Tag: Fandom Pulse

My Favorite Japanese Novels

In the 35 years since I graduated with an East Asian studies degree, I’ve read a considerable amount of Japanese literature. So, my little contribution to Fandom Pulse is a list of my 10 favorite novels, with the caveat that only one novel per author was allowed.

Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse.

But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet. Below are my favorite books by ten different Japanese authors translated into English, since I don’t read kanji, and a list of my ten favorite Japanese novels would amount to little more than an incomplete bibliography of Haruki Murakami.

Read the whole thing there. And yes, I’ve read Natsumi Soseki, Ryu Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Banana Yoshimoto, and all the other big names. This is a list of my favorite novels, not the technically best or most representative, or most important.

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Space Morons

Games Workshop tries to claim ownership of a concept that existed long before the company itself:

Games Workshop, the company that owns Warhammer, is attempting to shut down Jon Del Arroz’s Space Marine comic claiming he is infringing on the company’s trademark. In a post to X, Del Arroz, the co-owner and founder of Fandom Pulse, shared an email sent to crowdfunding website FundMyComic demanding Del Arroz’s The Emerald Array comic be removed from its website.

Fund My Comic’s Founder and operator Luke Stone informed Del Arroz via email that he has no plans to remove the comic or graphic novel from the site. He told Del Arroz, “At this time, the campaign will remain active on our platform. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that while the campaign may contain derivative works, it does not appear to infringe on any trademarks owned by the requesting party.”

It’s an absurd attempt to expand an already-questionable trademark. In fact, the trademark is so questionable that I suspect if Games Workshop were to take anyone to court, even someone infringing upon the protected space of “video computer games, computer software for playing games” it would find itself at risk of losing a trademark it probably should never have been awarded in the first place, just as the Arthur Conan Doyle estate lost its Sherlock Holmes trademark following a misguided attempt to prevent an author from “violating” it.

There are eight hours left in the campaign, so you can still back it if you haven’t already. And while it’s not an Arkhaven crowdfund, Arkhaven Comics will be publishing the retail editions.

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Arkhaven, The Legend, and Levon Cade

Fandom Pulse has an exclusive on Arkhaven Comics and Chuck Dixon getting the crew back together to turn Levon’s Trade, aka A Working Man starring Jason Statham, into a graphic novel.

Chuck Dixon wowed the world in early January when the trailer or A Working Man dropped, a new film based on his Levon Cade novels. Now, he’s partnering with Arkhaven Comics to adapt the first novel, Levon’s Trade into a graphic novel.

While Chuck Dixon is well known for his comic book work as a legendary creator of Bane in the Batman lore, and as one of if not the most prolific writers of all time, until Jasom Statham was announced as Levon Cade for the new film, A Working Man, many didn’t know that Dixon was also an accomplished novelist with several works, including a twelve-book series with Levon Cade.

The first book, Levon’s Trade boasts a 4.4 star average rating on Amazon with more than 700 reviews, a very popular installment for the author. A new review by Douglas Marolla calls the series “great” and highlights the character work Dixon put into not only Cade, but several of the supporting characters.

A Working Man has so much buzz already that comedians are incorporating the film into their routines, with poignant commentary on Jason Statham’s past roles combined with this one.

Arkhaven will announce a crowdfunding campaign for this and another much-anticipated Chuck Dixon project, but not until after the standard Hypergamouse books ship out to the backers.

A working man’s life is often hard.

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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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In Which I Agree with Larry Correia

Fandom Pulse quotes The International Lord of Hate’s thoughts on the use of AI in writing fiction. Or rather, the lack of utility thereof.

AI can produce a TON of vapid soulless shit, but hey, so can modern Disney! In fact, when the creator doesn’t give a shit about his art, not only does the audience feel it, the audience gets pissed off. So if you want to produce tons of unenthusiastic shit product and roll the dice hoping it somehow sticks and makes a buck, great. But if you actually give a shit about what you’re saying, then just fucking SAY IT.

The Baen Books author isn’t the only superstar to comment on the topic.

Vox Day is an epic fantasy author and AI music advocate despite writing and recording three Billboard Top 40 Club hits with his techno band in the 1990s. He told Fandom Pulse when we asked his thoughts, “The reason AI text is not a threat to authors the way AI music is a threat to musicians and AI art is a threat to artists is that the amount of vision required for a novel, or even a short story, is orders of magnitude beyond that required for a three-minute pop song or a single 1024 x 1024 image. That’s why a few words are a sufficient prompt for the song or the image, but not for even an obviously inferior short story. Unlike the other AI applications, I haven’t found the various text systems to be a useful tool for producing text of an acceptable quality.”

On tonight’s Darkstream – exclusive to UATV – I’m going to provide a sensory demonstration of what I mean by the way that AI is already a potential replacement for musicians and artists, but cannot even begin to replace authors.

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Fandom Imperialism

I bet it won’t take more than 18 months for Fandom Pulse to become the #1 site in comics journalism now that content machine John Trent has joined it on a full-time basis.

John Trent, the former EIC of Bounding Into Comics and That Park Place is now working full time and writing multiple articles a day for Fandom Pulse!

JDA is a formidable content creator in his own right, but John Trent isn’t merely next level, he is unparalleled in his ability to provide both quantity and quality in his relentless reporting. And unlike so many useless and converged so-called journalists purporting to cover the industry while ignoring the lager part of it, he gives equal time to the mainstream and the independents alike. If you haven’t subscribed to Fandom Pulse yet, you really owe it to yourself to do so. It is about to become a serious difference-maker.

In other culture war commentary, this comic is spot-on.

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The Pulse of Fandom

Now that Bounding Into Comics has collapsed into convergence, a new champion arises from the ashes: FANDOM PULSE! The editor-in-chief, Jon del Arroz, puts out a call for writers and other volunteers.

Fandom Pulse is looking for writers! We’re building a pop culture site that’s explicitly right wing to fight the culture war against the fake news of CBR, Bleeding Cool, IGN, and others. The key is going to be content, and we need writers to help us get to the point where we have enough to compete. If you can write clear, consistent work on pop culture at about 500 words an article, please let me know. We’d love to have you. Send an email to fandompulse@gmail.com

It’s certainly off to an interesting start.

Snyder told Entertainment Weekly that he got the idea for Rebel Moon as a student in the late ‘80s. Creating a one-line pitch, he settled on “a ragtag team of warriors from different backgrounds assembled to fight for a common cause — but piloting spaceships and wielding laser guns instead of World War II bombers.”

His wife Deborah Snyder further reinforces the notion that Rebel Moon is totally original when she told EW that “Mostly everything right now is based on a book or based on a game. It’s a remake, or it’s a sequel,” and added, “There are very few times you get the opportunity to do something that’s wholly original.”

Now, the overall story of Snyder’s film has little to do with the book Rebel Moon, which is essentially a 90’s military SF take on Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I haven’t given the movie a moment’s thought; I just assumed Snyder thought, correctly, that it was a cool SF title. However, based on the description, it’s pretty clear that both the title and the core conflict of the movie were, at the very least, somewhat influenced by the novel written by The Original Cyberpunk and me. Which is fine, of course. It would be bizarre and hypocritical to insist it is not fitting that a work so clearly derivative of an earlier work should subsequently serve as the source of another derivative itself.

The lady would appear to be protesting both unnecessarily and just a little too much. After all, if it’s a farming colony planet that is rebelling, why is the film named Rebel Moon?

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