Pride Month starts today and Book Riot primed the sadness as their movement dwindles in cultural relevancy. They put out an article declaring that queer books and authors “are at a breaking point” and calls on readers to join the fight. What the article documents, stripped of its framing, is a market that rejected a product category being pushed on children and the industry now paying the price for that overreach.

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DaVaun Sanders, publisher and executive editor of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, announced on Bluesky on May 21 that the magazine is going on indefinite hiatus after issue #40. His full statement:

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The Japanese A Wild Sheep’s Chase, published in 1982, is the third novel by a young man who had already written two short, strange books and was not sure yet what kind of writer he was going to be. You can feel him deciding inside the sentences. The famous Murakami voice, the cool, slightly bemused first-person, the lists of records and brand names, the women who appear and dissolve, the well that opens under the floor of an ordinary life, is present here in a recognizable form for the first time. Pinball, 1973 had pieces of it. A Wild Sheep’s Chase has the whole assembled instrument. He picks it up. He plays a tune on it.

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The tune is a detective story that is not really a detective story, about a thirty-year-old advertising copywriter who is sent on an absurd errand by a mysterious right-wing power broker to find a sheep with a star on its back. The sheep, it turns out, is something more than a sheep. The hero’s friend, called only the Rat in the earlier books, has gone north and stopped writing letters. Hokkaidō appears at the halfway point and the novel changes climate. There is the girlfriend with the beautiful ears. There is a Sheep Man. There is an empty mountain villa where a record plays through the floorboards.

What I love about this book is that it commits to its own absurdity without ever raising its voice. The narrator’s tone is so even, so unsurprised by the increasingly unhinged things happening around him, that the reader simply enters the dream alongside him. This is Murakami’s favorite trick, and A Wild Sheep’s Chase is where he masters it. The sentence rhythm does the work. He writes a calm sentence about cooking spaghetti, then a calm sentence about a sheep with a star on its back trying to take over the consciousness of Japan, and the two sentences have the same temperature. The horror enters by the same door as the spaghetti. You don’t notice you’ve crossed a border until you’re well across.

The girlfriend, who is given no name, is the part of the book I find most difficult to defend, and I am going to defend her anyway, because the alternative is to pretend I don’t love this book, and I do. She exists only for the narrator. She has the ears, she has the gift, she has the extraordinary perceptions, and then on Hokkaidō she vanishes from the novel without ceremony, and we are not invited to grieve her. This is a real flaw. It is a flaw I have come to terms with. Murakami in 1982 did not yet know how to write women who exist independently of the men they appear to, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle eleven years later is partly the book of a writer who learned. Kumiko in Wind-Up Bird is not the girlfriend in Sheep. The girlfriend in Sheep is closer to a function than a person.

What rescues her, slightly, is the moment with the ears. The scene where the narrator first sees them uncovered, in the restaurant, the way the world reorganizes around them, the way she becomes briefly the most powerful person in the novel, is one of the small exquisite moments of Murakami’s finest writing. It is the kind of moment he kept getting better at over time. The girlfriend disappears, but that scene does not.

The Hokkaidō half is the more interesting material. The Dolphin Hotel, the chauffeur who prays to his car, the empty pasture, the snow coming. Murakami had been to that landscape and knew what its silence sounded like. The chapters in the mountain villa, alone with the snow and the fireplace and the records, are doing something his earlier novels could not do, they are sustaining mood across long pages without action. He had figured out by 1982 that you could write a Japanese novel in which nothing visible happens for forty pages and the reader stays in the room. This is harder than it looks.

Now I have to talk about the translation, and I am going to be careful, because the Birnbaum English of this novel is the version most readers in the world have read, and many of them love it, and for many readers it is Murakami. I understand why. It is propulsive. It is fun. It moves. Birnbaum was the translator who introduced Murakami to the English-speaking world in the late 1980s, and he was working under conditions that included an editor at Kodansha International cutting whole passages of the Japanese to fit a length the publisher wanted. Some of what feels brisk in the English is actually just missing.

But even setting aside the cuts, the translation makes a choice on every page that I think a reader who has only read the English would not necessarily detect. Birnbaum’s narrator sounds like an American hardboiled detective. He is wisecracking, faintly cynical, quick with a comeback, possessed of a kind of Chandler-derived cool. The Japanese boku is not this person. The Japanese boku is more diffident, more passive, more puzzled by his own life. He drifts. He does not deliver one-liners. He notices things and leaves them be.

The most compact way to demonstrate this is to point at the conversation in chapter eight where the narrator and his business partner discuss the dissolution of their advertising agency. In Japanese, the narrator’s responses are shorter than his partner’s, hesitant, slightly deflective. There is a faint sadness underneath that the prose does not name. In English, the narrator returns volleys. He has the better lines. The asymmetry is gone. A passive man has been converted into an active one. This makes the book more enjoyable to read in English; it also slightly mistranslates who the narrator is. The whole point of this character is that he is being moved through events by forces he does not control. A wisecracking version of him is a different character.

The other thing the English does is smooth out the strangeness. Murakami in Japanese often writes sentences that are mildly awkward, slightly off, deliberately flat — there is a famous quality of his prose that Japanese readers describe as 翻訳調 (translation-style), as if he were writing Japanese already half-translated from English. Birnbaum’s English does not preserve this. It writes confident, idiomatic American sentences. The reader does not feel the slight strangeness that is part of what makes Murakami sound like Murakami in his own language. This is a difficult thing to translate — you would have to write English that sounded faintly like translated English without being bad — and I am not sure anyone could have done it well in 1989. But the loss is real, and a reader who later picks up Jay Rubin’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will sometimes be surprised by how different the prose feels. It is not just that Rubin and Birnbaum are different translators. It is that Rubin is closer to the actual Japanese and Birnbaum is making a Murakami the English market could understand quickly.

I rate the translation 6 because it is a professional, energetic, readable rendering that has lost the thing that mattered most: the temperature of the narrator. The book it produces is fun. But it is not quite the book Murakami wrote.

A Wild Sheep’s Chase is not the Murakami book I love most — that is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — but it is the book where you can watch him become himself. Hear the Wind Sing is a sketch. Pinball, 1973 is a more ambitious sketch. A Wild Sheep’s Chase is the first finished room in the house he was going to build. The sheep, the well, the woman who vanishes, the friend gone north, the snow coming, the strange calm voice that walks into the dream and does not panic — all of it is here, assembled, working.

I would rather read it in Japanese. But the English is how most of the world met him, and most of the world was right to fall in love. They were just falling in love with a slightly different narrator than I did.

Book: 4/5

Translation: 6/10

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

NEXT: Review: The Memory Police By Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Asimov’s Science Fiction has not shipped its March/April 2026 issue yet. The issue is in blue line approval as of this writing, which means it is almost printed but not in subscribers’ hands. The magazine’s cover date will be replaced with a volume and issue number when it does ship, because if the month appeared on the cover, Barnes and Noble would refuse to stock it.

This is where the oldest and most storied science fiction magazine in continuous publication finds itself in 2026.

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In February 2025 we reported on the acquisition of Asimov’s, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction by Must Read Magazines, a division of 1 Paragraph Inc., led by Steven Salpeter, a former Curtis Brown literary agent and IP developer, alongside investor and arts patron Michael Khandelwal. In July 2025 we covered the contract crisis that erupted when SFWA threatened to delist Analog from its market report over Must Read’s new contract language demanding moral rights waivers, merchandising clauses, and unfavorable rights reversion terms. Must Read eventually backed down, removing the moral rights clause after sustained pressure from SFWA, Writer Beware, and individual authors.

The moral rights fight consumed the magazine’s first five months under new ownership. Writer Scott Edelman documented his experience in detail: after selling a story to F&SF on July 17, 2025, his 85th submission to the magazine across 54 years of trying, he spent 23 back-and-forth emails with Must Read’s staff trying to get acceptable contract language before giving up entirely.

By January 2026, Must Read had incorporated revised contract language addressing the three areas SFWA had flagged: moral rights, merchandising rights, and author termination and rights reversion clauses. The one remaining dispute was a single phrase in the warranties and indemnities paragraph required by their insurance carrier. The contract war ended in a draw. Must Read kept the magazines. SFWA claimed a partial victory. The writers who walked away from sales during the dispute did not get their stories back.

Then January 12, 2026, brought the next crisis. Must Read Books announced that Sheila Williams, Asimov’s editor since 2004 and a Hugo Award winner for Best Editor Short Form in 2012, had been hospitalized after suffering a brain aneurysm. Senior managing editor Emily Hockaday stepped in as interim editor.

Williams is the institutional continuity of the magazine and that loss hits hard. Isaac Asimov himself referred to her as “Sweet Sheila Williams.” She has been friends with authors across the field for over four decades. She co-founded the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. She became editor in 2004 on the retirement of Gardner Dozois and has run the magazine for over twenty years. When Must Read acquired Asimov’s, group publisher P.L. Stevens said publicly: “Sheila has been our rock since the acquisition.” As of March 2026, she remained hospitalized but recovering, with family posting occasional updates.

Hockaday has handled the editorial responsibilities with evident commitment. She is acquiring stories, approving blue lines, and communicating with subscribers on Facebook with a transparency that reflects someone who cares about the magazine. Her April update noted that the previous printer, the same printer used under the Penny/Dell ownership, had become unreliable, forcing a switch mid-production. “We found a new printer, because the previous one had unacceptable delays as well as declining print quality,” she wrote. “The magazines will be late, but they are coming.”

A month later, a high school library media specialist named Young posted a public question confirming what many subscribers already suspected: as of May 2026, only one issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had shipped under Must Read’s ownership, a 2025 Volume 1 issue. Nearly twelve months under new ownership. One issue.

Hockaday responded that Volume 2 of F&SF would print alongside the March/April Analog and Asimov’s, and added that blue line approval for those issues had already been given. She also addressed the Barnes and Noble problem directly: the March/April, May/June, and July/August issues will appear with volume and issue numbers rather than month/year dating, because shipping a March/April issue in June would result in the magazine being refused by major retail chains that pull titles once their cover date has passed.

This is the operational reality of science fiction’s legacy print magazines in 2026. The printer who served them for years became unreliable. The founding editor of the flagship title is recovering from a brain aneurysm. The new owner spent its first months in a contract war with the professional writer organization. F&SF shipped one issue in its first year under new ownership. Issues are being dated by volume number because the cover month would be a lie.

The broader picture is grim. Circulation at all three magazines has been declining for years. F&SF experienced significant difficulties under its previous ownership including delayed author contracts and large gaps between published issues. The new owners came in with enthusiasm. Salpeter is by all accounts a real SF fan, and Khandelwal co-founded a writing nonprofit, but enthusiasm does not fix a printer that stopped being reliable or a key editor hospitalized with a serious illness.

The short fiction magazine market built the careers of nearly every significant science fiction and fantasy author of the 20th century. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Ellison, Tiptree, Willis, Gaiman, Martin — all of them appeared in these pages. The magazines function as the farm system for the novel market, providing writers a place to develop craft and build audience before graduating to books. When the magazines struggle, the talent pipeline for the entire genre narrows.

Must Read Magazines is trying. The evidence suggests they are genuinely trying. The evidence also suggests they are undercapitalized, understaffed, dealing with a printer crisis, managing a medical emergency, and still working through the trust deficit created by the contract controversy. A small investment group that acquired five legacy magazines simultaneously does not have the operational infrastructure that Dell Magazines, a subsidiary of a major media company, maintained for thirty years.

Hockaday’s update that she is “already buying stories for the March/April 2027 issue” is the most encouraging line in any of these communications. The editorial work is happening. The magazines are not dead. They are in the hands of someone who cares enough to be buying content nine months ahead while simultaneously approving blue lines and negotiating with a new printer.

What do you think the future of print science fiction short fiction looks like? Let us know in the comments.

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: The Forgotten Heir of Heinlein: A Spider Robinson Retrospective

We started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work, and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue.

Part 8:

Part 7:

Part 6:

Part 5:

Part 4:

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Christopher Tolkien resigned from the board of the Tolkien Estate in August 2017, at the age of ninety-two.

He had served as literary executor since his father’s death in 1973. Forty-four years of guardianship. Twenty-four edited volumes. A lifetime spent deciphering manuscripts written in pencil over erased earlier drafts, some of them composed in army huts during the First World War. He had protected his father’s legacy with a ferocity that Hollywood found maddening and scholars found admirable.

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Brian Niemeier built his audience without a publisher. His Soul Cycle series began with Nethereal in 2015 and expanded with Souldancer, which won the inaugural Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel in 2016. He crowdfunded his way through multiple campaigns, built a Patreon community called the Court of Kairos, and wrote Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You, a nonfiction title on the indie creator economy that hit number one on Amazon. He did all of it outside legacy publishing, on direct reader support.

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His new Kickstarter is Debt Reckoning, a nonfiction book on how the American student loan system dismantled a generation’s path to stability. The campaign launched this week and crossed its halfway funding mark on day one. This is a topic Niemeier has been discussing at length for years, as it’s a crisis that’s facing America like few others.

The argument starts with incentives. Niemeier wrote on his Substack: “Once colleges knew the federal lending system would keep expanding access to unlimited student debt, the normal price pressures that restrain costs evaporated. Universities added layers of administration, started amenities arms races, and inflated tuition far beyond what many graduates could realistically repay.”

The downstream effects are what he tracks through the book. The labor market split. One side ran on credential inflation and financed white-collar career tracks. The other was starved for skilled tradespeople that fewer young Americans were steered toward. Niemeier describes the result: “shortages in trades, absurd credential requirements for entry-level jobs, and millions of borrowers wrestling with repayment systems that grow more complicated by the year.”

Debt Reckoning covers how the loan system evolved, why tuition keeps rising regardless of how much aid expands, what current borrowers can do to navigate repayment and forgiveness options, and what reforms could stop the next generation from inheriting the same trap.

Niemeier has been writing about the connection between financial dependency and institutional capture for years. His entire publishing model is a working argument against it. Debt Reckoning takes the same thesis into higher education policy directly.

The campaign is live now and more than 75% funded with stretch goals on the way. This is already proving to be another incredible non-fiction book on a topic that’s one of the most important of our times. Niemeier has contributed to Fandom Pulse with blogs in the past on several different pop culture topics to support us and we’re happy to support his latest offering as well.

Back Debt Reckoning here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brianniemeier/debt-reckoning-book

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There was a time when science fiction readers spoke the name Spider Robinson with the same reverence they reserved for Niven, Pournelle, and Card. He won three Hugos. He won a Nebula. He took home the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1974. Robert A. Heinlein’s own estate picked him to complete the Grand Master’s unfinished novel, passing over every other writer in the field. For a stretch in the late 1970s and 1980s, the publishing world treated him as Heinlein’s literary heir apparent.

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Then he went quiet. And the genre that once celebrated him forgot he was still out there.

This is a writer worth remembering. The things Spider Robinson did well are the things modern science fiction has stopped doing.

From Night Watchman to Hugo Winner

Robinson’s origin story reads like something he’d have written himself. Born in the Bronx in 1948, he attended Catholic high school, spent a year in seminary, did two years at a Catholic college, and finished his English degree at SUNY Stony Brook. After college he spent years living without technology in the woods. In 1971 he took a job guarding sewers in New York City at night. The job was so miserable he wrote a science fiction story to escape it.

That story was “The Guy with the Eyes,” published in Analog in February 1973. It introduced readers to a curious little bar called Callahan’s Place. It also launched one of the most beloved series in modern SF.

Before he was a novelist, Robinson was a critic. He held down the “Galaxy Bookshelf” column at Galaxy magazine from 1975 to 1977, then reviewed for Analog and New Destinies across nearly a decade. He topped the 1977 Locus Award poll for Best Critic on the strength of that work. He knew the genre cold before he ever published a novel. When you read his fiction, that grounding shows up on every page. Robinson wrote like a man who had absorbed every Heinlein juvenile, every Sturgeon story, every Sheckley quip, and figured out how to synthesize them into something of his own.

The Major Works

Telempath (1976) is the novel that should top every underread classics list. Built out from his Hugo-winning 1976 novella “By Any Other Name,” it’s a post-apocalyptic story set after a bioengineered virus has amplified human olfactory sense a thousandfold, collapsing civilization because no one can stand to live in a city anymore. The protagonist, Isham Stone, is a young Black assassin sent to kill the scientist responsible for the collapse, who happens to be his own father. The book moves from revenge thriller to first-contact story to reconciliation parable, and it pulls off all three. The Muskies, airborne sentient beings humanity never knew were there, count among the more inventive alien concepts of the 1970s. The book ends on hope. Reconciliation. Rebuilding. This was 1976, the high tide of New Wave nihilism, and Robinson was writing about humans choosing to fix what they had broken.

Stardance (1979), co-written with his wife Jeanne, a dancer, choreographer, and Sōtō Zen monk, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus. It tells the story of a dancer whose art can only fully exist in zero gravity, and what happens when humanity’s first peaceful contact with an alien intelligence turns out to be a dance. The novella that anchors the book won both major awards in 1978. The full trilogy of Stardance, Starseed, and Starmind built out a future in which a symbiotic relationship with an alien lifeform lets humans live indefinitely in vacuum. The premise sounds bizarre on paper. On the page it works because the Robinsons grounded the cosmic scale in genuine love for what dance is and what art is for. No other husband-and-wife team in SF produced anything like it.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon (1977) and the dozen-plus volumes that followed are what Robinson is best known for, and probably what gets him most unfairly dismissed. Yes, the puns are aggressive. Yes, the sentimentality is laid on thick. Yes, Callahan’s regulars solve interstellar problems by buying each other drinks and crying about it. But these stories built one of the largest non-pornographic communities on early internet. Usenet’s alt.callahans newsgroup, and the countless cyber-bars it spawned, were readers trying to recreate the fictional space Robinson had imagined. That is a writer who understood, decades before the term parasocial community existed, that readers wanted somewhere to belong. The Callahan’s books are a club story tradition descended from Lord Dunsany and Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, refined into something warmer and more American.

Beyond the headliners there’s plenty more. Night of Power (1985) is a tight, controlled near-future thriller about a Black-power revolt in New York that took heavy critical fire on release for daring to engage the subject at all. Mindkiller (1982) and the Deathkiller / Lifehouse trilogy explore consciousness, addiction, and what it means to record a human mind. The Russell Walker novels, Very Bad Deaths (2004) and Very Hard Choices (2008), are mature, autumnal books about telepathy, friendship, and the cost of seeing too much. His short-story collection Melancholy Elephants (1984) contains a title story so good it took the 1983 Hugo for Best Short Story, and stands as one of the finest meditations on copyright and cultural exhaustion ever put on paper.

Variable Star: The Heinlein Project

In 2003, after Virginia Heinlein’s death, an outline turned up in the Heinlein papers. Eight pages, written in 1955, for a novel originally titled The Stars Are a Clock. Heinlein had set it aside to write Tunnel in the Sky, Double Star, and Time for the Stars, and never returned to it. Seven of the eight pages survived.

The Heinlein Prize Trust picked Spider Robinson to finish it. That choice tells you exactly how seriously the Heinlein estate took him. Robinson published Variable Star in 2006, the coming-of-age story of Joel Johnston, a young composer who signs on to a colony starship after his fiancée turns out to be the granddaughter of the wealthiest man in the solar system and breaks his heart. The novel reads like late-period Heinlein filtered through Robinson’s optimism. Critics divided on it. Some thought it too constrained by the outline. Others thought Robinson’s own voice intruded on Heinlein’s. The truth is the book reads like what it is: a respectful collaboration across half a century between two writers who loved the same things.

Then comes the heartbreak. In 2009 Robinson posted on his website that his agent had sold a trilogy of sequels based on Variable Star‘s characters and setting. Three more novels in the universe. Built out from Heinlein’s framework. Written by Spider Robinson at the height of his late-career powers.

They were never released.

Jeanne Robinson died in 2010 after a battle with biliary cancer. The Robinsons had been married thirty-five years, and they had been creative partners for nearly all of it. The Variable Star trilogy disappeared. The Russell Walker series stopped at two books. The Callahan’s stories trickled to a halt.

The Quiet After

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes plainly that his reduced activity after 2010 was caused by family health issues. He hasn’t been totally silent. My Favorite Shorts came out in 2016. He co-edited Tesseracts Twenty in 2017. His podcast Spider On The Web ran for years. He still appears at conventions and writer-in-residence posts. But the steady novel-a-year cadence that produced more than thirty books between 1976 and 2008 is gone.

You can read the situation a few different ways. The kindest reading is that grief reshaped a man whose creative identity had been forged in partnership with his wife. The more pragmatic reading is that the industry that championed him in the 1970s and 1980s is not the industry that exists today. A writer whose stock-in-trade is unironic optimism, redemption arcs, and stories where humans solve their problems has fewer obvious homes in the contemporary trad-pub landscape than he did forty years ago.

Either way, the result is the same. A writer who belonged in the conversation with Heinlein and Sturgeon, a man with three Hugos, a Nebula, the 2008 Heinlein Award for Lifetime Excellence in Literature, and a body of work that built actual reader communities, has slipped to the margins of genre memory.

Why He Matters Now

Robinson wrote science fiction in which problems had solutions. His characters argued, drank, smoked, joked, and worked things out. The Muskies in Telempath don’t get exterminated. They get understood. The Stardancers don’t conquer humanity. They invite it forward. The barflies at Callahan’s don’t tear each other down. They hold each other up. Even his thrillers end in hard-won grace rather than cynical defeat.

This is a mode of storytelling the genre needs back. The indie SF and crowdfunded fiction space has been steadily rebuilding the kind of optimistic, character-first, problem-solving science fiction Robinson was writing forty years ago. He was doing it before anyone called it a movement. He was doing it when the prestige establishment of the genre had moved on to bleaker territory.

He is not dead. He is not finished. He may yet surprise us. But even if he never writes another novel, the catalog is sitting there. Thirty-plus books. Three decades of stories. An alternate-history Heinlein collaboration that should have been four books. All waiting for readers to find them again.

If you have never read Telempath, that is where to start. If you have never read Stardance, that is where to go next. If you have only ever encountered Robinson through one bad pun at Callahan’s bar, you owe yourself a closer look.

Which forgotten science fiction author do you think deserves a full retrospective treatment next, and what’s the one book of theirs you would put in every reader’s hands?

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: Lois McMaster Bujold Is Done With The Machine, But Not With the Work

Lois McMaster Bujold is 76, retired from conventions, retired from public speaking, retired from contracts, and somewhere in Minneapolis right now, probably writing another Penric novella. At a moment when science fiction is watching several of its foundational voices step back entirely due to health, age, and the grind of a career finally catching up,…

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Sharon Lee has been building the Liaden Universe with her writing partner Steve Miller for over 40 years. Six anthology collections deep, the series remains one of science fiction’s most quietly beloved corners with a sprawling space opera built on trade law, honor debt, psionics, and the indomitable Clan Korval. The sixth installment, Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 6, arrives carrying more personal weight than most readers will know.

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The Liaden Universe centers on a society of humans descended from Earth who built a rigid culture around clan structure, contract, and a concept called mel’ant’i where a person’s worth and honor as measured by their actions and obligations. Clan Korval sits at the top of that world, a mercantile dynasty with a dragon-and-tree crest, an unsettling number of pilots, and a habit of collecting trouble. Val Con yos’Phelium and Miri Robertson anchor the main novel arc, but the short fiction Lee and Miller have produced around the edges of that universe has always functioned as its own reward. The full universe contains character studies, origin stories, world-building that never made it into the novels but deserved to exist anyway.

Lee and Miller started as short story writers. They never stopped. “Steve and I both started out as short story writers, and we never broke ourselves of writing short stories,” Lee told Baen Free Radio Hour host Sean Hazlett. The collections reflect the novels they were working on at the time. “You can look at them as a kind of history document,” she said. Several stories in Volume 6 orbit Colemeno (the setting of Ribbon Dance, Governor’s Ball, and Trader’s Leap) and the short fiction around it helped Lee and Miller work out the rules of a place where psionic ability gets amplified by ambient conditions. That kind of setting demands discipline. “You have to be careful not to jump the shark,” Lee said. “You have a teleporter, but it has to be realistic. You can’t have someone teleport across the world in a thought. Actions take energy. They take calories. You have to break your journey and eat something. And rest.”

That’s how they write the universe, by figuring out what’s believable. Short stories, Lee explained, are the primary tool for that work. “I have this idea, or I have this character. Let’s throw them into a short story and see what they do.” Characters from the novels who never got enough page time get stories of their own. “They’re an interesting person and I want to find out what they’re doing. How did they get there? Where did they come from? So I ask.”

Volume 6 also contains a first: a Liaden western. Editor David Boop approached Lee and Miller about contributing to a weird western anthology. Lee’s initial answer was no. Miller’s was different. The Lee and Miller method, as Lee describes it, works like this: “Whoever brought a story or a novel to the table and fought for it and convinced the other one, ‘I guess we’re going to do this’ — that person was lead.” Miller said he had an idea, so Lee stepped back. “I went, ‘Great. Go. Make the Western work.’”

Miller wrote a long piece that had everything it needed except a spine. He came to Lee and admitted they might have bitten off more than they could chew. Lee took a walk on the beach in Ogunquit, Maine, and figured it out. The story features a weatherman named Dale who communicates with ranchers through their hats. Walking along the water, Lee kept touching her hat. “I went, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got it. I’ve got how to pull it all together. It’s the hat. We’ve got to get Dale the weatherman more into this story because the hats are the key.’” Miller had been about to cut him entirely. “He went, ‘Okay. I was going to get rid of the weatherman because I thought he was extraneous.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. He’s the one. He’s the one who makes all this work.’”

“The Last Train Out of Kepler 283c” also answers a question readers have been asking since Agent of Change. Space leather, a fabric staple of the Liaden Universe for over 40 years, finally has an origin. It comes from Hodums, alien animals with spines that hold their hides in place until the weight gets too heavy and they drop. “Drop season” is when ranchers and aerial patrols go out and collect. Miller invented the animals whole cloth. Lee asked him how. “He’s like, ‘Well, leather’s got to come from someplace.’”

Lee read a passage from the story on air, and it holds up as a western without apology:

“He was big and strong and peaceable. Nobody was accepting a fight. Nobody expected him to knock down one deputy, much less two, or take off running. And if they’d ever thought about his pony, they sure hadn’t expected the bolt of hoofed lightning that answered his whistle, nor the ease with which a big man could swing into a saddle from a dead run. Nolan Quester had gone before the second deputy lumbered to his feet. Out of town and on the wrong end of the law.”

But the story that means the most to Lee in this collection is “Standing Orders.” It opens the anthology, and the reason it exists at all comes down to recovery, from cancer, and from what cancer does to a writer’s mind.

While Miller worked on Fair Trade, Lee handled their short story obligations, which was standard procedure for how they worked. What wasn’t standard was what she was coming out of. “I had just finished radiology and treatment for cancer,” she told Hazlett. “And during all that excitement, I had forgotten how to write.”

The forgetting wasn’t metaphorical. Draft after draft went nowhere over the course of months. “I did, I don’t know, 50 drafts of stories that just were impossible.” She set a deadline for herself, the kind a writer sets when options are running low. “I got up one day and walked to my computer and said, ‘If it doesn’t work this time, I’m just going to contact David and tell him we can’t fulfill the contract.’”

She sat down and started doodling on the keyboard. It worked. The opening came:

“The war was over. The Agnels had prevailed. The enemy was vanquished. Mankind was safe. Some people would think that was a good thing. Some people don’t know much about mankind.”

A character named Maggie Ruthfear arrived with those lines. Lee had no idea who she was. That turned out to be the unlock. “I remembered that I don’t have to know. She knows. And all I have to do is sit here and let her tell me.”

Lee went back to explain what had broken in the first place. “Cancer is cancer. It takes up a lot of time. The treatment takes up a lot of time. And doctors want you to focus on real life really hard.” There are no safe what-ifs when treatment is the reality. “You can treat it or not treat it, but these all have real world consequences. You can’t just make up a better ending.” That collapse of imagination into the immediate is what cost her the writing. “I had gotten mired in real life. I forgot that when you’re making things up, the sky’s the limit. And I had also forgotten that it’s not my story. It’s the character’s story.”

That last part is the foundation of how Lee writes. “It has always seemed to me when I write that somebody is telling me the story and I’m just writing it.” She rereads everything she wrote the previous day before she starts new work, and she’s often surprised by what she finds. She’s been going back through the entire Liaden catalog recently — something she’s never done before — and the experience has been disorienting in the best way. “I was reading them and saying, ‘My god, this person is good.’ And it was, ‘Did I write that? How on earth did I think of this?’”

Forty years of a universe, and it still surprises her.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: What Is a First Edition? The Muddied Waters of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern

For book collectors, few questions generate as much confusion as “What’s the first edition?” Most of the time, the answer is straightforward: the first printing of the first published version. But Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series created a bibliographic maze. Collectors still argue over what counts, and rare book dealers command different prices depending on which definition they use.

McCaffrey’s publication history doesn’t follow the standard pipeline. Her Pern books traveled through magazines, limited-edition convention publications, paperback originals, delayed hardcovers, and multiple cover artists across a decade. “First edition” can mean at least four different things, and the version most readers think of as definitive didn’t appear until ten years after the book’s original publication.

The True First: Magazine Publication

The absolute first appearance of Pern came in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. “Weyr Search,” illustrated by John Schoenherr, appeared as the cover story in October 1967. “Dragonrider” followed in two parts, December 1967 and January 1968, also with Schoenherr covers. These were novellas, not the full novel, and they won McCaffrey the Hugo and Nebula awards that made her the first woman to win either honor.

For purist collectors, the October 1967 Analog is the first edition of Pern. The first time F’lar, Lessa, and Mnementh appeared in print anywhere. These magazines trade for modest prices compared to hardcover firsts, typically $50-150 depending on condition, because most collectors don’t think of magazines as “real” first editions. Bibliographically, they are.

The First Book: 1968 Ballantine Paperback

Dragonflight as a complete novel first appeared in July 1968 as a Ballantine paperback original. This was a fix-up. The two Analog novellas expanded and stitched together into a 309-page book. The cover was generic fantasy art, nothing memorable. Ballantine Books catalog number U6124.

This is the first edition most serious collectors recognize: first book publication, first complete version of the story. Copies in fine condition with the original pictorial wraps run $100-300, higher if signed. Pristine copies are uncommon because it was a mass-market paperback that people actually read, and the paper quality was poor even by 1968 standards.

The catch: this was a paperback original. No hardcover existed yet.

The First Hardcover: 1968 Rapp & Whiting, London

The true first hardcover edition appeared in 1968 from Rapp & Whiting in London, the same year as the Ballantine paperback. Cover art by Lawrence Edwards. This is the British first edition, first impression, and it beats the American hardcover to market by a full year.

Rapp & Whiting hardcovers are scarce and command serious collector premiums. Fine copies in dust jacket with the original 30 shillings price intact can run $400-700 or more. Most surviving copies show typical wear: spine panel fading, price-clipping, reinforced spine tips. They’re legitimately rare because the print run was small and most copies stayed in the UK market.

But here’s the complication: this is the first hardcover edition, not the first edition. The Ballantine paperback appeared earlier in 1968. So the Rapp & Whiting is simultaneously a first edition (first British publication) and a reprint (the book already existed in American paperback). Depends which definition you use.

The First American Hardcover: 1969 Walker and Company

The first American hardcover didn’t appear until 1969, published by Walker and Company in New York. Different publisher, a year after both the Ballantine paperback and the British hardcover. The copyright page states “Published in the United States of America in 1969.”

Walker hardcovers are also scarce and command premium prices: $300-600 for fine copies in dust jacket, significantly more if signed. Small print run, limited library acquisition. But they’re third to market after the 1968 Ballantine paperback and 1968 Rapp & Whiting hardcover.

This creates real collector confusion. Many dealers list Walker 1969 copies as “first edition, first hardcover” without clarifying “first American hardcover.” Technically accurate for the US market but misleading if you don’t know the British edition came first.

The Edition Everyone Wants: 1978 Del Rey with Michael Whelan Cover

The version that defines Pern in most readers’ minds didn’t appear until October 1978, when Del Rey (Ballantine’s science fiction imprint) reissued Dragonflight in hardcover with Michael Whelan’s cover art. Lessa leading the dragons in flight above a shadowy green world, painted in Whelan’s unmistakable style. This is the image everyone knows.

McCaffrey herself loved it. She wrote to Whelan describing how she’d nervously sent him notes about what her dragons weren’t: “scaled, fanged, eared and snake-long in the neck.” She was relieved to see “Lessa, for once, appropriately clad for dragonriding.” Whelan studied crocodiles and bat wings, wrote to McCaffrey with questions, and created what became the most recognized dragon image in science fiction.

The 1978 Del Rey hardcover is not a first edition by any definition. It’s the first printing of the first Del Rey edition with Whelan cover art, appearing a full decade after the book’s original publication. But it’s what collectors want, because it’s the version that became culturally definitive. Fine copies in dust jacket run $150-400, more if signed by both McCaffrey and Whelan.

The Del Rey paperback reprints with Whelan’s cover began appearing around the same time. More common and affordable, but still sought after. The Whelan cover art appeared on Pern editions continuously from 1978 through 1991, then again from 1997 onward.

The White Dragon and “A Time When”

McCaffrey repeated this pattern with The White Dragon, but with an additional wrinkle that created one of the most sought-after Pern collectibles.

In February 1975, McCaffrey appeared as Guest of Honor at Boskone XII, the annual convention of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). To mark the occasion, NESFA Press published A Time When, a limited-edition hardcover of 800 numbered copies, most signed by McCaffrey. The book featured interior illustrations by Bonnie Dalzell and contained what would become the opening section of The White Dragon, along with a “Dragondex” concordance to Dragonflight and Dragonquest.

A Time When is a true limited edition, produced three years before The White Dragon appeared from Del Rey in June 1978. The subtitle gives the plot: “Being a Tale of Young Lord Jaxom, His White Dragon, Ruth, and Various Fire-Lizards.” Copies in fine condition command $300-800, sometimes more than $1,000 for exceptionally clean examples or the even rarer lettered copies (20 were produced). The 2024 market shows active interest, with multiple dealers listing copies and collectors tracking them.

The White Dragon itself made publishing history when it became the first science fiction novel to reach the New York Times hardcover bestseller list in 1978. The Del Rey first edition, with Michael Whelan’s cover of Ruth the white dragon, is the standard collectible version. First printings in fine condition with dust jacket run $150-300.

But the “first edition” is complicated again. The first appearance of the story was A Time When in 1975. The first complete novel was the Del Rey 1978 hardcover. The culturally definitive version is the Whelan cover, which appeared simultaneously with first publication this time.

The Collector’s Dilemma

So what is a first edition of Dragonflight?

• Purist answer: October 1967 Analog magazine with “Weyr Search”

• First book answer: July 1968 Ballantine paperback

• First hardcover answer: 1968 Rapp & Whiting, London

• First American hardcover answer: 1969 Walker and Company

• Iconic answer: 1978 Del Rey with Whelan cover

Each is legitimate. Each serves different collector priorities. Magazine collectors want the 1967 Analog. Completists want the 1968 Ballantine paperback. British collectors want the 1968 Rapp & Whiting. American collectors want the 1969 Walker. Genre fans want the 1978 Whelan edition.

The market reflects this confusion. A fine 1968 Ballantine paperback and a fine 1978 Del Rey hardcover can sell for similar prices despite a ten-year gap and completely different publication status, because they appeal to different collector bases. The 1968 Rapp & Whiting commands the highest premium for being both scarce and the true first hardcover, but many American collectors don’t even know it exists.

McCaffrey’s publication history rewards the informed collector and punishes assumptions. Know what you’re buying, know what “first edition” means in context, and don’t assume the version with the famous cover is the version with bibliographic priority.

The dragons may be creatures of Pern, but their publication history is pure Earth. Complicated, commercial, and human.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: EXCLUSIVE Interview: Science Fiction Legend C.J. Cherryh Talks Her Career

CJ Cherryh is one of science fiction’s most incredible writers, her prose pushing the limits of what’s possible with alien voice in a way no one else has been able to attain. Her carreer features an incredible pedigree beginning with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977 and Hugo-winning works like Cassandra, Downbelow Station, and Cyteen. Over more than four decades, she has published more than 80 books, especially within the Alliance-Union universe an Foreigner series. For those interested in checking out her work, Fandom Pulse has a reading guide.

Recently, she announced her retirement from writing on Facebook, stating, “The ability to control narrative is just not what it was,” in a shock announcement, finally saying “the body of work is what it is.” With that body of work we wanted to celebrate her career and conducted an interview with the sci-fi legend:

You started writing when the field and the business of publishing was so different than it is now. What does the arc of that look like from the inside, and where do you think the genre stands now versus where it was when you started?

The major change in the field is a) the passing of 'foundational' writers from the scene. And the proliferation of self-published works.

The Foreigner series is 23 volumes across three decades, touches a lot on how difficult understanding between minds is. Do you think science fiction as a genre has gotten better or worse at taking that difficulty seriously and are humans in the technological age getting worse at understanding each other? Can we do anything about it if they are?

All literature has had a go at understanding the mind and the limits of accurate communication. The 'misunderstanding' comedy of Plautus, the works of Shakespeare. ---When I created Bren I explored the gulfs of understanding in language---which I couldn't (without losing the reader) do by using a foreign language---but I could explore the follies of believing we have an exact equivalency of sense or feeling. Yet---they manage peace by giving each other enough latitude and taking each others' tests.

Rider at the Gate is one of the most viscerally unsettling takes on the human-animal bond in science fiction. The Nighthorses are partners, but they’re also predators and they are not remotely safe. Where did that particular darkness come from?

The nighthorses---I grew up around horses, these immensely strong and terribly fragile creatures---and a good cowpony taught me early the workings of an alien but very sensible mind. The incident on the bridge is autobiographical---said cowpony and I nearly ended up upside down in a far-below creek---but I managed to get him to look at the situation before we went over the edge. It's a different mindset---and you have to respect it. I created in Finisterre a really good reason why humans huddle together rather closely---and indeed, it is kind of a spooky place where humans are not being as dominant as they'd like to be.

You’ve described Finisterre as a “bad real estate deal,” placing it in the same category as Pern and Darkover. Readers and critics have noted the clear Pern resonance but where McCaffrey’s dragons are fundamentally benevolent, your Nighthorses are predators that could shred a rider’s sanity. Was that a deliberate inversion of the McCaffrey template, and did you have any conversations with Anne about it?

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The Based Book Sale is back. From now through Tuesday May 26, 2026, more than a hundred titles from independent and culturally conservative authors are available for $0.99 or free across science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, horror, and nonfiction. The catalog is enormous, and most readers will not have time to sift through every entry.

So we did the work. Below are Fandom Pulse’s nine curated picks, including two of our own titles, with notes on why each one earned a spot.

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Space Fleet Academy Year One (Jon Del Arroz with Vox Day)

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Space Fleet Academy is what Vox Day and I wrote as the answer to Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy and the wave of woke nostalgia television trying to drag the Trek brand further into the dirt. The book brings real science back to the academy setting and drops cadets into a dark universe where survival of the fittest is the operating principle, not the consequence-free utopia modern Trek pretends the Federation is. If you have wanted military science fiction that takes the academy concept seriously instead of using it as a launching pad for sermons, this is the book for you.

Dakiti: Ziva Payvan Book 1 by EJ Fisch

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EJ Fisch’s Dakiti opens the Ziva Payvan series, a five-book military science fiction run that built its reputation through reader word of mouth rather than publisher push. Ziva Payvan is a Haphezian assassin working black ops for her government, and Dakiti drops readers straight into the kind of covert operations and squad-level action that fans of the genre keep coming back for. The book holds a 4.3 average on Amazon across 185 ratings and 3.9 on Goodreads across 235 ratings, numbers that signal a loyal readership rather than a flash-in-the-pan release. Fisch has already completed the full arc, with Books 4 and 5 (Fracture and Embers) appearing as New Arrivals elsewhere in this sale, so readers who get hooked can run the entire series without waiting on a slow author. Dakiti is the entry point, and at sale pricing it’s the cheapest way to test whether the Alpha team is your kind of crew.

Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós (Castalia Library Edition)

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We covered this one in a full feature article last week and the news is still worth amplifying. Castalia Library has launched a translation project that no major English-language publisher has ever attempted: the complete 46-volume Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós, the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Trafalgar is volume one. October 1805, off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet Nelson, and by nightfall the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force. Fourteen-year-old Gabriel Araceli watches the catastrophe from aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world. Vox Day confirmed to Fandom Pulse that Castalia is translating all 46 volumes. For fans of Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who want to see the age of sail from the Spanish side of the line, this is the entry point.

Boy’s Own Starship by Christopher G. Nuttall

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Christopher G. Nuttall’s novel reads like a lost Heinlein juvenile, and that is the highest praise this column can offer. Nuttall is one of the most prolific independent science fiction authors working today, with dozens of military SF and space opera titles to his name, and Boy’s Own Starship is his explicit love letter to the Scribner’s-era young adult tradition that built the genre. The book carries the spirit of Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Rocket Ship Galileo: brainy young protagonists, real science, real consequences, and an adventure that respects the intelligence of the reader instead of talking down to them. If you grew up on the Heinlein juveniles and have been waiting for someone to write more of them with the same craft and the same confidence in young readers, Nuttall delivers. The sale price makes it an easy gateway into one of independent SF’s most reliable catalogs.

Midnight’s War: Out Of The Shadows by Vox Day

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Midnight’s War is the prose continuation of one of Arkhaven Comics’ strongest properties, a vampire dark fantasy from Vox Day and Chuck Dixon. In the year 8466 of the Cainite calendar, a catastrophic global economic crisis ends with the vampire tribes emerging from 2,600 years in the shadows. They already control the banks, the media, the governments, and the major international institutions. A new world order called the Great Concord of Gomorrah replaces the global financial system with a currency backed by human blood, enforced by an annual blood tax. Resistance survives in one place: the Knights of Saint Michael and of the Catacombs of Rome, a twelve-man military order modeled on the medieval crusading orders, armed with faith and blood that is poison to their enemies. The vampire courts are decadent, ancient, and lethal, and Vox Day builds the kind of suspense that comes from heroes who are outmanned at every turn in a world where the institutions all answer to the enemy. Readers who follow the Arkhaven run already know the tone, and new readers can step in here without the comic.

Stand Alone (Wolfhounds, Book 1) by John Van Stry

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John Van Stry is the bestselling military science fiction author readers have never heard of, and the situation is genuinely strange given his output. Stand Alone opens with Chase, a gang lieutenant in one of the emperor’s capital cities, planning to do a four-year prison stretch to cement his street credibility. Instead, the bastard father he has only seen once shows up on the bench and sentences him to ten years in the Imperial Navy among the Wolfhounds, the Emperor’s Own. Mech armor combat, fleet politics, AI conspiracies, and a protagonist who is exactly as ruthless as the man who sent him there. Van Stry delivers the kind of military space opera that used to define the genre before Tor decided message fiction was more important than action.

Reaper’s Crawl and the LitRPG turn of C.J. Carella

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C.J. Carella is one of the great workhorses of independent science fiction. The Warp Marine Corps series put him on the map with star-spanning action and a reborn USA fighting alien invaders, and the Bicentennial War trilogy continued it. Now Carella has pivoted into LitRPG, and the genre is better for it. He brings the same action-adventure pacing, the same instinct for combat geometry, and the same workmanlike reliability to the dungeon-crawl format. If you have not picked up a Carella book yet, the sale is the moment to fix that.

Starquest: Secret Agents of the Galaxy by John C. Wright

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John C. Wright has some of the best prose of any living science fiction author, and Starquest is his answer to the gutted husk Disney made of Star Wars. The series brings space opera back to its pulp roots: Pirate King Ahab, Dark Sun Weapons quenching living stars, Space Princess Lyra Centauri, the Crime Syndicate corrupting consuls and fixing votes, an iron-masked vigilante called the Ancient Mariner hunting a pirate captain through a Murder Mansion. Wright told Fandom Pulse he built a 12,000-year galactic history to undergird the universe, and the discipline shows on the page. Secret Agents of the Galaxy is volume two, the entry where the series finds its own voice apart from Lucas, and it is the strongest place to either start or continue the run.

The Stars Entwined (The Aryshan War, Book 1) by Jon Del Arroz

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Another of mine. The Stars Entwined opens an interstellar war between humanity and the Aryshan Empire and follows Lieutenant Sean Barrows, an internal affairs agent who gets surgically transformed and dropped into Aryshan territory as a spy. The complication: he falls in love with the enemy commander he was sent to deceive. C.J. Carella called it “warfare, diplomacy and espionage… plenty of action and intrigue. Highly recommended.” Richard Fox called me “the future of military science fiction.” Readers compare it to Old Man’s War, Vatta’s War, and the Vorkosigan Saga. If you want military space opera with romance, espionage, and an alien culture built to feel actually alien, start here.

For Steam And Country (Adventures of Baron Von Monocle, Book 1) by Jon Del Arroz

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One final book of mine, because the sale is the right time to bring new readers into the Von Monocle series, which I’ll be releasing The Steam Knight 2 of later this year and then working on the big finale book. For Steam And Country won the CLFA Book of the Year Award and built the #1 Bestselling YA Steampunk series on Amazon. Sixteen-year-old Zaira von Monocle has been farming her family’s land alone for two years when a lawyer arrives to inform her that her father, the legendary adventurer Baron von Monocle, is legally dead and his airship Liliana is now hers. The invading Wyranth Empire is wielding both gunpowder and sorcery, and the Kingdom of Rislandia’s only chance is a sixteen-year-old girl who has never commanded an airship. Swashbuckling, chaste, fast-paced, and accessible to teen and adult readers alike.

You can peruse dozens of more books on the Based Book Sale substack.

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NEXT: A Complete Checklist Of The Most Prestigious Science Fiction Books Ever Printed

Easton Press launched the Masterpieces of Science Fiction series in 1986 and has not stopped. The series now runs past 140 volumes. Every book is bound in genuine embossed leather, printed on acid-neutral paper, gilded on three page edges, and accented with 22-karat gold titling on a hubbed spine. Many volumes came with commissioned introductions and original artwork. A significant portion were signed by the author on a special limitation page, with a numbered certificate of authenticity.

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No comparable series exists in science fiction publishing. The Franklin Library ran a parallel effort, but it collapsed in the 1990s. Commercial publishers have never attempted anything at this production level for genre fiction at scale. What Easton built over those four decades is the closest thing science fiction has to the kind of fine press treatment normally reserved for Shakespeare or Dickens.

The series ran its heaviest output between 1986 and 1996. Sixteen volumes in 1986 alone, anchoring the list with H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, Frank Herbert, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The 1988 class added Dune, Ringworld, The Man in the High Castle, Dragonflight, and The Foundation Trilogy in a single year. By the mid-1990s the series had covered most of science fiction’s genuine canon.

There are debatable choices in the catalog. Some slots went to ideologically fashionable titles that the market has not validated over time. The Female Man, Door Into Ocean, and a few others land in that category. Bug Jack Barron, Whatever that Thing is It Is Not Science Fiction, got a volume. So did On Wings of Song. These are real books that real editors believed in at the time, but they sit awkwardly next to Heinlein and Clarke. The series was not purely a meritocracy. It reflected the editorial consensus of the late 1980s and early 1990s science fiction establishment, which had its own priorities.

That said, the core of the list is extraordinary. If you collected only the Golden Age and Hard SF spine of the Masterpieces series, you would have a library worth displaying and worth reading.

Where to Start

Dune (Frank Herbert, 1987) is the obvious anchor. The Easton edition is one of the most reproduced images in collector SF circles. Deep red-brown leather, 22kt gold, full presentation. If you own one Easton SF, this is the one.

Dragonflight (Anne McCaffrey, 1988) is the signed Masterpieces volume and the right entry point for the Pern shelf. McCaffrey built one of SF's most complete secondary worlds across decades of work, and the Easton signed run through Dragon's Fire traces that whole arc. The bond between rider and dragon is the emotional engine of the entire sequence, and McCaffrey never let it go mechanical. The Easton editions do the books justice at a production level that matches what McCaffrey put into them.

Starship Troopers (Heinlein, 2008) is the one Heinlein volume in the Masterpieces run, and Heinlein should be in any serious SF collection. The book is the argument. Heinlein laid out the case for civic responsibility and earned citizenship more clearly than any other SF novel before or since. The Easton edition came late in the series but was done properly.

Ringworld (Niven, 1988) belongs on any Hard SF shelf. Niven built a structure that still holds up as an engineering thought experiment. The Easton volume collects the book at its best production quality.

The Mote in God’s Eye (Niven and Pournelle, 1991) is arguably the greatest First Contact novel in the genre. Two authors at the top of their game building a genuinely alien species with real sociological logic. This volume rarely gets mentioned first, but it should.

Tau Zero (Poul Anderson, 1987) is the hardest of Hard SF in the Masterpieces run. Anderson takes a single premise — a Bussard ramjet that cannot decelerate — and follows the physics to their logical end, past galaxies, past the heat death of the universe. Anderson was a traditionalist with deep Norse roots, a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and it shows in how he wrote about fate and endurance. His characters do not rage against the cosmos. They sail into it. If you want one book that captures what Hard SF was built to do, this is it.

Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card, 1993) arrived as a signed edition and Card signed it personally. The novel is the single best argument in SF for why moral clarity in war fiction matters. It ran through the school curriculum for two decades before the culture turned on Card for his beliefs. The Easton edition predates all of that and exists as a record of when this book was treated as what it is: one of the best SF novels of the 20th century.

Hyperion (Dan Simmons, 1991) is the literary peak of the Masterpieces run. Canterbury Tales structure, genuine theological weight, prose that most SF writers cannot touch. The Easton edition did right by it.

Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis, 1994) is the one in the series that carries Catholic Christian weight. Lewis’s Space Trilogy has never gotten the mainstream credit it deserves. This is the rare case where an Easton volume could serve double duty: collector’s item and a book with something to say about the nature of creation and fallen worlds. The entire trilogy is worth tracking down, but the Easton edition covers the first book.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr., 1994) is the other volume with genuine Catholic grounding. Miller wrote it after converting following his participation in the bombing of Monte Cassino in World War II. The guilt drove the book. The result is the best post-apocalyptic novel in the genre, and it has never been surpassed. This one you read, not just display.

Falling Free (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2001) is the Vorkosigan universe entry in the Masterpieces series and an ideal introduction to why Bujold won the Hugo for Best Novel four times, matching Heinlein's record. The novel follows an engineer who discovers the corporation he works for views his students as disposable assets and has to decide what he is willing to do about it. Bujold builds the moral case through engineering logic and human decency rather than ideology. Clean premise, clean execution. If Falling Free hooks you, the nine-volume Easton Signed First Edition run of the Vorkosigan Saga proper starts with Borders of Infinity and goes straight through Diplomatic Immunity. Collect them as a set.

Getting the Checklist

Fandom Pulse put together a complete spreadsheet covering all 139 Masterpieces of Science Fiction volumes. Each entry has Owned and Read checkboxes.

The market for these books is still active. eBay, AbeBooks, and VeryFineBooks carry steady inventory. First-year volumes from 1986 and signed editions from the early 1990s carry premiums. Later volumes from 2000 onward are generally available at lower prices since the collector market thins out as the series continued past its core canon.

The most prestigious science fiction bookshelf in existence has a checklist. The question is how many of them you already own.

What’s the one Easton Press volume on your want list? Drop it in the comments.

Eastonpress Masterpiecessf Collection

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Castalia’s Court of Carlos IV Is the Episodios Nacionales Getting Serious

When we covered Castalia Library’s translation of Trafalgar last week, the key question was whether this was a one-off experiment or a genuine commitment. Vox Day confirmed they are translating the entire 46-volume series. Volume two answers what that actually looks like in practice, and it looks ambitious.

The Court of Carlos IV is the second installment of the Episodios Nacionales, and where Trafalgar gave readers naval battle and boys becoming men under cannon fire, this volume turns inward to the rot at the heart of Spain itself. Gabriel Araceli, now sixteen, moves from the deck of the Santísima Trinidad into the drawing rooms and backstage corridors of Madrid’s Teatro del Príncipe, and finds that the political conspiracies there are no less deadly than anything he witnessed at sea.

The novel operates on two stages simultaneously, and Pérez Galdós is deliberate about that metaphor. The theatrical world mirrors the aristocratic world just beyond the theater doors, where the Prince of Asturias plots against his own parents and Napoleon’s agents are quietly picking sides. At the center of the book is a private performance of Othello in which the fictional jealousies of Shakespeare’s tragedy bleed directly into the real jealousies of the performers. Máiquez, half-mad over the inconstant duchess Lesbia, nearly strangles Amaranta during the performance. The stage and the conspiracy become the same thing.

This is what separates Pérez Galdós from lesser historical novelists. The history isn’t backdrop. The Conspiracy of El Escorial, nor is it something Gabriel reads about in a pamphlet. He’s carrying the letters. He barely understands what he’s carrying. That gap between what the teenage narrator can see and what the reader can understand is the engine of the whole series: the irony of a boy stumbling through the collapse of an empire, narrated decades later by the man who survived it.

Why This Matters for Literature

Only eight of the forty-six volumes of the Episodios Nacionales have ever been translated into English. Thirty-eight novels from what Castalia describes as one of the supreme achievements of European realism have been inaccessible to readers who don’t read Spanish. That’s not a gap in a back catalog. That’s the systematic exclusion of a major literary tradition from the English-speaking conversation about what the 19th-century novel could do.

Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and is widely described as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Most English readers have never encountered his name. The reason isn’t quality — it’s that the translation industry has long prioritized French, Russian, and German literature when it ventures into European realism at all. Spanish literature, outside of the Generation of ‘98 and a handful of modernist texts, has been treated as a specialty interest rather than a core inheritance.

Castalia is making a structural argument by taking on this series: that the recovery of neglected great literature is itself a literary mission, not a commercial calculation. Their expansion into Spanish literature signals that the project is broader than a specialty press — the mission is recovery of major world literature that English publishing has ignored rather than Japanese literature specifically.

The Court of Carlos IV in particular represents something publishers rarely bother to protect: the novel as a total form. Comedy of manners, political thriller, coming-of-age story, historical panorama — Pérez Galdós doesn’t choose one lane. He builds a Spain on the eve of catastrophe and populates it with people complex enough to be real. Lesbia the faithless duchess. Amaranta with her genuine moral substance and her dangerous interest in a teenage errand boy. Máiquez the great actor destroyed by the same passions he performs for audiences. These aren’t types. They’re the raw material of a civilization about to lose itself.

The series as a whole tracks Spain through the Napoleonic Wars, the reign of Fernando VII, the Carlist conflicts, and the collapse of the liberal experiment — forty-six novels, one continuous moral reckoning with how a great Catholic nation came apart. That story has obvious resonance for readers who take seriously what it means for a civilization to lose its inheritance.

Castalia is giving English readers the chance to read it. We’ve also obtained exclusively for them that there will be hardcover editions of these works available.

The Court of Carlos IV is available on Amazon. Volume one, Trafalgar, is available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook.

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We started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work, and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue.

Part 7:

Part 6:

Part 5:

Part 4:

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

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The premise of The Memory Police is that things are vanishing from an unnamed island, and most of the islanders forget the things even existed. Ribbons go first. Then perfume, hats, birds, fruit, photographs, novels. When something is “disappeared,” the residents are required to dispose of every physical trace of it, and shortly thereafter the concept itself fades from their minds. They look at a bird and see only a small moving thing they have no word for and no feeling about. A small minority, however, retain their memories. The Memory Police, an authoritarian force whose ranks no one ever quite sees recruited, hunt these people down. The narrator is a novelist on the island. Her editor, R, is one of the people who remembers, so she hides him in a secret room beneath her floor.

The novel was published in Japan in 1994, twenty-five years before it appeared in English. It has been called Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Borgesian, and a half-dozen other useful but slightly misleading shorthands. None of them is quite right. Ogawa is not writing dystopia in any sense Orwell would have recognized; her authoritarian regime is curiously off-camera, more a weather system than a state, and the question of whether anyone runs the disappearances is left unanswered because the question is not the point. The question is what happens to a self when the materials it was built from are slowly removed. The answer, which the book takes its full length to reach and which it reaches by demonstrating rather than arguing, is that the self disappears with them, and that the disappearance can be borne with a strange tenderness, even peace, by the person disappearing.

This is a real book. I want to say that first because the shorthands tend to make it sound like a thought experiment, and a thought experiment is exactly what it isn’t. The Memory Police is a novel of accumulated detail, of sustained quiet attention to weather and food and small domestic rituals — the narrator types her manuscript on an old typewriter; she heats soup; she sits with the old man on the boat where he lives; she lowers food through a hatch to R in his hidden room. The accumulation is the technique. Ogawa is showing you what it feels like to be alive on an island where the materials of being alive are quietly leaving, and the only way to show this is to put the materials on the page one by one and let you feel their weight, and then let you feel the absence when they go. The book that the narrator herself is writing — a novel-within-the-novel about a typist who loses her voice and is held captive by her typing teacher — runs in parallel to the main story and slowly converges with it, until the two narratives are doing the same work from opposite ends. The structural achievement here is real and it is hers; no English-language writer of fantasy or speculative fiction in the last three decades has done anything quite like it.

The book is not perfect. Ogawa works by accumulation, and there are stretches in the middle third, particularly around the disappearance of the calendar, where the accumulation slackens and the novel feels like it is waiting for its next move. The framing of the inner novel is sometimes thin; the typing teacher is closer to a function than a character, and the parallel structure occasionally announces itself when it should disappear into the texture. The ending, which I will not describe, has been called whimpering by reviewers who wanted the resolution Ogawa never had any intention of providing; I think the ending is correct but I understand why some readers find it withholding. Ogawa is a novelist who trusts her reader to accept the terms of the world she has built. Some readers cannot accept the terms. This is not always the reader’s fault, but in this case I think it is.

What makes the book work, where it works, is the prose. Ogawa writes Japanese sentences that look almost transparent on the page, short, measured sentences, with very little syntactic ornament that carry an enormous load of implication. The Japanese reader is meant to feel something specific about each disappearance: not the grief of losing a beloved object, but the more difficult and disorienting feeling of losing a category of feeling. A world without ribbons is not a sadder world; it is a world in which the kinds of sadness associated with ribbons have become unavailable. Ogawa builds this effect through accumulation, through pacing, and through a particular use of Japanese final-verb endings and sentence-final particles that create a faint sense of a narrator slightly distanced from her own experience. None of this is obvious, but it is everywhere on the page.

Stephen Snyder is a serious translator who has been Ogawa’s exclusive English voice for over twenty years, and he has thought longer and harder about what he is doing than most translators working today. He has lectured publicly on the question of whether to foreignize or domesticate; he has written about the “anointed translator” relationship and what it costs and gains; he is, by training, an academic Japanologist of the lineage Kenji takes seriously. His prose in The Memory Police is supple, accurate, and unobtrusive. The pacing is right. The accumulation works. Reviewers who said you wouldn’t feel like you were reading a translation were saying something true. But I have to register a craft objection to the fact that. Snyder has elected to give the English narrator a slightly more present, slightly more emotionally available voice than the Japanese narrator actually has.

The Japanese narrator is more distanced from her own experience than the English narrator is, and the difference is small but cumulative; over 274 pages, it changes the book. The English narrator feels like a person quietly recording her experience. The Japanese narrator feels like a person who is already half-vanished from inside the experience she is recording. The first is moving. The second is what Ogawa wrote. Snyder is fully aware of the difference, as his interviews show, and he made his choice for defensible reasons, mostly having to do with what English readers can metabolize without losing the book’s emotional pull.

I would have made a different choice. I think I would have been wrong in a different way. Translation is negotiation, and Snyder negotiated honestly. The English book that exists is not the Japanese book, but it is closer than most translations get, and it is the book that put Ogawa on shortlists and into book clubs and into the hands of readers who would otherwise never have heard of her.

Reading The Memory Police now, six years after its English translation and thirty-two after its Japanese publication, I prefer to think about the book it actually is rather than the book it is believed to be. The Anglophone reception has wanted to make this a novel an ex post facto statement about totalitarian states, surveillance, the erosion of truth in the age of fake news. It is about all of those things in a peripheral way and none of them centrally. What the book is centrally about is what it feels like to live inside a self that is being removed in pieces, and to do so without protest, without rebellion, without the heroic resistance the American reader is conditioned to expect. The narrator does not fight. She hides her editor, which is the one act of resistance she performs, and even this she performs almost by inertia, almost as an extension of her own slow disappearance into the smaller and smaller life she has left. The novel takes this passivity seriously as a form of human dignity. American readers tend to find this baffling or sad. Japanese readers tend to find it true.

This is the challenge The Memory Police presents to the English-language reader. Some readers meet it; some don’t. Snyder’s translation does what a translation can do, which is to bring the reader to the edge and let them step across. The book is worth the crossing. The four out of five is for a novel I will keep on the shelf and reread at least once, which is more than I can say for most of what gets translated from Japanese in any given year. The eight out of ten is for a translation by a working professional at the height of his powers, with one specific decision I would have made differently. Most readers will never notice it. Most readers shouldn’t have to.

Book: 4/5

Translation: 8/10

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

Over 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey exist. Most readers have no idea which one actually helps them understand the ancient Greek epic versus which ones impose modern ideology onto a 2,700-year-old text.

The translation you choose matters. Pick wrong and you’re reading a contemporary author’s politics dressed up in Homeric clothing. Pick right and you’re experiencing something close to what Homer’s original audience heard around 725 BC.

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Starting Points for New Readers

Before diving into full translations, two resources make Homer accessible without sacrificing the core story.

Collier’s Junior Classics offers an excellent introduction to the Odyssey for younger readers or anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with the material first. These aren’t direct translations but carefully adapted retellings that preserve the narrative while making it digestible. Think of them as a map before the journey. You’ll understand the structure, characters, and major events without wrestling with archaic language or scholarly debates about meter.

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida takes a different approach. While not a direct Odyssey adaptation, Shakespeare’s play draws heavily on Homeric material and characters. It shows how the greatest English-language writer engaged with Homer’s world. The play focuses on the Trojan War period rather than Odysseus’s journey home, but it offers insight into how classical material translates across cultures and centuries. Shakespeare’s version of these characters influenced English literature’s understanding of Homer for generations.

Both options give readers context before tackling a full translation. You’ll know the difference between Scylla and Charybdis, understand why Penelope matters, and recognize major episodes when you encounter them in verse.

The Gold Standard: Richmond Lattimore

Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 translation achieves exceptional fidelity to the original Greek. The English closely mirrors the ancient text’s content and structure. This line-for-line alignment means readers can cross-reference with commentaries and the Greek original without distortion.

Lattimore uses dactylic hexameter, the meter used in the original Greek. This gives the translation a musical quality often lost in other versions. His approach prioritizes literal accuracy over poetic embellishment.

The result can feel stiff to casual readers. But for anyone serious about understanding what Homer actually wrote, Lattimore remains the academic gold standard. His translation is widely read and technically accurate, used in undergraduate classical studies programs precisely because of its faithfulness to the source.

Lattimore’s translation preserves Homer’s repeated epithets and oral tradition roots. It echoes much of the original text’s repetition, an important feature of the poem’s origins in oral tradition. When you read Lattimore, you’re reading Homer’s structure, Homer’s word choices, Homer’s Greece.

The Readable Alternative: Robert Fagles

Robert Fagles’ 1996 translation employs a line of varying length and a diction that feels old yet familiar. The poem has gravitas without being ponderous.

Fagles strikes a balance between scholarly rigor and narrative flow. His translation sold over a million copies and became standard in many American high school curricula.

But Fagles takes liberties Lattimore never would. It freely uses imagery and word choices not closely constrained by the original text. Fagles aimed to emphasize what he called the “sympathetic” depiction of women in the Odyssey. This choice colors his translation throughout.

Fagles found a voice that is stately and natural. It avoids absurd pomposity and too-colloquial folksiness. He succeeds at making Homer readable for modern audiences. Whether he succeeds at making Homer accurate is another question.

The Classic Middleground: Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation held the standard position for decades before Fagles arrived. Despite expressions like “Scot-free” in the mouth of Zeus himself, which shouldn’t work, the overall effect is poignant, evocative, heroic, and true to the spirit of Homeric verse.

Fitzgerald uses unrhymed poetry with lines of irregular length. The translation prizes lyricism and beauty over word-for-word accuracy. Readers who want Homer to feel like epic poetry rather than a scholarly text often prefer Fitzgerald’s approach.

Where Fitzgerald stumbles is in modernizing language that pulls readers out of the ancient world. When Zeus says “scot-free,” you’re reading 20th century American idiom, not 8th century BC Greek culture.

The Scholarly Workhorse: Albert Cook

Albert Cook’s 1967 translation uses verse with long lines to accommodate Homer’s hexameter. Lines are stretched or compressed by one or two beats, whatever works best. It matches Homer’s verse line for line and is considered linguistically accurate but more readable than Lattimore’s hexametric verse.

Cook’s translation captures one of Homer’s most important qualities: a direct, unembellished language. For classroom use, Cook offers a middle path between Lattimore’s scholarly rigor and Fagles’ dramatic flair.

The Worst: Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation made headlines as the first complete English Odyssey translated by a woman. The achievement matters less than what she did with the opportunity.

Wilson explicitly set out to impose modern feminist ideology onto Homer. She has stated that she is “making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy.” That’s not translation. That’s activism.

Wilson’s work advances a radical undertaking of erasing the old myths and writing new ones. This wouldn’t be ignoble if the process weren’t being obfuscated. But there is something brutal about taking a classic work, rewriting it against its own grain, and then passing it off as true to the original.

Wilson’s opening line translates polytropos as “complicated.” The ancient Greek word literally translates to something like “many-turned” or “many-turning.” The word is ambiguous in context. Even classicists have trouble discerning whether it describes Odysseus as passive or active.

“Complicated” is modern therapy-speak. It flattens the ambiguity of the Greek into contemporary psychological language. Wilson claims that she made this decision to better reproduce the brisk pace and emotionally engaging experience of Homer’s storytelling. The real effect is making Odysseus sound like a troubled modern man rather than an ancient hero.

Critics note the text being too modern and therefore not epic. Wilson adapts more than she translates. Her use of iambic pentameter as opposed to dactylic hexameter is a poor choice. Her characterization of Odysseus is simplistic.

The translation reflects a contemporary feminist perspective that alters the tone of Homer’s original work. Wilson didn’t translate Homer. She rewrote him for 2017 political sensibilities and called it scholarship.

Her defenders claim she’s correcting bias in earlier translations. Other scholars criticized Wilson’s translation as a deviation from the content of the original. When your translation philosophy centers on “making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy,” you’ve abandoned any pretense of faithfulness to the source material.

The Wilson translation recently sparked new controversy when Christopher Nolan revealed he used it as inspiration for his upcoming adaptation. Nolan’s adaptation has already generated backlash over casting choices and its modern reinterpretation. Using Wilson’s ideologically driven translation as source material explains why.

The Verdict

For understanding the Odyssey: Lattimore first, always. His translation may feel academic, but that’s because it actually translates what Homer wrote rather than what a modern translator wishes he had written.

For enjoying the story while staying relatively close to the source: Fagles or Cook. Both make Homer readable without completely abandoning fidelity to the Greek.

For poetry that captures epic grandeur: Fitzgerald, with the caveat that you’re sometimes reading mid-century American idiom.

For first-time readers wanting to know the story before tackling verse: Collier’s Junior Classics provides an accessible foundation.

To avoid entirely: Wilson. If you want 21st-century feminist theory, read 21st-century feminist theory. Don’t read it dressed up as Homer.

What translation of the Odyssey do you prefer? Let us know in the comments.

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

NEXT: Castalia Library Just Translated One of Europe’s Greatest Unread Novels

I’ll cut right to the point, because that’s the spirit in which this book was born: Softbone is a molotov cocktail hurled into the gynocentric cancer infesting the publishing arenas–both trad and indie. An unapologetic cyberpunk dystopian Animal Farm that isn’t afraid to openly give a middle finger to the political brain-rot or the overly sanitized corpo-slobs that walk on the eggshells of their own professionalism.

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Author Rian Stone is someone I was unaware of before fellow indie signal booster Kristin McTiernan showcased his previous book The Dog Walker, a book about the trials of a man dating in the modern era. He outta be heralded for the attempt, because the romance genre is so completely subsumed by women that a male author making the attempt to write romance both for male readers and from the male perspective is something most of us wouldn’t even bother attempting. Legion are the authors who plant a flag on a genre and declare it their personal domain and never venture forth to other worlds.

I’ve long said that some of the best books you’ll read come from authors who come from outside the genre. Sara Douglass came into fantasy after years in the romance genre and made some of the best fantasy ever. Similarly, Rian Stone a “rancher turned sailor turned corporate turned writer, accused of espionage, huge fan of cyberpunk and conan and neo noir.” has been in and around the red pill arena with books on the continually imploding dynamics between modern men and women. He also told me “Tate and Myron got their start on my podcast with Rollo and for that I’m sorry.”

The book’s cover sets the tone perfectly, reminiscent of a bygone era of hard-boiled pulp paperbacks that always had hot girls, the specter of danger, and badass dudes who knew were ready with a gun and the nerves to dive headfirst into danger. I love this cover.

Thus he enters the cyberpunk genre that leans into a tech-saturated, overly-pharmaceutical, corporate dominated dystopia steeped heavily in gynofascism. That’s a lotta buzzwords, but bear with me. Normally, I’m loathe to venture into fiction that deals too much with modern politics because most of the time it’s some Reddit-brained Bluesky user using the text of their book to cry about “Muh fascism, muh colonialism, muh patriarchy” that puts none of the effort into actually trying to make their work entertaining and functions as their virtue signal fanfiction disguised as a block of paper. It’s so cringe it bends the fabric of reality.

I trust few authors to take any political elements and weave them into an effective story that’s also entertaining, but Rian Stone does just that and much of it I credit to his creative mentality. I regularly catch his saturday morning livestreams at work where he’s espoused a love of old school entertainment–especially Aeon Flux and how the show doesn’t explain anything to you, it just throws you into the story and you have to figure it out as it goes. It’s a mentality that would be foreign if not downright sacreligious to the world-building mind of the modern fantasy author.

But that’s what Rian does in Softbone: he throws you into the middle of an estrogen tyranny with its main character Jacov Longhaus aka Jake Long, a man broken under the weight of an estrogen tyrannical government that beats the men of it’s society down with enforced political correctness, where everyone is too afraid of the system punishing you into uselessness to fight back. Nations are a thing of the past, now corporations like Amazon and Samsung operate techno-states and control all the technology. You have to watch an ad for everything from logging onto the internet to just opening a door. SSRIs are infused into everything you drink, maintaining a placid populace that can’t indulge in vice that’s not approved by corpos.

Rather than taking 150 pages to establish the world building, we are almost immediate jumping into the plot and a call to action that hit so quickly I felt like I was part of it. I’ve enjoyed my fellow indie works over the years, but I’ve been embroiled in so many slow start, long-winded world building for so long, I’ve become a bit weary of plots that take up to 50% of the book to really kick off.

Thank God for Softbone. What a refreshing change of pace this book was for me. A fast-moving techo-thriller with everything you’d want from a hardboiled cyberpunk Noir story. Deep down, Jake understands how wrong everything is so he escapes periodically to a place called New Kowloon, taking himself off the perpetually online grid and into what they call the Analogue. It’s an old tech wild west where the same rules apply: you get by with what can get be it by fist, bullet, wheel & deal, or a pound of flesh. Jake indulges in coffee, Zyns, and an illicit online affair with a woman who isn’t his ball-busting brickshithouse of a wife.

The short bit of time we spend with Jake up to the call of action, which was so good I was fist-pumping the air, endears you to a man who feels like he has been browbeated into a lesser state of being. Forced to work on code corrupted by incompetent third-worlders, enduring his overbearing wife just for the chance to be a state-approved father for a few years. Like all men, he’s forced by the state to endure hormone suppression therapy because the women in charge don’t want a population of testosterone infested men who have no outlet for their anger and osteoporosis from a lifetime of forced estrogen (thus the nickname Softbone for guys like him). Xanax and Ambien are in everything, keeping him placid and “safe”. Personal humiliation after personal humiliation. When he finally starts breaking free of the programming, it’s some of the most cathartic writing I’ve read in years.

Jake gets swept off by his love interest Fatahl to Ukraine and meets with Buck, the head of a team of counter-insurgents who hit back against the corpos in a guerilla war to prevent a manufactured vaccine from wiping out humanity. Buck is everything jake isn’t: strong, confident, decisive, everything he isn’t. Every step of the journey is Jake undoing his lifetime of suppressive programming, breaking free of chains that only he can see and hounded by his Ghost. Think of a Ghost as your intrusive thoughts brought to life as a voice in your head due to too much time online. A devil on your shoulder trying to get you to act out of sorts who remains an omnipresent representative of Jake’s own intrusive thoughts.

Danger remains a constant and not just in the extremely well written action scenes. Jake is engrossed for the first time in his life in a world of rugged individualists with little to help guide him besides the examples set by others. He grows stronger, more confident, more capable, but often at a cost. It’s gratifying to watch him slowly grow a spine while navigating social circles that feel normal now, but are entirely foreign to him. It’s a fish out of water story that doesn’t bog you down in Jake’s feelings for too long. It felt a lot like watching Ragoth’s personal growth from my debut book The Black Crown (the origin of the Orc City meme, which Rian has never forgiven me for not renaming the book to that).

The prose is tight and evocative, often with phrases that capture the moment. Like:

“Jake was wired while wired…He was awake only better. His blood flowed like it had somewhere to be.”

Softbone brings a lot of real world software talk into the picture, but without making it boring or turning it into sci-fi movie hacking. So much of the book feels like it could be copy-pasted into the real world right now. That’s something that scares me a little. Blaine Pardoe has a novel series called Blue Dawn where he lays down a second American civil war that has the dubious distinction of having events in his books become real world prophecies. I pray none of Rian Stone’s visions of the future in this book come true.

Which isn’t to say is a dour affair. At times it’s got levity to keep from taking itself too seriously. A mission in which they have to trick drone AI into not recognizing them as soldiers leads to a humorous work around I won’t spoil here. The book itself is like a lot of cyberpunk and works effectively as a satirical commentary on feminism, corporatism, techno-feudalism, people who are terminally online and such. It takes itself seriously enough that it maintains its tension but doesn’t take itself so seriously that it becomes pretentious.

During my time with the book, I found little to complain about. A few spots of wonky formatting on my kindle app, a couple of typos, but nothing that ruined the experience. It only affected me negatively because it halted my reading temporarily and I was wholly invested in this book from early on.

More than anything, Softbone is entertaining and fun. And that’s something sorely missing from so much of the indie book spaces where authors are trying to write the next Game of Thrones or Suneater Saga. Rian as an author hands you this book and dares you not to have fun. In this goal it works perfectly. Even if you care nothing at all about the aspects of social commentary within, this book is still a perfectly entertaining cyberpunk tech-thriller that delivers what we need the most: fun and entertainment.

This book is perfect for a lot of readers: for the guys who wants book made for guys, for fans of action and cyberpunk intrigue, for those bored of pretentious storytelling and want something quick and fun (book is about a 230 pages physical, so it’s a quick read).

Softbone is available in e-book, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

The sequel, Ghost of Odessa is out now as well.

You can find Rian Stone on Twitter, Substack, and Youtube

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Castalia Library built its reputation translating Japanese literature into English. Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro, Botchan, and Kokoro. Six volumes of Eiji Yoshikawa’s scroll cycle. Nine translations into a catalog that has established Castalia as the most serious independent literary translation operation in the English-speaking world.

Their tenth translation is not Japanese. It is Spanish. And it is one of the most overdue introductions in the history of European literature reaching English readers

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Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós is the first of forty-six novels in the Episodios Nacionales, the vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain that Pérez Galdós published across four decades beginning in 1873. Castalia describes the series as “a literary project on the scale of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and one of the supreme achievements of European realism.” Only eight of the forty-six volumes have ever been translated into English. Thirty-eight novels from one of the supreme achievements of world literature are inaccessible to readers who don’t read Spanish. Castalia is starting to fix that.

The premise of Trafalgar is this: Gabriel Araceli is fourteen years old, an orphan from the slums of Cádiz, attached to the household of a retired naval officer who slips away from his wife to join the Spanish fleet on the morning of October 21, 1805. Gabriel goes with him. He ends up aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, on the day Nelson destroys it.

Castalia frames the book’s appeal directly: “What follows is one of the great battle sequences in European literature: the four-decker as living giant, the sand spread on the planks for the blood, the smoke that swallows the line, the slow agony of a ship that will not surrender and cannot be saved.”

The excerpt published with the announcement establishes the register immediately. Gabriel narrates as an old man looking back at a boyhood in Cádiz’s worst streets. The prose carries the confidence of Pérez Galdós’s authority: unhurried, precise, ironic in exactly the way the greatest 19th-century novelists were ironic. He describes his childhood self and the gang battles at Puerta de Tierra “that stained the ground with heroic blood” with the same dry distance Tolstoy brings to Borodino.

This is Trafalgar as the losing side saw it. Not Hornblower. Not Nelson’s triumph. A Spanish tragedy narrated by the boy who lived it, written by a novelist who tracked down the survivors of the battle seventy years later to get the details right.

Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He never won. He is widely described as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Most English readers have never heard of him. Castalia is positioning Trafalgar as the entry point for readers who love Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell and want to see the age of sail from the other side of the line.

The expansion into Spanish literature signals something about what Castalia is building. Their translation subscription has run on Japanese literature since launch. A single pivot to Pérez Galdós announces that the project is broader than a specialty press, that the mission is recovery of major world literature that English publishing has ignored rather than Japanese literature specifically. Forty-five more volumes of the Episodios Nacionales exist. If Castalia follows through, they will have done something no major publisher has attempted in the history of English-language literary translation.

Fandom Pulse reached out to Vox Day asking if they would be translating the entire series, and he told us, “Yes, we are translating the entire 46-volume series.”

Trafalgar is available now on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to the Castalia Library Substack received the ebook on publication day. The Substack is at stack.castalialibrary.com.

Pick it up here: https://amzn.to/3P8oGsR

Have you read Pérez Galdós? If not, is this the kind of translation project that gets you to finally start?

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NEXT: How Madeline Miller, Emily Wilson, and Christopher Nolan Killed Homer for a Generation

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million Odyssey film, set for July 17, 2026, is the endpoint of a fifteen-year project to overwrite Homer. The trailer dropped May 5 with Robert Pattinson telling Tom Holland, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some snivelling bastard,” and the gay subtext readings began the same hour.

None of this is an accident. Nolan based the film on Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation. Wilson’s translation grew in the same soil as Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, the 2011 novel that convinced two million readers that Achilles and Patroclus were a canon gay couple.

The Achilles and Patroclus revision is one piece of a larger pattern. Modern publishing has spent two decades strip-mining the Western canon, taking villains, side characters, and minor women, then rebuilding the original story around them with the moral structure inverted. Gregory Maguire did it to The Wizard of Oz. Maleficent did it to Sleeping Beauty. Margaret Atwood did it to Homer. Madeline Miller did it twice. The Nolan film is what happens when Hollywood puts $250 million behind the same template.

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