Five-time Nebula winner Greg Bear died November 19, a week after heart surgery from which he never awoke. A CT scan showed stroke damage was caused to many parts of the brain by clots that had been hiding in a false lumen of the anterior artery to the brain ever since an earlier surgery eight years ago. After a review of the possible outcomes by the medical team, and following the wishes expressed in his advance directive, Bear was taken off life support and died two hours later.
He wasn’t a major talent or a SF icon, but he was a legitimate author who represented the last gasp of mainstream science fiction being founded in actual science. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t particularly like the three or four books of his that I read, but his passing is indicative of an era that is observably in the process of ending.
Contra my previous post on the subject, the November-December book, #19 in the Castalia Library subscription, is THE LAWDOG FILES by Lawdog. This is actually two books in one, because it contains both THE LAWDOG FILES and THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES. And consequently, this means THE ARTS OF WAR, featuring an introduction by Alex Macris, will be the January-February book, #20 in the subscription.
I’m sorry for the confusion, but somehow I forgot that we’ve already printed the interiors of LAWDOG and so we can get it shipped sooner than we can ship THE ARTS. The site store has already been updated accordingly. But if, for whatever reason, you a) subscribed in the week between November 5 and November 12, and b) do not want LAWDOG, please email me and let me know which of the previously released books you would like instead.
Also, if you’re on Gab, please note that we’ve established a Library account there which you can follow for regular updates and announcements.
A critter well known to us in our town twisted off one evening and decided to add Attempted Murder to his curriculum vitae by hitting his lady du jour in the head a couple of times with a hatchet. Not one to leave a job half done, he dragged her out to the lake, wired her up to a cinderblock, and shoved her off into the water. Wonder of wonders, she survived. Even bigger wonder, she came into town and filed charges on her homicidal boyfriend. I had been out on a date and wandered back into town about the time that the search was really getting wound up. I’d no sooner walked through the door of the office when the sheriff hit me with three conflicting orders on where to go, one of which would require asbestos underoos. I decided that going back home to change out of my date clothes would be counterproductive, so I was digging through my locker trying to find my spare set of armor when the call came in. One of our local merchants had spotted the critter climbing in the back window of an abandoned building used for storage. Since the other two deputies were on the far side of the county, the sheriff made a posse of me and a luckless Highway Patrol Trooper who had come in for a coffee refill, and we went tear-arsing off to Downtown Bugscuffle. The abandoned building in question had, at one time, been a fairly swanky department store positioned on the prize end of Main Street. However, in the intervening hundred years or so, the entire block had fallen into disuse and disrepair, leaving the once-grand old building standing all alone, used only for storing various and sundry stuff that needed storing by the locals.
For those of you who don’t know how to search a large building with only three people, it’s really quite simple. One officer, whom we’ll call “the sheriff,” stands on one corner watching the front of the building and the west side. The second officer, or “random DPS trooper,” stands at the opposite corner of the building, watching the back of the building and the east side. The third officer, being the bravest and most handsome of the three, goes inside with the idea of flushing the critter out a window where he can be spotted by one of the other two and, hopefully, arrested.
Three guesses who got to go inside, and the first two don’t count. Let me tell you, that place was darker than the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and stacked floor-to-ceiling with shelves. On those shelves were the collected knick-knacks of 20 years of Main Street stores. And not a lightbulb anywhere.
There I was, with a snubbie .357, a five-cell Maglight, and a Handi-Talkie, and only two hands. About the fourth time I tried to answer the sheriff’s “Have you got him yet?” radio call while trying to cover a suspicious patch of darkness with the .357 and juggling the Mag-Lite, I stopped in the feeble light of the moon shining down through a hole in the ceiling to make a few adjustments.
I was occupied with trying to figure out which I needed more, the Mag-lite or the Handi-talkie, when the SOB decided to jump me. I’m here to tell you, folks, things went rodeo from there. He lunged out of a shadow and tried to grab for my throat, and me, reacting totally out of instinct, I whacked him a good one across the forehead with the Maglight.
Bulb, batteries, and assorted electronic parts arced gracefully into the darkness. The critter took one step back and jumped at me again.
Things were not looking good in Dogville.
I held the snubbie back with my right hand, trying to keep it away from the critter’s grasp, and I tried to stiff-arm him away with my left when I stepped onto what was later found to be a D-cell battery from my Maglight.
Down I went. And the alleged aspiring axe murderer landed on top of me. Hoo boy. The gloves really came off then. We rolled around on the cold cement. I was hitting him in the head with the butt of my revolver and giving him elbow smashes to the jaw and brachial plexus, knee strikes, you name it, the whole enchilada. And he kept grabbing at my throat.
Finally, we rolled into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the bastard had a knife!
Folks, I hate knives. No, I really hate knives. He was on top of me, and he had to weigh three-hundred pounds, and that damn knife was coming down at me in slow motion at just about the same time the barrel of my snubbie rammed up under his chin.
I squeezed off two rounds.
The .357 magnum is a powerful round. Two of them, fired in quick succession, sufficed to blow the electronic brains and assorted stuffing of the Animatronic Life-Like Talking Santa Claus that formerly belonged to the local Thriftway halfway to Dodge City.
You don’t want to know what a couple of .357 rounds will do to hydraulics.
sigh
“The Good Shoot”, THE LAWDOG FILES, Castalia Library #19
The November-December January-February book for the Castalia Library subscription is THE ARTS OF WAR, featuring an introduction by Alexander Macris, a game designer who attended West Point. And yes, it will contain Sun Tzu, but more importantly, it will include works of major military history significance with which you are almost certainly unfamiliar, such as Frontinus, Vegetius, Maurice, and others.
As our ace proofreader noted after completing his read-through and cleanup of Sextus Frontinus:
It really bothers me that I was never taught works like this. I read Sun Tzu, Mushashi, and other Asians on the art of war. But Frontinus and these others are our heritage, and I never even heard of them until now, and that’s wrong. Think about how cool history class would have been if we had read even snippets of these books.
Arts of Dark and Light readers may wish to note that it is the works of Frontinus to which Marcus Valerius repeatedly refers throughout the series. In my opinion, THE ARTS OF WAR is about as close to a must-read as the Castalia Library is ever likely to feature, and I highly recommend subscribing to the Library if you have not already done so.
In other Library-related news:
The November-December subscription book is THE LAWDOG FILES.
The Annual Castalia Library subscription now includes a complimentary edition of DISCOURSES by Machiavelli. Current subscribers who renew their subscription may substitute the Library edition of their choice so long as it is in stock. Subscribers who wish to pay by wire transfer instead of credit card should email me directly for payment information.
The Annual Libraria Castalia subscription now includes a copy of THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante. Current subscribers who renew or upgrade their subscription may substitute the Libraria/Library edition of their choice so long as it is in stock. Subscribers who wish to pay by wire transfer instead of credit card should email me directly for payment information.
The next books scheduled to ship are a) Vols. 1-6 of the leather Castalia Library Junior Classics later this month and b) A THRONE OF BONES Vols I and II on December 16. There are still 23 Junior Classic sets available.
We are currently in communication with a major European author concerning the production of a leather-bound line of his works. This may or may not be done under the Castalia Library imprint.
A major step forward concerning the Swiss bindery was completed yesterday, as we received an important approval from the relevant government authority.
The MIDNIGHT’S WAR crowdfund will include a leatherbound edition of the omnibus.
We are currently focused on getting all four books of the INCERTO set by NN Taleb into production.
Avoid Like the Plague is my lowest rating, I’ve only given it two other times, and it takes a lot to get it. A production really has to work for it before I’m willing to put my ultimate seal of disapproval on it. I mean you got to dig deep and put your back to the wheel before I stamp that label on something. A show must do everything it can to earn it.
And this one did just that.
Throughout ten hours of runtime this travesty never let up in its determination to win my abject hatred for every aspect of its very existence.
It consistently fails on so many levels that you can’t help but be fascinated by its relentless incompetence.
This show is absolutely, and in all ways, the exact opposite of what J.R.R. Tolkien achieved with his life’s work.
There have been other attempts to subvert Tolkien. Writers who at the core of their work were trying to write an editorial reply that would somehow disprove Truth to be found in the works of men like J.R.R. Tolkien.
George RR Martin set out to invert the tropes that were established in the Lord of Rings, and it ended in the most hilarious series of failures of all time. At this point Martin is undoubtedly hoping he can run out the clock before he has to display the completeness of his artistic bankruptcy.
A better example is His Dark Materials. Phillip Pullman set out to create an atheist Chronicles of Narnia. The Golden Compass has been frequently remade in films and TV. It ends in debacle every time. Read John C. Wright’s review if you want a complete evisceration by a writer who leaves me in the dust.
But none of them come close to equaling the magnitude of the disaster that is, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. These attempts to present the Lie as the Truth always fail like this.
Convergence always destroys an organization’s ability to perform its primary function. And while many an organization has been converged, Amazon Studios was born in convergence. It was never going to be capable of providing entertainment, or of transforming any literature into the video medium in a way that would appeal to the book’s fans.
The September-October Castalia Library book is SKIN IN THE GAME by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is an excellent work, second only to ANTIFRAGILE in my opinion. Subscribers will also be able to purchase the fourth book in the leather INCERTO collection, FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS, at the subscription price. All four books are being designed to work together as a set, in the mode of the three Aristotle books.
A few notes concerning Castalia Library.
A THRONE OF BONES I and II are currently scheduled to ship on 16 December from the bindery. We are attempting to get them moved up on the schedule; this is yet another reminder, as if any were needed, that we would really like to get these things under our control.
If you no longer subscribe to Castalia Library, you are not eligible for the discounted subscribers price. We would like to avoid issuing new discount codes for each book, but if the discounts continue to be used by ex-subscribers, we will have to do so.
The leather JUNIOR CLASSICS VOLS. 1-6 are complete. We’re going to confirm addresses next week, then get them out. We have 2-3 goatskin as well as an unknown number of cowhide sets remaining, and they will be made available to those who wish to buy them soon.
A dry washcloth will suffice to remove the extraneous gold foil speckling on ETHICS and will not harm the leather. We’re looking into what happened there.
EXCERPT: This book, while standalone, is a continuation of the Incerto collection, which is a combination of a) practical discussions, b) philosophical tales, and c) scientific and analytical commentary on the problems of randomness, and how to live, eat, sleep, argue, fight, befriend, work, have fun, and make decisions under uncertainty. While accessible to a broad group of readers, don’t be fooled: the Incerto is an essay, not a popularization of works done elsewhere in boring form (leaving aside the Incerto’s technical companion).
Skin in the Game is about four topics in one: a) uncertainty and the reliability of knowledge (both practical and scientific, assuming there is a difference), or in less polite words bull**t detection, b) symmetry in human aff airs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world. That these four cannot be disentangled is something that is obvious when one has . . . skin in the game. It is not just that skin in the game is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management: skin in the game is necessary to understand the world.
First, it is bull***t identification and filtering, that is, the difference between theory and practice, cosmetic and true expertise, and academia (in the bad sense of the word) and the real world. To emit a Yogiber-rism, in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.
Second, it is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it. Just as you should treat others in the way you’d like to be treated, you would like to share the responsibility for events without unfairness and inequity. If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences. In case you are giving economic views:
Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.
Third, the book is about how much information one should practically share with others, what a used car salesman should— or shouldn’t— tell you about the vehicle on which you are about to spend a large segment of your savings.
Fourth, it is about rationality and the test of time. Rationality in the real world isn’t about what makes sense to your New Yorker journalist or some psychologist using naive first-order models, but something vastly deeper and statistical, linked to your own survival.
The Dark Herald manfully suffers through the fourth episode of DEM RANGZ so you don’t have to. The least you can do is read through the whole thing, which you really have to do in order to grasp the full magnitude of the self-immolatory incompetence of the Amazon Studios team.
The smelting guild member is giving an incendiary speech about illegal elf immigrants sucking up their jobs and I’m not kidding in the slightest. It’s a “Dey tuuk r’ jubs” thing. The crowd is getting pretty worked up about these wet ears who work harder, never sleep, never need retirement benefits because they are immortal, and will soon storm the borders… Wait a minute. What borders? Númenor is an island and there is exactly one elf on it, and she would very much like to leave.
And just a reminder. What made the Men of Númenor come to resent the Elves was their immortality, (not their willingness to do the jobs Númenoreans wouldn’t). They wanted to be immortal themselves. The Men of Númenor had pretty long life spans too, one hundred years old was just hitting middle-aged maturity so far as the *Númenoreans were concerned. Which made this desire a bit petty.
Chancellor (gack) Ar-Pharazôn arrives and steals the guild master’s thunder by giving a populist speech that allays the crowd’s fears and gets them chanting his name in the media-approved Alt Right fashion.
Well, now we know the form of the destructor. In the legendarium, he was known as Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. He seized the throne by forcing his first cousin Míriel into a marriage with him against her will. In Tolkien’s world, she was a tragic figure rather than an annoying one. Ar-Pharazôn himself led a war against Sauron. Scattered his army of Orcs and took Sauron back to Númenor in chains. He was the kind of guy you would have hired Yul Brynner to play.
Even though, his later actions directly lead to the destruction of their beloved and beautiful homeland, Elendil’s surviving Númenorians erected a giant pillar as a monument to Ar-Pharazôn in Minas Arnor to honor his great victory over Sauron. When Sauron’s forces captured Minas Arnor the first thing he did, was to have the pillar destroyed.
Ar-Pharazôn was an Adonis. An Alpha’s Alpha who was ultimately brought to ruin by his pride and his own iron will.
In this version he’s Trump.
What were you expecting? Something good and/or original? These guys were trained by JJ Abrams.
They just can’t stop telling the same non-story again and again and again and again. Trump has been out of office for two years, and yet they’re still obsessed with him. Then again, their other stock bad guy, Adolf Hitler, has been dead for nearly 80 years and that hasn’t caused them to give it a rest, so this may only be the beginning of the trend.
On the plus side, Amazon is inadvertently making a strong case for why women have no place in government, be it democracy, republic, or monarchy.
Karen-Galadriel forces her way into the manager’s office to give the queen a piece of her mind, she has once again exchanged her resting bitch face for her active bitch face. The queen is as ever, unmoved by it.
The Elf Warrior Princess vociferously demands that Queen Míriel, on Galadriel’s, say so and nothing else, go to war out of the blue and invade the Southlands. She is to then put Not-Sauron, (a castaway hobo and bar room brawler, whose claim to the throne is based solely on the Southlands royal sigil he is wearing on a hunk of driftwood hanging on a piece of string around his neck) on the fucking throne of the Southlands. Which incidentally hasn’t had a throne for a hundred years or so.
I suppose this is their version of Aragorn begging King Théoden to send the Riders of Rohan to Gondor.
Míriel rejects this idea due to the fact that is fundamentally retarded. Karen-Galadriel demands to speak to the manager’s manager and orders Míriel to give her an audience with her father, the king. Míriel remains unmoved by Galadriel’s bitch-face.
Nope my mistake, she is moved enough to throw Galadriel in the clink.
I got to say it, I’m starting to warm to Míriel.
Now, what sort of person imagines that a foreigner should be able to simply show up in a country and demand that its rulers put their entire military forces at their disposal in order to invade a sovereign country to which neither the foreigner nor the rulers have any connection? What sort of person…
Sometimes you don’t even need to check Early Life On Wikipedia. And apparently, sometimes you don’t even need to know the name. Karen-Galadriel is bad enough. But Karen-Galadriel-Neocon?
To call this show an abomination and an insult to the legacy of Tolkien would be too kind. It’s also an insult to human intelligence.
It’s easy to understand why the Prometheans hate Tolkien so much and why they want to destroy his legacy. He knew. He absolutely knew. He knew about them, their evil, and the source of that evil, as evidenced by the Dark Herald’s review of the third episode of The Rangz:
The Men who sided with the Valar during the War of Wrath got a nice off-the-cuffo from the gods. An island kingdom flowing with bounty and whatnot. And the Men were happy. For a while. However, a division rose up; there were those who remained loyal to the Valar and excepted Iluvater’s gift of death, they thought Elves were super cool too. But the vast majority of the Númenorians resented the Elves’ immortality and wanted to be immortal themselves.
Sauron was captured by the Númenororians and was imprisoned but then like an evil Joseph worked his way up to becoming the high advisor to the king. A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality. Finally, the last king of Númenor launched an invasion of Valinor to steal immortality. Iluvatar Himself intervened and destroyed the entire fleet of Men by opening a chasm in the sea. Then Númenor itself was sunk beneath the waves during a night of fire and whatever that will cost a lot to CG. The Elf Faithful escaped under the leadership of Elendil, who became their king and founded Gondor.
Read this sentence again: A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality.
Fascinating, is it not, that a high fantasy writer could foresee today’s transhuman global technocrats in the 1940s? It’s because their goals are no different than they were back before the dawn of recorded human history: to be like God.
You would have to have had the hubris of Morgoth himself to take on this project.
As a writer, I would have been terrified of it. If the producers had come to me to finish the Unfinished Tales by Tolkien plus some original pastiche based on the Appendixes, I would have told them. “Look, I’ll require two years prep time before I write word one. I’ll need to completely immerse myself in Tolkien’s work to the exclusion of all else. Then I have to spend a lot of time with Tom Shippey and other scholars, plus a Catholic priest with three doctorates who is really into JRR’s work. And at the end of the day, it still won’t be Tolkien, just so you know.”
Who would take this on? Bad Reboot that’s who.
The inarticulate slaughterer of every franchise where they press diseased foot is their bread and butter. Their mode of operation is now predictably obvious. Being completely incapable of creativity themselves, they select anything at all that might have an audience, invade and metastasize, then give it a Bad Reboot treatment. This consists of a Feminist Heroine’s Journey combined with a bunch of mystery boxes to lure foolish audiences along. Be sure to break the bank on flashy effects scenes.
I spent some time in sales, so I can see what Jar Jar Abrams’s school of non-writing is. It is sales technique disguised as writing. That’s it. That is all that the Abrams Mystery Box school really is. It’s just a hook with nothing attached to the hook but the next hook. It’s just one long sales pitch trying to keep you watching despite the fact that there is in fact nothing to watch.
Let me assure you now, there is nothing to watch here.
There is, however, quite a bit to read. And you should read the whole thing. After which, you should congratulate yourself for not adding to the “record numbers” that Amazon claims to be achieving.
So anyway, we get to see Commander Galadriel the Warrior Princess take up her brother’s quest to find Sauron. Like every feminist heroine, her primary obstacle is disbelief. Her MEN don’t believe in her quest to find Sauron. This is fundamentally stupid because it’s based on the belief that he died of old age which is kind of hard for an immortal to do.
So, they go to some Ice Fortress of ice, (Geode makes a guest appearance) and she kills an ice troll single-handedly, (second step of the Feminist Heroine’s Journey is now in the bag). She find Sauron’s mark thus proving Galadriel was right all along, but her men quit on her anyway. So, she is forced to turn back and report to Gil-Gilad.
Let me be clear about this, in a really bad show, Karen-Galadriel is the worst thing in it. Morfydd Clark is horrendously miscast. I’ve seen her act but only in Little Wounded Bird roles.
We meet Neil Patrick Harris Elrond. It’s an absolutely cringe scene as they declare their platonic love for each other. In the Legendarium, he’s her son-in-law. Here, he’s obviously gay. Elrond attempts to mansplain things to Galadriel who shoots him down as she’s supposed to in the Feminist Heroine’s Journey. She then gets some leaf crown as an award from Gil-Gilad. He then declares her recon team the greatest heroes in all of elf-kind so they get the super big prize. A one-way ticket back to Valinor.
Oh. What. The. Fuck?
Okay, after the War of Wrath all the elves had the option of going back to Valinor… EXCEPT GALADRIEL! If you know anything at all about Valinor then you know she can’t go there.
Galadriel was specifically prohibited from returning by the gods of Middle Earth themselves.
That door was completely closed to her until she refused the offer of the One Ring by Frodo. Only then was she allowed to “…diminish. And go into the west. And remain Galadriel.”
Just to state this one more time. Galadriel could not fucking go to *Valinor.
All of this nonsense has inspired me to set a goal of finishing and releasing the complete A SEA OF SKULLS in electronic form before the end of the year, with the print edition to follow once a few rounds of typos have been identified and corrected. This is doable; just last night I finished Theuderic’s second-to-last chapter.
They watched the Amazon Abomination so you didn’t have to subject yourself to it.
I got 18 minutes in before I had to switch it off. The writing is so awful and cliched that at points I thought I was having a stroke. I love Tolkien and I hope Amazon loses a fortune for what they have done because this really isn’t good entertainment.
It genuinely felt like a parody. Tolkien reimagined by Human Resources Equality and Diversity branch.
Why describe the entire episode? It was cr@p anyway.
Oh lawdee dem rangz
I’ve loved everything The Lord of the Rings for decades now but I had trouble getting through the first episode of The Rings of Power.
I tried to start the lord of the rings trilogy last night (for no reason at all). i got the best sleep i had in months.
The diverse cast is encouraging to me, but Tolkien would have wanted it to address the pressing social issues of our time such as climate change and vaccine hesitancy.. let’s wait and see before passing judgement.
Black elves, black hobbitses, and black dwarfs. Checkmate, racists!
