Tag: books

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Shadow Cannot Maintain

The Dark Herald explains why the IP holders of the D&D property are destroying the appeal of the Drow, and even more so, the character of the Drow renegade, Drizzt Do’Urden

The problem is that Drizzt was intriguing to D&D players because he was the only good member of a race that was well-known for being unspeakably evil. You hated running into even a single Drow if you were in a low-level campaign.

It was the fundamental dichotomy of his character that drew people to him. A child of the spider goddess who followed a path of light was somebody you wanted to find out more about.

What made him choose the life of a complete outcast? A traitor to be tortured and murdered by his own people but hated and feared by all else because he was a member of that race. His character archetype is that of the Renegade Hero* and it is their rebellion that fascinates an audience.

The problem is that retards like the people who write for Screenrant are so wrapped up in their Delulu Land paradigm that they can’t be made to understand that turning the Drow into just a bunch of subterranean indigenous people with BLACK skin and cultural differences that white colonizers from Greyhawk or the Wherever Realms can’t acknowledge as being valid utterly destroys the character of Drizzt.

It’s his rebellion against the fundamental evil of his own race that drew his audience to him. His evil race is the very foundation of his character. Take that away from him and he’s just some loner.

We all know that the shadow cannot create. But we’re learning that it cannot even successfully maintain what it holds. It inevitably destroys everything it touches over time.

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Based Books are Inevitable

Hans Schantz considers how the decline of mainstream publishing is producing increasingly based independent books on Fandom Pulse:

Mainstream publishing, once the gatekeeper of culture and ideas, is teetering under the weight of its own inefficiencies, ideological rigidities, and disconnect from audience demand. As it falters, a new breed of independent based creators — unburdened by institutional constraints and in tune with their audiences — stands ready to shape the future of culture through a broad-based and decentralized funding and distribution ecosystem.

Hobbled by ideological conformity, bureaucratic inefficiency, and a disconnect from readers, mainstream publishing survives only on revenue from their backlist and from celebrity authors. Elle Griffin observes:

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

Based creators are poised to thrive in this challenging media ecosystem. Using alternate platforms, they bypass the gatekeepers, fund their projects, and pool their fanbases to enhance their reach and to connect with new fans and readers. They offer authentic entertainment and uplifting stories to readers tired of propaganda and cultural programming. They work in a decentralized fashion that bypasses gatekeepers and connects directly to fans and readers.

All of which is observably true. There’s more, so be sure to read the whole thing. It’s also worth pointing out that the holiday edition of the Based Book Sale is running through tomorrow, December 3rd.

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Thanksgiving Sale Last Day

SATURDAY UPDATE: Today is the final day of the sale. Since three more titles have sold out since Thursday, and since there are only 8 3 copies of the Library edition of A THRONE OF BONES I and A THRONE OF BONES II left, we’ve added three more Libraria titles to the sale.

At a 60 percent discount, you can pick up all three for just $100 more than the retail price of a single volume. Today only. For more details and updates, visit the Castalia Library substack.

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Thanksgiving Sale: Libraria Edition

The Thanksgiving Sale 2024 has gone incredibly well, so much so that four of the Library books we put on sale this week are now completely sold out. So, we’ve decided to put all seven of the LIBRARIA editions of those same seven books on sale, for subscribers and non-subscribers alike, for $200, which is 60 percent off the retail price. This is an excellent opportunity for Library subscribers to pick up a copy or two if they’re curious about the various differences between the two editions, and, of course, there are few finer gifts available in that price range than a Libraria book with its Italian goatskin and 22k gold cover stampings.

The Thanksgiving Sale will end tomorrow, November 30th, at midnight. Limited stocks are available, especially for the following Library titles:

UPDATE: NDM Express is also having a Thanksgiving sale, including three Landmark Thucydides with minor issues.

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The Endpapers of Empire

As Castalia Shipping reminds us that WAR AND PEACE is starting to ship out from the warehouse and flexes its new pallet jack, Castalia Library has both revealed the unique endpapers for THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM Volume One as well as shown off the newly bound-and-warehouse-bound STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS.

The HYPERGAMOUSE campaign is within sight of its third stretch goal and John C. Wright has published the first book in his 12-book Star Quest series, Space Pirates of Andromeda. You can also watch the recent Arkhaven Nights in which we discussed his new book.

Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old — here you will hear wonders told!

Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.

Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!

Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!

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The Question of a Christian Library

Over on the Castalia Library substack, we’re taking a poll about the possibility of launching a new Christian-themed subscription in 2025. We’re well aware of the various pros and cons; the details concerning what we’re contemplating are spelled out over there. So, if you’d be kind enough to let us know if it’s potentially of interest to you, and if so, what books you’d like to see us produce, please share your metaphorical two cents with us.

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