on LGBTQ as Sanderson has gone from a devout Mormon who refused to include such evils in his books, to putting them as background characters in Stormlight Archives to acknowledge they exist, to actively promoting the sinful lifestyles.

Sanderson posted, saying, “My current stance is one of unequivocable support for LGBTQ+ rights. I support gay marriage. I support trans rights, the rights of non-binary people, and I support the rights of trans people to affirm their own identity with love and support. I support anti-discrimination legislation, and have voted consistently along these lines for the last fifteen years. I am marking the posting of this FAQ item, at the encouragement of several of my LGBTQ+ fans, with a sizable donation to the Utah Pride Center and another to The OUT Foundation.”

He continued saying this new stance would influence his books like The Stormlight Archives, saying, “I put LGBTQ+ people into my books, and will continue to do so. Not because I want to fulfill a quota, but because I genuinely believe that it is right for the characters–and is a good and important thing for me to be doing.”

At this point, I suspect it should be abundantly clear who the only modern heir to Tolkien in the epic fantasy genre could possibly be. Especially for any reader who honestly compares Arts of Dark and Light to Mistborn or The Stormlight Archives. It’s very, very unlikely that this will be recognized at any point in the next 30 or so years for obvious reasons, but that’s absolutely fine.

Once it goes into the public domain, it will rapidly surpass all of its copyright-protected inferiors.

DISCUSS ON SG

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Murakami has a new novel out. He gave an interview about it last month when it was released.

It’s hard to explain what The City and its Uncertain Walls is about. It opens with a guy whose job it is to read dreams. Those dreams are stored on shelves of a library. And that library exists in a town that is surrounded by a wall, with a Gatekeeper watching the one entry point. Oh, and each person has a shadow — one that can live independently from its…host? Source? Person?

It’s Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years. And it’s actually a re-visiting of a novella he wrote in 1980. In an interview conducted through a translator via email, he talked about his inspirations behind the new book, how he feels about getting older and his unyielding love for The Great Gatsby.

The City and its Uncertain Walls has its origins in a short story you wrote and published in 1980. The novel is also connected to a previous book you wrote, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. How do you feel when you’re revisiting work you wrote decades ago?

The 1980 novella I wrote, “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” is the only work of mine I haven’t allowed to be reprinted. It appeared in a magazine, but I didn’t let it be published in book format. The reason is that when it was published in the magazine, I felt it was still raw and immature. The theme I explored in that story was a very important one for me, and what I wrote about was, you might say, an inception point for me as a novelist. The problem was I lacked the requisite writing skills at the time to convey the story the way I thought I should. So I had decided that I would go back to it and do a complete rewrite once I had acquired the necessary experience and writing expertise.

In the meantime, however, other projects came up that I wanted to tackle, and some 40 years passed by (in the flash, it seemed) without me getting back to work on that story. By then I was in my 70s, and I thought maybe I don’t have all that much time remaining. So it’s a great relief to manage to finish writing this novel now, from a fresh perspective. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I will, of course, be writing a review of it once I finish it. I was very pleased to find a hardcover edition under the tree this morning.

DISCUSS ON SG

First Star Wars, Now Middle Earth

The Hellmouth is methodically destroying the intellectual property it manages to acquire. Star Wars is effectively dead, so now it’s abusing Middle Earth.

Pop culture critic Gary Buechler aka Nerdrotic shared his review for Warner Bros. latest release The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim by deeming it a “boring slog.”

In a recent video upload, Buechler makes it clear the film does indeed feature a girl boss in the form of Helm Hammerhand’s daughter, Hera, who has no name in Tolkien’s original work and is only mentioned in a single sentence.

He says, “They went with a girl boss.” After noting the movie is not as bad as The Rings of Power, he says, “What [Warner Bros.] did manage to do was girl boss better.”

He explains, “War of the Rohirrim is about some unnamed daughter who ends up being the impetus of the story leading around a bunch of incompetent men who should have listened to her in the first place.”

“What could have been the story centered on Helm Hammerhand and the tragic events that led to the naming of Helm’s Deep turned into something else,” he added.

It’s all so tedious. Tolkien wrote less about women, and had less interest in the female perspective, than nearly any author not writing gay space dinosaur porn. So, naturally, the Hellmouth sees the mere mention of one character having a daughter and promptly throws out everything in order to tell her story.

It’s a remarkable form of arrogant non-creativity to both a) require someone else’s story and then b) refuse to tell it as is. What’s fascinating is the way in which it clearly never occurs to the non-creators that absolutely no one is interested in their stories, which is why they require the rights to the IP in the first place.

Tolkien’s legacy would have been much better served by putting his work into the public domain upon his death. Or, at the very least, upon his son Christopher’s death, as Christopher Tolkien was an excellent steward of his father’s work.

DISCUSS ON SG

He’s Not Wrong

George R. R. Martin excoriates the Hellmouth’s mediocrities who inevitably make the works of others “their own” by ruining them.

Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin doubled down when Hollywood does an adaptation it should be a “faithful adaptation.” In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin stated, “Maybe I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who still thinks that when you adapt a work of art, a novel, a short story, you should do a faithful adaptation. It annoys me too much because they change things and I don’t think they generally improve them.”

“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it.”

He continued, “’The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

The truth is that subverting and ruining truth and beauty is one of the purposes of Hollywood. They’re greedy, to be sure, but their greed is less of a priority for them than their obligation to render what is true false and what is beautiful ugly. They are not only the enemies of God, they are the enemies of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

DISCUSS ON SG