Tag: books

The Rehabilitation of a Pedo

Not only does SFWA resolutely refuse to eject the pedophiles, past and present, convicted and unconvicted, from its midst, but the morally-depraved science fiction community is now even trying to rehabilitate the reputation of confirmed dead lesbian child-abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley, upon whose work the new Star Wars Acolyte is obviously based.

After her death, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter, Moira Greyland accused her not only of aiding and abetting her second husband in child molestation, but in herself molesting their daughter. Since Ms. Greyland made this accusations only after MZB was dead and could no longer defend herself or refute the charges, MZB had no opportunity to go to court and clear her name. Some authors have donated the money earned from sales to Bradley to various child-related charities. Given that she edited Breen’s book, Greek Love, and edited and contributed at least one article to his journal, The International Journal of Greek Love, she had to at least suspected his unhealthy interest in boys. “Greek love” is an old euphemism for male homosexuality, especially the relationship between an older man and a boy or youth. Many who knew her well said they had never seen or suspected anything untoward. However, others believed the accusations. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., the publisher of Bradley’s digital backlist, donated all the profits to the British charity Save the Children. Author Janni Lee Simner donated the money she earned from sales to MZB to the American anti-sexual assault organization Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network. Other writers chose to keep the money they earned…

She was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2000 posthumously.

After her death, she was cremated, and her ashes, appropriately enough were scattered on Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England.

Her influence as a writer will last so long as her stories are in print. Her influence as an editor continues to spread, as the writers she mentored are now mentoring a further generations of writers.

Remembering Marion Zimmer Bradley on Her Birthday, SCIFI.RADIO, 3 June 2024

If her influence as a writer continues to bear fruit such as Acolyte, she’ll be completely forgotten, and deservedly so, before the end of the decade. No one reads Darkover anymore and the market for lesbian pedophile space witches isn’t likely to survive Clown World’s collapse.

It’s fascinating to observe how the same freaks who believe and assiduously repeat obviously false information about those of whom they assiduously disapprove will openly deny and attempt to discredit the direct and convincing testimonial evidence of the actual victims of the criminals they are defending.

The dead lesbian pedo Marion Zimmer Bradley has never been disavowed by SFWA, is still recognized as a Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and there are at least two known pedophiles who are honored as SFWA Grand Masters. The real reason the SF community hates me to this day with a white hot passion has nothing to do with Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, my open contempt for their diversity pets, or even my ideological views. It’s because I published this book and they know their attempts to rehabilitate their fallen heroes will never, ever succeed.

There is a perfectly valid argument for separating the art from the artist in many cases. The problem, in the specific case of MZB, is that it is not possible to do so when so much of her art was steeped in her particular wickedness and written with the avowed objective of infecting society with it.

UPDATE: From Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see how many of these SF authors join the rehabilitation efforts going forward. And notice that there is no mention of me being one of the authors who has publicly condemned her.

A number of science fiction authors have publicly condemned Bradley. Among the first was John Scalzi, who within a day of the allegations being made public, described the allegations as “horrific”. Hugo Award winner Jim C. Hines wrote that Bradley’s positive effect on her readers and associates “makes the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley protecting a known child rapist and molesting her own daughter and others even more tragic.” G Willow Wilson, who along with Bradley is a fellow World Fantasy Award winner, said she was “speechless”. Diana L. Paxson, who collaborated with Bradley on a number of novels and who continued to write novels set in the Avalon Series after Bradley’s death, said that she was “shocked and appalled to read Moira Greyland’s posts about her mother… I never personally observed, nor had any reason to suspect, that (Bradley) was abusing either of her children.”

UPDATE: In response to this post, SciFi.radio has memory-holed the article. But the Internet remembers…

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Leather at NDM Express

If you’re not a Castalia Library or Castalia History subscriber, but you’re looking to pick up a single leather book, you can now do so at NDM Express. This includes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is now available in stock, as well as the second edition of THE MISSIONARIES.

Subscribers should continue to buy any additional leather books at the Arkhaven store, as they will be able to apply a subscriber’s discount there.

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MIDNIGHT’S WAR on Amazon

First, the gold-logo backer’s editions arrive at the warehouse today and the tracking numbers should start going out to the backers later this week. This was delayed from when we first finished them because we did a second round of revisions in order to correct some color profiles that had printed a little darker than we preferred. Second, both the hardcover and paperback retail editions are now available direct from the Arkhaven store at NDM Express and on Amazon. All of the editions are printed in the larger 8 x 10.88-inch size we introduced with MY SISTER SUPREMA and GHOST OF THE BADLANDS.

Third, regardless of where you happen to buy the book, or even if you’ve read the comic on Arktoons, it would be good to see some reviews for it up on Amazon.

Nothing beats a good book.

WELCOME TO THE MIDNIGHT WORLD

In the year 8466 of the cainite calendar, in the aftermath of a catastrophic global economic crisis, the vampire tribes came out of the shadows for the first time in more than 2,600 years and revealed themselves to an unsuspecting humanity. With near-complete control of the media, the national governments, the global financial system, and most of the major international institutions, humanity was helpless to resist the vampiric bid for power. A dark world order was established. The global monetary system was replaced with a new currency backed by human blood, and a global tax was introduced to ensure humanity’s new rulers that their endless thirst would never again go unslaked.

The Great Concord of Gomorrah was established to secure the rights and duties of Man and Vampire alike. Under the protection of the Concord, an astonishing array of famous, infamous, and downright notorious figures emerged from the annals of history and were revealed to have survived their apparent deaths through the Rites of Cain. But as an ocean of blood flowed freely through the new global economy, long-dormant vampire rivalries were reborn in new forms.

But not all humans submitted to the Great Concord, and more significantly, not all human blood proved to be palatable to Mankind’s cruel overlords. For some of the ancient legends turned out to be true. Drawing inspiration from the crusading orders of the Middle Ages, twelve young men joined together in a new military order, The Knights of Saint Michael and of the Catacombs of Rome. Armed with little more than their faith and blood that is poison to their enemies, The Knights of Saint Michael wage a desperate war against the vampire lords of the Midnight World.

UPDATE FROM ARKHAVEN SHIPPING:

You know the drill. It’s time to send out the paperback and hardcover omnibus Vol 1-6 to the backers and while we do have an email and the backer number, we have neither names nor mailing addresses. So what I need is for you to respond to the email that will be sent to you later today. The good news here is that we are upping our crowdfund game and it looks like we can integrate our shipping software directly into the crowdfund platform. So while we are still cleaning up the previous crowdfunds, going forward the delivery system should be top notch. That being said, for the time being we will need you to respond to the email sent to you in order to be sent your copy of Midnight’s War.

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Definitely on the List

If I ever go back to Japan, I will be sure to visit the Murakami Library.

Murakami’s writing is known for its combination of the surreal and the mundane, and architect Kengo Kuma designed the Haruki Murakami Library – situated on the campus of the writer’s alma mater – with this in mind. Natural materials are juxtaposed with flowing, futuristic lines to evoke a sense of stepping into the celebrated author’s world.

The Audio Room is where fans can listen to a selection of records once featured at Peter Cat, a Tokyo jazz bar Murakami ran with his wife before finding success as a writer. Next door in the Gallery visitors will find Murakami’s complete works in numerous languages, free to read inside the library.

Upstairs, the Lab offers a peek inside the small recording studio used by Murakami to produce his former radio show, alongside an area for listening to the author’s books in audio format. This floor also houses the Exhibition Room, which features limited-time exhibitions related to themes and motifs from Murakami’s writing, such as architecture and jazz.

The basement floor houses a recreation of the author’s home study and the Orange Cat Café.

One might be a bit wary of the librarian, however…

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An Accurate Review

In which a reviewer of fantasy books tries, and quite understandably fails, to finish reading the award-winning masterworks of one N.K. Jemisin:

I believe that the Broken Earth Trilogy specifically the fifth season which is the first book is so bad
that it’s essentially unreadable. I don’t remember a book that I’ve read that I believe personally is as bad as this one, and it shocks me that not only is this book extremely popular, but every single book in the trilogy won the Hugo award for the best book. This is a beloved series that many people claim
this is the best fantasy series of all time and I could not have a more contrary opinion to my feeling about
this book.

The fact that a third of this book was written in the second person is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing. The second person does not work when it comes to books, it works in some other forms of media, it works in video games, it works quite well in video games where you can picture yourself into the main character and people are talking to you in that way, but in a book it comes off so odd that it’s off-putting and difficult to suck in. There is a reason that virtually no books utilize the second person, and it’s not because they’re not as smart as NK Jemisin that they haven’t been able to pull it off, it’s because it doesn’t work.

I believed, constantly, as I read this book, that Jemisin was trying to be too smart and it came off as ridiculous. The second person is horrible, the way that she writes is atrocious. At times where she uses these italics and bolds and all caps within the text to really drive home a point, to really make this strong emphasis, you shouldn’t have to rely on that to make a really strong point. It comes off as kind of crazy.

I thought the twist that was in this book, and there is a major one, and I still don’t know if it actually occurs because I didn’t finish the book. I got 95 percent of the way through, and I said ‘I cannot bear to finish this book’ but I’m about 100 percent confident that there is a major twist that happens at the end of this book that is so obvious that it becomes one of the most telegraphed and poor choices for a twist that I’ve ever read. I can’t say what it is, but I can say that myself, and I suspect a great many readers figured out what it is within the first 50 or so pages. It’s not so much that the twist is ruined, you know. I’ve figured out twists before and it’s disappointing, it doesn’t happen a lot for me. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I’m oftentimes the last person to pick up on these things, and I really do like it that way. I prefer to be surprised, I don’t want to figure stuff out, I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I want to be, you know, the dummy that is the last one to get it, but man, it’s obvious.

The problem is that the way that the book is structured with this bouncing around in a timeline is ruined
because of the twist. It’s a really poor way to tell the story and the story would have been much preferable to be in a more cohesive, clear, linear fashion, and I don’t think that’s true for all books. I think some books that use time jumps and these different point of views and these things can be very very good, some of my favorite books utilize that, but I think the book sacrificed a great deal in quality to do this and it didn’t work. The twist did not achieve its stated goals.

Now when I’ve said this before, I heard a lot of people in the comments say ‘you’re supposed to figure it out.’ No, you’re not! That is a retrospective retelling of the events to try to justify what occurred in this book. Now the last thing I’ll say about a major reason that I disliked this book is the way that characters move on from traumatic events. I think it’s horrible, some horrible things happen in this book, and this book bills itself as being a tear-jerker and just very depressing and these bad things happen, and that
that’s true for the large part, but the characters have these horrible things happen and they reminisce about them for a moment, and they take it in, and then they just move on. That’s crazy, that’s not real life. When horrible things happen people sit with them for great amounts of time, and maybe in later books they reinvestigate this, but in this first book, man, it didn’t work well.

So I can’t say enough negative things about this book and I am absolutely floored at how popular this book and this book series are.

The secret is that the book and the book series are not even remotely popular. By her own admission, N… K… Jemisin can’t making a living off them. This is the problem with manufactured “success”. It simply isn’t real, and no amount of fakery and propping up pets, poster children, and other imposters is going to fool anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

And yes, the reviewer is correct. One of the cruelest things I have ever done is inspire the SFWA crowd to demolish their own awards by handing a Best Novel award or two to N… K… Yes, I knew “the indirect backlash and overcorrection” would happen. Yes, it was intentional. But no, I never imagined that they would do it THREE straight years in a row. That really exceeded my expectations.

The only thing that would have been funnier would have been if they’d actually followed through on their rhetoric and given an award to Chuck Tingle. But even that would have been less damaging than what they actually did.

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Clown World’s Best Intellectuals are Retarded

Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE Victor Davis Hanson. A lot. I own several of his books. I genuinely admire his work. But there is no way to escape the obvious. At the end of the day, VDH is totally fucking retarded about the decline and fall of a West that has already been infiltrated, subverted, subjugated, and functionally disarmed by the global satanists:

VDH: I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.

They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States; if 1 percent are engaged in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155-mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So we are not armed, and yet, our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military—never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of those numbers are the same … the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this third and fourth generation are not joining up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics—72 percent to 74 percent of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.

And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic, and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year.

Mr. Bluey: What do you suggest that societies today, including the United States, learn from those historical examples you gave us earlier in the interview to maybe mitigate some of the risks that we might find ourselves in in the future?

VDH: I would not put much confidence in international bodies or even in so-called close allies. The Spartans came all the way up to the Thebans and they heard the Macedonians, they turned right back. On the last day of the existence of Constantinople, they were looking out at the walls at the Hellespont thinking that Venetian galleys en masse would come up and save them.

So … I support NATO.

NATO? NATO is supposed to be the answer to the complete destruction of industrial capacity across the post-Christian West? That’s not a viable strategic analysis by a military historian, that’s Salvador Dali multiplied by Jackson Pollock on mushrooms.

I’ll definitely read his new book. It appears to be ominously relevant, particularly in light of VDH’s own prescriptions.

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Bad Literature as Predictive Model

We know that movies and television shows have been used as a revelation of the method by the wicked in order to avoid occult karma for their actions by openly confessing them in a plausibly deniable manner that the public will not believe. But six decades after it was written, this section from the dreary, Gamma-infested slog that is A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, written by an author who was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 11 years after his suicide, tends to strike the modern reader as ominously predictive of the current state of affairs in the increasingly degenerate nations ruled by the evil inverts of Clown World.

Dear Reader,

Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of man’s own making. —Addison

As I was wearing the soles of my desert boots down to a mere sliver of crepe rubber on the old flagstone banquettes of the French Quarter in my fevered attempt to wrest a living from an unthinking and uncaring society, I was hailed by a cherished old acquaintance (deviate). After a few minutes of conversation in which I established most easily my moral superiority over this degenerate, I found myself pondering once more the crises of our times. My mentality, uncontrollable and wanton as always, whispered to me a scheme so magnificent and daring that I shrank from the very thought of what I was hearing.

“Stop!” I cried imploringly to my god-like mind. “This is madness.” But still I listened to the counsel of my brain. It was offering me the opportunity to Save the World Through Degeneracy.

There on the worn stones of the Quarter I enlisted the aid of this wilted flower of a human in gathering his associates in foppery together behind a banner of brotherhood. Our first step will be to elect one of their number to some very high office—the presidency, if Fortuna spins us kindly. .Then they will infiltrate the military. As soldiers, they will all be so continually busy in fraternizing with one another, tailoring their uniforms to fit like sausage skins, inventing new and varied battle dress, giving cocktail parties, etc., that they will never have time for battle. The one whom we finally make Chief of Staff will want only to attend to his fashionable wardrobe, a wardrobe which, alternately, will permit him to be either Chief of Staff or debutante, as the desire strikes him. In seeing the success of their unified fellows here, perverts around the world will also band together to capture the military in their respective countries. In those reactionary countries in which the deviates seem to be having some trouble in gaining control, we will send aid to them as rebels to help them in toppling their governments.

When we have at last overthrown all existing governments, the world will enjoy not war but global orgies conducted with the utmost protocol and the most truly international spirit, for these people do transcend simple national differences. Their minds are on one goal; they are truly united; they think as one. None of the pederasts in power, of course, will be practical enough to know about such devices as bombs; these nuclear weapons would lie rotting in their vaults somewhere. From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e., the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could easily be straightened out in the men’s room of the redecorated United Nations. Ballets and Broadway musicals and entertainments of that sort will flourish everywhere and will probably make the common folk happier than did the grim, hostile, fascistic pronouncements of their former leaders.

Almost everyone else has had an opportunity to run the world. I cannot see why these people should not be given their chance. They have certainly been the underdog long enough. Their movement into power will be, in a sense, only a part of the global movement toward opportunity, justice, and equality for all. (For example, can you name one good, practicing transvestite in the Senate? No! These people have been without representation long enough. Their plight is a national, a global disgrace.)

Degeneracy, rather than signaling the downfall of a society, as it once did, will now signal peace for a troubled world. We must have new solutions to new problems. I shall act as a sort of mentor and guide for the movement, my not inconsiderable knowledge of world history, economics, religion, and political strategy acting as a reservoir, as it were, from which these people can draw rules of operational procedure.

Boethius himself played a somewhat similar role in degenerate Rome. As Chesterton has said of Boethius, “Thus he truly served as a guide, philosopher, and friend to many Christians; precisely because, while his own times were corrupt, his own culture was complete.”

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A Bold Beginning

Thanks to one of our international men of mystery, I’m able to bring you the opening remarks from the chairman of the 1966 Philadelphia symposium on the mathematical challenges to Neo-Darwinism that long preceded my own conclusive mathematical disproof of evolution by natural selection, regardless of the Dawkinsian “probably” that has recently been appended to what is now more formally known as the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow.

Ladies and gentlemen: I want to make just a few introductory remarks. I think it is the distin­guishing mark of all true biologists as opposed to mere sectarian specialists that they are deeply interested in the mechanism of evolution. As Dr. Kaplan has explained, the immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory. This dissatisfaction has been expressed from three quarters and is not only scientific.

First of all, religious: Where once the complaint was that evolution happened at all, now the complaint generally is that it happens without Divine motivation. Many of you will have read with incredulous horror the kind of pious bunk written by Teilhard de Chardin on this subject, if Professor Schultzenberger will excuse my putting it that way.

Then, there are philosophical or methodological objections to evolutionary theory. They have been very well voiced by Professor Karl Popper — that the current neo-Darwinian Theory has the methodological defect of explaining too much. It is too difficult to imagine or envisage an evolutionary episode which could not be explained by the formulae of neo-Darwinism.

Finally — and these are really, I think, the only objections that should concern us — there are objections made by fellow scien­tists who feel that, in the current theory, something is missing, and we look forward to hearing their formulation of what, precisely, is missing. These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them.

Sir Peter Medawar, National Institute for Medical Research, 24 April 1966

It’s rather remarkable that within ten years of these professional biologists publicly declaring that they must, no on account, make light of the mathematical objections to their pet theory, my high school biology teacher was telling me that the science was settled and no intelligent, educated person would even consider doubting the sacred Neo-Darwinian dogma.

How things change! Thanks to developments in genetic science, we now have conclusive mathematical evidence of the absolute impossibility of both Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutions. The hoary old dragon of Darwin has been slain, once and for all. It may not have stopped twitching yet, and the faithful are still hoping against hope for a revisionist third coming, but any impartial and sufficiently numerate observer will admit that it is clearly pining for the fjords.

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The Decline of the Literary West

Reader’s Digest is shutting down in the UK:

Reader’s Digest’s UK edition has closed down after 86 years due to ‘financial pressures, as the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief shares a touching tribute. In an honest and heartfelt tribute, the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said ‘the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape’.

The closure comes 14 years after it fell into administration because of a £125m pension fund deficit.

Founded in the the US in 1922, Reader’s Digest – whose motto was ‘Articles of enduring interest’ – was first published in the UK in 1938. Back in 2000 Reader’s Digest UK was selling more than one million copies a month.

I loved Reader’s Digest. My grandparents were subscribers, and whenever I visited them I would read several of those thick little magazines a day. Laughter the Best Medicine was all right, but I preferred the more subtle humor to be found in Life in These United States. And the abridged novels it contained often provided exposure to interesting authors to be explored more fully in the the future.

But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society.

With more than 3 million subscribers in the USA, the original magazine should be around for a while. But the failure of the once-powerful UK edition is a good reminder of the vagaries of time. Yesterday’s success not only doesn’t guarantee success today, it often plants the seeds for tomorrow’s failure.

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