#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Howard Andrew Jones, a fantasy author for Baen Books well known for this Chronicles of Hanuvar series, has passed away, as reported by his close associate Sean Korsgaard.
More details at Fandom Pulse.
Also, director David Lynch died at the age of 78.
It’s really fascinating to see how the manufactured “creative talents” who are inevitably mediocrities falsely proclaimed as geniuses, are prone to committing shameless and easily proven acts of plagiarism. Such as, just to give one example, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Robert Zimmerman:
Beginning with his first album, which contained “House of the Risin’ Sun,” Dylan showed a penchant for lifting other performers’ work. At the time the album was recorded, fellow performer Dave Van Ronk was preparing his own version of the song. Dylan knew this; Van Ronk had even asked him not to record the song before he got his version out, but Dylan went ahead anyway, even using Van Ronk’s arrangement.
Charges of plagiarism only started gaining traction against Dylan around 2003. Around that time, with the Internet having made it easy to directly compare music from different sources, people started to notice how much of Dylan’s work sounded like other people’s stuff.
The melody from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for example, comes from a 19th-century spiritual called “No More Auction Block.” His 1962 song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” turned out to have been lifted wholesale from folk singer Len Chandler. Lyrics from the 2003 album Love and Theft were line-for-line copies from the autobiography of Japanese author Junichi Saga.
In 2006, he released Modern Times, which lifted passages from Classical poetry, 19th-century Confederate verse, and a blues song from 1940. Dylan won two Grammies for the album.
The plagiarism didn’t stop with the music. While much of what Dylan lifted from others without attribution was already in the public domain, and whatever wasn’t got reworked enough to count as Fair Use under copyright law, Dylan’s autobiography includes several passages lifted from novels and plays, and even from early-’60s issues of Time.
JRR Tolkien had these satanic frauds pegged from the start.
The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.
I am, and have been for decades, a fan of Tanith Lee. I absolutely adore Tanith Lee. Her tales of Paradys and the Flat Earth are solidly entrenched in my top ten fantasy series, and while I wasn’t unaware that her work was a major stylistic influence on Neil Gaiman, due to what I observed to be his unoriginal mediocrity, I simply wasn’t well-read enough in Gaiman’s work to realize that Gaiman wasn’t just heavily influenced by Tanith Lee, he appears to have done little more than steal her characters and world-building without attribution in lieu of creating anything himself, as one fan of Lee’s noted:
Neil Gaiman’s THE SANDMAN is a great comic book series. Gaiman modeled his series on Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH. But you wouldn’t know this, because Gaiman has never given her any credit. Despite the fact that the main character — a byronic, pale, otherworldly, deity-like character — is the prince of night and dreams. Despite the fact that every time people see art depicting Tanith Lee’s main character Azhrarn, they think it’s Morpheus from the Sandman. (How bad is this? When people see depictions of her character, they say SHE must have ripped HIM off.)
Despite the fact that the dream lord’s younger sibling is Death.
Despite the fact that other members of his family include Delusion, Delirium…. They are not gods but beings older than gods, and when the gods die, Dream, Death, Delusion, and Delirium will remain. This family of immortal, eternal, unchanging beings, who each embody an eternal abstraction starting with the letter D.
Someone else on the internet, noticing the similarities, flipped open the third book in Tanith Lee’s series to a random page, and lo and behold, there’s a description of a character who was clearly the inspiration for Gaiman’s Mazikeen. The prose, the characters, the narrative strategies, the mythology, the story structure, all of it: Gaiman found it all in Tanith Lee‘s writing and never gave her any credit.
He became rich and famous profiting from her ideas. People effused over his amazing imagination, when the ideas they praised him for were actually created by Tanith Lee. And, while he was building his name and fame, she was struggling. In the 1990s, toward the end of her life, she complained in an interview that magazines weren’t buying her stories anymore.
A simple “If you like The Sandman, you should really read Tanith Lee’s books!” from Neil Gaiman would have meant so much to her career. To the livelihood of a struggling, less-privileged writer, whose amazing imagination Gaiman was actively ripping off. People praised The Sandman comics for their depiction of gay and trans identities. But in the original material, Tanith Lee was far more progressive about lgbtq+ identities, and that was twenty years earlier.
I first read Tanith Lee’s book NIGHT’S MASTER (the first in the FLAT EARTH series) in maybe 2005, about 10 years after first reading The Sandman. I looked to see if Gaiman had credited her for “his” ideas; as far as I could tell, he never had. And for the subsequent 19 years, whenever I see a new Neil Gaiman interview, the first thing I do is ctrl-F to search to see if he mentioned Tanith Lee. And he never has, that I’ve seen.
I have no difficulty believing the accusations against him.
Because I know — KNOW — that he has felt entitled to take what he wants from a woman, without her permission, and without any acknowledgement of her contributions.
And, finally: If you loved Neil Gaiman’s stories, if you are heartbroken to learn the storyteller you loved is apparently an abuser, here is my suggestion: track down Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH books. Her prose is more exquisite and imaginative, her ideas more original, her empathy real.
Not only that, but a personal acquaintance of Lee, Liz Williams, points out that Lee herself believed Gaiman plagiarised her work and had “considerable disdain for him.”
Tanith was my friend, as many writers in the UK will attest, especially on the south coast. I did know this, because she told me. We were at a convention – IIRC Orbital 8, in 2008 – at which both Neil and Tanith were guests. She told me that she was trying to avoid him because he’d plagiarised a large chunk of her work: not just a bit, but entire paragraphs. She didn’t say which book it was from. And she had considerable disdain for him.
A well-read reader on r/neilgaimanuncovered confirmed the charge.
He basically stole Sandman from Tanith Lee’s “Tales of the Flat Earth“ and his “Snow, Glass, Apples” from her “Red as Blood” with zero credit whatsoever, never even a recommendation that others read her work (a major sign of insecurity and guilt, right there). He also stole Coraline from Clive Barker’s ”The Thief of Always.” He’s a fraud as well as a monster.
I never read Snow, Glass Apples but I do recall thinking its description sounded an awful lot like Red as Blood. All of his revised fairy tale stories struck me as very similar to Lee’s White as Snow, but again, I never bothered reading any of Gaiman’s short stories until very recently. And since I’ve never read Coraline or anything by Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware of the relationship between those two works either.
But it is very satisfying to see the literary world finally coming out and telling the public the obvious truth about Neil Gaiman’s mediocrity and total lack of creativity. He’s never been a great writer, he’s never been a great storyteller, he is instead, as Terry Pratchett suggested, “an incredible actor” playing the role of a great storyteller. In my opinion, these charges of stealing without attribution and plagiarism tend to further support my hypothesis that “Neil Gaiman, Bestselling Author” was a literary fraud manufactured by the much the same people who made L. Ron Hubbard a bestselling author.
The conclusion appears to be as apt as it is succinct. “He’s a fraud as well as a monster.”
So finally, we have the answer that we’ve suspected for months. Robert Rankin indicates that Terry Pratchett had more than an inkling that his Good Omens co-writer and supposed good friend was not “a very nice, approachable guy” but an actor hiding his true self.
“Terry told me he wished he’d never worked with him, but I never found out why.”
As you may or may not be aware, George Gordon Byron is one of my favorite poets. And his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” is my favorite poem that wasn’t written by a particular friend of mine, Dante, or A.A. Milne. And while it’s not well known, but I am actually a published poet, as I wrote a poem that was published in Bucknell University’s poetry journal when I was studying there.
Of course, as always seems to be the case, the combination of my talents with my iconoclasm not only caused the poem to be accepted for publication, but also caused half the staff to quit in protest after it was published. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
In any event, I put the Byronic poem to restrained nu-metal, took the liberty of changing the two instances of “quaff” to drank/drink since it just didn’t work, put together a chorus that fit the context, used the final verse as a pseudo-chorus, and threw on a lyrical outro. The poem is well worth reading, and if you want to hear the musical version, you can hear The Only Skull on UATV. When I put the album out in the spring, this will definitely be on it.
Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I drank like thee;
I died, let earth my bones resign:
Fill up thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.
Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!
Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods than reptile’s food.
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shown,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!
Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Why not—since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.
Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Now rhyme and revel,
Rhyme and revel,
Why—not rhyme and revel?
Rhyme and revel with the dead!
And by worse, I mean a LOT worse for Neil Gaiman fans, as in the aftermath of multiple sexual assault accusations being made, non-fans are going back, reading Gaiman’s work, and observing what was always – and I do mean always – obvious in his work:
Many years ago I bought a huge anthology of Gaiman’s stories. I wasn’t familiar with his work and wanted to give this man a chance. The book collected dust for ages until this week. I had no idea about the allegations when I started reading, but the stories disturbed me enough that I got curious about him and googled. Based on the stories I’m reading so far, I can’t say I’m surprised. I know y’all are huge fans over here, but….has no one noticed how strange his approach to writing women and children is????
I just finished Snow Glass Apples, about a 13 year old girl prostitute vampire that get’s happily r***d by a necrophiliac… He’s very clearly a master storyteller, he didn’t have to go there. He could have easily disturbed us without having to resort to the pedo overtones. But he made the choice to go there. He wanted to. He likes the story better this way.
There are traces of this kind of thing in the stories I’ve read so far – the way the troll in Troll Bridge sniffs at the 15 year old girl’s breasts and crotch. Again, the story was good on it’s own. These details add nothing to the story except to be edgy by sexualizing a very young girl.
It’s not simply about what you write, it’s the way you write about it. There are no shortage of people who were severely put off by my approach to the multicultural interactions portrayed in the prologue to A SEAS OF SKULLS. And due to the way I wrote about it, no one is going to conclude that I am pro-beheading, pro-rape, or pro-crucifixion, although they might correctly conclude that I am not enthusiastic about mass migration.
When, like Neil Gaiman, you’re writing about underage teenage girls and putting them in overtly sexual situations on a regular basis, then drawing a bath for your wife’s young nanny and exposing yourself to her, there is an awful lot of very foul-smelling smoke that lends itself to the conclusion there is a extremely nasty fire burning somewhere in the dark.
Tanith Lee wrote a fair amount of dark sexual material. She also wrote about children from time to time. But what she did not do was combine the two. While what one writes tells the reader a lot about the writer, how one writes tells the reader even more and may even provide some hints as to why.
There are rumors that a big story about Gaiman will be published in mid-January. We’ll see, and we probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything that might be alleged. After all, he managed to convince a surprising number of people that he was “a master storyteller” when he has always been more akin to a deejay doing remixes than an original musician.
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.
I don’t fear AI replacing writing. Especially not on this particular grounds:
“The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well, you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard,” he said in an essay posted on his website last week.
However, the development of technology has allowed people to outsource writing to AI. There’s no longer a need to actually learn how to write, or hire someone to do it for you, or even plagiarize, the English-American scientist wrote.
“I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write,” Graham said.
It’s common for skills to disappear as technologies replace them; after all, “there aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem,” he admitted. But people being unable to write is “bad,” he insisted.
“A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots,” Graham believes.
We already live in a world that is mostly inhabited by think-nots. Hence MPAI. And there is no reason to fear AI writing, since very few writers produce anything worth reading anyhow. Between Twitter and Facebook, we know that all the erudite theories about “unlocking human potential” were groundless fantasies, since we have conclusive evidence that most people have absolutely nothing to say.
I’m not surprised that Ron Unz reached much the same conclusion that I did about the Miles Mathis Committee:
The first of my surprises was the sheer volume of his material. I try to be methodical and comprehensive, so I’d originally planned to read his entire corpus of work, but I immediately saw that this was totally impossible unless I was willing to invest many, many months in the project.
His main eponymous website MilesWMathis.com includes an “Update Page” containing links to well over 1,500 of his articles and their updates, of which nearly 1,000 were his new pieces on conspiratorial topics, stretching back to around 2011 or so, with only a small fraction of these being by guest contributors. Spot-checking the word-count on a few of them suggested that they are rarely shorter than 5,000 words and perhaps might average closer to 8,000 words or more. So the total of his conspiratorial writings certainly runs many, many millions of words, with most of those pieces also containing numerous images. He had probably published enough content to fill at least 60 or 70 non-fiction books, certainly an astonishing level of productivity for a single writer.
Indeed, the volume of conspiratorial material on this Mathis website was so enormous that I suspect his aggregate content is far greater than the combined total for every other conspiracy-website on the Internet. Given that huge quantity of writing he even provided a separate archive page listing the 160 conspiratorial articles that he considers his best.
Writing a 5,000 or 10,000 word essay of entirely original text often including copious images and doing that every couple of days or so seems a rather formidable undertaking for a single individual, especially since nearly all of these were apparently based upon extensive Internet research. These essays seem reasonably well written, though usually in his trademark meandering, obfuscating style, and I spotted very few typos, spelling errors, or grammatical mistakes, indicating that they had also been carefully proofed, certainly far more so than the output of a typical website writer.
Furthermore, I soon discovered that he also maintained an entirely separate website called MilesMathis.com, devoted to his mathematical and scientific writing, which includes nearly another 500 articles, supposedly totaling some 7,800 pages of text and perhaps 1.5 million words or more. A little spot-checking suggested that there was only slight overlap with those listed on his main website.
One very odd aspect of his work was that apparently all of the 1,500 or so individual articles on his main website were in the form of PDF files rather than as ordinary HTML pages, and I could think of no other writer nor blogger who followed that approach.
For me, it wasn’t the volume, but rather, the observably different writing styles appearing in the same papers. I personally know and edit two extremely prolific writers, John C. Wright and Chuck Dixon. And there is a fundamental sameness to their writing styles, even across a much wider range of thematic topics, than one sees in the Miles Mathis, JK Rowling, or James Patterson committees. Even books written by a pair of co-writers instead of a single author is usually quite identifiable; for example, if you compare Good Omens to a typical book by either Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman, it’s very easy to not only see that two authors were involved, but to a certain extent, which parts were written by whom.
In the case of the MMC, the painter guy, who has a very good eye for photo fakes, is clearly different than the genealogy guy. The difference is downright jarring when they’re both contributing to the same article. And they’re both different than the history guy, who has a much better grasp on basic history than most writers.
Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely like reading the MMC, regardless of who is running it. The fact is that if you read Miles Mathis, you’ll get far closer to the truth of objective reality than you ever will by reading The New York Times and other news organizations responsible for maintaining the current Narrative. When the mainstream media talks about “misinformation” they are just projecting their own behavior onto others. As the meme has it, “conspiracy theory” is just another word for “sneak preview”.
I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to reading the now-inevitable expose about how I am a Swiss intelligence operative descended from a long line of aristocratic British crypto-rabbis who is motivated by pure jealousy of Miles’s luxurious golden ringlets. My connections to Owen Benjamin alone should be sufficient to fill at least two pages of the PDF. Beale/Bâle/Baal. Phoenician Navy confirmed!
A very positive review of A SEA OF SKULLS by a reader well-read in epic fantasy.
This was an absolutely PHENOMENAL book from start to finish! Better than the first in the series! The depth of worldbuilding found in here is rivaled only by Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Nobody has yet beaten Tolkien. And in my opinion, nobody ever will. But Day has certainly surpassed Forgotten Realms in depth and has, after this book, surpassed Martin’s work in quality and scope (Even if we’re only considering the first 3 since the last 2 books in ASOIAF are simply nowhere near as good).
To illustrate the caliber of Day’s worldbuilding, I was reading through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn concurrently, which is praised as having some of the greatest worldbuilding of all time! And while Mistborn is justly praised for its really strong worldbuilding, it’s simply nowhere near as good as the Arts of Dark and Light, which has entire cultures, races, religions, even languages fleshed out. “A Sea of Skulls” operates on an entirely different level of depth and complexity. This comparison, though perhaps unfair given the differences in subgenre, highlights the exceptional quality of Day’s work in this regard…
Bottom line: Objectively, this series is already better than “A Song of Ice and Fire” and it will remain that way assuming it doesn’t deviate in quality in a similar manner as Martin’s series did. It’s better than Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, better than Erikson’s Malazan, and somehow even better than Abercrombie’s First Law. The only series better than AODAL is Lord of the Rings, and Vox Day WILL NOT beat Tolkien. It’s not going to happen, BUT… if he keeps this up, he might just find himself moving from “pretty good author” to “one of the greats” territory, alongside writers like Mieville, Stephenson, and Weir.
My chief takeaway from this? We’d better do yet another round of proofreading before we print the interiors of the leather editions. Any volunteers who HAVE NOT proofread it already? It’s always amazing how two different proofreaders can each come up with a list of 100 typos, and only about 20 of them are in common.
However, I will assure the reviewer and anyone else who is interested that all of the major threads can and will be wrapped up in A GRAVE OF GODS. When I was contemplating the possibility of five books, I was not counting Summa Elvetica and I wasn’t sure about how big I was going to make the scope of the series. But after seeing how Martin fell apart and hasn’t been able to complete his, I decided to further discipline my focus and keep the primary series to three books.
In related news, we’ve settled on the names for the four German editions, and Summa Elvetica will be an official part of the series. Two of the translations are already completed and will be released sometime this winter.
He didn’t know right away or he wouldn’t have co-written a book with him. But there’s no question that Terry Pratchett figured out who and what Neil Gaiman was by the time he wrote the Introduction to Good Omens, the book they wrote together. And I don’t think it’s an accident that despite the success of the first book, Pratchett never wrote another one with Gaiman in the 25 years that separated the 1990 publication of that book with Pratchett’s death in 2015.
Remember, Pratchett was a wordsmith, and a much better one than average. And since Gaiman’s reputation has always been one of being “a very nice, approachable guy”, Pratchett is clearly implying that he knows Gaiman is not, but is instead “an incredible actor”. Which events have subsquently confirmed to have been the case. Because that’s the only option that could “come as a surprise to many”.
