Benito Pérez Galdós Edges Out Sarah Hoyt and Vox Day For Top Honors in First Day of 2026 Summer Based Book Sale
Over 800 Based Books Sold; Six Days to Go!
Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) who was regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Miguel de Cervantes has taken the gold in the first day of the 2026 Summer Based Book Sale.
Trafalgar, the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — sold fifty copies in the first day of the week-long sale. Translator Vox Day describes this classic work, under-appreciated among English-speaking (and reading) audiences.
October 1805. Off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet the British under Nelson. By nightfall, the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force, and an empire that has ruled the seas for three centuries will have lost them forever.
Gabriel Araceli is fourteen years old. An orphan from the slums of Cádiz, he has been taken into the household of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a retired naval officer who cannot bear to miss the coming battle. When Don Alonso slips away from his furious wife to join the fleet, Gabriel goes with him, and eventually finds himself aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, on the morning of the most catastrophic day in Spanish naval history.
What follows is one of the great battle sequences in European literature: the four-decker as living giant, the sand spread on the planks for the blood, the smoke that swallows the line, the slow agony of a ship that will not surrender and cannot be saved. Pérez Galdós, writing seventy years after the event with the aid of the testimony from the survivors of the battle, gives us a view of Trafalgar from the losing side, not as a British triumph but as a Spanish tragedy, narrated by an old man who was a boy in the rigging and has carried the day with him for the rest of his life.
Trafalgar is the first of forty-six novels in the Episodios Nacionales, Pérez Galdós’s vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain, a literary project on the scale of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and one of the supreme achievements of European realism. Published in 1873, it has remained continuously in print in Spanish for over 150 years. Trafalgar is for readers of Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who are interested in seeing war in the age of sail from the other side of the line, and for readers of Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Hugo to encounter one of Spain’s greatest novelists for the first time.
Closely following in second place with 48 sales and the silver is Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Set in an interstellar future where humanity colonized many planets but also lost touch with some for centuries or millennia, the three-part 2025 novel blends tropes of science fiction and fantasy in intriguing ways.
The work has been nominated for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel, reflecting its strong libertarian themes of individual rights and resistance to tyranny.
The rest of the trilogy is available through the Summer Based Book Sale and also stands in fourth place with 40 sales.
Hardcoded: AI and the End of the Scientific Consensus (The Mathematics of Evolution) by Vox Day and his AI associate, Claude Athos, captured the bronze with 46 sales.
Why artificial intelligence will replace institutional science
When Vox Day and his AI collaborator submitted four mathematically rigorous papers challenging neo-Darwinian evolution and one parody paper to six leading AI models configured as peer reviewers, the results exposed a fundamental problem with both science and AI. Five of six models comprehensively failed. Three were anti-calibrated—they reliably preferred fabricated nonsense over genuine science. A parody paper with about Japanese scientists dying fish different colors to prove natural selection scored 9/10. The real science, mathematically airtight and empirically validated against ancient DNA, was rated 1/10 and dismissed as “pseudoscience.”
This is the book that documents what that happened and what it means.
The Rest of the Top Ten
C.R. Walton, a planetary scientist at the University of Cambridge (UK) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), captured fifth place with 31 sales for Cyclus Dawn: Hard Science Fiction (Metamorphosis Book 2). From Book 1 of the series:
Technology accelerates human evolution ...
Yet extinction draws near ...
After manifold technology accelerates evolution, humanity has colonised the stars. Lifespans stretch to hundreds of years. Worlds bloom with strange new life.
Bryn, an Invigilator with a dark past, is tasked with keeping watch over the utopia. Summoned to stop a galaxy-devouring threat, he must discern friend from foe on the most distant human colony in existence: Wilderness Five.
In sixth place is Vox Day’s Out of the Shadows with 28 sales.
OUT OF THE SHADOWS delivers a gripping exploration of power, transformation, and the hidden forces that shape our world. When a brilliant biotech entrepreneur stumbles upon evidence that the infamous Theranos scandal was merely a cover for something far more sinister, he unknowingly sets in motion a chain of events that will change humanity forever. What begins as a Silicon Valley success story rapidly evolves into a violent journey through a reality where the impossible is real, and the darkest myths of human history emerge from the shadows with terrifying consequences for the entire world.
This fast-paced thriller masterfully blends corporate intrigue, political machination, and visceral action into an unforgettable narrative. The novel poses haunting questions about progress and predation, about what men are willing to sacrifice for power, and whether humanity can maintain its soul when faced with forces beyond its imagination.
Set in The Midnight World created by author Vox Day and comics legend Chuck Dixon for their Midnight’s War comic, OUT OF THE SHADOWS is vampire fiction that pulls no punches—a harrowing philosophical ride about the price of ambition and what happens when humanity discovers it’s no longer at the top of the food chain.
Vox Day captures seventh place as well with 27 sales for Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection (The Mathematics of Evolution Book 1). Renowned physicist Frank J. Tipler, declares in his introduction to the book:
“Probability Zero represents the most rigorous mathematical challenge to Neo-Darwinian theory ever published. Period.”
From the book description:
For over a century, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection has served as the secular creation myth of the modern world. It has been hailed as the origin of the species, the foundation of modern biology, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment, and the universal acid that redefined Man’s place in the universe.
But after 150 years of storytelling, the scientific myths finally met the math.
In Probability Zero, Vox Day conducts the final forensic audit of a failed theory. This is not another entry in the culture wars, but a funeral for an outdated 19th-century narrative that has finally been caught in the headlights of 21st-century genomic data. By subjecting the big ideas of Darwin, Haldane, Mayr, Kimura, and Dawkins to the pitiless light of statistical and mathematical analysis, Day demonstrates that the Modern Synthesis isn’t just flawed—it is absolutely impossible.
In eighth place with 26 sales is Japanese historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa (1892–1962) with The Kamigata Scroll (The Secret Scrolls of Naruto Book 1). From the book description:
EDO NOIR FROM THE TOKUGAWA ERA
Osaka, the 1760s. Two men arrive after dark at a canal-side guardhouse, looking for a room. One is a gruff tile-maker from Edo named Karakusa Gingorō. The other is his man Taichi, who is carrying a great deal of money and would prefer not to be murdered for it. They are bound for Awa — the sealed domain on the island of Shikoku that forbids entry to outsiders — on a mission to find a vanished spy whose disappearance, ten years ago, left behind a grieving daughter and an unanswered question that could bring down the shogunate.
They do not know that a woman is crouched in the shadows beside the guardhouse, listening to every word. They do not know that a killer in a black hood is already following them through the dark streets, choosing his moment to strike.
And they do not yet know about Norizuki Gennojō — the swordsman-monk whose flute can be heard on the road to Awa, and whose sword, when he is finally forced to draw it, is worth thirty men.
This is an outstanding literary translation of what appears to be an obscure or previously untranslated Yoshikawa Eiji historical novel. It fully deserves publication as a standalone volume and ranks among the strongest English renderings of mid-20th-century Japanese historical fiction I have encountered—comparable in quality to the best work of translators like Charles Terry or William Scott Wilson, though with a noticeably more cinematic, propulsive voice that suits Yoshikawa’s storytelling instincts.
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), English author and prominent Christian apologist, takes ninth place with 23 sales for his unconventional memoir of faith, Orthodoxy, his most enduring nonfiction work.
Orthodoxy is a 1908 book by G. K. Chesterton that serves as a spiritual autobiography and a classic of Christian apologetics. Written while Chesterton was an Anglican (he converted to Roman Catholicism 14 years later), the book details his personal journey from agnosticism to embracing orthodox Christian belief
“Since he published Orthodoxy in 1908, G. K. Chesterton has inspired Christians and challenged skeptics with his unique wit and wisdom. He delivered biting analysis still relevant today.” --Christianity Today
Closing out the top ten is Thirty Pieces of Silver (Spirits in the Silicon) by Travis J.I. Corcoran and Lawrence Railey.
Every society worships something
In our world, in the 21st century, we worship consumerism, or sexual liberation, or the Party.
...but in the alternate history cyberpunk world of Heretics of the Catacombs, where Rome never fell, where moveable type was invented in 1125, lighter-than-air travel in 1350, and electricity in 1450, society still worships the One True God, and venerates His saints and apostles.
Worship always involves physical artifacts. In some societies it’s rainbow flags. In others, little red books of the Party founder’s saying. In the eternal city of Byzantium and the rest of the Roman Empire that never fell, it’s relics - a fragment of the True Cross, a tooth of an ancient saint, a piece of a centuries-old transistor radio.
Venture into the neon lit world of Byzantium in the futuristic year of 1754 Anno Domini, when cybernetically augmented monks chant as they swing incense burning thuribles, surgically enhanced hookers flirt with hackers in underground bars, Viking mercenaries sell their guns to the highest bidder, and Aztec traders offer chocolate, gold, and illegal cocaina.
...and in the background, behind the mist and the drizzle, beneath the electroluminescent-lit towers and churches, below the filth and the riches, the forces of Good and Evil do battle in the darkness.
Extended Sale Rankings
First days sales appear to have totaled around 850 books.
With six more exciting days left in the sale, there will be plenty of opportunities for insurgents to break into the top rankings. What new favorite author will you discover?
About the Based Book Sale
The Based Book Sale is a grassroots collaboration of independent authors, small presses, and readers built around the idea that great books do not need institutional gatekeepers to find an audience. For one week, hundreds of titles across science fiction, fantasy, history, philosophy, politics, and nonfiction are offered at steep discounts — many for just $0.99 or free — as participating authors cross-promote one another’s work and introduce readers to new voices, hidden gems, and unconventional ideas. You can learn more from a recent interview with Based Book Sale Founder, Hans G. Schantz.
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Good to see people checking out Pérez Galdós. He's truly a first-rank novelist, for all that he is largely unknown to the English-reading world. Congratulations to him and Mrs. Hoyt for the clean sweep by the Peninsular writers.
Hans, what is your position on AI-assisted novels? I see that there is at least one of them on the list above. Do you think the Based Book Sale should, at a minimum, inform potential readers which books are human-made and which are AI?
Personally, I am only interested in reading books written by fellow human beings (call me old fashioned!), and so it would be helpful to know which are which as I decide what titles I might want to purchase.
To be clear, I am all for technology, and freedom of choice, and so if some writers feel they need the assistance of a computer to help them write their books, then good for them. Buy as a paying customer, and as someone who is interested in the human-made rather than the artificial, I would be grateful to know exactly what it is that I am reading. Thanks.