Tag: writing

Reading Isn’t Stealing

Scott Thurow and the other authors who oppose training AI on their writings are absolutely and utterly in the wrong, as evidenced by their reliance upon “copyright” to make their case against it.

The tech companies are doing it because they want to, and because they can. It’s the most flagrant copyright breach in history, being perpetrated by the richest companies in the world. It’s their typical modus operandi – steal first, and request permission when challenged. 

And instead of trying to prevent this, the British government wants to give them a free pass. That will be catastrophic, not just for writers in the UK, but all over the world. American authors, for example, who demand compensation from the tech giants will be told, ‘Tough – our scraping operation conforms to UK law.’

Copyright, the most crucial protection for any writer, will effectively cease to exist.

It is copyright that is the abuse, not the reading and analysis of books that have been duly purchased and utilized as the reader sees fit. Copyright neither protects the author nor is necessary in order to inspire creative people to create works of art. It’s not at all a surprise that it’s bestselling corporate hacks like Thurow who are most upset by the possibility that AI can churn out books as unoriginal and poorly-written as their own.

As far as the possibility that people will be able to request a “Scott Thurow” novel that will serve as a convincing substitute for the real thing, that is a clear and obvious matter of trademark, and I have no doubt that the AI services will be paying authors and other IP owners for the rights to utilize their trademark in this way; Grimes is already offering a service to record songs that feature an AI facsimile of her voice to sing the vocals.

If this does spell the end of copyright, that is a good thing. The fact that copyright now extends 70 years or more beyond the life of the author, and that it does so as a result of the Devil Mouse putting pressure on the US Congress, is sufficient proof that it has nothing to do with protecting or even benefiting the creators.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Problem of Perspectives

It’s fascinating to observe how TV people – and remember, George RR Martin was a TV writer – simply don’t understand some of the technical basics of storytelling. The Dark Herald explains why Black Captain America was always doomed to failure from a technical perspective, even if the Disney degenerati were not actively attempting to subvert the characters and the storylines, at the Arkhaven substack.

Feige was determined to follow his plan of a Marvelverse that had one continuous storyline for both TV and movies. He clearly viewed himself as a grand master storyteller who could rival Tolkien. Except it was a truly terrible idea. First of all, he didn’t invent any of the characters so they are now nothing like they should be, consequently, the audience has wandered away. Second, if he had read the comic books then he would have known just how utterly hopeless a task a single grand storyline has always been. It’s been tried repeatedly, and it’s always failed because you can’t tell any kind of coherent story with one hundred POV characters. The closest thing to a success was DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths because most of the cast was dead by the end of it.

The attraction for executives like Fiege is that it feels like you are making people show up for everything you do because if they don’t, they will miss part of the story. This creates two major problems, one, there is no entry point for new viewers. They are expected to go all the way back to Iron Man (2008) and work their way through what is now about 100 hours of content and you have to include the TV shows because Kevin wanted it that way. Even if you are rigidly trying to keep the narrative cohesive you have the problem of people just not being interested in ALL of the characters. This confuses the hell out of casual viewers because a story like Captain America: Brave New World is built on major events they didn’t know about because they didn’t watch them.

Just for a baseline understanding of the setting you had to have watched the 2008 Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Captain America Civil War, Avengers Infinity War, Avengers Endgame, Falcon and the Winter Solider, and The Eternals.

It’s really not a very difficult concept. The average individual has trouble keeping more than three simultaneous thoughts in his mind. So, the optimal limit on perspective characters in any one creative work is nine, which works out to an average of three characters per act. One can certainly go below this, but one goes above it at one’s peril of cause the reader – or the viewer – to lose interest.

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Write What Thou Wilt

This selection from an essay by the late Roger Zelazny pretty well encapsulates why I never get caught up in the popular illusion that sales = quality or the importance of a writer. From The Road to Amber:

The anecdote that fascinates me most is about the man I have a secret admiration for—Timothy Shay Arthur, who amazingly in the 1840s wrote five percent of everything published in America. He was the most prolific author of his day. If they wanted temperance books, he’d grind out temperance books by the ream. If abolition suddenly became a popular notion politically, he’d be writing abolition tracts. If somebody wanted frontier novels, he’d be writing frontier novels. Everybody was reading Timothy Shay Arthur. If you asked the man on the street then who was the best author of the day, he’d most likely say Timothy Shay Arthur.

During the time Timothy Shay Arthur was writing five percent of everything published in America, Henry David Thoreau was writing Walden. Nobody read Walden except a handful of New England intellectuals, most of whom were personal friends of the author. Yet, if we look back now through the history of American letters we discover that apart from the small song called “Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now” from a temperance play called Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, Timothy Shay Arthur is not remembered. But everybody knows of Thoreau’s Walden. Even if they haven’t read Walden, they at least know it is a story about a guy who went and lived in the woods and reflected on the nature of society and on nature itself. His book persisted. Nobody knew at the time that it was a classic. I think one is foolish to set out to try to write a classic. One just does the best job one can. But Arthur is barely remembered. Thoreau will still be read another hundred years from now.

Which leads to another consideration: Who judges in the present time? How valid are their judgments? Should you be writing to impress reviewers and critics, and even if you succeed in doing so, how lasting will their effects be upon your career? I am reminded in this regard of the fact that H. L. Mencken, American columnist, essayist, and editor for American Mercury—a fairly hip fellow on the literary scene back in the 1920s—decided to stick his neck out and write an essay on the people he thought would be remembered fifty, a hundred years down the line as the great American novelists of the 1920s. He chose three. He chose Carl Van Vechten, James Hunicher, and Clyde Brion-Davis. Everybody reads those today.

Carl Van Vechten wrote one nice book; it was called Peter Wiffle. He wrote six others and every book went downhill a little bit from the first one until he was writing so-so stuff at the end and he quit. He originally had been a music critic for a New York paper and he wound up writing books about cats, whom he cared about maybe more than people. I don’t know. James Hunicher, unfortunately, died shortly after Mencken’s essay appeared having written only one book, so we’ll never really know. Clyde Brion-Davis just never caught on the same way as the people Mencken did not mention in his essay, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos. They were writing all around Mencken at the time, and Mencken just didn’t feel they were doing as fine a job as Van Vechten, Hunicher, and Brion-Davis. It’s a very slippery thing to count upon your contemporaries for judgment.

I feel the only person that you must please as a writer, really, is your own self at its deepest levels.

I had to laugh at the part about the descent of Carl Van Vechten. It tends to remind me of a certain so-called “science fiction author” who has somehow managed to follow exactly the same path, with every book going downhill from the first one until he wound up writing books about cats…

The sad thing is that Zelazny himself is already forgotten; even his greatest novel, which was lauded by some as one of the best science fiction novels ever written, is virtually unknown to any reader under the age of 50.

Write what thou wilt, with due regard for those happy few who are interested in reading your books.

DISCUSS ON SG

Beginning with a Bang

The Dark Herald has taken his talents to the Arkhaven substack, and he’s gotten off to a blistering start with a comparison of Neil Gaiman’s derivative work to the woman from whose work he derived it:

One is the real deal and the other is a cheap knockoff of the original. 

There is a Swiss Rolex and there is a Bangkok Rolex. There is Classic Coke and there is Sam’s Cola.  There is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and the one on Cousin Jimbo’s velvet blanket.

There is Tannith Lee and there is Neil Gaiman. 

This has become vastly apparent to me this weekend while reading Night’s Master. It’s a funny thing about writers, we all have that one writer that made us want to write for a living.  While learning the craft we discover our strengths and limitations.  Some of us will eventually discover that we have surpassed our masters.  In bitter truth, most of us will discover that we can’t due to the limitations of our innate talents but those who face this unpleasant realization do not resent the writer who inspired us. 

Mostly. 

Gamma males, on the other hand, live in a world blanketed by their resentments and can never bring themselves to give credit where it’s due. It’s too painful a truth to acknowledge.  How can I be the secret king when there is all too obviously a real king? John Scalzi has never given credit to Joe Haldeman for his influence on his early work, although it’s clearly there. Neil Gaiman’s disdain for Tanith Lee went all the way back to when he was doing literary reviews. By Lee’s account, (which I will take over Gaiman’s in a heartbeat), he was pleasant, fawning and even obsequious during his interview of her for the Guardian.  When he published his interview, Lee discovered that Gaiman had described her as “formerly attractive.”

On top of which, reportedly and according to Lee’s belief, he directly plagiarized entire paragraphs from her. I haven’t seen the direct evidence of the truth of the plagiarism yet, but I suspect that between the Dark Herald and me, we should be able to find it if, in fact, it exists. While I’m very familiar with the various tales of the Flat Earth, including the Secret Books of Paradys, which I own and have read repeatedly, and also own her Secret Books of Venus series, I’d never read a single Neil Gaiman work until after we launched Arkhaven and I was encouraged to read Sandman.

Which, you may recall from the streams I was doing at the time, struck me immediately as mediocre and derivative, as well as more than a little off-putting.

Anyhow, it’s no surprise that the Dark Herald is off to an excellent start at the Arkhaven substack. He’ll be blogging there henceforth, so if you’re accustomed to reading him at the store site, I’d encourage you to sign up for a free subscription there.

In other Arkhaven news, we received the test print of JDA’s Overmind omnibus from the new printer this weekend. The quality of the color printing is excellent, indeed, one could quite credibly say superlative. We’re placing an order for the initial print run of 75 leatherbound copies, so there will be a few extras available for sale when they’re ready. The Hypergamouse printing will soon follow. And two additional bonuses; the leatherbound comics will be sewn, and somewhat to my surprise, color edge printed.

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In Praise of Blasphemy

I think I have stumbled upon why the godless sex perverts who made up an influential element of the science fiction crowd of the 1960s lionized and feted Roger Zelazny on the basis of a short story which not only isn’t anywhere nearly as good as his later work, but doesn’t stand up well over time in any context, be it scientific or socio-sexual.

The damning paragraph follows. Note the the Locar of which the patron saint of Gamma fiction writes is Ecclesiastes.

“And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.

“But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said ‘Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’

“And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hybris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us. ⁠—All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”

No wonder science fiction and fantasy have devolved into diseased lunacy. Their foolish elite literally set themselves against God, and now they have reaped the inevitable whirlwind as their retarded heirs laboriously scribble their deranged fantasies about being gang-raped by gay dinosaurs.

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A Tale of Two Remembrances

Castalia House’s Morgan recalls his friendship with the late author, Howard Andrew Jones:

It was late 1997 or early 1998 that Howard Jones had contacted me. I was the Official Editor of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association at the time. Periodically someone would contact me on how to get their pastiche Conan novel sold or how to get on the syndicated Conan T. V. show which was showing at the time. I never saw that show.

I received an e-mail from Howard who introduced himself and told me that he wanted to be to Harold Lamb what Glenn Lord was to Robert E. Howard. Glenn Lord was the agent for the Robert E. Howard copyright holders for around 28 years. Those Zebra and Ace non-Conan Robert E. Howard paperback collections. Glenn Lord was the agent who made the deals. He was a breath of fresh air.

Thus began a decades long friendship with Howard. We discussed fantasy fiction and historical novels we liked. We discovered new authors through each other. He seemed to like Fritz Leiber more than Robert E. Howard when I first knew him. We both tracked down old obscure hardbacks of historical fiction from the pulps. I seemed to like Arthur D. Howden Smith more than he did. Despite that, he had a copy of the first Grey Maiden story by Smith and sent me a photocopy of it. He also lent me a bound set of pulp stories including Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s “He Rules Who Can,” Joseph Ivers Lawrence “Swords on the Northern Sea,” and a Sargasso Sea story by F. van Wyck Mason.

He got Harold Lamb’s fiction back into print with University of Nebraska’s Bison Books. Before this, there were two collections of Harold Lamb’s cossack stories from the 1960s. Bison Books produced eight large volumes of Harold Lamb’s fiction from both the pulp and slick magazines. Howard organized them in a logical manner. We had discussed at one time of co-editing a volume of sword & sorcery fiction covering the early and middle years as an introductory volume to new readers.

At the same time, he was the fiction editor for Black Gate magazine. He championed getting new sword & sorcery fiction published. Sword & sorcery had been banished by the big publishers (for probably ideological reasons) but Howard knew there was a desire for it.

John O’Neill of the late and much-lamented Black Gate magazine also paid tribute to his former editor:

Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.

We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.

In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much content, especially without a budget?

Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers, and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, Ryan Harvey, and others. Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I still believe should have been presented to Howard.

Before long Howard’s own writing career had taken off with such magnitude that he had to step back from day-to-day duties at the magazine. Over the next fifteen years he released fifteen books, including three featuring Dabir and Asim, four novels in the Pathfinder universe, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy, three volumes in The Chronicles of Hanuvar, and the Harold Lamb collections Swords from the East and Swords from the West.

Howard was a wonderful writer. He believed in heroes, and that steadfast conviction informed all of his writing. But despite all his success Howard never lost touch with his other major talent — finding and nurturing new writers. Howard was an enormously gifted editor, and a tireless champion of underappreciated writers.

Many men have lived much longer, and left behind legacies that will not be remembered nearly as long, than Howard Andrew Jones.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Shadow Can Only Mock

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

“Considerable Disdain for Him”

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.”

DISCUSS ON SG

The Only Skull

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!

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