Dua Lipa opened a library on June 27, inside the 120-year-old Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal, stocked with 100 books hand-picked by her media brand Service95. She’s calling it the Manifesto Library, and she wants you to know it’s a monument to books the establishment tried to erase. The problem starts with the name.

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

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“I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.”

JD Vance said this on a podcast in 2021, three years before Donald Trump chose him as his running mate. Nobody outside conservative media noticed. Three years later, the sentence detonated.

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Apex Magazine posted a statement this week announcing it had removed a story from Issue 153 over suspicion of AI assistance, and the editors admit in the same statement they have no way to confirm it. The story, “Vigil of the Tenth Air,” is gone from the website. Amended copies of the issue are going out to every subscriber free of charge. Here is the statement in full, as posted by the magazine:

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The Safe Place, book two of my Valiant Frontiers series, came out last week, and the trilogy’s third and final volume is on track to follow before summer ends. That puts a full three-book arc in readers’ hands inside a few months, a pace closer to serialized web fiction than the multi-year gaps traditional science fiction publishing usually forces on a series.

That’s part of the point. Traditional publishers and Hollywood have mostly stepped back from crew-driven, planet-of-the-week space opera, the kind of story that built the genre’s mainstream audience in the first place. The stuff of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and more doesn’t exist anymore. I aim to fill that gap, setting out to prove that real science fiction with a sense of wonder still works.

The Safe Place picks up the crew of the AES Valiant shortly after the events of The Soul Catcher, book one in the series. Captain Christopher Conley vanishes from the ship without warning, followed by a string of other crew members, each disappearance marked by an energy spike traced back to the surface of a planet the Valiant’s sensors had read as dead. Dr. Elaine Morgana and the science team determine that whatever hit the ship came from below, not from anywhere in orbit.

The missing crew don’t stay lost for long, but where they end up raises more questions than it answers: a hidden pocket of reality guarded by a species called the Onathi, who call it their “safe place” for reasons that become clear fast. What they’re hiding from left its mark on the Onathi themselves, and Security Chief Verelan has to decide how far she’s willing to push before that same threat notices the Valiant crew too.

Getting everyone out falls partly to Engineer Kelim, whose bond with a dead crewman’s soul (a thread that started in The Soul Catcher) turns out to be more useful here than anyone expected. He’s not just fixing engines this time. Whatever he pulls off with the Onathi’s own technology is one of the book’s better payoffs for readers who’ve been with the series since book one.

The full trilogy, starting with The Soul Catcher and closing with Time Bomb, will be out before summer ends. New readers can start the series and finish it inside a single season instead of waiting years between installments the way most trilogies require.

Have you started reading yet?

Catch up on the series:

• The Soul Catcher (Book 1): where Kelim’s bond with the soul catcher begins

• The Safe Place (Book 2): out now

• Time Bomb (Book 3): releasing next month

All three land before summer’s end. Start with The Soul Catcher now to be caught up before the trilogy closes. If you have read the first book — please leave a rating or review on Amazon! It’s so helpful!

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Isis Asare is no longer Executive Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, just over a year after the organization installed her in the role. SFWA did not send members a dedicated announcement about her exit. Instead, the news arrived buried inside a broader year-end update, a single warm paragraph among other business, with no mention of why she left or what happens next at the top of the organization.

Here is the SFWA statement in full:

“Our community was joined this year by Executive Director Isis Asare. During her tenure, SFWA reached new audiences, launched ambitious initiatives, strengthened current programming, and became decidedly and emphatically more human. As Isis concludes her time at SFWA, we are deeply grateful for her collaborative leadership and supportive vision of what our community can and should be. We will miss her steady hand, but we also know that her next chapter will continue to shape the future of our genre. We will be cheering her on for years to come. You can follow along with Isis’ journey here.”

Note they have no reason given, nor a successor named. Just a farewell wedged between other Nebula season news, on an organization that has made a habit of internal turmoil playing out just off camera.

For readers who have never had a reason to pay attention to SFWA, the acronym stands for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, founded in 1965 by working science fiction writers. Fantasy was not originally part of the mandate. The organization existed to negotiate publishing contracts and keep smaller authors from getting steamrolled by industry legalese, a genuine trade function that mattered when publishing contracts were inconsistent and authors had little leverage.

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LitRPG Con is running this weekend, July 10-12, at the Grand Hyatt in Denver, and its schedule reads like a master class in the difference between a convention built for readers and one built for ideology. Compare its panel list against the Worldcon 2026 program covered here Wednesday, where 101 panels carried the “Inclusivity” tag and a search for “Christian” returned zero results, and the gap explains itself.

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Anne McCaffrey’s unpublished manuscript “After the Fall Is Over” has a new witness. A Reddit user who goes by Brandon Weyr, who says he works as an actor, posted an account in r/pern describing a visit to McCaffrey’s home where the author walked him through the plot of the long-shelved Ninth Pass capstone. Fandom Pulse covered the mystery surrounding the manuscript earlier this year, when the only public record consisted of secondhand comments from Todd McCaffrey and fansite administrator Hans van der Boom. This account goes further than either of them ever did.

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Brandon Weyr posted:

“We then sat down and she regaled us with the tale of “After the Fall is Over” which involved Pern reconnecting with the FSP who had returned to Pern’s skies due to the promise of Pern’s botanic bounty of numbweed, which had become blighted off planet. The spectre of Thread in another farflung planetary system was also part of the story. As well as the need for Jaxom to receive advanced surgery or the world risked losing he and Ruth. In many ways it did sound largely like a retread of Skies of Pern however: Brekke and F’nor had had children they weren’t fostering off. Twins if I remember correctly, who were incredibly likely of course to impress. F’lessan and Tai I believe also had a child. And then of course the children of Jaxom & Sharra, Menolly & Sebell, Piemur & Jancis, and basically the next gen of important players were poised to take things up if there were even more stories after. Another major aspect was either pirates or the FSP under bad orders, ended up launching a missile which was deflected by the Queen Dragons pooling their TK. Overall the story seemed a mix of Skies of Pern, Lyons Pride, and the ending of her Catteni series. So I can kinda see why it is yet/never to be published. Oh, and the Captain or 2nd Officer in the FSP crew is of course a realtion of Paul Benden.”

Brandon Weyr’s own comparison points to two McCaffrey series outside Pern entirely: Lyon’s Pride from the Tower and the Hive quintet, and Freedom’s Ransom, the closing volume of her Catteni tetralogy. Both comparisons are accurate in that there are striking similarities, and one of them explains the manuscript’s structure far better than the “Skies of Pern retread” label that has circulated among fans for over a decade in conjunction with why this wasn’t published.

Lyon’s Pride follows Damia and Afra Lyon’s eight children as they come of age and get pulled into active duty defending the Alliance against the insectoid Hive. The book’s climax turns on the family’s telepathic and telekinetic Talents combining their power to intercept an enemy threat, a dynastic passing of the torch dressed up as a space battle. It’s considered a lesser installment in the series compared to the earlier The Rowan and Damia because of its scattered nature and less of a tight emotional impact for characters than the first two books in the series.

Set that against Brandon Weyr’s account of “After the Fall Is Over”: Brekke and F’nor’s twins, F’lessan and Tai’s child, and the offspring of Jaxom, Menolly, and Piemur all introduced as the next generation of dragonriders, with the climax resolved by the Queen dragons pooling their telekinetic ability to deflect an incoming missile. This is almost exactly the same mechanic McCaffrey already used to close out the Tower and the Hive series, relocated to Pern and given scales instead of a psi rating.

Freedom’s Ransom, the final Catteni book, has a reputation among McCaffrey readers as the weakest entry in that series. Reviewers at the time noted that after three volumes of rebellion and open warfare, the fourth book downshifted into trade negotiations, with the newly liberated colonists at Botany working to reclaim looted goods from their former captors through commerce rather than combat. “After the Fall Is Over” as Brandon Weyr describes mirrors that shape closely: an off-world power, the FSP, returns to Pern’s skies not as a threat but as a trading partner, drawn by the planet’s numbweed after a blight wiped out their own supply. Diplomacy and resource scarcity replace Thread as the engine of conflict, the same downgrade in stakes that cost Freedom’s Ransom its reputation.

The Skies of Pern connection is apparent, too. With FSP contact, the political friction between an old warrior caste and a new peacetime order, and the looming question of what dragonriders are for once Thread stops falling: McCaffrey had already run all of those ideas in her 2001 novel. But to call it a “retread of Skies of Pern” undersells what Brandon Weyr describes. The actual narrative engine, a family of next-generation dragonriders inheriting their parents’ burdens and saving the day through pooled dragon power, definitely echoes Lyon’s Pride far more than Skies. The resolution mechanism with an outside power pacified through trade rather than defeated in battle belongs to Freedom’s Ransom. The Skies of Pern comparison mostly is involved with set pieces. The other two supplied the plot.

Pern fansite administrator Hans Van der Boom called the manuscript a retread and told Anne so to her face. Todd McCaffrey has said it “would not have made Pern fans happy.” Brandon Weyr’s account, if it holds up, explains why in specific terms neither of them was willing to give: McCaffrey wasn’t repeating herself so much as recombining two of her own late-career formulas of books that already were considered disappointments in series and grafting them onto Pern’s most beloved characters.

This is all unconfirmed information outside the one source, but the plot details do make sense. On the flip side of the argument, seeing a future history of posterity from characters we’ve grown to love, and having them have a future among the stars rather than just confined to a planet, would have fulfilled every promise McCaffrey made when she insisted Pern was sci-fi and not fantasy after she first released Dragonflight.

Regardless of the quality, now that so much time has passed, it might be time to release the early draft of McCaffrey’s final work as such, presenting it for historical purposes rather than presenting it as canon, much as Christopher Tolkien did with his father’s unpolished work.

Does a manuscript built from recycled McCaffrey mechanics deserve a posthumous release so fans can judge it for themselves, or does Todd and Gigi McCaffrey’s decision to leave it in the agent’s files look more justified now that the plot is out?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Anne McCaffrey Had Rules Banning Fan Fiction Pornography, And Modern Publishing Should Follow Her Lead

There is a café near Porta Saragozza in Bologna where someone is always practicing upstairs. You never see who it is. You hear scales through the ceiling, then a passage from something you almost recognize, then the scales again. I was sitting there with the Japanese edition of this book, and the pianist upstairs started what I think was Chopin — one of the ballades — and stopped in the middle of a phrase. Started again. Stopped again. I was reading Onda’s description of Jin Kazama walking onto a stage for the first time, and the person upstairs was doing exactly what Onda was writing about: trying to find the place where the music lives inside the notes. I put my coffee down and just listened to both of them at once.

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That is the experience this novel is trying to give you. For roughly four hundred pages, Onda Riku asks you to hear piano music through written Japanese, and for long stretches she succeeds at something that should be impossible. The Yoshigae International Piano Competition is fictional, but the pieces are real — Chopin, Liszt, Bartók, Prokofiev, Bach — and Onda writes their performance not as description but as event. You are in the hall. The air changes. A sixteen-year-old boy who has never owned a piano puts his hands on the keys and the room tilts.

Jin Kazama is the book’s most extraordinary creation and its most dangerous one. He is the son of a beekeeper, he has been raised on sound rather than conservatory training, and he carries a letter of recommendation from a dead maestro that amounts to a dare: I am sending you a gift — or perhaps a disaster. Onda gives him the quality that the best writing about music always reaches for — the sense that genius is not skill pushed further but something alien to skill entirely, something that hears the world differently and cannot explain why. In the Japanese, Jin’s speech is plain, almost childlike, Tokyo-standard without affectation, and this is part of his meaning. He is not performing anything, not even ordinariness. He simply is what he is, and when he plays, everyone else in the novel has to decide what that means for them.

The danger is that a character like this can become a symbol instead of a person, and Onda does not entirely escape it. Jin is wonderful when he is arranging the angle of a piano on a stage because the sound needs to go somewhere different, or when he is walking through a city listening to it the way other people look at paintings. He is less convincing when the novel needs him to carry its thesis about nature and music and the sounds the world makes before humans organize them into art. The bees in the title are beautiful in the Japanese — 蜜蜂 has a sweetness in the mouth that “honeybees” does not — but they are asked to do too much thematic work. By the third time a character reflects on the connection between natural sound and musical genius, the insight has stopped being an insight and become a position paper.

Aya Eiden is the novel’s real emotional center, though Onda does not present her that way. Aya was a prodigy. Her mother died. She vanished from the stage for seven years. Now she is back, and the competition is not really about winning — it is about whether she can play at all, whether the music is still inside her or whether grief silenced it permanently. This is a story I have encountered many times in Japanese fiction, the return after loss, and Onda handles it with restraint that surprised me. Aya’s fear is physical. It lives in her hands. And when she finally plays her first-round piece and the fear does not win, Onda does not celebrate. She simply moves to the next contestant’s performance, and the reader is left holding Aya’s relief alone, without the novel underlining it. That is fine writing.

Masaru Carlos Levi Anatole — half Japanese, half Peruvian, Juilliard-trained, tall, handsome, technically flawless — is the character the novel likes least and treats most fairly. He is talented enough to win anything, and the question Onda poses through him is whether supreme competence is the same as artistry. The answer she arrives at is more generous than I expected. Masaru is not a foil. He is a musician who has worked brutally hard for everything Jin was given by accident, and the novel respects that work even as it suggests that work alone does not produce what Jin produces. There is a passage in the second round where Masaru plays Liszt and Onda writes his performance as architecture — precise, loadbearing, luminous — and then Jin plays the same piece and she writes it as weather. The comparison is not kind to Masaru, but it is honest.

Akashi Takashima, the fourth contestant, is twenty-eight, works in a music store, and knows he is too old and too ordinary for what he wants. He is the reader’s surrogate, and Onda uses him carefully. He is the one who notices what the others are too gifted to notice — that the audience is shifting in their seats, that the hall has a particular acoustic at three in the afternoon, that the piano tuner has done something unusual with the upper register. He gives the novel its ground. Without him, the book would float away on genius and abstraction.

The structural problem is the one every reader will notice: four hundred and thirty pages of a single piano competition, organized by rounds. Entry, Round One, Round Two, Round Three, Finals. Each round requires multiple performances. Each performance requires a description. Onda is inventive enough that the descriptions do not repeat — she finds a different register for almost every one, shifting between the performer’s interior, the audience’s reaction, a judge’s professional assessment, and occasionally the music itself as pure sensation. But the architecture constrains her. The competition format means the emotional rhythm of the novel is essentially a series of peaks with valleys of backstory and interpersonal scenes between them. By the third round, I knew exactly when the next peak was coming. The book never bored me — the prose is too alive for that — but it did become predictable in its unpredictability, if that makes sense. Every performance is a surprise, but the fact that a surprise is coming is not.

This is a four, and I mean it as real praise. Onda attempted something that most novelists would not dare — a book whose central event is people sitting at a piano, one at a time, playing music the reader cannot hear — and she made it work. The book won both the Naoki Prize and the Japan Booksellers’ Award in the same year, the first novel to do so, and neither prize was wrong. It is a genuinely ambitious novel by a writer with an extraordinary ear for the cadence of Japanese prose. Its limitations are the limitations of its form: the competition structure that gives it shape also gives it a ceiling.

The translation is where I have trouble.

Philip Gabriel is one of the most experienced Japanese-to-English translators working today. He has translated Murakami for decades. He knows what he is doing. And the music descriptions that are the heart of the book come across in English with considerable force. When Onda writes a performance as landscape or weather or memory, Gabriel finds English that moves at roughly the right speed and lands in roughly the right place. This is not nothing. It is, in fact, the most important thing the translation had to get right, and it gets it right often enough.

What it loses is everything around the music.

In the Japanese, each character speaks in a distinct register. Jin’s plain Tokyo-standard. Aya’s careful, slightly formal sentences that betray her conservatory upbringing even when she is trying to sound casual. Masaru’s bilingual looseness — he thinks in patterns that are not entirely Japanese. Akashi’s ordinary salaryman speech, the voice of a man who knows he does not belong in this company. Gabriel himself has acknowledged in interviews that the composer Hishinuma’s rough downtown Tokyo dialect — shitamachi speech, blunt and combative — does not survive the crossing into English. But it is not only Hishinuma. In Gabriel’s English, everyone sounds roughly the same. The social textures that tell a Japanese reader exactly who is speaking and what world they come from, the registers, the formality levels, the gendered patterns, are all flattened into competent, readable, undifferentiated American English prose.

This matters more than it might in another novel, because Honeybees and Distant Thunder is a book about the difference between musicians. Onda’s whole argument is that Jin and Masaru and Aya hear music differently because they are different, and in the Japanese, that difference lives in how they speak and think, not only in how they play. When the speech flattens, the argument loses a leg. You can still see the differences in what they do at the piano. You can no longer hear them in the silence between performances.

The title is another small loss. 遠雷 — enrai — is a word with a particular weight in Japanese. It means thunder heard from far away, and it carries a feeling of summer, of something approaching, of weather that has not yet arrived. The compound is compact and slightly literary. “Distant Thunder” is an accurate translation and a reasonable one, but it is two words where the Japanese has one, and the one Japanese word does something the two English words do not: it holds the distance and the thunder together as a single sensation. This is not Gabriel’s fault. English does not have the word. But the loss is there.

I would give this translation a six. Gabriel did serious, professional work. The music crosses. The characters cross, diminished. The speech does not cross. For a novel this dependent on the distinction between voices, that is a significant cost.

The book, though,, the book is the real thing. Read it in Japanese if you can. If you cannot, read it in English and know that you are hearing the piano clearly, even if the conversations in the lobby are harder to make out. Onda Riku wrote a novel about sound, and the sound is still there.

You can get the book here.

Book Rating: 4/5

Translation Rating: 6/10

— Misako Mikami

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NEXT: Anne McCaffrey Had Rules Banning Fan Fiction Pornography, And Modern Publishing Should Follow Her Lead

Anne McCaffrey, who created the Dragonriders of Pern series beginning in 1968 and spent decades building one of the most beloved science fiction and fantasy universes in the genre’s history, published an explicit set of fan fiction guidelines that included one rule stated without apology or hedge:

“Pornographic sites, based on any of my literary works, are expressly forbidden. But I’m sure you know that. I’m a grandmother, after all.”

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That sentence, delivered with characteristic wit and firmness, drew the line McCaffrey believed any author with a moral compass should draw. She had built her worlds. She had created her characters. She had spent her career producing fiction she was proud to put her name on. She was not going to allow those same characters and worlds to be used as raw material for pornographic content by people who had contributed nothing to their creation.

Her complete rules covered the full range of fan activity with care and generosity. Non-commercial fan fiction, fan art, and online RPGs were explicitly permitted. Free web hosting with banner ads was fine. The trademark notice requirement was reasonable. The protections she offered registered fan sites in the event of future licensing deals were thoughtful. She concluded with the phrase she told her grandchildren: play nice.

The rule against pornography was the natural centerpiece of a framework that said: I love that you love my work, I want you to engage with it, and there are limits to what that engagement should include.

The publishing industry has spent the years since McCaffrey’s death in 2011 systematically demonstrating what happens when those limits go unenforced.

Fifty Shades of Grey began as a Twilight fan fiction posted to FanFiction.net under the pen name Snowqueen’s Icedragon, titled “Master of the Universe.” The story was an explicit BDSM narrative using Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen as the protagonists. E.L. James later filed off the serial numbers, renamed the characters, and published it through a small Australian press before Random House picked it up. That the resulting books sold in enormous numbers is not a vindication of the process. It is a demonstration of how much money the publishing industry can extract from IP it did not create, using sexual content the original author never sanctioned. Stephenie Meyer told the press she would never read it and found the concept distasteful, but she never issued McCaffrey-style rules forbidding sexual content from fan fiction based on her work, and she never took legal action. The question one Substack writer asked — “Should Stephenie Meyer have sued E.L. James when she had the chance?” — has an obvious answer in retrospect. She should have.

Alchemised, published in September 2025 by Penguin Random House’s Del Rey imprint, is the most recent and most commercially significant entry in this pipeline — and the clearest illustration of where the industry ends up when authors fail to draw McCaffrey’s line. The book began as Manacled, a Harry Potter fan fiction posted to Archive of Our Own by SenLinYu — a graphic, dark narrative combining Harry Potter with The Handmaid’s Tale, featuring BDSM content, forced surrogacy, rape, kidnapping, and torture. It accumulated 10 million views on AO3 before being taken down when the publishing deal was announced. The “reskinned” novel changed Hermione to Helena and Draco to Kaine, renamed the Order of the Phoenix the Order of the Eternal Flame, and replaced magic with necromancy. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was acquired by Legendary Entertainment for a seven-figure movie deal. That those numbers are large does not make them clean. They represent the full financial reward available to anyone willing to take a beloved children’s author’s characters, subject them to graphic sexual violence, scrape off the names, and hand the manuscript to a major publisher. The author described removing Rowling’s intellectual property as “liberating” — in an interview extensively marketed using Harry Potter comparisons by the same publisher that called the content original.

J.K. Rowling’s position on fan fiction was never as clear as McCaffrey’s. Her literary agency spokesman said she was “flattered” and wanted the practice to remain “non-commercial” and “child-friendly,” with a warning that “if young children were to come across characters in X-rated stories, there’d be trouble.” She “deplores” pornographic fan fiction personally. She never published McCaffrey’s clean, direct rule. She never said in her own voice what McCaffrey said: this is expressly forbidden. The result is that her characters — children’s book characters, created for readers aged nine and up — have spawned one of the most extensive libraries of explicit sexual content on Archive of Our Own, where Dramione alone accounts for hundreds of thousands of published works across every rating category.

McCaffrey’s guidelines also addressed the commercial question that has now become the defining issue in the fan fiction pipeline debate. She specified that fan sites must be entirely free to participants, that no membership fees may be charged, and that sites could not be used to sell derivative merchandise. The rule was non-commercial engagement only. The moment Fifty Shades went to Random House and Manacled went to Del Rey, both works crossed every line McCaffrey identified. They were commercial. They profited from other authors’ intellectual property without compensation or consent. The children’s characters Rowling created for nine-year-olds were used as the scaffolding for graphic sexual violence that a major publisher then sold to adults worldwide. There is no version of that transaction that should be described as a success. It is a failure of every mechanism that was supposed to prevent it.

McCaffrey’s instruction was simple and correct: play nice. She meant it. The industry decided there was too much money in not doing so. Some things are not worth the revenue. McCaffrey understood that. The publishers who built their lists on her successors’ characters did not, and do not, care.

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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: The Jesuit, the Starship, and the Star Trek Books: A James Blish Retrospective

Connie Willis was not the only science fiction author who spent the nation’s 250th birthday publishing political screeds on Facebook. David Brin, winner of two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and a Locus Award, took a different approach. He went historical. The history does not hold up.

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Brin’s July 4th post opened with an invitation to re-read the Declaration of Independence, which he then proceeded to misuse. The full post:

“On July 4th I hope Americans will re-read... or recite aloud to neighbors ... the Declaration of Independence. There are many ironies that gird your ‘No Kings!’ vigor. But 2 points?

There’s this line: ‘He (King George) has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’ Ponder that one. Ironic?

The Declaration makes clear that Congress and the colonies sent multiple missions to plead, remonstrate or negotiate with King and Parliament, including some led by Benjamin Franklin. All efforts failed in the face of feudalist obstinacy and cruel tyranny. But we tried and that is the essence of the Declaration.

‘In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.’

When later Confederate secessionists tried to model their ‘declarations’ after that of 1776, their treason and hypocrisy was laid bare. Because NOT ONE delegation was sent to talk to President Elect Lincoln. Not.. even... one.

Nor could they point to any grievances at all! Except northern states refusing to shut down abolitionist newspapers. Look it up. That’s it!

They had none of the excuses for severing sworn bonds that Jefferson listed earlier as necessary, in order to justify cutting bonds of sworn loyalty. None. Not one. They were simply traitors. And the same psychological movement - yammering/whining/blustering heirs of Jefferson Davis - are doing likewise, today.

God and destiny and hard work Bless America, whose 80 year Pax has given the world and humanity (by far) their best era, ever. Plus fostering the sagacity and science to pick up the tools of creation and engender new kinds of beautiful minds. And one hopes also for wisdom.

May those new children of mostly American minds choose enlightenment and justice and go - and a little grateful patriotism - and help their country weather this storm and remain a beacon to the world... ...and to the galaxy.”

Let’s go through this.

Brin’s first point quotes the clause about King George obstructing naturalization of foreigners and asks his readers to find it “ironic,” the implication being that Trump’s immigration enforcement mirrors George III’s tyranny. The comparison collapses immediately under examination. King George was blocking immigration to prevent the growth of a self-governing colonial population that threatened British control. The colonists wanted more settlers to build a free society. The current administration is enforcing laws passed by Congress to stop illegal entry into a sovereign nation.

But here is the part Brin does not address. Illegal immigration as it currently operates is not a humanitarian system, but instead is a pipeline for corporate slave labor. Undocumented workers cannot legally assert their rights, cannot organize, cannot demand minimum wage enforcement, and cannot sue when exploited. The corporations who benefit from this arrangement pay them below market wages, pocket the difference, and externalize the social costs onto the communities where those workers live. If anything, the immigration enforcement Brin is implicitly defending by invoking King George is the system that enables the exploitation. Trump’s policies, whatever one thinks of their execution, target the illegal labor pipeline that suppresses wages for American workers, including the poorest and most vulnerable. A king blocking immigration to maintain colonial control is not the same as a republic enforcing its borders to prevent the corporate exploitation of illegal labor. Brin is a physicist who advises Google and Microsoft on technology trends. He knows the difference between an analogy and an equivalence. He chose not to apply that distinction here.

The second point has Brin correctly noting that the Confederate states sent no delegation to Lincoln before seceding, unlike the colonists who exhausted diplomatic channels before declaring independence. Lincoln had been elected legally, had not yet taken office, and had not threatened slavery where it already existed. The Confederate states simply left. What Brin gets wrong is his characterization of their grievances. He claims their only complaint was “northern states refusing to shut down abolitionist newspapers.” He told his readers to look it up. They should.

The Confederate articles of secession were fundamentally about the doctrine of states’ rights, the principle that individual states retained sovereign authority over their own affairs against federal overreach. Slavery was the immediate flash point, but the underlying constitutional argument was whether Washington could dictate the domestic institutions of member states against their expressed will. That argument did not die at Appomattox. It lives in every debate about federal mandates, regulatory authority, and local governance today. Brin reduces a complex constitutional crisis to a single sentence about newspapers, then draws a straight line from Jefferson Davis to the current administration. Neither reduction holds up.

But it really breaks down with his global implication that the current administration represents the same “psychological movement” as Confederate secessionists, which the fourth time in this publication’s recent coverage that a prominent science fiction figure has compared Trump or his supporters to either Nazis or traitors on or around the Fourth of July. Connie Willis called it a “Nazi regime.” Brin calls Trump’s supporters the “yammering/whining/blustering heirs of Jefferson Davis.” Tim Russ, who plays Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, called Texas teaching Bible passages “Christian Sharia law.” Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura on Starfleet Academy, told a convention audience that unnamed institutions are trying to keep everyone “depressed and low vibrational.” Sunny Hostin said the American flag makes her feel threatened.

Brin has been at this longer than most. He published Polemical Judo in 2020, explicitly framing American political life as a “life or death struggle for civilization” in which Republicans wage war on “fact-based professions.” He has maintained a political blog since 2004. He describes American history as an ongoing “eight-phase Civil War” between Enlightenment forces and Confederate ones, in which he has assigned himself to the correct side. He criticized Tolkien for depicting an “elitist social structure” and called Star Wars “anti-democratic” — views which, like his July 4th post, reveal a man who processes everything through a single political frame regardless of the subject matter.

The irony Brin missed is that the Declaration he quoted was written by men who owned slaves, in a republic that took nearly a century to abolish slavery and another century to enforce civil rights, which has nonetheless produced what Brin himself calls “by far the best era humanity has ever had.” The document survived its authors’ contradictions because it contained principles larger than the men who wrote it. Jefferson knew what he was putting on paper. The gap between the Declaration’s stated ideals and the reality of American life in 1776 was not hypocrisy to be wielded as a weapon — it was a promissory note that the country spent the next 250 years trying to honor.

That is the story of the Fourth of July. Brin spent his post trying to make it a story about Jefferson Davis, a comparison with zero correlation to anything happening in Washington today.

David Brin has won more major science fiction awards than almost anyone writing today. The science fiction establishment has given him every honor it has. He spent the nation’s 250th birthday calling half the country Confederate traitors while misquoting their grievances. When will these authors realize that constantly attacking their country with nonsense turns off their readership?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: VIDEO: Romantasy ONLY Bookstore Opens In Tolkien’s Hometown!

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Most science fiction readers know one thing about James Blish. If they came up in the 1970s, they know he wrote the Star Trek books. Every episode of the original series adapted as a short story, twelve mass-market paperback volumes from Bantam, sold in every airport and drugstore for a decade. For an entire generation of fans, Blish’s adaptations were how Star Trek existed between reruns.

Almost nobody remembers the other things.

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James Blish won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959. He wrote one of the foundational Catholic-themed SF novels of the twentieth century, taught alongside A Canticle for Leibowitz whenever anyone teaches the subject seriously. He wrote a four-book future history, the Cities in Flight sequence, that stands as one of the great pessimistic space epics of the mid-century. He coined the term “gas giant.” He was one of the two or three most influential SF critics of his generation. He helped found the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, SFWA, and the UK’s Science Fiction Foundation. He did all of this while working a day job in advertising copy and then dying at fifty-four.

Then he mostly vanished from the conversation. The Star Trek books drifted out of print. The Hugo winner became a footnote. The catalog is still there. Almost nobody talks about it.

The Futurian and the Zoologist

Blish was born James Benjamin Blish in East Orange, New Jersey, on May 23, 1921. He was a science fiction fan first. In high school he self-published a fanzine called The Planeteer on a hectograph, running it for six issues, and joined the Futurians in New York City, the seminal fan group that also produced Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, and Cyril Kornbluth. His first published story, “Emergency Refueling,” appeared in Super Science Stories in 1940. He sold it to fellow Futurian Frederik Pohl, who was then the editor.

Blish trained as a biologist. He took his bachelor’s in zoology from Rutgers University in 1942, served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1944 as a medical laboratory technician (discharged, according to at least one source, for refusing an order to clean out a grease trap), then went to Columbia University for graduate work in zoology. He left in 1946 without a degree. The science background matters. Blish’s fiction is rigorously biological in ways that most 1950s SF was not. His pantropy stories, his aliens, his invented physiologies all reflect a man who understood how living systems actually work.

After Columbia he went into public relations. He worked as science editor for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, and later wrote advertising copy for various pharmaceutical and tobacco accounts. He did not become a full-time writer until 1968. Most of his major work was produced in the margins of a day job.

His first marriage was to fellow Futurian Virginia Kidd, the writer and literary agent, from 1947 until their divorce in 1963. His second marriage, to the artist Judith Ann Lawrence, lasted from 1964 until his death.

The Cities in Flight Sequence

Blish’s first significant sustained work was the Okie stories, which began appearing in Astounding in 1950. The framework, powered by an antigravity engine called the “spindizzy,” involves entire Earth cities lifted whole from the planet and sent roving through the galaxy looking for work, the way Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s wandered the American West looking for jobs. Manhattan is one of the cities. The mayor, John Amalfi, is the protagonist across most of the sequence.

The four novels that make up the sequence — They Shall Have Stars (1956), A Life for the Stars (1962), Earthman, Come Home (1955), and The Triumph of Time (1958) — were finally collected as Cities in Flight (1970) in internal chronological order. The premise sounds like space opera. The substance is not. Blish was reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West throughout the composition, and the whole sequence is a working out of Spengler’s thesis that civilizations rise, mature, calcify, and die in observable cycles. The Cities in Flight books track that arc across cosmic scale. The Triumph of Time ends with the death of the universe in the year 4004 and the birth of the next one, with Amalfi himself becoming the underlying structure of the new cosmos.

Nothing else in 1950s American SF ends quite that way. Blish’s pessimism was real, his historical reading was serious, and his willingness to follow the logic of his premises to their end without flinching produced fiction that treats the reader as an adult. The pulp-adventure surface of the Cities in Flight books hides a genuinely bleak philosophy of history underneath, and the tension between the two is what makes them last.

A Case of Conscience

The novel most worth revisiting is A Case of Conscience (1958), which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959. The original novella version, published in If in 1953, later took a Retrospective Hugo for Best Novella in 2004.

The premise is precise. In 2049, a four-man team of scientists is sent to the planet Lithia to determine whether it should be opened to human contact. The team includes Father Ramón Ruiz-Sánchez, a Peruvian Jesuit who is also a biologist and biochemist. Lithia is inhabited by intelligent bipedal reptilian beings who have built a utopian society. No crime. No conflict. No poverty. No dishonesty. No word in their language for war, or lie, or theft. And no religion of any kind. The Lithians have arrived at Christian ethics without Christ, at moral behavior without moral theology, at virtue without grace.

Ruiz-Sánchez concludes that Lithia is a work of the Devil. His reasoning is careful and, from a Catholic perspective, deeply troubling. If a society can produce peace, logic, and understanding in the complete absence of God, then it stands as a living argument that human beings do not need God to be good. Ruiz-Sánchez lists his objections point by point. He calls for maximum quarantine of the planet. The other scientists reach different conclusions. The physicist Cleaver wants to strip-mine Lithia for lithium to build nuclear weapons. The team returns to Earth divided.

What makes the novel remarkable is not the setup, which many first-contact novels have used since. What makes it remarkable is that Blish takes the theological problem seriously. Ruiz-Sánchez’s Catholic worldview is not a straw man to be knocked down. His faith is not treated as embarrassment or as ideology. It is presented as the operating framework of a genuinely intelligent man doing his best to make sense of something the Church’s existing categories were not built for. Blish drew a foreword into later editions in which he mentions he received the actual Vatican policy on contact with extraterrestrial intelligences (the policy addressed the questions of whether such beings might lack immortal souls, or possess them and be fallen, or possess them and remain in a state of grace).

The novel’s title is itself a Catholic theological term. A “case of conscience” is a technical term in moral theology, meaning a difficult ethical situation requiring the exercise of prudential judgment. The novel is asking the reader to make one alongside the priest.

Blish himself was not a Catholic. He was, at best, an agnostic humanist who had studied biology and Jung and Spengler and was skeptical of institutional religion. That fact makes the achievement of A Case of Conscience more interesting, not less. Blish did the reading. He treated the material with the seriousness a Catholic novelist would have brought to it. Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., the current director of the Vatican Observatory, has argued that the theology in the novel is not actually Jesuit theology, and that Ruiz-Sánchez’s conclusion (that Lithia was created by the Devil) is itself the Manichaean heresy, which any Jesuit would recognize and reject. Blish anticipated this criticism. His response was that the theology is that of a future Church, not the present one, and that he set out to write about “a man, not a body of faith.”

Reasonable Catholic readers will disagree about how well the theology works. What is beyond dispute is that A Case of Conscience takes Catholic thought seriously as an intellectual framework capable of engaging science fiction’s largest questions. In 1958 that was almost unprecedented in the genre. It sits on the short shelf of foundational Catholic-themed SF alongside Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Anthony Boucher’s short fiction. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996) is unimaginable without it.

The novel is also the first book of Blish’s After Such Knowledge trilogy, a thematic sequence unified by (as Blish put it) “a questioning of the ethical validity of secular knowledge.” Doctor Mirabilis (1964) is a historical novel about the thirteenth-century English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. Black Easter (1968) and its sequel The Day After Judgment (1971), which Blish considered a single work, treat black magic and the end of the world with the same theological seriousness. Together these books make up one of the strangest and most substantive religious sequences in modern SF.

The Star Trek Adaptations

In 1967, Bantam Books commissioned Blish to adapt individual Star Trek episodes into short-story form. He had never seen the show. He was not particularly enthusiastic about the assignment. He took it because the money was steady and he needed the income.

Across the next decade he adapted every original series episode into a short story with only a handful of exceptions (”Shore Leave,” “And the Children Shall Lead,” and the Harry Mudd episodes which he was holding back to adapt as a novel that his cancer never let him finish). The stories were collected into twelve mass-market paperbacks published from 1967 to 1977. His declining health during the late run meant that Judith Ann Lawrence quietly wrote or completed several of them uncredited. She received her first cover credit on Star Trek 12, published two years after Blish’s death. She later completed the Harry Mudd adaptations as Mudd’s Angels (1978).

The adaptations were based on early draft scripts rather than the aired episodes. That is why longtime fans notice small differences from what appeared on screen. “The City on the Edge of Forever” reads closer to Harlan Ellison’s original teleplay than to the aired version. Kirk’s dialogue in several early stories runs sharper than what NBC eventually broadcast. For fans who read the paperbacks before ever seeing the episodes (as many did in the pre-VHS era), Blish’s versions are the definitive ones.

He also wrote Spock Must Die! (1970), the first original adult Star Trek novel. It launched a publishing franchise that runs to this day, several hundred novels deep. Every Star Trek novelist since is working in a market Blish opened. He credited his late-career financial stability to the Star Trek commission.

The tragedy of the arrangement is that many casual readers came to think of Blish as the Star Trek guy. That designation is not wrong. It is also not the whole story, and it is not even the interesting part.

William Atheling Jr. and the Critical Work

Under the pen name William Atheling Jr. (an homage to Ezra Pound, who had used the name for his own music criticism), Blish wrote some of the most influential science fiction criticism of the mid-century. His two major collections, The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970), are still consulted by anyone serious about the history of the field. He judged SF by the standards applied to literary fiction. He took writers to task for bad grammar, sloppy scientific reasoning, and lazy plotting. He named names.

Along with Damon Knight, Blish essentially invented modern SF criticism as a discipline. Both men understood that the genre would never be taken seriously by anyone outside it until its practitioners started taking their own craft seriously. Blish’s essays are direct, well-argued, and often unsparing. They made him enemies and cost him nothing.

He was also a working institution builder. He helped found the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference with Damon Knight, Judith Merril, and Virginia Kidd in 1956, which became the model for every subsequent SF writers’ workshop including Clarion. He helped found SFWA. He helped found the UK’s Science Fiction Foundation after his move to England in 1968. The genre’s professional infrastructure has his fingerprints on it.

The Final Years

Blish moved to Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, in 1968, partly because he had grown weary of American publishing and partly because Judith Ann Lawrence’s roots were in the UK. He continued to write. Doctor Mirabilis, Black Easter, and The Day After Judgment all appeared during this period, as did the bulk of the Star Trek adaptations, several new novels, and a substantial critical output. A special issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was devoted to him in 1972.

He had already survived a diagnosis of tongue cancer in the early 1960s. In the mid-1970s he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He kept working. According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, his final essay, written on his deathbed, was on Spengler and science fiction. He died on July 30, 1975, at fifty-four years old. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, not far from Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows.

He was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.

Why He Matters Now

Blish is the writer’s writer nobody quite knows how to place. He was too intellectually serious for pulp readers, too intertwined with mass-market Star Trek for the literary crowd, too pessimistic for the space-opera fans, too demanding for the beach-read market. The pieces of his career fit awkwardly together, which is part of why the mainstream conversation has never quite figured out what to do with him.

But look at what he did. He wrote the Catholic first-contact novel that everyone since has been either building on or arguing with. He wrote a four-book future history driven by Spengler’s philosophy of history that still reads as a serious work of cosmological pessimism. He invented, along with Damon Knight, the practice of taking science fiction seriously as literature. He opened the door for the entire Star Trek publishing industry. He helped build the professional institutions that every working SF writer in the English-speaking world benefits from.

The indie and crowdfunded SF space rebuilding the intellectually serious end of the genre has been reaching back to writers like Blish for its models, even when it does not name him. The Catholic SF renaissance quietly underway in the past decade has A Case of Conscience as its taproot, whether the current wave of writers know it or not. Mary Doria Russell reached back to him. John C. Wright has cited him. Every priest who shows up in a first-contact novel written since 1958 owes a debt to Ramón Ruiz-Sánchez.

If you have never read A Case of Conscience, that is where to start. The theology is arguable. The moral seriousness is not. If you have read the Star Trek books and never gone further, Cities in Flight is the next stop, and The Seedling Stars after that. If you want to see how a serious critic worked in the field, The Issue at Hand is still in print in various forms.

He died at fifty four years old, robbing the field of a legend before his time.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Larry Correia Says George R.R. Martin Killed an Entire Generation of Epic Fantasy Authors

Castalia House released The Little Duchess this week, the first English translation in the 150-year history of La Petite Duchesse, one of the most popular novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, a Breton author whose eighty-three novels shaped a generation of young French readers in the late nineteenth century. The translation is by Summer Charrette, and the ebook has already been delivered to Castalia Library subscribers. It is now available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook.

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The book itself is worth knowing. Published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse is the story of Alberte de la Rochefaucon, a twelve-year-old girl pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, and plunged into the drawing rooms and dinner parties of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored — bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to educate her. Her companions call her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. When a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to learn what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself. Readers who love Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Charlotte Yonge will recognize the territory immediately.

La Petite Duchesse ran through fourteen French editions. Despite that, it has never existed in English until now.

Castalia’s Vox Day noted the anomaly when preparing the publication and traced it to what he considers a deliberate pattern: “I was wondering how such a bestselling author’s works could have vanished into history, untranslated, when La Petite Duchesse alone had 14 editions. Then I read her biography, and like Perez Galdos, Fleuriot was not only a devout Christian, but a Catholic and a Royalist. So I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here with regards to socialist academics on both sides of the linguistic divide having attempted to bury a significant percentage of some of the best and most popular works of the Christian nations.”

Fleuriot’s biography supports the observation. Born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany on October 28, 1829, she came from a family of devout Catholics and Royalists loyal to the Bourbons. Her father was raised by an uncle who was a priest shot by revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy — the Revolutionary-era legislation that attempted to subordinate the French Church to the new secular state. Her background gave her fiction a deep grounding in traditional Catholic and family values, which made her work immensely popular with the French Catholic middle class. She wrote eighty-three novels across her career, all aimed at young women. She died in December 1890.

Fourteen editions of La Petite Duchesse alone. Eighty-three novels total. Complete obscurity in the English-speaking world until this week.

The Galdós comparison Vox Day draws is instructive for a different reason. Benito Pérez Galdós is widely considered the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes — five Nobel Prize nominations, 46 historical novels in the Episodios Nacionales series that constitutes one of the supreme achievements of European realism, a body of work comparable in scope and ambition to Balzac or Dickens. Only eight of those forty-six historical novels have ever been translated into English. Castalia has been working through the series, publishing its own translation of Trafalgar — the first volume — alongside further volumes in an ongoing project to give English readers access to what Castalia describes as “one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written.” The irony Vox Day’s Galdós comparison creates is worth noting: Galdós was himself a secular republican and anti-clerical figure, the opposite of Fleuriot politically and religiously, and he was also left largely untranslated. The neglect of non-English literature runs broader than any single ideological pattern — but Fleuriot’s specific case, eighty-three novels and fourteen editions of a single title with zero English translations across 150 years, suggests something more targeted than mere academic indifference.

Castalia’s translation program has become one of the more remarkable publishing projects in the English-language literary world. The weekly translation commitment announced earlier this year has already delivered Sanshiro — Natsume Soseki’s 1908 novel of a young man navigating modern Tokyo, considered one of the classics of the Meiji period — alongside the complete six-volume first English translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, the 1926-27 serial by Yoshikawa Eiji that established the modern Japanese adventure novel and made Yoshikawa the most widely read author in Japanese history. FP covered the Naruto Scrolls completion and the announcement of the next project, the Hanshichi Casebook — Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, 69 stories set in Edo, only 14 previously translated, with Castalia publishing all of them across seven volumes.

The pattern across all three projects — French, Spanish, Japanese — is that Castalia is doing work that academic presses and mainstream publishers have declined to do. Pérez Galdós has been sitting in Spanish classrooms and bookshops for 150 years. Fleuriot sold fourteen editions of a single novel. Yoshikawa Eiji was the most widely read author in Japanese history. None of them existed in complete English translation. Castalia is not discovering obscure provincial writers. It is translating authors whose home cultures have recognized them as major figures, whose neglect in English is a specific product of who decided which foreign literature deserved translation budgets and prestige.

The weekly ebook subscription is available at stack.castalialibrary.com. The Little Duchess is now on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

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NEXT: Larry Correia Says George R.R. Martin Killed an Entire Generation of Epic Fantasy Authors

Connie Willis has won eleven Hugo Awards, seven Nebula Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grand Master designation. She is the most decorated author in the history of the genre, more honored than Heinlein, Asimov, or Bradbury by the industry’s own accounting. She lives in Greeley, Colorado, about forty miles north of Denver.

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On the Fourth of July, while the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary, she published a Facebook post that ran several hundred words, called the current administration a “Nazi regime,” catalogued her political grievances at length, announced that the “fever of divisiveness has broken,” and ended with a list of American heroes that included Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harvey Milk, and “the guy who threw a Subway sandwich at the border patrol.”

The full post, which Willis titled “A HOPEFUL AND HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY,” ran as follows:

“We went to the Greeley Stampede last night (our local fair and rodeo.) It can be kind of a rough crowd, but this year my husband and I both noticed something different about it — and not just that last year there was lots of MAGA stuff, and this year I saw hardly any red hats or in-your-face T-shirts. What we noticed was people’s attitudes — they were friendly and polite and smiling. Everyone talked to each other — the people at the table where we ate our corn dogs and cherry limeades were all talkative and cheerful, teenagers we were maneuvering around made way for us, and when I told a guy in the line waiting for tickets to get in that I liked his shirt, he gave us two free passes to the fair that he had. Everyone smiled. It was a sea change from last year’s tension and wariness, and it felt like the fever of divisiveness has broken, or at least is breaking.

A lot of people have been saying they’re despairing this Fourth of July, that they feel more like mourning than celebrating, but I find myself MUCH more hopeful than last year, when Trump and DOGE were running riot, colleges and businesses were caving, and watching 1776 on TV (which we do every Fourth of July), made me sick to my stomach. This year we’re in a much different place. The winds have shifted, and Trump is now struggling on multiple fronts, from his corruption (which was on the front page today) to the war he keeps losing over and over.”

She then followed up with a completely long and unhinged list what she described as evidence of Trump’s collapse, including health speculation: “His health is failing — he is NOT blinking in those meetings and he gets crazier by the minute, clinging to fake polls and claiming he can talk to the dead.” She celebrated an active-duty Air Force officer calling for impeachment at the Capitol. She quoted from Heather Cox Richardson, Daily Kos, The Bulwark, and Jack Smith. She called Trump’s cabinet corrupt. She called the administration a “Nazi regime.” She concluded with her list of American heroes.

The list is worth noting because it tells you what kind of July Fourth post this is. Alongside Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the soldiers who died at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, Willis included Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Mark Elias, and “the guy who threw a Subway sandwich at the border patrol.” The man who stormed the beaches at Normandy and the late-night comedian currently in contract negotiations at CBS occupy the same moral category in Willis’s pantheon of American heroes. Perhaps this is why these writers in the establishment fail at understanding how to make great characters and have lost so much of the reading audience.

This is what the science fiction establishment does with the Fourth of July. The convention circuit, the Hugo Awards, the SFWA infrastructure that has given Willis twelve Hugo nominations in the last decade, and this is the culture they produce. Not stories about what America can be. Not reflection on the tradition of liberty that made Western civilization’s great experiment possible. A Facebook post listing Jack Smith and Seth Meyers as heroes while calling the sitting president a Nazi on the nation’s 250th birthday.

Willis has been propped up because of politics, and because of her gender more than any kind of lasting talent that will be remarked about in stories. The most memorable thing about her is Harlan Ellison jokingly groping her at a Worldcon in which that same crowd then tried to cancel him for.

The post she wrote on July 4, 2026 is a part of the cancer of the system. It is the instinct of someone who has been in a bubble long enough to mistake the politics of SFWA conventions for the politics of Greeley, Colorado, and who interpreted a crowd of polite fair-goers as evidence that the national mood has shifted toward her preferred electoral outcome. The fever of divisiveness has not broken. She simply did not see any MAGA hats at the Stampede this year and concluded she had won. The group has pushed itself so insular they don’t know that anything else even exists.

The genre that produced Bradbury’s warnings about book-burning, Heinlein’s meditations on civic virtue, and Roddenberry’s vision of humanity bettering itself and pursuing excellence has an institution that regularly hands its highest honors to an author who spends the nation’s 250th birthday calling the other half of the country Nazis on Facebook.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Larry Correia Says George R.R. Martin Killed an Entire Generation of Epic Fantasy Authors

The fantasy shelves at Barnes and Noble in 2026 look nothing like they did in 2010. The dominant properties are romantasy titles with sprayed edges and foil covers, designed for BookTok discovery and enemies-to-lovers arcs. Epic fantasy occupies a fraction of the space it once did. Baen Books author Larry Correia posted a thread on X this week explaining exactly how that happened, and who is responsible.

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He said:

I’ve been telling people this for years. GRRM pissed off millions of customers but he don’t give a shit. He got his bag. But his legacy is being such an epic bum ass bum that he crippled an entire genre, ruined consumer sentiment, and killed off an entire generation of epic fantasy authors.

Romantasy and LitRPG grew as a direct result of filling the smoking crater George left in the industry. New writers could no longer get deals to write epic fantasy unless the entire series was in the bag, and nobody can afford to gamble that much time to write that many books they may never sell.

Publishers no longer took chances on new series because customers had got burned by lazy shirkers like George and Pat. Agents wouldn’t represent new epic fantasy unless the whole thing was done. It hurt Indy because dudes had to convince customers that they weren’t bums too. Except when book one makes $50 total, because customers said Im not starting a new series until it’s done! they sure as shit ain’t writing book two. So it’s a self fulfilling prophesy of suck.

In the comments Dunning-Krugerands are saying this isn’t true. Look at guys like Brandon Sanderson. Wrong. Guys like him, or me, who already had established names, reputations, and fan bases were fine. We had enough customers who trusted us we could still do new things and people would come along to make it economically viable.

For example, the only reason my epic fantasy series got picked up is because I was already successful and could guarantee a viable level of sales off my existing fans. Newbs don’t have that. And over the ten years it took for me to write the six books to finish it, the entire time I heard from potential customers, nope, not gonna start a new series until it’s done because of George.

I am fine during this because I’m still gonna make a couple hundred grand off each of those just off my existing fans. Newbs make two bucks an hour, say to hell with being a writer I’m going back to my day job, and you all missed out on the next great author and his absolutely brilliant series, because you were too mad at billionaire George shoving twinkies in his mouth instead of writing.

Nope. Guys like me and Brandon are fine. George’s profound laziness screwed over the new guys. Customers and the industry quit taking chances on new guys. We will never know how many excellent fantasy series we missed out on, robbed by George’s laziness burning so many customers.

Some writers gave up, but others moved into different genres. Which is good. But it sure does suck if epic fantasy is your jam. LitRPG is close but different enough it blew up during this time frame because that’s where the talented went.

Being such a pretentious, bloviating bum that you damage an entire industry and strangle a generation of aspiring artists is quite the legacy.

Kal (who is a good writer btw, check out his books) asks what can we do about this? For me personally I’m just gonna continue mocking George’s work ethic in the hopes more normies realize what an outlier he is, and how they should expand their horizons to read other authors who aren’t stuck up, know it all, dickheads.

And before anybody starts barking at me that I’m such a hypocrite because I’ve not finished all my series, sorry I’ve only finished three of eight so far, and have only written THIRTY books since George’s last one, the next MHI comes out in December, and the last two books are next year, and I’m not planning on retiring anytime soon (if ever).

Correia has skin in this argument. He dedicated the final book of his Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series, Heart of the Mountain, to George R.R. Martin. The dedication read: “To George R.R. Martin. See? It’s not that hard.” When Martin’s fans complained, Correia explained exactly why he took the shot: “He was a giant ahole to a bunch of my friends, and since then his lazy hubris screwed an entire generation of new authors because burned readers wouldn’t try unfinished series, so f* him.” Martin’s 2024 blog post, for context, blamed “toxic fandom” for his inability to write. Thirty books ago, Correia started his Monster Hunter International series. Martin’s last novel came out the year Correia was getting started.

The market data validates every word of Correia’s argument, but the specific numbers point toward a conclusion that should concern anyone who actually loves fantasy as a literary tradition.

Romantasy, the BookTok-driven fusion of romance and fantasy best represented by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, generated $610 million in U.S. sales in 2024, up 34% from $454 million the year before. Yarros’s Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, the fastest-selling adult fiction title in two decades. Five of the top-ten bestselling novels of 2024 were written by Maas or Yarros. One out of every four books on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List that year was a romantasy title. Fantasy as a category grew 41.3% in value between 2023 and 2024. The publishing industry looks at those numbers and sees salvation.

What it actually sees is replacement.

Romantasy is not epic fantasy. It does not share epic fantasy’s literary ambitions, its moral architecture, its investment in worldbuilding as a vehicle for ideas. It is romance with fantasy set dressing — enemies-to-lovers arcs, fated mates, power systems designed to create attractive male characters with supernatural abilities, and plots engineered to generate emotional peaks that translate directly to TikTok recommendation clips. The audience for it is primarily women aged 13-34. The discovery mechanism is BookTok, which rewards emotional reaction and visual presentation of physical books over literary merit. The books are designed to be photographed. They come in special editions with sprayed edges and foil covers and alternative chapter art. They are collector objects that also happen to have text inside them.

LitRPG, the other genre Correia identifies as filling the crater, serves a different audience but shares the same replacement logic. Its readers are primarily male, primarily young, and primarily interested in power-fantasy progression through explicit game mechanics. He Who Fights with Monsters and The Primal Hunter are the genre’s dominant properties. Dungeon Crawler Carl earned a television deal. The genre generates enormous reader loyalty — 42% higher retention than traditional fantasy per market analysis — and drives massive volume in digital subscription models through Kindle Unlimited. It is economically successful. It is also, as Correia notes, “close but different enough” from epic fantasy that readers who want the actual thing are still not being served.

The tragedy in Correia’s post is not Martin’s laziness, though that is real and documented. It is the structural damage done by one man’s failure to a market that was trying to develop the authors who would come after him. The reader who got burned waiting fifteen years for Winds of Winter is the same reader who told Correia, over and over across a decade, that they were not starting his six-book Saga of the Forgotten Warrior until the whole thing was done. Correia finished the series. He has thirty books and an established fan base and can absorb the skepticism. The new author without any of those assets cannot. That author went and wrote romantasy or LitRPG instead, or went back to their day job, and the reader who wanted the kind of epic fantasy that shaped the genre’s golden era lost both the author and the series they never got to read.

Martin turns 78 this September. The Winds of Winter has been in progress since 2011. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024: “I don’t know, it happens a day at a time. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m alive right now! I seem pretty vital!” He got his bag. Correia’s argument is that everyone else paid for it.

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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: Star Trek And Doom Novelist Dafydd ab Hugh Reportedly Passees Away At 65

Dafydd ab Hugh, born David M. Friedman in Los Angeles on October 22, 1960, died this week at 65. Ansible reported the news. Few details are available. He had been largely absent from public life and online presence for several years.

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He took his pen name from the Welsh — Dafydd ab Hugh means “David son of Hugh” — reflecting his mother’s Welsh descent, and eventually made it his legal name. Before he wrote a single novel he served in the United States Navy in the 1980s, training as a Radar Intercept Officer with the goal of becoming an astronaut. Color blindness ended that path. He turned to writing instead, which was the genre’s gain.

His first novel, Heroing; or, How He Wound Down the World, came out from Baen Books in 1987. It introduced Jiana, a professional heroine navigating a world of quests and mythical challenges — the kind of sword-and-sorcery protagonist Baen built its early catalog around. A sequel, Warriorwards, followed in 1990. He then published two time-travel novels reworking Arthurian legend through Arthur War Lord (1994) and Far Beyond the Wave (1994) for Avon Books — modern characters chasing each other back through history to the court of Arthur, trying to change the past and discovering the usual complications.

His short fiction drew serious attention. His 1990 novelette “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk,” published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, earned Nebula and Hugo Award nominations. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia singled it out as his most notable original work — a post-apocalyptic piece whose linguistic invention drew comparisons to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker while pushing further into graphic territory. It is exactly the kind of story that wins award nominations and does not get made into a franchise, which is perhaps why it has been underremembered.

The bulk of his publishing career ran through Star Trek and Doom tie-in fiction, where he did some of the more interesting work in those respective lines. His Deep Space Nine novel Fallen Heroes (1994) is frequently cited by DS9 readers as one of the better entries in the early Pocket Books run, as an alien invasion of the station that leaves almost everyone dead, told through a time-shifted structure with Quark and Odo as reluctant detectives piecing together what happened. It is darker than most Trek novels of the era were willing to go, and it works because ab Hugh understood that DS9 was a darker show than its predecessors. The Rebels trilogy (The Conquered, The Courageous, The Liberated, 1999) followed, continuing his work with the DS9 cast. He also wrote Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Balance of Power and contributed to the Invasion! crossover event across the franchise lines. A Time to Create and A Time to Destroy were announced for his hand in the 2004 A Time to… miniseries, but the books were never published when the line was reduced from twelve to nine volumes.

The four Doom novelizations, Knee-Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, and Endgame (1995-1996), all co-written with libertarian SF author Brad Linaweaver, were a different animal. First-person-shooter tie-in fiction was not a prestigious category, but ab Hugh and Linaweaver treated the material with more seriousness than the format asked for. Knee-Deep in the Dead was compared, somewhat generously, to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers for its Milsf sensibility. Endgame pushed into genuinely strange territory, working in themes of faith and galactic conflict that sat oddly alongside the demonic carnage.

He held libertarian-to-conservative political views, which at various points put him at odds with the increasingly progressive Trek fiction community, though he largely kept his distance from the online battles of recent years. He was not a prominent culture war figure. He was a working genre writer who produced novels for franchises he cared about, wrote at least one genuine short story that deserved more recognition than it received, and then went quiet.

This is another sad loss for science fiction. Have you read his work?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: VIDEO: My Plan To Save Baen Books

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

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1. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein’s novel follows a 2075 revolt by the lunar penal colony of Luna against the Federated Nations of Earth. Computer technician Manuel “Mannie” O’Kelly-Davis narrates the story. He recruits agitator Wyoming Knott and exiled revolutionary Professor Bernardo de la Paz, then brings in a self-aware supercomputer named Mike to plan an independence movement timed to culminate on July 4, 2076.

Heinlein built the parallel to 1776 on purpose. He owned a brass cannon he fired every Fourth of July for nearly thirty years, and the flag his rebels adopt in the novel comes from the Battle of Gonzales, the fight that started the Texas Revolution. The book won the 1967 Hugo Award. The revolution costs the Professor his life before he sees the republic finished, and Mike goes silent once the fighting ends. Nobody in the book gets independence as a reward for existing. They rig elections and run propaganda campaigns to get it.

2. 1632 (2000), by Eric Flint

Flint dropped the dying coal town of Grantville, West Virginia into Germany’s Thirty Years’ War in this novel. The story opens in 1631. The town’s roughly 3,500 residents bring their guns and their tools. More than either, they bring knowledge no one else in 1631 has.

Flint’s own politics were left of center, but Grantville survives by importing the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights into a continent that has never seen either one, and the town pays for that decision in dead miners and burned farms. The Ring of Fire series that grew out of the book has since run to dozens of novels and anthologies. Nothing about Grantville’s survival was guaranteed at the start.

3. The Probability Broach (1980), by L. Neil Smith

One added word in the Declaration of Independence changes everything in this novel. In Smith’s version, government’s power derives from the “unanimous consent” of the governed. That single addition lets Albert Gallatin side with the farmers during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 instead of with the government, and the rebellion becomes a second American Revolution that ends with the execution of George Washington.

Denver police detective Win Bear falls through a dimensional rift into the resulting North American Confederacy and has to decide whether to stay. Smith won the Prometheus Award for the book in 1982, an award he created himself for the Libertarian Futurist Society. The Confederacy in the novel is wealthier and more advanced than our own history, but it gets there through civil war and the death of the first president.

4. Freehold (2004), by Michael Z. Williamson

Kendra Pacelli is a UN Protection Force sergeant framed for a crime she did not commit in this novel, released by Baen Books. She flees Earth’s authoritarian government for the libertarian colony of Grainne. Williamson served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and Air Force, with deployments for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Fox, and that service shows in the novel’s military detail.

Pacelli spends much of the book relearning what self-reliance costs before the UN invades Grainne outright and she has to fight in the war that follows. “Freehold” reached #3 on the Locus bestseller list for science fiction and fantasy paperbacks the month it came out and spawned an eight-novel series plus two anthologies. Grainne’s freedom survives the invasion because its people fight to keep it.

5. Island in the Sea of Time (1998), by S.M. Stirling

A single unexplained event sends the entire island of Nantucket and a Coast Guard training ship back to 1250 B.C. in this novel. Police Chief Jared Cofflin takes emergency authority and organizes the islanders to grow food and hold the Bronze Age at bay. Renegade Coast Guard lieutenant William Walker uses the same knowledge and technology to build a kingdom of his own among the tribes of Britain.

Both sides start from the same modern toolkit. One builds a republic. The other builds a tyranny. Stirling’s trilogy was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the series has run to multiple sequels and a connected Emberverse. Nantucket survives on farming and diplomacy conducted by people with no army and no government beyond what they build for themselves.

The Common Thread

These five books share a structure more than a flag. Liberty in each one is contested, expensive, and never guaranteed to the people who want it, which puts them closer to July 4, 1776 than most of what gets marketed as patriotic science fiction. Which of these five reads closest to how the American Revolution itself would play out as a novel: the lunar rebellion timed to the Fourth, the coal town importing a Constitution into the Thirty Years’ War, or the colony fighting off the empire that raised it?

Happy July 4th everyone!

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Elizabeth Moon Returns With New Paksenarrion Trilogy: First Book Drops October 6

Jason Cordova has pushed back on our reporting that he is leaving Baen Books, posting a response on social media Friday. Fandom Pulse stands by its sourcing while acknowledging new information Cordova provided.

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Here is Cordova’s full statement:

So the Usual Suspect (I swear, it’s like one step forward, four steps back with this guy) has gone off and started spouting nonsense about me and Baen Books (again). Incorrect information has been spewed forth like the projectile vomit it is (though vomiting after food poisoning is worth far more than the dribble that is causing me to post this in the first place...again) so I’m forced (again) to correct unnamed individuals of their fallacies (AGAIN).

For starters, I am not the ‘heir apparent’ at Baen Books. Never was, so far as I know. I can’t read Toni’s mind, but I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say I am in no position to take over. I mean, really? ME in charge? Hahahahahahahahahahaaha.... hahahahahaahahahaaahahah... okay, okay. That’s some pretty funny stuff right there. Man, can you imagine ‘me’ in charge? Whoo boy. People would have romantic dinners in the firelight, courtesy of the burning ruins in my wake after my ‘negotiating tactics.’ It’d be the stuff of legend.

Also, another fallacy to correct. No, I am not leaving Baen Books. Apparently I am tolerated enough and good enough at my job that Toni likes keeping me around. It’s definitely not because of my dashing good looks or impressive height, but more in line with my abilities of coffee fetching and lunch ordering. Oh, and shitposting. Mad skillz yo.

However, I did recently get a promotion from Mail Clerk / Associate Editor / Office War Monkey. I am now the Special Projects Manager at Baen Books. It’s a really cool job that allows me to utilize my skills while freeing up more writing time, something Toni and I both wanted (over the past three years my productivity has dropped as responsibilities have climbed). What, precisely, is the Special Projects Manager? Well, we’ve got some exciting news coming soon that’s going to expand on what my new job entails, and also is going to help our authors moving forward.

This also means I will no longer be working in the office but remotely, something I’ve been wanting to do for the past 6 months. Cost of living in North Carolina is getting ridiculous, so we’re planning on moving to another state soon. The new job and responsibilities, as well as shedding old tasks, allows this to happen. I’m super stoked.

Hopefully that clears things up. More writing, less work, promotion, still at Baen.

Did I miss anything?

Cordova’s statement confirms several things our original report identified: he is stepping away from a full-time in-office role, his writing output has dropped as his workload at Baen climbed over the past three years, and he is leaving North Carolina partly because of financial pressure. He is framing this as a promotion. Our source at Liberty Con, who was present for multiple discussions about Cordova’s status, describes the post as “damage control.” We were also told there were multiple discussions confirming our reporting publicly at Liberty Con.

This new title, Special Projects Manager, remains vague by Cordova’s own admission. Whether that role carries anything resembling the editorial and operational responsibilities he held before is an open question Baen has not answered.

Which brings up a recurring issue. Fandom Pulse has attempted to reach Cordova and Baen Books for comment on multiple occasions over the years for comments on our coverage of the company. Neither has responded. This publication covers Baen more consistently than virtually any other outlet. A publisher that struggles with press outreach and has operated without a publicist for two years might consider that returning a call to a friendly outlet would serve their authors better than silence.

In our original report that seemingly caused their ire, we reported how Ark Press poached their top author Larry Correia, as well as two of their top editors, funded by Peter Thiel and his investment group as he built himself a boutique publisher with real money behind it. That was a heavy blow for Baen, who apparently didn’t want the information to get out at the time. When we reached out to DJ Butler, who moved to Ark at the time, his response was to do a joint livestream with Toni Weisskopf, where he refused to answer whether he was working for Theil. He got agitated and began swearing on the livestream at the questions.

Months later, Passage Press publicly posted that Ark Press was indeed their imprint, confirming exactly what we reported. Butler did not apologize for casting aspersions on our reporting. He was subsequently fired from Ark Press.

The underlying questions from our original report have not changed. Toni Weisskopf will retire at some point. Someone will need to run Baen’s operations after that. Who that is, and what shape the house is in when the transition comes, remains the real story.

Cordova’s post also drew a comment from Jonna Hayden, production manager at Raconteur Press, who used the moment to take a personal shot at this reporter, referring to me with a racial slur play on my last name. Raconteur Press publishes niche anthologies that have not broken into wide readership. Antagonizing a publication that covers the sci-fi and fantasy space with nearly 300,000 monthly readers and a 7,000-subscriber mailing list, one that would otherwise cover their releases, is a strange business decision.

Fandom Pulse will continue covering the science fiction and fantasy publishing world without fear or favor. When publishers talk, we report it. When they don’t, we report that too. This is why we’re the most trusted outlet in sci-fi and fantasy news.

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Do you miss books like Baen Books used to publish? Military sci-fi, space opera with big scope and epic stakes for characters. Start reading with The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: Elizabeth Moon Returns With New Paksenarrion Trilogy: First Book Drops October 6

Helena Marino wakes in agony on the first page, light stabbing her, fluid burning her throat, hands hauling her out of the dark. The next thousand pages rarely let up. Alchemised opens in cruelty and stays there, and the strange part is that readers love it for exactly that. The promise of this book, made wherever its fans gather, is that it will shatter you and leave you hollow. I finished it hollow, and have been trying ever since to decide whether that counts as an achievement.

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First, the honest credit. SenLinYu can write. The prose is controlled and sharp, the war-torn world of alchemy and necromancy is built with real care, and the central setup has a grip: Helena, an alchemist and prisoner with holes in her memory, and the man assigned to dig the truth out of her skull. You can see why this thing conquered the internet. It began as Manacled, a Harry Potter fanfiction crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most-read works ever posted to its platform. Sen reworked it into an original world, Del Rey put it out, and it hit number one and sold past a million copies, with film rights going for seven figures.

Here is where I get off. The selling point of Alchemised is devastation. You do not read it to love these people; you read it to watch them shatter, and to shatter with them, and the means are a thousand pages of escalating atrocity. SenLinYu has called this a dystopian horror story rather than a romance, and that rings true. My trouble is that relentless cruelty is not the same as depth. War and trauma are worth a serious novel, but this one administers pain more than it makes meaning of it, and the doorstopper length turns the suffering into a slog well before the end. A book can stare at the worst of human nature and still send you back to the world with something. This one mostly took.

The whole fanfic-to-bestseller wave raises another question. Manacled ran on a borrowed engine, the love a reader already carried for Hermione and Draco. Cut that loose, and the original characters have to earn the feeling from scratch. For me they did not, quite. The ache that fans describe lives partly in the old story they are remembering.

A hard word for the parents, because this is the part I would not skip. Do not let the Harry Potter pedigree fool you. This is an adult book, full stop, and not adult in the sense of a few mature themes. It is full of torture, rape, forced pregnancy, and mass death, with explicit sexual content besides. If your teenager loved the boy wizard and heard this is the grown-up Dramione, that is the trap to step around. It is a standalone, with a film on the way, written for adults who want dark dystopian horror and can carry the long trigger list that comes with it.

If that is your shelf, you will likely find this a polished, ambitious example of the form, and the million readers ahead of you are not wrong to feel what they feel. It is just not my shelf, and it is nobody’s gateway. I came up loving fantasy because it opened a door onto wonder. Alchemised closes that door and bolts it.

So here’s my question for you. When a book promises to destroy you, is that honesty about hard things, or have we started mistaking our own pain for proof that a story is good?

Rating: 4/10. Real craft and a real phenomenon, but a thousand pages built to wound rather than to reveal, and the furthest thing from the books it descends from.

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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: Elizabeth Moon Returns With New Paksenarrion Trilogy: First Book Drops October 6