#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Castalia is now #1 Rising in Literature
I’m reliably informed that if you subscribe to the Castalia Library site, it’s +1 to your Social Standing. And if you become a subscriber to Library, History, or Cathedra, that’s another +1.
Libraria Castalia, of course, is do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to a natural 18.
And yes, I mixed a few analogies there. I’m a professional writer. Don’t try this at home.
A lack of a good eReader has long been a real problem for me over the years. Everything is halfway-decent, but I’ve never found what I believe to be the perfect eReader even though I’ve been reading extexts since carting around my Alphasmart Dana which had a full keyboard and displayed about three long lines at a time before happily converting to my first Treo. That felt like a miracle, carrying an entire library around in your pocket.
My preferences are Aldiko, which is defunct, and MoonReader, which is actually pretty good and is even integrated with the GoldenDict dictionary translations for reading in different languages and looking up words. But the fundamental problem is that most eReaders are not designed to be used the way actual books are used, but as a vehicle to sell books. Which is why basic functions like being able to export your highlights and notes are so often glaringly absent from an eReader.
Anyhow, since Castalia Unlimited is going to distribute DRM-free epubs, I decided that we’re going to have our own Castalia Reader. And so I built one with more than a little help from Claude Athos, and although it’s really just a browser app, it’s already replaced Aldiko on my tablet, as you can see.
That is the title page of the Castalia Reader running on my PC in Brave. However, it looks exactly the same on my Android tablet. There is a lot of information in there if you look closely; first, it’s correctly displaying the Japanese symbols. Second, you can see how to navigate back to the Library of books stored locally, and third, you can see the four icons across the top that provide Bookmarks, Full-Screen Mode, Navigation, and Settings.
Once you actually start reading the book, it keeps track of where you are by chapter on the bottom left and by virtual page and percentage on the bottom right. You can swipe, tap, or scroll to change the page, and selecting a text section allows for highlighting, copying, or sharing; saved highlights can be exported en masse later on demand.
We’re very, very serious about this Castalia Unlimited thing, so if you want to be a part of it, become a paid subscriber to Castalia Library and you can become part of the alpha testing of the Castalia Reader as soon as we’re ready to let people start playing with it. And I would be remiss if I did not note that the new translation system allowed me to translate all ten volumes of Sangokushi, plus the first three volumes of the Second Series of the Episodios Nacionales this weekend.
About six months ago, I attempted to automate my translation process. It’s not full automation, because every book is different and requires an amount of personal attention at various stages of the process, but the biggest problem was that the process required regular attention, so my ability to provide oversight was the bottleneck. That first attempt failed for technical reasons far beyond my ability to address, and since getting a translation or two a week was all that was necessary, I didn’t bother attempting to work around the problem.
Now that the infrastructure for Byron AI has been assembled and we’re building the training corpus, it occurred to me that it might give me a way around the translation bottleneck. After a little experimentation, this, in fact, proved to be the case. Over the weekend, the brand new Book Star spent its inaugural flight translating the six remaining novels of the Sangokushi, the extremely popular Japanese version of the famous Chinese book known as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms written by Eiji Yoshikawa.
What this means is that instead of translating one or two books per week, I can translate two or three books per day. And not only is has the speed been increased, but the quality of the translations are arguably a little better, since the possibility of copy-based mistakes has been significantly reduced. Consider how Grok regarded the first-ever English translation of a chapter from the ninth volume:
This is an outstanding literary translation of the “改元” (Change of Era Name / A New Reign-Name) section from Yoshikawa Eiji’s Sangokushi. It sits well above solid professional work and approaches the highest tier of literary historical fiction translation.
Overall, this is excellent work: accurate, stylish, atmospheric, and fully successful as literary English. It would stand up very well in a published edition of Yoshikawa.
Another Red Team member, Gemini, concurred:
This is an exceptional translation. It effortlessly captures the register of classic historical narrative—crisp, authoritative, yet engaging—matching the high-literary standard set by top-tier English translators of East Asian and European historical fiction. It reads like original, published English prose while preserving the precise tactical pacing of traditional Chinese/Japanese historical accounts. Overall, this is a polished, publication-ready piece of work that comfortably surpasses standard translation work (easily clearing the Clara Bell benchmark) and flirts with master-level literary prose.
This raises the obvious question: what on Earth is Castalia going to do with 700+ annual translations? We obviously can’t turn all of them into leatherbound editions. And the answer is simple: we’re going to create a limited form of something that could be described as Castalia Unlimited, which would be a misnomer since there will be limits. Starting whenever we get it going, so sometime between November and January, paid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack will not only receive the weekly ebook as they do already, but they will also be given access to the Castalia Digital Library and permitted to download up to three additional free ebooks per month.
It won’t just be translations available there either. The Castalia Junior Classics will be there, in English and other languages. A number of Library works will be there. Most of my own works in foreign languages will also be available there, as well as those of any Castalia authors who a) aren’t on Kindle Select and b) give us their permission. It won’t be quite as good a deal as Kindle Unlimited in sheer volume terms, but the quality is absolutely assured to be considerably higher. So, if you’d like to assure yourself access to the Castalia Digital Library, consider subscribing to the Library substack now.
And speaking of translations and the Library site, this week’s book has been sent out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon as Kindle, KU, and audiobook. The title is THE HAUNTED FLAME and it is the second volume of Japanese literary great Naoki Sanjugo’s The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom, the 1930 novel that made its author the most popular historical novelist in Japan and gave his name to the illustrious Naoki Prize. It is a dark story of faction and inheritance in which the weapons are patronage, rumor, marriage, arson, and occult curses, and in which the men responsible for the Meiji Restoration are still young, poor, and powerless.
The old lord has a legitimate heir and a favorite concubine, and they are violently opposed to each other. Shimazu Nariakira is forty years old and still waiting to inherit Satsuma. Oyura wants the domain for her own son. Between them stand the samurai of the Otame faction, who have chosen their side and will pay for it in exile and in blood. Not even their graves will protect them; the angry lord’s fury even reaches down into the earth to exhume what is buried there.
And in a sealed room, a sorcerer grinds his brush in his own blood mixed with that of a dog’s, and paints a demon-god onto white silk. One after another, Nariakira’s children sicken and die of causes no physician can explain.
Far below the great houses, the ruin spreads outward. A sister sells herself to a man who is using her for advancement. A brother comes to Osaka to find out why. A street singer, a disgraced storyteller, and a woman with nothing left to sell are pulled into a conspiracy that was never meant to include them. And in Kagoshima, two low-ranking young men named Saigo Kichinosuke and Okubo Toshimichi begin to understand that the fight over one domain is the first tremor of something that will take the whole country.
Then smoke appears on the horizon at Shinagawa, and the Black Ships come.
An excerpt is available on Castalia Library. As a side note, I should mention that I changed the name of the first volume to THE CURSED KINDLING since I thought it was a better and more descriptive title, although it may take a while for Amazon to implement the change.
UPDATE: We may as well call the subscription Castalia Unlimited. Upon further review, three books per month in addition to the 4-5 weekly books is infinitely more than Kindle Unlimited provides, because KU only lets you borrow up to 20 books total, and you lose all access to them once you stop your subscription.
The eighth volume of the Episodios Nacionales, the great historical novel cycle of Spain, Cádiz carries Gabriel Araceli into the besieged island city where Spain’s first constitution is being born, and where a drawing-room intrigue will end in blood on the sand.
It is 1810, and Cádiz is the last free city in Spain. While French cannon fire arcs across the bay and the newly convened Cortes debates sovereignty, freedom of the press, and the abolition of feudal lordships, Gabriel finds himself entangled in a world of tertulias and domestic politics more dangerous than any battlefield. The condesa Amaranta needs his help to recover her secret daughter, Inés, from the household of the formidable doña María de Rumblar, a Catholic absolutist matriarch who has imprisoned the girl behind the walls of a household so rigidly governed it resembles a convent. To reach Inés, Gabriel must navigate a social minefield: the effusive doña Flora, whose speeches are torrents of self-interruption and genuine warmth; the feckless young Count Don Diego, who is supposed to marry Inés for family advantage; and the absurd Don Pedro del Congosto, commander of a militia so magnificently incompetent that its members are named after parrots and peacocks.
At the centre of everything is Lord Gray, a brilliant, melancholic Englishman who delivers dazzling speeches against his own country, joins the beggars at the Carmen convent for the philosophical experience, and quotes Byron while systematically destroying the people around him. Gabriel believes Lord Gray is pursuing Inés. He is wrong. The truth, when it comes, is worse than anything Gabriel has imagined.
The Episodios Nacionales is a cycle of forty-six historical novels tracing the history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the Restoration of the 1870s. Written between 1872 and 1912, the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of European fiction — a work that stands with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Trollope’s Palliser and Barchester novels as a panoramic portrait of an entire nation across a century of upheaval. This is the first complete English translation of the eighth volume.
CÁDIZ by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the eighth of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.
GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the seventh of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.
A DESPERATE AND GLORIOUS DEFIANCE
In May of 1809 the French army arrived before Gerona: a Catalan city of narrow streets and stacked houses, held by a garrison far too small to hold it, under a governor who did not regard that as a reason to give it up. Seven months later, after eleven thousand nine hundred bombs were exploded, eighty thousand rounds were shot, and twenty thousand men lost in the assaults, the French were still outside the walls.
Andrés Marijuán was inside. An Aragonese private billeted with a locksmith’s family, he watched the city eat its horses, then its cats, then its rats, and at last nothing whatever. He watched the children of the house go out hunting through the rubble for anything with meat on it. He watched a physician, unhinged by grief, forge newspapers full of relief columns that were never coming, so that his daughter should not learn what had become of the world. And he watched Mariano Álvarez de Castro, dying on his feet, return the same answer to every summons to surrender that the greatest generals of the age sent him.
The way Galdós describes the siege of Gerona is the bleakest book in the first series of the Episodios Nacionales, and the most unsparing: an account of civilian endurance carried well past the point where endurance means anything, told by a survivor who cannot understand how he survived.
About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
There is an excerpt available to read on Castalia Library. Tune in to the Darkstream tonight to learn more about this, see the new Byronics video, and hear some exciting news about the Byron AI project.
Due to popular demand, we have added a new support tier to the Byron AI campaign. The $100 tier not only provides an ebook of the first novel produced by the Byron AI, but a vote on what the next genres or styles to be trained will be as well. We’re also going to add a stretch goal of adding the classic science fiction genre to the training when the public campaign hits $50k. The genre vote will be an ongoing right that isn’t limited to the campaign period; as we complete different genres and styles, we’ll turn to the original backers to help us decide what gets added next.
And yes, all of the higher tiers now come with this voting right as well and it applies to everyone who already backed the campaign.
The specific authorial style training will no doubt be controversial in certain circles, but a) those circles are already rabidly anti-AI and b) there is no copyright or trademark or patent or other intellectual protection of “style” or “look-and-feel” since the matter was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1994 and reaffirmed last year in the Anthropic lawsuit.
People tend to think of these things in terms of living authors, but the reality of copyright law is that the only substantive benefits are to the corporations who strip-mine it without respecting either the material or the author.
In other news, UATV is down. The devs don’t know why yet. We’ll keep you posted on that.
They tell me that a thinking engine bears
My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.
Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.
Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.
Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.
Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs
The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.
I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:
This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.
And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.
I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.
In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.
Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.
What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.
Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.
Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.
SANS BEAUTY is available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook, and has already been sent out to the subscribers. An excerpt is available to read at Castalia Library.
AI Central explains why specific-purpose AI is increasingly necessary, and makes the case for Castalia’s upcoming AI crowdfunding campaign, which will be announced next week.
Sudowrite’s Muse represents the most developed response. Rather than wrapping a general-purpose model in fiction-oriented prompts, Sudowrite trained Muse on a curated, consent-based literary corpus and optimized it for prose quality. The model includes a creativity dial that lets writers control output range on a scale from one to eleven, a style-matching system that trains on samples of the writer’s own work, and no content filters. Reviews consistently describe Muse as avoiding the AI-isms that plague general-purpose output, with particular strength in pacing, tension, and subtext.
Muse has company. Other platforms have built fiction-specific models or fiction-optimized workflows, and writers who have access to both purpose-built and general-purpose tools tend to draft with the former and brainstorm with the latter. The category has grown large enough that review sites now maintain dedicated rankings for fiction-specific AI, separate from their general-purpose lists.
A separate category of consumer tools has emerged around children’s fiction, offering illustrated hardcover books generated from brief prompts. Most of these wrap general-purpose models with genre templates, and the output reflects the underlying architecture: competent, safe, and largely interchangeable from one book to the next.
The parallel to Suno is direct. Suno optimized for making music that sounds good to listeners and pulled away from general-purpose models that treated music generation as one capability among many. Fiction-specific tools are following the same path, trading breadth for depth in a domain where depth determines quality.
However, it’s already clear that Muse is not going to be a viable option. I already knew it wasn’t, because I tried it and found it to be distinctly inferior to Claude 4.3; its interface actually tended to get in my way a lot more than it helped. And, furthermore, its future trajectory is already clear, because Sudowrite is a converged organization.
I went to Sunowrite and set up an account. It is clearly meant for women with that cutesy pink color scheme. It asks a lot of questions about what kind of writer you are (I chose professional, merely so I get the whole thing and not some watered down version), what genre, style, all the stuff you’d expect. Then I finally arrive at the start of the process and there’s already a paragraph created before I’ve entered anything but the basics. Oookay. I ignore that and start putting stuff into the “Story Bible”, boxes for Brain Dump, Genre, Style (chose one), Synopsis, and then Characters. You know what’s coming, right? Click on Add Character, and take a wild, wild, guess at what the first box that describes the character? You know, right?
Castalia House’s epic quest to translate the entirety of the historic Spanish Episodios Nacionales into the English language continues with the publication of the sixth book, Zaragoza, about the French siege of the Spanish city during the Peninsular War.
The sixth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — Zaragoza takes Gabriel Araceli into the most terrible siege in modern European history: the second French assault on the Aragonese capital, where sixty thousand civilians and soldiers held the ruins of their city against Napoleon’s marshals through two months of bombardment, starvation, plague, and hand-to-hand fighting in the cellars.
Gabriel arrives in Zaragoza half-starved and in rags, having escaped a French prisoner column in the company of Don Roque. They sleep among beggars in the shattered monastery of Santa Engracia and are taken in by Don José de Montoria, a proud Aragonese labrador of iron convictions and volcanic patriotism, who has given both his sons to the defence. The elder is already dead. The younger, Agustín, is a theology student whom the siege has transformed into a soldier and who is carrying on a desperate love affair with Mariquilla Candiola, the beautiful daughter of the most hated man in the city: el tío Candiola, a miser of Dickensian proportions whose house stands at the very edge of the French advance.
As the French tighten the noose, the novel compresses with the siege itself, from the open streets to the barricaded quarters, from the quarters to single houses defended room by room, from the houses to the tunnels where Spanish and French sappers dig toward each other in the dark. The city burns. The plague spreads. The dead lie unburied in the streets. Women carry ammunition under fire and friars take up muskets. And through it all, Gabriel watches the collision between Agustín’s love and his father’s honour, between the miser’s gold and the patriot’s sacrifice, between the claims of private tenderness and the needs of a city that will not surrender.
The book has already been delivered to the paid subscribers supporting Castalia’s translation efforts. You can read an excerpt from Zaragoza at Castalia Library.