The Sun Eater novelist Christopher Ruocchio has explained why he believes that science fiction authors ignoring religion does the genre a disservice.

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In an interview on the 2 To Ramble YouTube show, Ruocchio discussed how his reversion to his Catholic faith influenced the series and how the books integrate religion.

At one point in the discussion he shared, “I think science fiction has done religion a disservice by pretending it will just go away. Human beings are, I think, intrinsically spiritual whether or not we want to be. And so that’s a dimension of human life that’s not going anywhere even if the nature of the worship or the object of it changes.”

“My science fiction has a strong religious element to it. It’s not a Christian element explicitly. There’s a couple characters who are. But they do not dominate the narrative in any way. It’s not like that.”

Ruocchio is not alone in making such comments. Foundation writer Isaac Asimov made similar comments in his essay “Religion and Science Fiction.”

Asimov stated, “It is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion. What if we find intelligent beings on other worlds. Do they have a religion? Is our God universal, and is he/she/it their God as well? What do we do about it? What do they do about?”

“This point is almost never taken up but, since it would certainly arise if such beings were discovered in actual fact, science fiction loses touch with reality in taking the easy way out and pretending religion doesn’t exist,” he added.

Ruocchio is simply stating the obvious. Human beings have always been spiritual, and pretending that advanced technology or some enlightened future will magically erase that fundamental part of who we are is lazy, dishonest, and bad storytelling.

Great science fiction explores truth about humanity, not ideological fantasies where religion conveniently vanishes so the author can push whatever message is trendy this week.

Fandom Pulse is reader-supported independent journalism. Paid subscribers get exclusive scoops and investigative reporting daily.

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NEXT: Former Disney Lead Software Engineer Claims Company Toned Down Its DEI Policies Since President Trump’s Election: “The Vibe Shift Is Real”

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 3

Part 2

Part 1

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Before Fandom Pulse had established itself as a pop culture site and when much of the pop culture zeitgeist was still in denial about pop culture’s downward trend or cancel culture itself, there came a canceling in the realm of tabletop gaming and military sci-fi. What looked like a career-ending victory for woke ideologists turned into a resounding success without skipping a beat.

Allow me to set the stage and explain for those who were unaware.

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In 2023, Battletech, under the ownership of Topps and Catalyst Games labs, unceremoniously fired long time Battletech author Blaine Lee Pardoe. Pardoe was a massive authorial voice responsible not just for many of Battletech’s numerous military sci-fi novels, but also much of the content in the series source books. This was in direct response to a malicious effort on the part of a fake-trans person’s email campaign to Topps and Catalyst because of Blaine Parode’s conservative political leanings.

Blaine Lee Pardoe was interviewed by youtuber Razorfist as soon as news broke about the cancelation.

At first, this appeared to be a win for woke ideologists attempting to boot out one of the few conservative creators in the tabletop gaming spaces until Blaine announced that he had hit the ground running with a new series in conjunction with Brent Evans and Wargate Books for a new military sci-fi series called Land & Sea–complete with “Big Stompy Robots”.

The premise of the series is simple: in the not-too-distant future, Earth and all of mankind come under attack by alien sealife attacking from the depths of earth’s oceans. The near future setting allows for the existence of sci-fi weaponry that doesn’t feel out of place in the modern world. This includes the ASHURs, the aforementioned mechs that are already in place for the start of the series. (ASHUR is the assyrian god of war).

The series launched with its first three books in quick succession and thanks in part of Blaine Pardoe’s prolific output has already reached 10 books. Blaine is the primary author of the first 9 books and recently indie author Declan Finn was brought in as the author of the 10th book in the series. Land & Sea also recently fulfilled its first successful graphic novel (titled Paradise).

The series was never meant to be just a novel series and the long-awaited tabletop wargame is in playtesting. Rules and models can be downloaded by joining Brent Evans patreon Creative Juggernaut and 3D printed. Fans of the series have been providing feedback for the playtesting directly, far in advance of the wargame’s official release.

All of this was only in planning stages when the series kicked off in 2023, and although I reviewed the first book at the time, I’ve since been attempting to catch up on the series. In light of being six books deep at the time of this article, I’ve opted to re-review the first book for those who have not become aware of the series existence.

SPLASHDOWN REVIEW:

In my initial review, I said that the series’s first book, Splashdown, plays out like the first act of an alien invasion movie. I hold true to this opinion, but add that it feels like the opening episodes of a tv show, based on how subsequent novels play out.

As Blaine explains on his blog ‘Notes from the Bunker: “This is a story that mixes a bit of Tom Clancy, with the Expanse, with a big dollop of Mech combat, and a juicy chunk of Red Dawn thrown in for good measure. Splashdown does a lot of the world-building and character establishment – the perfect entry point for this new universe.”

Blaine’s desire to jump right into the action leads to several opening chapter snippets of strange occurrences in Earth’s seas. From unusual readings to bizarre sightings to a deadly encounter with large crabs that shoot lethal pressurized water jets. It feels like the opening of the Jurassic Park novel, which did much the same with its harrowing foreshadowing of the alien threat before it officially makes itself known.

As these threatening events increase in frequency throughout the book, we are introduced to the many characters of the ensemble cast that the first three books focus on. A mixture of military, ex-military, and civilian individuals who deal with the threats as they arrive.

There’s Ashton Slade, a military intelligence officer who begins putting the data behind the instances of alien events together. Adam Cain, an old warhorse, was called back into duty. Dana Blaze, an amoral, ambitious news reporter who is surprisingly a fan favorite. Jay Drake, a billionaire tech developer looking to profit off the aliens. Titus Hill, a submarine commander. Cassie, a high school girl. Natalia Falton, a marine on duty in Guam when the aliens attack. And Antonio Colton, an ex-military man, becomes the leader of a militia unit known as Colton’s Cutthroats.

It sounds like a lot, but quickly you become acclimated to the flow of the book. Much like a TV show that bounces from character to character, you catch a glimpse of ordinary people in their lives just before the initial inciting incident of the aliens’ attack arrives and throws everything into disarray.

The pseudo-modern-day setting allows for the feel of a slightly more technologically advanced era, not unlike our own. With cultural stagnation as it is, it doesn’t feel out of place that in 2040, we still have social media and smartphones. It's indicated that a big blackout event bricked a lot of technology at some point years prior, which resulted in Jay Drake’s tech becoming a sort of savior to everyone by working when old tech did not. A few passages throughout the series make light of iconic pop culture movies or TV shows that indicate older people remember them, but younger generations are clueless.

The first incitement comes in the form of massive snails that crawl aboard the shore of coastal cities–inducing panic and awe for these alien creatures. Throughout the book, we’re introduced to some of the mainstays in the alien sealife’s ranks. (They are dubbed The Fish for short). Crabs, Frogs, and the imposing leader caste of the Fish, known as the “Bosses.”

One great supplemental book that has since come out is the Alien Threat Assessment, a short 72-page info assessment done in the style of an old-school military information booklet. It contains a military-style briefing on all the alien classes, what they look like, strengths, weaknesses, and such. It’s an invaluable series companion for those who want to know more about the aliens.

Splashdown bounces between all of its established characters learning along with the world about the alien’s existence and the horror of when they attack in unison after a period of zero communication from them. The snails in question disgorge a load of ping-pong ball-sized piranha-flea hybrids (dubbed goblins) that act as a terror tactic.

The tension building to these initial attacks is well done. Even though you know it’s going to happen, which is a given considering the premise of the series, it still hits hard when the devastation is finally unleashed. The centerpiece of this book is the attack on Guam, where Natalia Falto is stationed, and the full-scale military-on-alien battle takes place. Here is where Blaine Pardoe’s pedigree in military sci-fi from decades in Battletech shines. The knowledge of military tech and tactics is on full display, putting you on street level with the troops fighting.

And, of course, the mech action is unleashed when Falto’s commanding officer, Rickenberg, takes to his Lion ASHUR and takes on some of the crabs and the first appearance of a Boss. Blaine takes the time to show the impact of the alien attacks from each character’s POV. The Action is top-notch, the human element feels stark and real without feeling nihilistic. The scope of the war is global and feels as though the setting could accommodate a multitude of stories from a diverse array of characters at every level of the conflict. (This is what happens in the anthology book FLOTSAM OF WAR).

The only drawback comes if you are expecting a one-and-done read. This is very much the opening act of a larger series and events end in such a way that you are left wanting to know what happens next in the follow-up RIPTIDES.

For fans of military sci-fi, Battletech, Exo-Squad, even Warhammer 40k to some extent, Land & Sea will feel like a solid addition to your library of sci-fi military books. The setting is well underway and helps provide the context for the upcoming wargame when it is finally set for release. For those who don’t want the wargame, the books themselves are solid mil. Sci-fi without having to invest in huge world-building lore thanks to its modern-ish setting. Its grounded feel helps it achieve the sense of reality that other settings lack or lose.

You can buy Land & Sea: SPLASHDOWN on Amazon

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Vox Day’s Castalia Library is quietly doing something the mainstream publishing world has largely ignored: translating major works of classic Japanese literature into English for the first time. The latest release is The Secret Scrolls of Naruto: The Edo Scroll, the second book in Eiji Yoshikawa’s serialized adventure novel, published exactly 100 years after its original Japanese publication, and never previously available to English readers.

For anyone who loves historical fiction, adventure storytelling, or Japanese culture, this is a game changing moment.

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Who Was Eiji Yoshikawa?

Eiji Yoshikawa (1892-1962) is one of the most important figures in Japanese literary history, yet he remains almost entirely unknown to Western audiences due to the limited number of his works that have been translated into English. He was a prolific serialized novelist whose work appeared in newspapers and magazines across Japan throughout the early-to-mid 20th century, building a readership that made him a genuine national institution.

The comparison Castalia Library draws, calling him “the Alexandre Dumas of Japan,” is apt and illuminating. Like Dumas, Yoshikawa wrote sweeping historical adventures populated with memorable characters, propulsive plots, and a deep engagement with the history and culture of his nation. Like Dumas, he worked in serialized form, delivering regular installments to an eager readership. And like Dumas, his work operates on multiple levels simultaneously—entertainment on the surface, historical meditation underneath.

The few Yoshikawa works that have reached English audiences demonstrate his stature. His novel Musashi is the definitive fictional account of legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and that has been available in English translation since 1981, remaining one of the finest historical novels ever written in any language. His Taiko, about the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, is similarly celebrated. These translations revealed a writer of extraordinary gifts to Western audiences, and they also revealed how much remains untranslated.

The Secret Scrolls of Naruto is one of those untranslated works. Until now.

The Secret Scrolls of Naruto

The series is set in Edo, the city we now know as Tokyo, during the 1760s, deep in the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Tokugawa period (1603-1868) was one of Japan’s most distinctive historical eras: a time of enforced peace maintained through rigid social hierarchy, political isolation from the outside world, and the elaborate culture that produced kabuki theater, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and the flowering of urban merchant culture.

Yoshikawa sets his story in the warren of streets and hidden spaces that characterized this world. The first book established the characters and the Kamigata region—the Osaka-Kyoto area. The second book, The Edo Scroll, shifts to Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy deepens.

The premise is classic adventure fiction. A detective named Mankichi from Osaka is hunting a missing woman through the back streets of Surugadai in midwinter. What he finds leads him into a conspiracy involving killers, a swordsman-monk named Gennojō, underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in darkness, and a midnight ambush at the real historical temple Sensō-ji. The pacing is propulsive, the atmosphere is specific, and the characters are the kind of vivid creations that made Yoshikawa famous.

Vox Day has been direct about the quality. “I can attest that these books are very, very good,” he wrote in announcing the release.

Wait, Naruto?

Western readers encountering the title The Secret Scrolls of Naruto will inevitably think of Masashi Kishimoto’s massively popular manga and anime series about a young ninja named Naruto Uzumaki. The franchise has sold over 250 million copies worldwide and introduced an entire generation of Western readers to Japanese culture.

The connection is more than coincidental. In Japanese, “naruto” refers to the famous whirlpools of the Naruto Strait between Awaji Island and Shikoku, a natural phenomenon that has been part of Japanese cultural consciousness for centuries. The name appears throughout Japanese history, literature, and geography.

Kishimoto has never explicitly cited Yoshikawa’s ninja stories as an influence, but the thematic overlap is striking. Yoshikawa’s Secret Scrolls involves ninja, scrolls, secret techniques, and the shadowy world of covert operatives in feudal Japan—precisely the mythology that Kishimoto drew on when creating his modern ninja universe. The ninja tradition Yoshikawa was fictionalizing in the 1920s is the same tradition that eventually produced one of the most popular anime franchises in history.

Whether Kishimoto read Yoshikawa is unknown. What’s clear is that both writers are drawing from the same deep well of Japanese cultural mythology around ninja, hidden techniques, and the shadow world operating beneath the visible surface of Tokugawa society.

For anime fans who love Naruto and want to understand the historical and literary roots of the world Kishimoto drew from, Yoshikawa’s novels are essential context. The scrolls, the techniques, the shadow operatives—this is where that mythology comes from.

The Castalia Library Project

The Yoshikawa translations are part of an ambitious project at Castalia Library. The scope extends well beyond Japanese literature.

Spanish literature is being addressed through Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales, a 46-volume landmark series of historical novels about Spain that remains almost entirely unknown to English readers despite being one of the major achievements of 19th-century European literature. The first three volumes have been translated and will be available in May. Forty-three more volumes await.

Galdós (1843-1920) was the Spanish equivalent of Dickens, a prolific, politically engaged novelist whose work engaged with Spanish history and society across a massive canvas. The Episodios Nacionales covers Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) through the Restoration era, combining historical fiction with social commentary in ways that made Galdós the defining novelist of modern Spain. That this work has been unavailable in English is a genuine gap in the literary canon.

Previously untranslated works from Italian and German have also been completed, though specific titles haven’t been announced. The Library’s stated commitment is to translation quality—Castalia claims their translations consistently rate higher than the average translated classic, working with translators who prioritize accuracy and literary quality over speed.

The Subscription Model

Access to these translations is available through a paid Castalia Library subscription, which delivers new translations on a weekly Monday release schedule. Individual titles are also available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook for readers who want specific works without a subscription commitment.

The subscription model serves the translation project directly. Unlike traditional publishing, where a translation of a relatively obscure foreign classic requires a commercial calculation about whether it can sell enough copies to justify the investment, the subscription model allows Castalia to fund ongoing translation work through reader support. The weekly release cadence—new translation every Monday—creates a sustained output that traditional publishing couldn’t maintain for this kind of material.

What do you think? Are there other major works of world literature that English readers are missing out on due to a lack of translation, and should more publishers be taking on this kind of project?

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NEXT: After the Undiscovered Country: The Star Trek Novels That Tried to Close the Book on Kirk’s Crew

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country gave the original crew the sendoff they deserved. The Khitomer Accords signed, the Enterprise flying into the sunset, signatures scrawled across the stars. Gene Roddenberry died three days before it opened. It felt genuinely final.

But “final” has never sat well with publishers, or fans. Over the next three decades, a handful of novels, comics, and autobiographies tried to fill the gap between that last great adventure and Kirk’s death on the Enterprise-B in Generations. Some of them tell new stories. Others are content to look backward from the vantage of age. Here’s a list of all of the above so you can see the true final adventures of the USS Enterprise.

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The Retrospective Shelf: Looking Back More Than Forward

Several entries in the post-Undiscovered Country era use the period as a framing device rather than as a stage for new action. They’re not without value — they just aren’t really “what happens next” stories.

Best Destiny (1992, Diane Carey) sets Kirk answering a distress call near Faramond post-ST VI, but that’s scaffolding for a long flashback to a 16-year-old Jimmy Kirk running away from home, resenting his father George, and getting dragged on a milk run aboard Captain Robert April’s Enterprise that turns dangerous when pirates attack. George Kirk loses an arm and a leg. Jimmy gets the lesson he needed. It’s solidly written Carey, but readers wanting post-Undiscovered Country momentum will feel the pivot.

Klingons: Blood Will Tell (2007, IDW, Scott & David Tipton) is a five-issue comic miniseries with a genuinely clever premise. It retells classic TOS episodes “Errand of Mercy,” “The Trouble with Tribbles,” “A Private Little War,” and “Day of the Dove” from the Klingon perspective, framed by a post-ST VI story where High Council member Kahnrah debates whether to back Gorkon’s peace proposal with the Federation. The flashbacks carry the weight; the frame is the point. For Klingon fans, it’s essential. For those wanting pure post-ST VI narrative, it’s more meditation than adventure.

The Captain’s Table: War Dragons (1998, L.A. Graf) drops Kirk and Sulu into a bar near Utopia Planitia after ST VI, where retired captains trade war stories. The bulk of it is those stories are flashbacks to early-TOS-era run-ins with reptilian space pirates called the Nykkus and Anjiri. Sulu gets the better present-day adventure aboard the Excelsior. The Captain’s Table framing device is a fun conceit, but War Dragons functions more as a collection of tall tales than a forward-moving story.

The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (2015, David A. Goodman) covers Kirk’s entire life in memoir format, ending at the Enterprise-B launch. It hits the expected beats — Tarsus IV, Kobayashi Maru, Carol Marcus, Edith Keeler — with confidence and affection. The post-ST VI section is brief, serving more as an emotional landing strip toward Generations than as a story in its own right. Worth reading as a companion piece, not as a standalone adventure.

The Autobiography of Mr. Spock (2021, Una McCormack) addresses itself to Jean-Luc Picard and spans from Vulcan childhood through Michael Burnham, Pike, Kirk, post-ST VI diplomacy, “Unification,” and Spock’s final mission to save Romulus. McCormack handles Spock’s hybrid identity and emotional growth better than almost any other prose author working with the character. The post-ST VI section, covering his Romulan-Vulcan reunification work and his evolving relationship with Saavik and Valeris, is the most substantive of the retrospective entries on this list.

The Lights in the Sky brings Shahna, the drill thrall from “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” the woman who once asked to join Kirk and was told to stay and help her people, back as Triskelion’s ambassador to Earth, hoping to reconnect with Kirk after all those years. It’s a gentle, fan-pleasing concept built on one of TOS’s more quietly sad supporting characters. This is contained within the short story anthology “Strange New Worlds.”

All That Most Maddens and Torments (Christopher Cooper, published in Star Trek: Explorer, 2021) is a short story set during Kirk’s first moments inside the Nexus, filling in the gap between his disappearance aboard the Enterprise-B and Picard finding him decades later. More of an emotional coda than a narrative, it gives Kirk’s experience in the Nexus interiority the film never had time to provide. It’s contained in the Star Trek Explorer short colleciton, “Q And False.”

The Real Post-Undiscovered Country Stories

These books actually pick up after the credits roll and try to answer the question everyone had: now what?

Shadows on the Sun (1994) — Michael Jan Friedman

McCoy has always been the most emotionally complex of the three leads and the least served by the tie-in novels. Friedman gave him a real book. Set post-ST VI, Shadows on the Sun sends McCoy on an assignment alongside his ex-wife — the woman he divorced, the marriage whose collapse haunted his entire life. Friedman splits the narrative: one thread is the present-day mission, where McCoy has to function professionally with a woman he loved and failed; the other is a flashback to his earliest Starfleet posting, where a decision to save an assassin’s life set off consequences that echo into the main story.

It’s the most character-driven of the post-Undiscovered Country novels. It doesn’t need a universe-ending threat to justify its existence. McCoy’s regret is the threat. The flashback structure works because it earns the present-day emotional weight. If you care about who McCoy is rather than what he does, this one holds up.

Mind Meld (1997) — John Vornholt

Spock, post-Undiscovered Country, is escorting his young Vulcan niece Teska back to Vulcan for her betrothal ceremony — teaching her what it means to be Vulcan, helping her manage emerging telepathic abilities she doesn’t yet understand. An unplanned mind meld reveals she’s connected to a deadly assassin, and suddenly both of them are targets. Beneath the action, Teska’s destiny is tied to the eventual reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan peoples — which gives the book a resonance with the long arc of Spock’s life that pays off if you’re reading it in sequence with his appearances in TNG.

Vornholt keeps the pace brisk. It’s not a demanding novel, but it uses Spock well and doesn’t manufacture conflict by having him behave out of character. The stakes feel proportional.

Sarek (1994) — A.C. Crispin

The most ambitious of the post-Undiscovered Country novels and the one that does the most to bridge the TOS and TNG eras. Crispin built something genuinely layered. The premise: Sarek is working to expose a Romulan conspiracy using Freelans — telepathic agents who are, in fact, enslaved descendants of captured Vulcans, bred for mind control — to stoke xenophobia and blow up the Khitomer Accords before the peace takes hold.

Running parallel: Amanda Grayson is dying on Vulcan. Her journal entries structure the emotional core of the book and illuminate the Sarek and Spock relationship in ways the films only gestured at. Kirk’s nephew Peter also gets drawn in through a xenophobic organization called the Keep Earth Human League, which the Freelans have been amplifying. The conspiracy is functional. The family story is what makes it. Crispin understood that the real subject of Sarek was grief — the grief of a Vulcan who has loved humans and is watching them die.

The Ashes of Eden (1995) — William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

The Ashes of Eden is Shatner’s novel, written with the Reeves-Stevens, who are responsible for most of it, and it is very much a Shatner production. Kirk is 62, the Enterprise-A is being decommissioned, and his nemesis Admiral Androvar Drake has taken command of Starfleet. Disillusioned and aging, Kirk meets Teilani, a half-Klingon, half-Romulan woman who asks him to defend her homeworld, Chal, a planet whose inhabitants do not age.

Kirk steals a decommissioned Enterprise and goes. What he finds is that Drake has orchestrated the whole thing — a conspiracy involving dissident Klingons and a rumored doomsday weapon, aimed at reigniting Federation-Klingon hostilities before the peace can set. The plot mechanics are there. The wish fulfillment is nakedly apparent: Kirk gets rejuvenated, gets a beautiful alien woman, gets to fly the Enterprise again. It’s a better ending than Generations gave Kirk for sure. But the Reeves-Stevens know how to structure a thriller, and the book moves. As the entry point to Shatner’s multi-novel continuation of Kirk’s life, it does what it needs to do: it makes the death in Generations feel premature rather than inevitable.

The Last Roundup (2002) — Christie Golden

The most straightforward post-ST VI adventure novel on this list, set between Undiscovered Country and Generations. Kirk is retired and restless, teaching at Starfleet Academy, when his nephews invite him to join a colonization mission on an uninhabited planet called Sanctuary. He recruits Scotty and Chekov and goes. What they find is an alien outpost with a threat that turns out to be very much the Federation’s problem. Stranded without a ship, Kirk investigates while, one by one, loyalty draws the rest of the crew into the fight.

This is a proper Trek novel in the Pocket Books tradition: a solid threat, the crew functioning as a unit, Kirk doing what he does best without the benefit of a starship under his feet. The emphasis on his restlessness in retirement is well-handled. He’s not a man built for lecture halls, and the novel knows it. The Last Roundup is the cleanest “one last adventure” story this era produced.

The Alternate Timeline

The Crucible Trilogy (2006-2007) — David R. George III

George’s three-novel sequence is the most ambitious literary project the TOS line ever attempted, and though it isn’t exactly a “what happens after Star Trek VI,” it does show the end of the lives of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in alternate timelines. It’s the most demanding read on this list. Each volume takes one member of the triumvirate and traces the lifelong consequences of “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the episode where McCoy accidentally travels back to 1930s New York and saves Edith Keeler, and Kirk has to let her die to preserve history. These

Provenance of Shadows (McCoy) runs the alternate timeline in full. McCoy saves Edith Keeler. The result is a world at prolonged war. He lives out decades in Georgia, watching history unspool wrongly because of him, weaving in and out of canonical TOS moments in a structure that is more literary novel than genre adventure. It’s the most heartbreaking of the three.

The Fire and the Rose (Spock) recontextualizes his path from the early Kirk years through ST VI and into TNG‘s “Unification,” with his logical decisions, including his role in the Keeler crisis, examined as sources of guilt he could never fully process. It’s the densest volume.

The Star to Every Wandering (Kirk) is the most directly post-ST VI of the three. Kirk’s time-displacement haunts him into and through the Generations era, forcing him to race through timelines to resolve a collapse of causality rooted in that same pivotal moment in 1930. Picard eventually finds him. It bridges the original crew’s era to TNG more deliberately than any other novel attempted.

The trilogy asks more of the reader than most Trek novels do. George writes long. The alternate-timeline sections in Provenance particularly require patience. But the payoff is unlike anything else in the tie-in library.

The Undiscovered Country was a proper ending. These novels are for the readers who needed to know what the crew did with the morning after. Some of them more than justified the question.

Which post-Undiscovered Country novel hit hardest for you? Drop a comment below.

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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: RUMOR: Star Trek: United Has Been Greenlit at Paramount/Skydance

The first thing worth knowing about Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Prelude is who wrote it, which is not Kanehito Yamada, the manga’s author. The light novel prequel was written by Mei Hachimoku, a separate writer brought in for the project. Yamada supervised, credited as having consulted on the material to keep things consistent, but his voice is not the one on the page.

Published in Japan in April 2024 and released in English by Yen Press in early 2026, Prelude collects five short stories set before the events of the main manga. Each focuses on a different character and functions as a setup vignette, giving a glimpse of where everyone was just before the series proper picks them up.

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The Two That Work

Fern’s story opens the book and is the strongest thing in it. She’s caring for Heiter, who is ill, and goes searching for herbs that might help him. Simple premise. But it works because Fern is a character readers already care about, and watching her quiet determination in service of someone she loves earns the page time. The story ends right before Frieren enters her life. As a prelude — in the literal sense — it lands. There’s a completeness to it, emotional if not plot-driven.

Stark’s story is second and almost as good. He’s defending a town from a dragon he has never actually faced. He’s coasting on a reputation he isn’t sure he deserves, and the story forces him to confront that. He does end up saving someone. It’s modest adventure fiction, but it has stakes and a character arc that fits neatly within the space of a short story. Like Fern’s chapter, it positions itself right at the edge of his arc in the anime — you finish it and understand exactly where he’s standing emotionally when things begin.

The book is wise to lead with these two as they carry the most goodwill.

Where It Loses Ground

Lawine and Kanne’s story is the third, and here the book starts to coast. These are the two mage academy characters Frieren and company encounter during the first-class mage certification exam arc. These are minor characters. Their story involves a joint test, a difficult wealthy mage they have to deal with, and learning to work alongside each other despite clashing personalities. Structurally, it is probably the most complete story in the volume. Something actually happens. There’s a beginning, conflict, and resolution. But the characters asking readers to follow them for those pages are ones most will struggle to care about, and competent plotting cannot paper over that gap.

The Aura story afterward, who, if you remember from the early manga, is the Guillotine Demon, is harder to justify. Aura loses her magic, loses her confidence, regains both. The arc is clean enough. The problem is she’s a villain who is dead by this point in the timeline. Developing her further requires readers to invest emotional energy in a character with no future in the story. There’s a version of this that works as tragedy — the reader knowing what Aura doesn’t. This isn’t quite that version. It sits on the page without much resonance.

The Frieren Chapter and the Translation Problem

The final story, centering on Frieren herself, is the most thematically on-point piece in the collection. She’s asleep in a carriage, dreaming her way through memories of people across centuries, and the drift between those dreams and waking is the entire emotional mechanism of the series condensed into a short story. Time moved, but the people are gone. She is only now beginning to understand the weight of that. As a piece of thematic work, it belongs here.

But even here, a persistent problem surfaces that runs through the whole book: the translation flattens the voices. Fern, Stark, Aura, and Frieren end up reading with a similar register, which is modern, slightly casual, a little generic. When a demon and a grieving young girl feel like they were written by the same hand in the same mood, something has been lost. Some of this may trace back to Hachimoku’s prose, but the English translation carries its own layer of responsibility. The language choices push contemporary in a way that works against the series’ characteristic melancholy and remove.

The Verdict

Prelude is not a bad book. It’s a short one. This reads in an afternoon and asks very little of the reader. The Fern and Stark stories justify picking it up. The other three range from passable to skippable, and none of them will change how anyone reads the manga or watches the anime.

What it isn’t is essential. These are reminder vignettes, reinforcing things readers already understood and add no real layer to the characters that carry the book across the finish line. Yamada’s supervision kept it from going badly wrong, but the absence of hisvoice is felt in every chapter.

7/10.

What did you think about this light novel?

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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: Reclaiming The Shire: The Right Wing And Christian Soul Of The Lord Of The Rings (Part 3)

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 2

Part 1

Hobbits and Hippies

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This last week on X, a debate raged in Tolkien fandom, splitting into two equally wrong camps: those who dismiss The Silmarillion as Christopher Tolkien’s glorified fan fiction, and those who invoke Tolkien’s stated wish for a living mythology to justify Amazon rewriting the Second Age wholesale. Both positions collapse under scrutiny. The truth is messier, more specific, and far more interesting.

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What Christopher Actually Did

J.R.R. Tolkien spent roughly 60 years writing and rewriting the myths of Arda, from the earliest Book of Lost Tales drafts around 1916 to revisions still in progress when he died in September 1973. He never reached a single, stable, publishable version. When Christopher inherited the manuscripts, he faced something between an archaeological dig and an editorial crisis.

What he published in 1977 draws primarily from the late 1950s Quenta Silmarillion, the seventh or eighth version of the core text, the most mature and most fully realized. He supplemented it with the Annals of Aman, the Grey Annals, and standalone tales like the Narn i Chîn Húrin. He cut, reordered, and stitched passages across decades of drafts to produce a single continuous narrative. In places, most notably Chapter 22, covering the War of Wrath, where the late drafts broke off or conflicted with earlier material, he wrote brief connective passages himself. He said so plainly in the foreword: “Complete consistency is not to be looked for.”

He was not hiding anything. He was being honest about what the book was and what it was not.

The Canon Question

Christopher himself called The Silmarillion “nearest the canon” among the posthumous publications. That phrasing is deliberate. It sits above the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, which are drafts and commentary, raw working material for scholars. It also sits above Unfinished Tales, which are exactly what the title says.

The Tolkien Estate’s own 2023 legal filings define the Tolkien canon as encompassing published works, including posthumous publications, plus notes and early drafts constituting the full legendarium. By that definition, The Silmarillion is not soft canon or provisional canon. It is the canonical mythological foundation of Middle-earth, the cosmological layer on which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings rest.

Tolkien himself made this clear in Letter 131, written to publisher Milton Waldman in 1951, one of the most important documents in the entire correspondence. He described his ambition as creating “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.” He was explicit that the five parts of Ainulindalë, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, belonged together as a single work, not as separable pieces. He wanted to dedicate it, in his own words, “simply to: to England; to my country.” The phrase “mythology for England” is Humphrey Carpenter’s paraphrase, but the intent it captures is accurate.

Tolkien saw the legendarium as an interconnected whole. The cosmogonic scale was the foundation. The Lord of the Rings was, in his own conception, only one story within that larger body. You cannot coherently accept the appendices and the shadow of Morgoth hanging over Sauron while rejecting the text that makes those things meaningful.

The Editorial Problem Is Not a Disqualifying Problem

Scholar Verlyn Flieger, one of the most rigorous Tolkien critics working today, has consistently noted that the layered, unfinished nature of Tolkien’s manuscripts is not a flaw in his mythology. Tolkien built the legendarium as a set of tales passed down and retold across ages, with the inconsistencies between versions reflecting the nature of oral tradition and mythological transmission. The Book of Lost Tales frames the entire mythology as stories Eriol the mariner hears from Elves. Later versions shift that frame but never fully abandon the idea of the mythology as received and imperfect history.

Christopher Tolkien was not violating his father’s design by editing inconsistencies. He was working within it.

Where scholars legitimately push back, and Tom Shippey and others have made this point, is on specific editorial choices where Christopher resolved ambiguities by omission rather than by preserving the complexity. The compressed treatment of the War of Wrath is the clearest example. Later, in the History of Middle-earth series, Christopher documented his own second-guessing of these decisions at length. But regretting specific cuts is not the same as saying the published volume is not canonical. A film editor who later wishes he’d kept a scene does not thereby make the released film illegitimate.

What This Does Not Justify

Here is where the second online camp fails, badly.

The argument runs: Tolkien wanted a living mythology, open and usable, in the tradition of Norse and Finnish myth. Therefore, Amazon had latitude to reimagine the Second Age. Therefore, Rings of Power is a valid creative descendant.

This is a category error.

Tolkien wanted a mythology for England, not a mythology by anyone who purchased the rights. His expressed wish was for other writers to develop their own stories within the world’s texture, the way Norse mythology generated countless separate tellings. That is emphatically different from a streaming platform compressing thousands of years of the Second Age into a single narrative, relocating the forging of the Rings, collapsing Númenor’s arc, and inventing major characters wholesale.

Christopher Tolkien, who held guardianship of the legendarium until his death in January 2020, was unambiguous about where he stood on commercialization. In his 2012 interview with Le Monde, he said: “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.” He said Jackson’s films “eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people 15 to 25.” That was his verdict on relatively faithful adaptations. He never saw Rings of Power, having died two years before it aired, but the logic of his position is not ambiguous.

The Tolkien Estate’s 2023 legal position confirms that the “main shape of the Second Age” must not be altered. That is not a loose guideline. Rings of Power alters it structurally and repeatedly, most visibly in the compression of Sauron’s deception of the Elves and the timeline of Númenor’s fall. The Estate’s acknowledgment that “plenty of unanswered questions exist” about the Second Age created room for creative interpretation of gaps. It did not license rewriting events the texts document.

Where the Middle Ground Actually Is

The real middle ground is not between “fully canon” and “basically fan fiction.” It is between “perfectly consistent, signed-off masterwork” and “canonical despite being editorially constructed.” The Silmarillion is the second thing. Christopher assembled it with care, from his father’s own words, using the most mature available drafts, and produced the only version of the mythology Tolkien ever had any realistic chance of seeing in print. The History of Middle-earth series does not supersede it — it annotates it, complicates it, and deepens it for those who want to go further.

What The Silmarillion does not do is open a door. It closes one. The more precisely you understand what Tolkien actually wrote — the specific theology of Arda, the defined history of the Elder Days, the carefully constructed fall of Númenor — the less room exists for the inventions Rings of Power requires to function.

The mythology is not a sandbox. It is a cathedral. Christopher Tolkien spent decades making sure people understood the difference.

What do you think? Does the editorial nature of the Silmarillion change how you read it, or does the source material speak for itself?

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Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Brian Jacques’ ‘Redwall’ Series No Longer In Development At Netflix

Star Trek writer Una McCormack absolutely lost her mind on BlueSky over President Trump’s negotiation tactics with Iran, making a bizarre statement that she seemed actually upset that no one dropped a nuclear bomb while she was sleeping.

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Project Hail Mary has become one of the biggest sci-fi sensations in close to a decade. It’s been a bit of a dry spell at the box office, but modern studios really don’t understand what makes people love the genre. Andy Weir, the author of the book the movie is based upon, is drawing a lot of negative attention for his success from the hard left for a few reasons, and it looks like they want to tear him down at the expense of the genre.

The core of Project Hail Mary is simple: a positive, white, male lead goes into space to find a cure for a problem plaguing Earth, meets a benevolent and fun alien, and grows along the way. It’s very simple as a plot, and something we’ve seen many times before in science fiction. The formula works, and that’s why it resonates so much with crowds.

The film had the biggest opening of 2026 until usurped by another fun sci-fi movie with a white male lead: Super Mario Brothers Galaxy, but it’s had tremendous success for something without a franchise behind it, simply its own story to carry it along through word of mouth. The film has recouped its entire $200 million production budget domestically as of this writing, with a global haul of over $429 million.

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Most readers discover Anne McCaffrey through the Dragonriders of Pern. It’s one of science fiction and fantasy’s most beloved settings, and it’s where the majority of her readership begins and ends. What those readers often don’t realize is that Pern exists within a much larger framework, a shared universe called the Federated Sentient Planets that connects almost everything McCaffrey ever wrote.

At least with most of her novels. Her debut novel Restoree (1967) stands alone, set on the planet Lothar with no FSP connections whatsoever (though we can imagine it is). Everything else, from the Brainships, to the Crystal Singers, to the Planet Pirates, the to Talents, the Petaybee colonists, and finally Acorna’s people, exists within the same interstellar civilization. Beyond this, her Freedom series also has no connection, but the large body of her work can be traced and viewed as one big world.

For Pern fans looking to explore that larger universe, this guide is your roadmap.

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What Is the Federated Sentient Planets?

The FSP is McCaffrey’s version of a United Nations for the galaxy—an interstellar governing body that regulates trade, colonization, and relations between sentient species. It’s not a utopia. Corporate interests frequently override humanitarian ones. Colonial oversight is imperfect. Individual planets maintain significant autonomy. And the bureaucracy, as any reader of the Petaybee novels will tell you, can be suffocating.

What unifies the FSP universe thematically is McCaffrey’s consistent interest in certain ideas: the rights of individuals against institutional power, the nature of consciousness and personhood, the ethics of exploitation, and the question of what makes someone truly alive and deserving of dignity. These themes run through every series in the universe, connecting them more deeply than mere shared geography.

The flowchart created by Mike J. Nagle organizes the Pern-related series beautifully, grouping the Dragonriders, the Ireta/Planet Pirates storyline, the Brainships, and the Crystal Singer trilogy under the FSP umbrella. But as Nagle acknowledges, the chart doesn’t include everything. Acorna, the Petaybee novels, The Coelura, Doona, and the Talent/Tower and Hive series all belong in this universe and need to be placed.

The Series and Where They Fit

The Talent Universe (The Tower and the Hive)

This is arguably the earliest-feeling series in the FSP timeline, though pinning exact dates is difficult. The Talent universe begins with To Ride Pegasus (1973), which is set in the near future, close enough to our own era that it reads almost as contemporary science fiction. Humans with psychic abilities, or Talents, are identified, registered, and eventually become the backbone of interstellar communication and transport.

The series progresses through Pegasus in Flight and then jumps centuries forward to The Rowan (1990), where a powerful telepath/telekinetic named the Rowan serves as a Prime—a Talent strong enough to launch spacecraft across interstellar distances using mental power alone. The Tower and the Hive novels (The Rowan, Damia, Damia’s Children, Lyon’s Pride, The Tower and the Hive) follow the Rowan’s family across generations as they defend against an insectoid alien threat called the Hivers.

Timeline placement: The Talent universe almost certainly predates the other FSP series. The psychic network these novels establish—Primes launching ships between star systems—may explain how the FSP’s interstellar civilization maintains cohesion across such vast distances. Think of it as the communications and transport infrastructure upon which everything else is built.

The Barque Cats

A late offshoot of the Talent universe, the Barque Cats duology, Catalyst (2010) and Catacombs (2010), written with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, follows ship‑born cats and their bonded “Cat Persons” whose telepathic links and uncanny instincts make them indispensable on FSP vessels. These cats keep ships vermin‑free, sense environmental hazards, and, in some cases, develop full two‑way mind‑speech with their humans, pushing the Talent setting’s interest in psychic bonds into delightfully pulpy territory.

Timeline placement and cross‑links: The Barque Cats are explicitly set in the same universe as the Talents and the Tower and Hive books, effectively a side‑series in the mature FSP era when telepaths are fully integrated into interstellar infrastructure. They are also name‑checked in the Acorna and Talents books, reinforcing that these stories share a common Federation where telepaths, unicorn‑like healers, and telepathic ship cats all coexist on the same trade lanes.

Connection to Pern: While the Barque Cats never appear on Pern itself, they showcase the same FSP habit of engineering and partnering with animals for highly specialized roles, much like the genetic work that created Pern’s dragons from fire‑lizards. Read alongside the Planet Pirates and Pern colonization novels, the Barque Cats underscore that dragonriders, crystal singers, telepaths, and ship cats all grow out of a single interstellar civilization whose technologies and bio‑engineering practices the Pern colonists deliberately chose to leave behind.

The Brain and Brawn Ships (The Ship Who Sang)

The Brainship series begins with The Ship Who Sang (1969), one of McCaffrey’s most celebrated works. Children born with severe physical disabilities but exceptional mental capabilities are given a choice: become a “shell person,” their body encased in a life-support titanium shell integrated into a ship, building, or station, and serve Central Worlds in exchange for paying off the cost of their construction.

Helva, the ship who sang, is the original and most beloved of these characters. Subsequent novels—written with various collaborators including Mercedes Lackey, Anne’s son Todd, and S.M. Stirling—follow other brainships: PartnerShip, The Ship Who Searched, The City Who Fought, The Ship Who Won, The Ship Errant, and The Ship Avenged.

Timeline placement: The Brainship technology suggests a civilization sophisticated enough to routinely integrate human consciousness with machinery but still dealing with significant social inequality. The shell persons carry enormous debt and must earn their freedom. This feels like a mid-period FSP civilization, after the Talent network is established but before the social advances seen in later series. The ethical questions raised by the Brainship program are never fully resolved, which is the point.

Connection to Pern: The Brainships are explicitly connected to the Planet Pirates storyline, which directly connects to the Ireta/Dinosaur Planet series, which is the origin point of Pern’s colonists. This is the clearest canonical link between the Pern universe and the broader FSP.

The Crystal Singer Trilogy

The Crystal Singer (1982), Killashandra (1985), and Crystal Line (1992) follow Killashandra Ree, a failed musician who discovers she has the rare ability to “sing” crystal on the planet Ballybran. The crystalline rock, when cut with voice-controlled machinery by singers with perfect pitch, is essential to advanced power and communications systems throughout the FSP.

The cost is brutal. Crystal immersion causes symbiont infection that extends singers’ lifespans dramatically but erodes their memories. The Guild that controls crystal harvesting is exploitative and ruthless. Killashandra is not a particularly sympathetic protagonist, which makes her one of McCaffrey’s most interesting.

Timeline placement: The crystal technology feels contemporaneous with the Brainship era or slightly later. The FSP is clearly well-established, with complex interstellar commerce and strong guild structures. Crystal communications technology may be what makes the Talent-based transport network even more effective.

The Coelura And Nimisha’s Ship

This short novel (1983) is set on Demeathorn, where Caissa’s father is explicitly the FSP Ambassador. The story involves a rare creature whose silk-like secretions are used to create extraordinarily beautiful fabric, and the political and ecological consequences of that discovery. It’s followed up with a book titled Nimisha’s Ship in the same general loose region of the universe though it has different characters.

Timeline placement: Brief but clearly FSP, probably mid-period given the Ambassador’s role and the political structures described. They’re largely considered part of the “Crystal Universe” as a subset, so they might be read around the Crystal Singer books as a time guide.

The Ireta Series and Planet Pirates

Dinosaur Planet (1978) and The Survivors (1984), later combined as The Mystery of Ireta, follow an Exploration and Evaluation Corps team that arrives on a planet expecting routine survey work and finds dinosaurs. Then their transport ship disappears, leaving them stranded.

The Planet Pirates trilogy (Sassinak, The Death of Sleep, Generation Warriors, written with Elizabeth Moon and Jody Lynn Nye) connects directly to the Ireta storyline. Pirates are attacking the space lanes of the FSP, raiding colony ships and selling colonists into slavery. The trilogy brings together characters from the Ireta storyline with Fleet officers, including the remarkable Sassinak, a survivor of a pirate raid who dedicated her life to fighting them.

Timeline placement: This series occupies a clearly defined middle period of FSP history. The civilization is expansionist, actively colonizing new worlds, and dealing with the criminal enterprises that exploit that expansion. The Ireta/Planet Pirates storyline connects directly to Pern through the colonization era, the people who would eventually colonize Pern are part of this same civilization and this same era of expansion.

The Pern Connection: Pern’s colonists left from this era of FSP history. They were leaving behind a civilization that included Brainships, crystal technology, and planet pirates. The original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy establishes that Pern was a deliberate choice by colonists who wanted to escape the complexities of FSP civilization and live more simply. The fact that Thread then cut them off from that civilization—forcing a technological regression that erased most knowledge of their origins—is the central tragedy of Pern’s history.

The Dragonriders of Pern

The flowchart handles the Pern reading order comprehensively, but its place in the FSP timeline deserves emphasis. Pern is not a fantasy world with a science fiction explanation bolted on, it’s a science fiction world that deliberately forgot its own history.

The colonists who settled Pern were FSP citizens. They brought genetic engineering technology sophisticated enough to create dragons from native fire-lizards. They had computers, medical technology, and interstellar communications. Thread stripped all of that away over generations.

When AIVAS is discovered in All the Weyrs of Pern, it represents the moment Pern reconnects with its FSP heritage. The plan to eliminate Thread permanently uses FSP-era technology that the Pernese had forgotten they possessed.

Timeline placement: Pern’s colonization happens during the same expansionist era as the Ireta storyline. The main body of Pern novels—the Harper Hall trilogy, the original trilogy, the later novels—takes place thousands of years after that colonization, effectively in the far future of the FSP timeline. Whether the FSP still exists in recognizable form by the Ninth Pass is unknown. Pern has been cut off long enough that no contact has been maintained.

The Doona Series

Decision at Doona (1969), Crisis on Doona (1992, with Jody Lynn Nye), and Treaty Planet (1994, with Nye) follow the human colonization of a planet that turns out to already be inhabited by the Hrrubans—a feline alien species. The diplomatic crisis that follows, and the eventual negotiation of coexistence, is a meditation on first contact, cultural understanding, and the FSP’s colonial policies.

Timeline placement: The Doona novels feel contemporaneous with the early-to-middle FSP expansion era. The FSP’s colonial bureaucracy is present and officious. The ethical questions about colonization rights suggest a civilization still working out the rules of interstellar settlement.

The Petaybee Novels

Powers That Be (1993), Power Lines (1994), and Power Play (1995), written with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, follow Yanaba Maddock, a retired military officer assigned to investigate a corporate-controlled colony planet called Petaybee. What she discovers is that Petaybee itself is a sentient entity—a living planet that communicates with its human colonists through a unique symbiotic relationship.

The sequels, Changelings, Maelstrom, and Deluge, continue the story of Petaybee’s people as they defend their world against corporate and governmental exploitation.

Timeline placement: The Petaybee novels are explicitly FSP—the corporation controlling Petaybee operates under FSP oversight, and the conflict between colonial rights and corporate interests is framed in FSP political terms. The series feels like a later-period FSP story, when the civilization is large enough that individual planets can be effectively ignored or exploited by corporate interests operating within a vast bureaucratic structure.

Acorna and Her Universe

Here’s where the flowchart leaves a significant gap. The Acorna series, Acorna (1997) through multiple sequels, written with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, follows a young alien with healing powers who is raised by human miners before discovering her own people, the Linyaari.

McCaffrey confirmed that Acorna is set in the FSP universe. The mining operations, the corporate structures, the interstellar civilization, all of it fits the FSP framework. But where exactly does it fit on the timeline?

Educated placement: The Acorna novels feel like a later-period FSP story. The civilization is mature, expansionist, and dealing with the moral complexities of interstellar commerce and alien relations that characterize the mid-to-late FSP era. The Linyaari, a unicorn-like species with healing abilities, suggest the FSP has been making first contact with new species for centuries. Acorna’s story of integration, identity, and the ethics of using her abilities feels thematically connected to the Brainship novels’ questions about personhood and exploitation.

Placement guess: Contemporaneous with or slightly later than the Planet Pirates era, given the similar corporate-dominated interstellar economy and the ongoing first contact dynamics.

A Speculative FSP Timeline

Pulling all of this together into a rough reading order that respects both internal chronology and narrative accessibility:

Foundation Era — Near Future
To Ride Pegasus → Pegasus in Flight (The Talent series begins; psychic abilities identified and developed on Earth)

Early FSP — Interstellar Expansion Begins
The Rowan → Damia → Damia’s Children → Lyon’s Pride → The Tower and the Hive (Talent Primes enable interstellar travel; Hiver threat emerges)

Mid FSP — Colonial Expansion
Decision at Doona (First contact protocols established)
The Ship Who Sang → Brainship sequels (Shell person technology developed and deployed)
The Crystal Singer → Killashandra → Crystal Line (Crystal technology essential to FSP infrastructure)
The Coelura (Corporate and diplomatic FSP structures in full operation) → Nimisha’s Ship

Catalyst → Catacombs

Expansionist Era — Pirates and Planets
Dinosaur Planet / The Survivors (Ireta discovery)
Sassinak → The Death of Sleep → Generation Warriors (Planet Pirates crisis)
Powers That Be → Power Lines → Power Play → sequels (Petaybee colonization and defense)
Acorna → Acorna sequels (Linyaari first contact and integration)

Colonial Era — Pern Founded
Pern colonization occurs during this period. The colonists are FSP citizens choosing to leave the complexity of FSP civilization behind. They bring FSP technology including the genetic engineering that will produce dragons.

The Long Silence — Pern Isolated
Thread cuts Pern off from FSP contact. Thousands of years pass. The FSP continues in some form—or doesn’t. Pern forgets its origins entirely.

Far Future — The Ninth Pass
The main body of Pern novels takes place here, thousands of years after FSP colonization. AIVAS represents the moment Pern recovers its FSP heritage and uses it to eliminate Thread permanently.

Why Pern Fans Should Care

For readers who love Pern and have never explored the rest of McCaffrey’s universe, this framework changes how the books feel. The colonists who created the dragons were citizens of a sophisticated interstellar civilization who chose to walk away from it. The genetic engineering that produced fire-lizards and eventually dragons was state-of-the-art FSP biotechnology. The AI AIVAS isn’t a mysterious ancient artifact—it’s FSP technology, the same civilization that produced Brainships and crystal communications networks.

Reading the Planet Pirates trilogy before the Pern colonization novels such as Dragonsdawn, and The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, places those stories in a context that makes them richer. You understand what the colonists were leaving behind. You understand the resources they had access to. And you understand just how complete their isolation from that civilization eventually became.

Pern is the most famous corner of that civilization. But it’s far from the only one worth exploring.

What do you think? Are you going to be delving into Anne McCaffrey’s greater universe?

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If you love a well-built universe, and 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: ‘The Golden Compass’ Author Philip Pullman Explains Why He “Hates” C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Magician’s Nephew’

Philip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass and the His Dark Materials series, explained why he hates C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew.

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In an interview with atheist Alex O’Connor on his Within Reason show, Pullman shared, “In one of the other books, I can’t remember which it is, there’s a boy whose mother is dying, got cancer or something. And he goes to this other land, whether it was Narnia or somewhere else and he’s told there’s a magical apple tree, where if you take an apple, one of these apples, and eat it, it cures you of any disease. But he’s a good boy and he doesn’t do it because he’s been told that stealing is wrong. So he doesn’t do it. And he doesn’t take the apple.”

“He goes home. But wonder of wonders there’s a magic apple on his pillow or something. Anyway, he gives it to his mother she’s all right,” he added.

Next, he explained why he hates this, “What a lie. What a filthy lie. And I say filthy because there are children who are reading that book who themselves have a mother who is dying of cancer or something and who he's trying to persuade that their behavior will make a difference to their mother living or dying.

”If you're a bad boy, your mother's going to die. If your mother lives, it's because you are a good boy,” he continued. “It's a filthy lie. I hate that. I despise it."

In The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan explains what would have happened if Digory had stolen the apple and taken it home to his mother, “Understand, then, that it would have healed her; but not to your joy or hers. The day would have come when both you and she would have looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.”

The narrator continued, “And Digory could say nothing, for tears choked him and he gave up all hopes of saving his Mother’s life; but at the same he knew that the Lion knew what would have happened, and that there might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.”

However, Aslan then allows Digory to pluck an apple from the tree to give to his Mother. It mirrors Christ’s instruction that he will answer prayers. The Gospel of Matthew states, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asks for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.”

Pullman not only took issue with The Magician’s Nephew, but Lewis’ entire The Chronicles of Narnia series, “The way he treats his characters. To have the children go through this adventure with all sorts of voyages to different places and see different things and then dispatch them in the end in a railway accident seems to me the most ghastly way out.”

”He couldn't face the responsibility of making them grown up. He didn't want them to be grown up. He wanted them to turn away from things like, was it nylons and invitations and things,” he continued. “Which is a terrible thing to do to a child who's on the verge of growing up. Children don't want to be sent to heaven. They want to grow up and be men and women.”

”The promptings of sexuality in the teenage body and and the teenage mind are important and wonderful and valuable things and just to dismiss them in that off-hand way, terrible, terrible thing,” Pullman stated.

Fandom Pulse is reader-supported independent journalism. Paid subscribers get exclusive scoops and investigative reporting daily.

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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: SFWA To Celebrate Race-Baiting Activist N.K. Jemisin As Science Fiction Grand Master At Nebula Awards

SFWA has done the unthinkable and named N.K. Jemisin, Grandmaster of Science Fiction, which they plan to celebrate at their upcoming Nebula Awards Conference, as the club continues to push into political propaganda, abandoning any semblance of being a professional science fiction writers’ organization.

N.K. Jemisin is best known as a diversity-hire in publishing with a penchant for black activism, hailed as one of the greatest writers out there despite her works being narrowly focused on race-baiting agitation.

Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which won three consecutive Hugo Awards from 2016 to 2018, functions less as science fiction and more as an extended racial allegory dressed in fantasy clothing. The series centers on “orogenes,” a persecuted class of people with earth-moving abilities who are kept as slaves, forcibly sterilized, and referred to by the slur “roggas,” a term Jemisin constructed as a direct parallel to the n-word. The Fulcrum, where orogenes are trained and controlled, operates explicitly as a plantation metaphor. The protagonist Essun’s young son is beaten to death by his own father for displaying orogene abilities, a scene drawing direct parallels to how Jemisin frames the treatment of Black children in America. The second-person narration Jemisin employs throughout the trilogy, unusual in fantasy fiction, was described by the author herself as representing trauma dissociation, but it also functions as a device forcing readers to inhabit a racially oppressed identity regardless of their own background.

Her DC Comics run Green Lantern: Far Sector applies the same framework to superhero fiction with considerably less subtlety. Jo Mullein, a Black woman Green Lantern, is assigned to the City Enduring, a society of three alien species that achieved peace by chemically eliminating their own emotions through something called the “Emotion Exploit” patch. The allegory is immediate: a society demanding its citizens suppress emotion to maintain social order maps directly onto respectability politics arguments about Black emotional expression. The central murder mystery unfolds against a backdrop of a protest movement called the Sooth, coded unmistakably as a Black Lives Matter parallel, fighting against a system that literally mandates emotional suppression. Mullein’s outsider status as someone from a world that still experiences racism gives Jemisin regular opportunities to deliver contemporary racial commentary through the character’s observations about the City Enduring’s supposedly “post-racial” society. The comic received critical acclaim from mainstream outlets for exactly these qualities, which tells you everything about who the intended audience is.

Jemisin is also very vocal with her black supremacist views, stating before, “As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful, the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change. With epic fantasy there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative, in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack…”

Now, SFWA has declared her to be a grandmaster in an hour-long rambling video to promote the Nebula Awards conference. "We are honoring our newest Grandmaster, N.K. Jemisin, who shows us that storytelling can be a powerful tool for engaging with our reality. Through her work, she reminds us that speculative fiction can be both a space for resistance and a landscape for transformation,” said SFWA President Kate Ristau.

Before getting into the rest of her topics, Ristau made another strange comment that shows this is all about politicism rather than sci-fi, "It is our duty to acknowledge the generational impacts of settler colonialism, forced displacement, and assimilation on Native American families. We recognize these first peoples who coexisted in interdependent and sustainable relationships with the land."

The video also goes into a full list of identity politics-ridden works that are nominated for their various categories, almost all featuring some kind of race, gender, or sexual orientation heavy-handed messaging.

The program continues with strange and quirky attempts at humor which Ristau doesn’t seem much like a professional at all, let alone a head of an organization. "Thank you to our communities that help us brew coffee and fan the fires of our rage. I mean, uh, joy. Uh, definitely joy. Just just joy,” she says in a bizarre admission of her mental illness.

It’s also worth noting that they propped up an audiobook narrator for an award who uses “she/her” pronouns, despite the person clearly being a man with a deep voice.

Most of the nominated works in various categories aren’t worth naming as they aren’t fiction that anyone outside of the club is likely to have read or care about. A sample of one of the works should be enough to show how it’s all about identity and not about the actual quality of stories: “The super-abled 501 local union building wasn't ADA compliant. I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn't exactly fix my mobility problems.”

Ristau ended her stream with an urge for her club to vote, again not really seeming to realize that her job is to advocate for authors and science fiction works, as she said: “The power of story to make change from the ground up.” She then concluded, “Your work can change the world. So can your vote.”

How this helps professional science fiction writers in the least is beyond anything Fandom Pulse could come up with. We reached out to Vox Day, the editor in chief of Castalia House Publishing, and a recent science fiction #1 bestseller with his co-written Space Fleet Academy: Year One. He commented on Jemisin’s nomination, “I congratulate SFWA on completing its self-destructing speed run and rendering itself entirely irrelevant to the actual genre of science fiction literature.”

This year’s Nebula Awards conference promises to be even cringier than last year with hyper-politicized works and a Grand Master who is clearly chosen for racial reasons. The conference programming also has some strange panels that one must wonder what it has to do with science fiction:

What do you think of this? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Set in the same BIOSTELLAR universe as the bestselling Space Fleet Academy series.

The Cruel Equations shows the other side of the universe that cadets like Constantine Ramsey are being trained to defend. The Academy teaches its students to make the hard choices. The Cruel Equations shows what those choices look like when they land on a world of 340 million people who never asked to be a test case for humanity’s survival.

The hardest science fiction you will ever read.

NEXT: Dragonsteel’s Eye of the World Leatherbound Edition Hit With Manufacturing Crisis

Brandon Sanderson’s Dragonsteel Entertainment has halted production and fulfillment of its highly anticipated leatherbound edition of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World after a wave of manufacturing defects emerged in the first batch of shipped copies. The company sent an email to customers acknowledging the problem while outlining steps taken to address it, but the language of that email tells a more serious story than the measured corporate tone suggests.

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Last week, 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 1

An Oxford Don Goes to Paperback

On a blank examination paper sometime in the early 1930s, an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon wrote a single sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

J.R.R. Tolkien had no idea what a hobbit was. He had no plot, no outline, and no plan. He had a sentence that arrived unbidden while he was grading School Certificate papers, the kind of tedious academic labor that paid his bills and consumed his time. The sentence sat in a drawer for years before he built anything around it.

When he did, the result was The Hobbit, a children’s adventure story published by George Allen & Unwin on September 21, 1937. The firm’s decision to publish came down to a ten-year-old boy. Stanley Unwin, the company’s chairman, had a policy of paying children a shilling to review manuscripts. His son Rayner, age ten, read Tolkien’s manuscript and rendered his verdict: “This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations. It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.”

Allen & Unwin published the book. It sold out its first printing before Christmas.

Rayner Unwin later recalled, in his publishing memoir, that Tolkien sent twenty-six letters to George Allen & Unwin in 1937 alone, calling them “detailed, fluent, often pungent, but infinitely polite and exasperatingly precise.” Tolkien fussed over every element of the book’s design: illustrations, maps, endpapers, dust jacket. He had originally proposed five maps. He wanted Thror’s Map tipped in at first mention in the text, with the moon-letter runes printed on the reverse so they could be seen when held up to the light. Cost constraints reduced his five maps to two.

This was the man publishers were dealing with. He was meticulous, stubborn, exacting, brilliant, and slow.

The Hobbit sold well in England and better in America. The New York Herald Tribune awarded it best children’s book of 1938, with a prize of $250. Stanley Unwin wrote to Tolkien with the obvious request: Could he produce a sequel?

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Last week sparked a lot of discussions about Tolkien and what The Lord of the Rings meant in the wake of the news that Stephen Colbert would be writing the next movie. As such, we are going to do a deep dive into the rise in prominence of Tolkien in culture and show how this overtly Christian and right-wing work was popularized by the left, then claimed by the right after deep study, but is now being corrupted by the left again, quite intentionally. It’s a long story, but it’s immensely fascinating.

Here’s part one, our introduction:

In 2024, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow warned America about the vice presidential nominee’s reading habits.

JD Vance had named his venture capital firm Narya, after one of the three Elven rings of power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Maddow told her audience the name was suspicious. “He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the N to the front.”

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I picked up The Skylark of Space because you cannot understand where science fiction came from without reading it. This is not a book I expected to love as a reading experience, and it’s not one I did love, but it is one every serious fan of the genre owes a debt to, and the history behind it is as interesting as anything between the covers.

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Edward Elmer Smith was born in 1890 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and spent his professional life as a food engineer specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes. That background matters because the man writing the first true space opera was doing it between shifts as a chemist, not as a professional author with a literary support system. He began the novel in 1915 with his neighbor Lee Hawkins Garby, who contributed the romantic sections Smith felt he could not write himself. He finished the manuscript around 1920, spent years collecting rejection letters, and finally sold it to Amazing Stories in 1928 for $125. The magazine serialized it across three issues and requested a sequel before the second installment had even run.

Hugo Gernsback appended “PhD” to Smith’s name for his contributions to Amazing, which is how he became “Doc” Smith to generations of readers. He went on to write the Lensman series from 1937 to 1948, which many consider his best work. But The Skylark of Space is where it all started, and critics have recognized it as the first example of space opera. Isaac Asimov called it “the first great ‘classic’ of American science fiction” while also admitting “as literature, it was a total flop.” That is about right.

The plot moves from an Earth-bound inventor story into full interstellar adventure. Government chemist Dick Seaton accidentally discovers that combining copper with a mysterious element he calls “X” produces propulsion on a staggering scale. He partners with millionaire Martin Crane to build a spherical spaceship. His ruthless former colleague Marc DuQuesne steals the plans, builds his own vessel, and kidnaps Seaton’s fiancée Dorothy and her friend Peg to force a trade. Seaton and Crane chase them across the galaxy, rescue the women after DuQuesne’s ship runs out of fuel near a dead star, and eventually reach the alien planet Osnome, where two warring civilizations are fighting over copper-rich territory. Seaton and company ally with Prince Dunark of Kondal, help defeat the treacherous Mardonalians, get their ship rebuilt into the more powerful Skylark Two, hold double weddings blessed by the Kondalian monarchy, and fly home loaded with treasure while DuQuesne escapes by parachute.

On paper that sounds like a wild ride. In practice the first two thirds of the book are a slog. The Earth-based sabotage plot, the kidnapping, and the initial chase drag on past the point of usefulness. The prose is rough pulp, the technical descriptions of power bars and object compasses pile up without building tension, and the pacing lurches. Smith was writing this in serial installments between 1915 and 1920, and it reads that way.

Then the crew lands on Osnome and the book comes alive. The alien cultures, the planetary warfare, the copper oceans and jeweled palaces, the sheer scale of discovery: this is what Smith was building toward, and it delivers. You can see directly why it inspired everything that followed. Mike Ashley called it “the seminal space opera,” and Damon Knight praised its “fast, lean plot, an air of excitement, four characters who are comfortingly bigger than life, and the feeling that adventures are waiting everywhere.” Knight was writing about the Osnome half of the book.

I read this for the history, and the history is real. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories in the same August 1928 issue as Philip Nowlan’s “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” the story that introduced Buck Rogers. That single magazine launched two of the most influential franchises in science fiction. Everything from Star Wars to The Expanse traces a line back to what Smith was doing here, a lone genius inventor taking a handbuilt starship out into a universe full of alien civilizations and coming back changed. That idea was new in 1928. It has never stopped being used since.

The Skylark of Space is not an easy read. The writing is unpolished and the first act tests your patience. But the Osnome sequences alone justify the trip, and the book’s place in the lineage of the genre is impossible to argue with. If you love science fiction and want to understand where it came from, this is required reading. Just be ready to work for it.

What classic science fiction have you read to understand the history of the genre? Let us know in the comments.

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Survival of the fittest just became a lot more dangerous. Space Fleet Academy Year Two delivers the hard sci-fi action Paramount refused to give you with Starfleet Academy. That’s why we’re still here while the show is gone. Read it today!

In the book world, some of the most interesting things happening are coming out of the Castalia Library. Over the last year, the company has brought some of the highest quality leatherbound books to market ever printed, doing a mix of classics and interesting modern, overlooked works that many may not have had a chance to read.

Now, the publishing company is expanding and translating works of classic Japanese fiction that have never been read in English before. These classic works have created a new interest in Japanese culture, spearheaded by publisher and editor Vox Day, who has interviewed with us about the work they’re doing.

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Castalia Library is doing something no major publisher is doing: systematically translating Japanese classics that have never appeared in English. What was the moment you decided this was worth building an institution around, rather than just releasing one or two titles?

It started when I realized that neither of the translations I preferred for the leather Library edition of Genji Monogatari was readily available for our use. Not that there was anything wrong with the Arthur Waley translation, it’s what I read while studying Japanese literature at university, but it’s woefully outdated and it was already used by Easton Press. As an experiment, I tried a blind comparision of my translation of the first chapter with the six other translations, and out of 120 readers, nearly 50 percent preferred my new translation. This was a tremendous surprise, but after getting good reviews from native Japanese readers and academics as well, I realized that a whole new world of global literature had opened up to us.

So, while I worked on Genji, I asked Kenji to start with a shorter classic that only had one or two older and outdated translations, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. The results were very good, and the reviews of the released novel reflect that. Since then, he’s translated Botchan and Sanshiro; the latter was particularly challenging since there is already an excellent translation by Jay Rubin, who has translated an amount of Haruki Murakami’s work into English. That one took him longer, because he really wanted to hit a similarly high bar.

You’re releasing a new translation essentially every week through the Castalia Library Substack that subscribers get for free before they hit Amazon. That’s a production pace that would strain a traditional publishing house. How did you build the infrastructure to sustain that?

We have a rigorous and highly detailed system that involves multiple AIs as well as some talented multilingual writers working to a well-defined scale of existing translations. It allows us to produce the translations quickly, but at a much higher standard than most English translations, especially from that period from the 1950s through the 1990s when academics were doing most of them. Academic translations tend to be accurate, but excessively dry. One of the reasons I wanted to see Kokoro translated is because the McClellan translation I’d originally read tended to leave the English reader wondering how it had ever been so popular in Japan.

Fidelity to the original source is important, but not at the expense of comprehensibility by the reader. For example, you cannot translate “cavolo” from Italian into English literally. No English-speaker ever says “cabbage!” when they’re annoyed like an Italian would. The correct translation is more like “darn it!” So our principle is to always sacrifice a modicum of literal fidelity for literary quality.

Walk us through how a title gets selected. Is there a list or a set of criteria. What makes a work qualify for the Castalia Library treatment?

We look initially at three factors. First, is it public domain? Second, is there an existing translation, and if there is, is it any good? Third, is it a book that is either a) intriguing in its own right or b) important in the national literature of its origin. After that, it’s more a question of if it happens to personally appeal to the translator who’s going to handle it. There are some books we’ll do that are of less appeal to me than to the other translators, and that’s fine.

What Japanese author or work do you consider the single most important thing Western readers have been missing, and why?

I think the extended ouevre of Eiji Yoshikawa. He was extremely prolific and extremely popular, both during the Meiji era and today, and his works are amazing. He’s more or less the Japanese Dumas, although a little more violent, of course, since this is the world of the samurai. I really didn’t think much of the only English translation of Musashi, so I was considering doing that, but since there’s so many Yoshikawa works that have never been translated at all, it will be a while before we’ll get around to addressing that. In fact, today we’re releasing the first of the six volumes of Naruto Hicho, The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, The Kamigata Scroll. It’s a fantastic book with intrigue, adventure, a beautiful assassin, tragedy, and romance.

You have personal favorites in this literature. What are they, and what do they do that Western literature in the same period wasn’t doing?

None of the four great mystery novels of Japan have been translated into English until now. I recently finished translating the first draft of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken, which can be reasonably described as if Umberto Eco had co-written The Name of The Rose with Edgar Allen Poe in Tokyo with both of them out of their minds on absinthe or maybe something stronger. It’s intelligent and it is absolutely insane. I love it so much that I don’t know when I’ll be able to decide that it’s actually ready for release. Kenji is tackling the other one that is available, a darker mystery known as Dogra Magra.

The leather-bound editions are a poignant statement about what a book should be. A lot of publishers have abandoned that end of the market entirely. What does it mean to you that the object itself is beautiful and the highest quality possible?

As it happens, a lot of publishers are now starting to look at getting into deluxe books again now that Amazon has largely destroyed both the ebook and audiobook markets with KU and Virtua Voice. We’ve already been working with two other publishers at the bindery. I’ve just always been focused on all the aesthetic aspects of a book; my first solo novel, The War in Heaven, features an oil painting by Rowena, for whom I lobbied Pocket Books to be the cover artist. A great cover image or a really beautiful binding doesn’t make the text any better, but it sets the tone and adds considerably to the value of the book as an object.

The medieval scribes understood this. It’s a pity that most modern publishers don’t. You have only to look at Amazon to see how the art of the book cover has degraded over time.

As a Hugo Award finalist editor, you’ve read across a century of science fiction and fantasy at a serious level. When you come to Japanese literature with that background, what do you find that the Western genre tradition got right, and what did it miss that the Japanese understood?

Japanese literature is generally darker and more detailed. There is a saying that every English novel ends with a wedding, and, of course, every fantasy novel ends with the farm boy becoming the hero, killing the bad guy, marrying the princess, and becoming a king. Every Japanese novel, on the other hand, ends with a suicide.

Not every novel, you understand, but a lot more than you’d ever imagine. I think the ultimate modern Japanese novel would be a mystery about a young woman from Kyoto who works at a convenience store in Tokyo, whose murder is investigated by the homicide police and turns out to be a suicide.

Western literature is generally more optimistic, which I think is ultimately a reflection of the hope that Christendom has in eternal life through Jesus Christ.

What are the hallmarks of great writing, in your view?

Engaging characters whose behavior is realistic for their time and place. Stories with verisimilitude no matter how fantastic the setting. Emotions that are genuinely evoked rather than manipulated through artificial drama. And then, there are those with the true gift of the muse, the literary stylists like Tanith Lee and John C. Wright. They’re just on another level from the rest of us.

How many years of material of classic and worthy works is sitting in Japanese that hasn’t been translated?

Decades. It’s estimated that 95 percent of the historic literature has never been translated into English, which makes sense, since most of the translation efforts are understandably devoted to the modern bestsellers like Murakami, the Kawakamis, and Higashino. Even some of Japan’s greatest and most influential novelists remain untranslated; for example, we’ve been working on the previously untranslated work of Naoki Sanjugo, after whom the Naoki literary prize is named.

Do you see Castalia Library eventually moving into other non-English literary traditions or is the Japanese focus a permanent defining commitment?

We are already translating the Episodios Nacionales by Benito Perez Gardo, who is second only to Cervantes in his importance to the literary world of Spain. And I definitely intend to translate several of Hermann Hesse’s novels, since he’s been one of my favorite authors since I was in high school. But I think that Japanese will remain a particular focus for us, due to my connection and affection for the language, the people, and the culture.

You’ve operated largely outside the legacy publishing infrastructure for years. Looking at where traditional publishing is right now, do you think what you’re building with Castalia Library would even be possible inside that system, or does independence make this the only way it works?

There is no way we could have done any of this inside the professional publishing system or without the support of the Castalia community. No way at all. It really is a community effort; it may have started as my vision but it has now gone so far beyond anything I initially imagined that I won’t be surprised if it lasts for centuries. We are the digital monks of the 21st Century. I think what we’re doing is tremendously important, in more ways than one, and I sincerely invite your readers to join us in the grand project of the Library.

You can check out the works on the Castalia Library substack, and some are up on Amazon for purchase.

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NEXT: The Surprise Biostellar Novel Is A Testament To Real Science Fiction

Alongside Space Fleet Academy: Year Two, we released Cruel Equations, the second book in the Biostellar universe. No preorder campaign. No months of hype. Just a book, dropped into the world the way a sniper round drops into a courtyard. There’s a reason for that.

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Space Fleet Academy gives you the Biostellar universe from the ground up. Cadets, training, rivalries, first contact with the military hierarchy of an interstellar civilization. Readers have told us it scratches the itch that Star Trek used to scratch before Paramount turned it into a lecture series.

Cruel Equations gives you the other side of that civilization. The side that doesn’t show up in recruitment posters.

The premise is pure hard science fiction. Sometime around 1900, modern medicine quietly shut down natural selection. Nearly everyone survives to reproductive age now, regardless of their genetic fitness. That means harmful mutations accumulate unchecked, generation after generation. A geneticist named Yuki Tanaka runs the numbers and discovers that humanity is on a slow countdown to extinction through declining fertility. Not in a decade. Not in a century. But the math is the math, and the math says we die.

The obvious fix, editing the bad genes out, fails catastrophically. The genome turns out to be too complex for precision engineering. Variants that look harmful in isolation are compensating for problems elsewhere. An entire generation of gene-edited children die or develop crippling disorders. Science can’t replace the filter that natural selection provided.

So someone proposes the other solution. The terrible one.

Frontier colonies get assigned high mortality targets. Children die on the edges of human space so the core worlds can stay comfortable. Natural selection operates where the dying happens, and periodic gene flow transfers the results back to the center. The species survives. The cost is paid in small coffins on colony worlds that never asked for the bill.

Four hundred years later, a colony called Verlaine has gotten too good at saving its children. The Federation sends inspectors. The inspectors frown at the survival rates. And a deputy health minister named Jean-Marc Bergeron has to stand before his parliament and translate a coefficient into corpses: 2.5 million additional deaths per year, mostly children.

That’s the setup. What follows is a political thriller, an assassination mystery, a military blockade, a coup, and an occupation, all built on a scientific foundation that holds up under scrutiny.

We wrote this book because we believe hard science fiction has lost its nerve.

The genre used to ask real questions. Larry Niven built Ringworld on real physics. Jerry Pournelle put military and political systems under pressure and watched them crack along real fault lines. That tradition has been replaced, in most of the publishing industry, with social messaging dressed in spaceship costumes. The science is window dressing. The conclusions are approved by committee before the first word hits the page.

Cruel Equations goes back to first principles. The genetics are based on scientific models. Mutation accumulation in low-mortality populations is a documented phenomenon. The political response to the crisis follows the logic that real governments follow when faced with impossible choices: denial, panic, bad solutions, worse solutions, and finally the solution that works but costs more than anyone wants to pay.

Nobody in this book is a villain. The Federation bureaucrats believe they’re saving the species. The colonial resistance believes they’re saving their children. Both sides are right. Both sides cause deaths. That’s the kind of story hard SF is supposed to tell.

This is what the Biostellar universe looks like when you peel the Academy recruitment paint off the hull. The same civilization that trains cadets in Space Fleet Academy runs the system that assigns death quotas to colony worlds. The same fleet that defends humanity’s borders enforces the blockade that starves a planet’s hospitals dry. One universe. Two very different angles of view.

We care about building a fictional world that rewards serious readers, one where the science holds, where the politics follow from the science, and where the characters face choices that don’t have clean answers. That’s the promise of the Biostellar series. Adventure and wonder through the Academy. Consequence and cost through Cruel Equations.

Both books are available now. If you’ve read Space Fleet Academy: Year Two, you owe it to yourself to see the rest of the universe. If you haven’t started either, Cruel Equations works as a standalone.

What do you think of hard SF that takes its science seriously enough to follow the logic into uncomfortable territory? Let us know.

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Brandon Sanderson has proven that with keen marketing, one can get woke with products and still win as his latest crowdfund hits $10 million for Hoid’s Storybook Collection, combined with a new “secret” novel titled The Fires of December.

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Even though he faced a lot of fan backlash on Wind And Truth, the very end of his Stormlight Archive for a change in tone with modernisms and an extreme push of the LGBTQ agenda, it seems the Sanderson train is unstoppable.

Earlier this year, Sanderson announced that he has an AppleTV deal to adapt his works, and he’s writing the first draft of the Mistborn screenplay, the adaptation of many of his fans’ favorite trilogy of his work.

His rise to prominence started when Harriet Jordan, widow of Robert Jordan, picked Sanderson to finish The Wheel of Time. Though Sanderson’s prose was not anywhere near the level of Jordan, he managed to complete the work with a satisfying ending, and it caused many fans to check out his fantasy, such as Mistborn, Elantris, and Warbreaker, which spun off into other series in interconnected fantasy universes he calls The Cosmere.

The concept intrigued many fans, and Sanderson built a very loyal and cultish following based on posting updates of his rapid releases, something few in epic fantasy had ever done.

In 2022, he made history by taking to Kickstarter, abandoning traditional publishing for “Four Secret Novels,” which lit the internet ablaze, making over $41 million in sales for the four books. This solidified Sanderson as a bona fide superstar in the industry as he was finishing up his contract with Tor Books for his Stormlight Archive series.

Since then, Sanderson has toyed with a couple of other crowdfunds, including a highly successful leatherbound edition of his Mistborn books, but this Hoid’s Storytelling Collection marks the first time he’s launched a new novel on the platform.

His success comes from both his marketing of his Cosmere, a push from the mainstream, and building a giant mailing list from his initial Kickstarter with more than 165,000 people to market to directly. That level of dedicated customer is something every author dreams of attaining, and Sanderson has found it.

It helps that, beyond the storybooks, he’s offering a new “secret novel” echoing the marketing of his past Kickstarter campaign and getting fans back excited for a new work. But with this latest campaign, it looks like the Sanderson machine is keeping going full steam ahead, and he is likely to remain the king of fantasy for years to come.

What do you think of Sanderson’s new crowdfunding success?

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NEXT: Robert Picardo Doubles Down On Personal Attacks On Space Fleet Academy: Year Two Launch