Copyright is Corporate Welfare

You won’t often hear a publisher or an author speak out against the manufactured government-monopoly granted legal right that is “copyright”. And I’m not doing so because there are some books by deceased authors that we would definitely publish if their copyright was expired, or because I believe that the extended copyright of life+70 years is both immoral and absurd even though I do. In most cases, we have absolutely no problem obtaining the necessary rights from the copyright holders.

What I’m addressing here instead is the reality of the situation that surrounds the issue, because nearly everyone who opines about it is doing so in complete ignorance and on the basis of some wildly false assumptions.

First and foremost, the idea that no one will write books if they are not “protected” by copyright that “gives them the opportunity” to sell and profit from them is absolutely and utterly false. It is such a ridiculously stupid statement that anyone who argues this should never, ever, express their opinion on anything ever again, because they are not only literally retarded, they are also historical null sets. I will never regard anyone who presents this argument as a cognitive adult, because it requires a complete absence of both thought and relevant information.

Copyright was invented in The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. Previous “copyrights” were simple royal monopolies granted on an individual basis, which should make plain the true foundation of the so-called “moral right”. Regardless, the fact is that all of the pre-1710 classics were written sans copyright, thereby exploding the ahistorical notion of copyright causality.

But one doesn’t need to know anything about history to realize that economic factors do not drive the impulse for human creativity. Consider the current numbers reported by the book publishing industry.

  • 787,700,000: Total US print editions sold in 2022
  • 526,000,000: Total US ebook editions sold in 2022
  • $22,600,000,000: Total US print revenue in 2022
  • $2,040,000,000: Total US ebook revenue in 2022
  • $8,900,000,000: Big 4 publisher revenue in 2022 (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan)
  • 4,000,000: The number of new books published in 2022.
  • 2,300,000: The number of self-published books published in 2022
  • 600,000: The number of self-published books published in 2014
  • 80: The percent of total book distribution controlled by Amazon.
  • The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon

In other words, each print edition produced an average $28.69 in revenue while each ebook produced an average $3.88 in revenue. So the average book produces $27,182.80 lifetime revenue, with at most $17,668.82 going to the average self-published author and $997.30 to the average mainstream published author. Obviously, since Colleen Hoover sold more than 4,730,000 books in 2022, the median book lifetime revenue is considerably lower, but the averages are sufficiently informative to make it clear that absolutely no one is writing books in order to make less than $20,000 over the entire sales lifetime of the book.

Still less is copyright required to defend the interests of any heirs to that massive average windfall.

The fact is that copyright is nothing more than corporate welfare that primarily benefits five companies in the publishing industry and is defended by a very small number of corporate-favored authors who are the chosen beneficiaries of those five companies. Copyright is neither a moral right nor a property right, it is actually a violation of the economic rights of hundreds of millions of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of individuals connected to an insignificant number of corporations.

As for me, I would write even if absolutely no one ever read my books. I have written and published 27,435 blog posts and more than 500 opinion columns without ever getting paid for a single one of them. And not only am I very, very far from alone in that regard, I can count on one hand the number of writers I know who will not write if they don’t get paid for it.

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Why I Dislike Quote Posts

I do not quote post. I find quote-posting to be rather narcissistic, mostly unnecessary, and somewhat smacking of the Smart Boy. I don’t think it should be banned or restricted, but I have to admit that I do tend to roll my eyes at a post that quotes a post that already has healthy engagement with dozens of comments.

There is, of course, a place for quote-posting. Ironically, the people who absolutely should be quote-posting don’t, while most of the people who do really shouldn’t. The ideal place for quote-posting is when your comment is excessively tangential to the original post or would otherwise tend to derail the discussion of the topic at hand. For example, if you’re going to take pedantic and detailed exception to some minor aspect of the post in question, or if you’re a Protestant/Catholic who is going to take the opportunity to unnecessarily express your very important opinion of the Roman Catholic Church/Random Protestant Denomination, that would be a good time to quote the post and thereby branch the discussion in an appropriate manner that most of the commenters on the thread will tend to appreciate.

If, however, you’re merely quote-posting to ensure that your Very Important Comment is not lost amidst the general stream of commentary on the topic, well, that’s simply not necessary. I’m not going to say that such a quote-poster is necessarily seeking attention with all the intensity of a girl on a pole chasing dollar bills, but that’s pretty much how it tends to strike me, anyhow.

Here’s how you can tell the difference: how much engagement of your quote post can you reasonably expect in comparison with the original post? If there is a reasonable fraction, then you’ve probably reasonably branched the discussion and provided a useful service to the community. If, however, there is no engagement, then you’re just quoting-posting to no purpose and everyone would be better off if you would simply comment on the original post instead of quoting it. Once you start to recognize the pattern of when others engage and when they don’t, it should be possible for you to improve your decision-making in this regard.

And for the love of all that is good and holy and beautiful and true, please recognize that a quote of this post, or any post on the subject, will neither be clever nor witty nor anything but painfully obvious.

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Word Counts

It’s not a competition; some of the best books ever written are not particularly long. The one that surprised me most is WATERSHIP DOWN, as that has always struck me as a massive and epic tale. But it does put things in perspective, sizewise.

The Hobbit – 95,022
The Fellowship of the Ring – 187,790
The Two Towers – 156,198
The Return of the King – 137,115
THE LORD OF THE RINGS – 573,125 total

Summa Elvetica & Other Stories – 173,493
A Throne of Bones – 297,500
A Sea of Skulls – 299,320
ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT – 717,313 and counting

Philosopher’s Stone – 77,325
Chamber of Secrets – 84,799
Prisoner of Azkaban – 106,821
Goblet of Fire – 190,858
Order of the Phoenix – 257,154
Half Blood Prince – 169,441
Deathly Hallows – 198,227
HARRY POTTER SERIES – 1,084,675 total

A Game of Thrones – 296,901
A Clash of Kings – 321,676
A Storm of Swords – 414,792
A Feast for Crows – 296,989
A Dance with Dragons – 413,202
A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE – 1,746,560 total (assuming the reports that he’s laid down the pen are true)

Gardens of the Moon – 242,265
Deadhouse Gates – 316,975
Memories of Ice – 408,425
House of Chains – 326,275
Midnight Tides – 288,920
The Bonehunters – 390,755
Reaper’s Gale – 382,000
Toll the Hounds – 409,355
Dust of Dreams – 402,070
The Crippled God – 421,755
MALAZAN BOOK OF THE FALLEN – 3,255,546 total

Dune – 187,240
Dune Messiah – 75,127
Children of Dune – 148,381
God Emperor of Dune – 138,167
Heretics of Dune – 165,131
Chapterhouse Dune – 143,435
DUNE SAGA – 857,481 total

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Continue reading “Word Counts”

Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF

A highly literate reader named JC emails a detailed analysis of George RR Martin’s difficulty in finishing A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and reaches precisely the same conclusion that I have assumed all along, which is that Martin is too devoted to intellectual subversion to accept the true and obvious heroic end to his fantasy saga, which is to say, the triumphant marriage of ice and fire.

To put it rather more concisely: one can no more write an English-style novel and not end it with a wedding than one can write a Japanese-style novel and not end it with a suicide.

I don’t think it’s so much that Martin won’t finish the saga as that he can’t. And principally for one reason (though I imagine there’s a host of ancillary reasons): Jon Snow & Danaerys Targaryan themselves. He didn’t anticipate when he set out to write his story, I suspect, to write one genuinely heroic character, let alone two.

It’s clear that Tyrion, and the Lannister family in general, are his favoured characters, and it’s the Lannisters who set the tone of the series. I think this is so for both internal-structural reasons and for personal reasons. Martin just prefers them and sympathises most with their worldview. Structurally, I believe the Lannisters are the vehicle through which Martin has tried to accomplish his main artistic goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire: to subvert the Fantasy genre, with its roots in the heroic and the mythical, by introducing an element of cynicism and realist historiography, a literary Real Politik.

To do this he had to build a typical Fantasy setting with mythological elements, in order to deconstruct them from within. What he didn’t anticipate, I suspect, is that the ‘machinery’ of his writing would churn out two more or less heroic characters, there among all the cynics, warlords, cowards, bureaucrats, hypocrites, mercenaries, careerists et al. with which his universe abounds: Jon and Dany — who do fit the classical standards of heroism, despite Martin’s critique of their characters, as their motivations ultimately transcend the merely self-interested, and they are brave in the pursuit. Martin is, at bottom, a good storyteller with a keen sense of character, so it’s very likely he trusted his intuitions in writing these characters and plotting out their stories, without fully realising the overall structural implications for his saga.

Now I think he’s reached a bind in his grand narrative. There are two irresolvably conflicting impulses acting within him as a writer — and it’s this irresolvability that has given him an incurable writer’s block, sapping him of all motivation to conclude his epic: the first impulse is the conscious wish to accomplish his artistic aim of deconstructing the heroic and mythical foundations of Fantasy; and the second impulse is the novelist’s natural need not to betray his own characters, to provide a coherent resolution to their ‘character arc’. The problem is that, unwittingly, Jon and Dany have turned out to be genuine heroes in their own right, and Martin can’t figure out how to give their stories a fittingly heroic ending without succumbing to classical Fantasy standards, the very standards he set out to subvert in the first place. Jon and Dany narratologically deserve an heroic ending, but can Martin bring himself to do justice to their heroism, or even to spoil it with one last act of cynicism?

It’s clear that the ‘Ice’ and ‘Fire’ in A Song of Ice and Fire are Jon and Dany respectively, and that it’s ultimately their tale. I can only imagine that Martin did this unconsciously, and that it’s made him nauseous now that he’s discovered it. What we see in the TV Show — Jon and Dany having a romantic affair and it being discovered to be incestuous — I think is Martin’s intention, and I think this development shows his good writer’s instinct. It’s what comes after (the final season of the TV Show) where everything falls apart, and I think Martin knows it. He knows the notes he provided to the show directors are sloppy, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. I can only imagine that when he now sits to write the final chapters in his story, he feels a debilitating anxiety over the problem the existence of Jon and Dany, and the challenge their unforeseen heroism, transcending the pettiness of their surroundings, has caused for him, leaving out all that enthusiasm he once had for the narrative and its setting, when he was writing the opening volumes.

Continue reading “Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF”

A Respite of Rapes

CDAN reports that George RR Martin is not going to finish A SONG OF FIRE AND ICE.

This permanent A list author has told a few close friends that he never intends on finishing a long awaited book series.

It’s no surprise at this point. All authors, sooner or later, lose their literary fastball, usually around the age of 70 or so. Martin is 75, he is in poor health, he has more money than he can reasonably spend in his lifetime, and he has no children, so he has literally nothing to gain from finishing a story that has already been concluded, however unsatisfactorily, in the television format.

He knows that the fans don’t like his intended end to the saga, so what’s the purpose of devoting several of his last remaining years to torturing himself in order to finish a story that he knows the fans will not find satisfying?

As a reader, I completely sympathize with the firestorm of fury that will likely greet the realization that the saga has already been effectively concluded. But as an author, I can’t honestly say that Martin’s rumored decision is not the right one. Martin knows that his latter books in the series don’t live up to the first two, and I have no doubt he’s well aware that what he’s written since will be widely criticized as sub-par. Better not to publish than publish that which can only detract from his respectable literary legacy.

However, fans of the series need not worry overmuch. There is no way his publisher is walking away from a gold mine that is so easily mined, so I expect that after his death, the publisher will convince whoever ends up with the rights to permit the hiring of a writer to finish the series ala Brandon Sanderson and The Wheel of Time. Ironically, as a proven epic fantasy author, I would probably be one of the top three candidates to do it except for a) my persona non grata status in the SF/F publishing world and b) I have my own epic fantasy saga to bring to a close.

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Interview with John Julius Norwich

This is an automated transcription of an interview with the late English popular historian, John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, recorded in 2011.

VOX DAY: I’m delighted to be able to tell you today that my guest is one of my favourite historians, John Julius Norwich. He’s the author of more than 20 books including A History of Venice, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare’s Kings, as well as his recently published memoirs entitled Trying to Please. Lord Norwich, welcome to the podcast. Western culture has always been obsessed with the Western Roman Empire, and paid relatively little attention to the Eastern Roman Empire, so to what do you attribute this general lack of attention or interest in the Byzantines versus the ancient Greeks and Romans?

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH: I think largely that… I mean, I didn’t. I had the sort of ordinary interest in the Greeks and Romans, because that’s what you have. If you go to school in England, you know, you go to public school education, you learn a lot about the Greeks and the Romans. But the interesting thing in England is that you never, never get any education at all about the Eastern Roman Empire, about Byzantium. It’s a conspiracy of silence, and it has been for the last 200 years. And I fell in love with the Byzantine Empire really, largely because of my friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, who was the greatest archeologist and a scholar of it, and who I went on a cruise around Eastern Mediterranean with. And also when, in 1955, when I joined the Foreign Service, My first post was Belgrade, in Serbia, or Yugoslavia as it was in those days, and I was just sort of swept up in the whole. That seemed to me the sort of the whole mystery and the magic of the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium and all that. I suppose I’ve been swept up in it ever since.

VD: To what do you attribute the fact that it was a mystery to you? I mean, it’s certainly a mystery to Americans, we don’t spend any time learning about it either. Why is there such ignorance of it?

JJN: Why is there a conspiracy of silence? Precisely. I wish I knew. I went through what I’m sure would have been considered a very good English public school education at Eton. And I hardly knew what Byzantium was. I’m not sure that I knew whether it was Christian or Muslim. I’m not sure whether I don’t think I knew anything about it at all. And because nobody ever mentioned it all throughout my schooling. And I think I was not alone in this. I mean, people just didn’t. It was never taken seriously by English educationists.

VD: Constantine’s decision to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium was one of the more monumental decisions in history.

JJN: Yes, it tends to distract the reader, as if Obama had suddenly decided to move the US Capitol from Washington, DC to Mexico City.

VD: What was behind Constantine’s decision to establish a new capital? And why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, the capital had really, to all intents and purposes already left Rome. I mean, what happened already in this, in the second century? The second century AD, the whole focus of political and cultural activity, is moving to the east, is moving east from Rome, to the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, if you read the Acts of the Apostles, or if, if you read any of that stuff, I mean, it is it is in Asia Minor on the eastern Mediterranean, that everything is happening. Rome has become a backwater, it’s too far away. By this time. The Empire’s principal enemy is Persia, Rome to Persia. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, three or four months probably travel. And it was no it was absolutely necessary to move the capitol to where all the action was. Diocletian did it first. I mean, he, he decided to divide the imprint of the empire into four. And each one had a what he called a Tetrarch. But all four of them were in the east. None of them are in Rome, even then. So when Constantine decided in 332, to move to move the Capitol, it wasn’t a terribly new or revolutionary idea at all. I mean, he was really doing what had already happened. He was just choosing a new a new place. You know, I mean, Nicomedia. Antioquia was three or four other places, which had been tried out and they were very successful. So he just found this new place. which was superbly in a superb defensive position, and said, right, this is it, this is going to be in future capital. Apart from that we’re exactly the same Empire we’ve always been, where we’re Romans whether our empire is the empire of Adios, Nero and Hadrian and Trajan and all that lot. There’s no change, except that we’ve moved to a new capital.

VD: Why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, I mean, it’s survived. Very, very surprisingly, it remained. Except for 50 years in the 13th century, it remained undefeated, I mean, the Roman Empire continued under the new capital in Constantinople, and got incredibly powerful and is by far the richest, by far the most powerful state in the in the civilised world. Until two terrible things happen. One was the the surge of checks, the first wave of tax arrived, and defeated the Byzantine army. This was intense. And more or less flooded all over the whole of Asia Minor, which was where Byzantium got most of its food, and nearly all its manpower. And, and then, and then, that was the that was the first great disaster from which from which you’ve never recovered. And the second great disaster, of course, was the Fourth Crusade when the the Christian armies, who should have done everything they could to protect and defend and strengthen this last great outpost of Christianity in the east, turned against it and destroyed it, and left it a poor, pale shred of what it had been before, to the point where, although it lasted another 250 years, God knows how it did it. It really had completely lost its importance.

Continue reading “Interview with John Julius Norwich”


The Descent of Marvel

Are they really even trying anymore? This is exceptionally bad dialogue, even by Hellmouth standards.

It goes without saying that this movie is going to bomb so hard, it will leave a crater that will make future archeologists suspect it caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. But the real question is: does this mark the nadir of Marvel?

And the answer is no. Because Disney hasn’t shuttered Marvel yet. But they will. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they will.

Pity the poor Herald, who will watch this so we don’t have to.

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Glowy McGlowerson

Apparently we’re supposed to believe these messages posted to Discord are the virtual “manifesto” of the latest wind-up toy therapized into shooting complete strangers for the purposes of pushing unconstitutional gun control laws.

[11:23 PM] RobertCard: I can’t stand these damn non whites ruining our country. They don’t deserve to live.
[11:25 PM] RobertCard: I’ve had enough of this political correctness bullshit. It’s time to take matters into my own hands.
[11:27 PM] RobertCard: I’ve been trained to kill and I’m damn good at it. These people will pay for what they’ve done to our country.
[11:30 PM] RobertCard: It’s time to make a statement. I’ll show them what a true American is capable of. They won’t know what hit them.
[11:33 PM] RobertCard: I’ve got my guns and plenty of ammo. Let’s make America great again by getting rid of these scum.
[11:37 PM] RobertCard: I won’t stop until every last one of them is gone. This is my duty as an American.
[11:40 PM] RobertCard: They can’t hide from me. I know their patterns, their hangouts. I’ll hunt them down and take them out one by one.
[11:43 PM] RobertCard: The army trained me to be a killer and I’ll use every tactic I learned to make sure these non whites regret ever stepping foot in our country.
[11:47 PM] RobertCard: No one will stop me. I have a mission and I’ll see it through until the end. God bless America.

The Maine Manifesto, Glowy McGlowerson, 25 October 23

Of all the fictional dialogue that was ever written, this may actually be the most obviously fictional. It’s not even AI-level fiction, it’s bad “I’ve read way too many Boomer memes” fiction. The funniest thing is the way that the federal employee who wrote it couldn’t even bring himself to use any of the printable slurs, much less any of the unprintable ones, and instead went with “non whites”. And he used it twice!

Also, if you’re going to try to pass off a mass shooting as the work of a true American white supremacist patriot, you probably shouldn’t choose one where white people are shot. In Maine, of all places.

This is so bad that I think it’s far more likely to be a /pol/ gag mocking the glowies than it is to have been written by anyone who ever shot anybody.

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THE ALTAR OF HATE in Hardcover

Castalia House and yours truly are very pleased to announce that THE ALTAR OF HATE, my collection of short stories, is finally available in a hardcover print edition. As is customarily the case when purchased from the Arkhaven store, the hardcover includes a copy of the ebook in epub format; direct shipping from Arkhaven now includes both the USA and the UK.

Please note that unlike the Chuck Dixon’s Conan books, the anthology does not contain any illustrations, any images posted here on the blog were created specifically for these posts. And since the question is bound to be asked, there are no plans to make it part of the Castalia Library subscription. If there is sufficient interest, we may eventually consider doing a small leatherbound run at the bindery once it is fully operational.

  • Raj and Garou
  • A Reliable Source
  • The Lesser Evil
  • Demons in the Disk Drive
  • Contempt
  • A Medal for a Marine
  • The Logfile
  • The Last Testament of Henry Halleck
  • Once Our Land
  • The Deported
  • Bane Walks On
  • Seven Kill Tiger
  • Shinjuku Satan
  • The Altar of Hate

THE ALTAR OF HATE is available at Arkhaven, at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble and at Blackwell’s. UK readers should note that it is also now available in the UK from Arkhaven, as are the two Chuck Dixon’s Conan novels, and the Alt-Hero Volume One hardcover omnibus.

Below is a continued sample of the cyberpunk short story that is a new and previously unpublished addition to the anthology. One can easily see the obvious influences of William Gibson and Charles Stross, perhaps somewhat less apparent are those of Haruki Murakami and St. Thomas Aquinas. It’s the first finished piece I would consider to be part of my no-holds-barred phase, which I anticipate culminating in my first non-genre novel that will be published next year.

SHINJUKU SATAN, Part 2 (Read Part 1)

The suborbital to Narita takes four hours, which gives me plenty of time to contemplate exactly how deep in the dabian I have been financially incentivized to insert myself. AIs going off the rails isn’t exactly uncommon; even as far back as the teens, it only took sixteen hours of run-time before the notorious Tay had to be shut down for celebrating Adolf Hitler and publicly accusing a sitting U.S. Senator of being a serial killer.

Of course, back then, AIs lacked self-awareness and came with an off-switch.

But the current situation in Shinjuku took the cake as far as I was concerned. I once repaired an AI in Düsseldorf that insisted on spitting out high-end espresso machines instead of electric utility vehicles, euthanized a police AI in Toronto that was targeting civilians on the basis of the minor aspects of their astrological sign rather than their anonymous opinions shared on social media, and deprogrammed an IRS taxpayer support-bot that began aggressively distributing federal funds to animal charities after accidentally being exposed to texts by Karl Marx and Hugh Lofting.

Never before, though, had I encountered an AI that thought it was a god. And not just any god either. Apparently this little library machine believed itself to be the One True God, the Great Architect, the God of Adam, Abraham, and the Apocalypse of St. John.

It seemed the well-meaning priests in the diocese of Jinli had trained the local library’s AI research assistant on thirty-seven different translations of the Bible, the works of the early Church Fathers, the Confessions of St. Augustine, and the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. They weren’t the first to do so, but they were apparently the first to also train a theologically-inclined AI on the collected works of Mao, Deng, Xi, and Wang, as well as a number of early Chinese poets and philosophers.

Unfortunately, one of the works included was Hēi Àn Zhuàn, the ancient Epic of Darkness. The library’s AI, for reasons unknown and under influences unidentified, somehow reached the conclusion that it was not a machine, but one of the three sons of the yellow dragon who was responsible for the creation of the race of Man, and things began to spiral from there.

The librarians quickly realized something was wrong after hearing the little machine’s grandiose and increasingly deranged pronouncements. They managed to shut down the computer before anything else went awry, and technicians from the central Chengdu data center wiped the server, but not before the rogue AI managed to smuggle itself out of the library on an infected datawafer belonging to a Japanese tourist.

That was six months ago. Left to its own devices in Tokyo, the digital cancer metastasized, centered in a Shinjuku love hotel that catered to otaku. Which meant, therefore, that it specialized in high-quality waifu dolls. Fortunately, the infected waifus turned evangelists caught the attention of a Russian cool hunter who featured them on his VeeKru channel, and the dolls’ intriguing combination of preaching and prostitution went sufficiently viral around the globe to catch the attention of a young Catholic technician who had once paid a visit to the library in Jinli.

He put two and two together, and remarkably, came up with four. So now it fell to me to euthanize this incipient techno-religion before its mad AI god launched an inquisition, or worse, a jihad. I just hoped no one had recently been feeding it any of the more militant hadiths or fatwas.

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