There’s a whole world of ideas out there that you’re not supposed to explore. Forgotten history. Unconventional science. Unfashionable philosophy. Suppressed perspectives. Questions that respectable people aren’t supposed to ask.
For one week only, from Wednesday, October 28, through Tuesday, November 3, discover books that challenge conventional wisdom, recover forgotten knowledge, and encourage you to think for yourself.
Castalia House and I are participating in the 2026 Nonfiction Based Book sale with two books:
I would also very highly recommend John C. Wright’s excellent collection of essays, Transhuman and Subhuman, which is among the best and most thought-provoking nonfiction works I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the brother of the Crown Prince, flew to Tehran. With him came Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin. They sat down with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and senior security official Rezaei, who hosted the talks, for about two hours. The agenda: the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Hormuz, the American blockade of Iran’s ports and a regional non-aggression framework.
Read that list again. Those are the four biggest security problems in the Persian Gulf. The countries that actually live there just met to discuss them. The United States, which has two carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group and a blockade in the neighborhood, was not in the room. Nobody seems to have missed it.
The three visitors are the signatories of the Makkah Agreement, the mutual-defense treaty that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed on August 7. Article 2 says an attack on one is an attack on all. It was sold, at least in Washington’s imagination, as a Sunni shield for the Kingdom against Iran and its friends in Yemen.
Eleven weeks later, the entire shield showed up in Tehran to talk about cooperation. Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan says Tehran will “study” the agreement, “and if it is good, we will support it.” The treaty conveniently includes an accession clause allowing new members to join by consensus. My sources tell me the three formally invited Iran to join once the U.S.-Israeli war ends, and that Tehran accepted on that basis. No official readout confirms that yet. But the official readouts did agree to keep talking “among the four,” and Iran has a phrase for what it wants: “endogenous security.” Translation: security for the Gulf, by the Gulf, without the 5th Fleet.
Imagine NATO’s founding members inviting the Soviet Union to join in 1952, and you have some idea how badly this has gone for American strategy.
In fairness to American strategists, none of the people involved in the US strategy for the Middle East for the past 40 years have actually been Americans. What we’re witnessing is the failure of the Greater Israeli strategy of the neocons, which I have to admit, did succeed rather better than I would have ever imagined given how effectively it exploited the non-nation states of the region.
The problem, as always, is that the seeds of ultimate failure are planted with initial success. Fortunately for the USA, it appears to have been more of a Suez moment than a Sicilian one.
Days before the Israeli electorate appears to have refused to give the ruling Likud Party a majority, the Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF refused the Israeli Prime Minister’s order to restart Israel’s war against Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir clashed over a military action that could renew the conflict with Iran days before Israel’s elections, N12 News reported Sunday evening. Recently, Zamir received a directive from the political echelon to carry out an action, which security officials told N12 would “trigger a rapid escalation into a confrontation with Iran.”
Due to the sensitive nature of the action, N12 reported that Zamir requested an in-depth discussion and formal authorization before moving forward with the action.
Sources familiar with the details told N12 that Zamir and additional IDF leadership are concerned that the political echelon may be trying to exploit the front with Iran ahead of elections for political gain.
It’s also being rumored that Saudi Arabia has effectively surrendered to Iran and is seeking an accommodation to extricate itself from the US security system. And it’s confirmed that the leaders of Norway and Finland are talking to Putin.
So perhaps things are happening behind the scenes.
Spencer Pratt reflects upon his experience running for mayor of Los Angeles:
I hate to be this cynical, but I’ll be honest…running for Mayor exposes you to things that make you believe the city is actually being overtaken by demonic energy. Drive south Fig at night. Go to 6th and San Pedro. You see children openly prostituting, drug zombies setting dogs and cats on fire, babies born to crackheads and tossed in a dumpster, dead people just lying in the streets…that’s not even to mention the dozen neighbors of ours who burned alive in what is now a crumbled hellscape.
Many times I wondered if the city’s problems weren’t beyond the reach of any politician’s capacity to actually fix. There is a cultural and spiritual rot that can’t be fixed at the ballot box. Until we fix the culture, we are kinda just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and the shit we shovel around every 4 years doesn’t really mean a thing.
The Dark has been gathering for decades. Now we are seeing the early results of its rising. And we are also seeing how men like Bukele will be required in order to chase it back into the shadows again.
When the faction of Clown World that is running the CIA is contradicting the policy of the faction of Clown World that is running the fake Trump administration, that is not “incoherent policy” that is two desperate factions of Clown World fighting for survival:
Armed with information the CIA provides, Ukraine’s military has been launching strikes deep inside Russia. American spy satellites give Ukraine early warning of incoming Russian missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground in Ukraine, a retired senior officer who travels there frequently told him, “the CIA is in the lead.”
It gets better. A Baltic intelligence officer who works closely with the Americans told Harris that, whatever Donald Trump says in public, the CIA’s operations against Russia are now “much more aggressive” than they were under Joe Biden. Officers in the CIA’s Special Activities Center, the people who run covert and paramilitary operations, are reportedly among the happiest at Langley, because they are so busy. And this is not new. As Harris notes, the CIA helped build Ukraine’s modern intelligence apparatus after Russia took Crimea in 2014. This has been the agency’s war for more than a decade.
Let me translate that from the polite language of a magazine profile. American intelligence is identifying the targets inside Russia, American satellites are running Ukraine’s air-defense warning network, and American officers are “in the lead” on the ground. If Russia were doing that for Mexico against Texas, Washington would call it an act of war. Moscow has said for years that it is fighting NATO, not just Ukraine. Here, courtesy of The Atlantic and its anonymous sources, is the evidence.
Now comes the absurdity. According to Harris, the CIA’s success has become a problem for the President. The refinery strikes the agency helps enable have hobbled Russia’s economy. The International Energy Agency estimates that in the first eight months of this year, Ukraine hit a Russian refinery on average once every three days.
Those refineries make diesel. The world is short of diesel. The International Energy Agency says the shortage will run well into 2027. And Trump, according to Harris, blames the attacks on Russian refineries for the spike in prices and wants them to stop. He has threatened to cut off intelligence support to Ukraine unless Kyiv halts the refinery strikes.
Think about that. The CIA helps Ukraine knock out Russian refining capacity. Diesel prices soar. Then on October 9, in the middle of peace talks in Miami, the President announces a deal for Russia to sell its diesel on the world market, boasting on Truth Social that prices would be “COMING DOWN… AND FAST!” Harris reports that the announcement caught the negotiators by surprise, and that Putin made no reciprocal commitment. So the United States is simultaneously paying to destroy Russian diesel production and begging Russia to sell it more diesel. You could not design a more incoherent policy if you tried.
You don’t have to buy into my hypothesis of multiple Trumps of varying height to accept the idea that there are rival factions of Clown World with different ideas about how they can survive their defeat at the hands of the various nations that have rejected their globalist satanry.
And that hypothesis is much more in line with the incoherency and many contradictions of the statements by the various Trumps.
If you have ANY interest in games, you’ll want to tune into UATV tonight for a rare DEVSTREAM!
PSA: SocialGalactic is back online We just completed a major server upgrade. SG was down for about an hour while we worked through some post-upgrade smoke tests. Everything should be working normally now.
JDA attends Worldcon, writes a convention report, and filed it on File 770. This did not go over well with those who style themselves the Haters of Hate.
On Saturday, I published a report on World Fantasy Con for File 770. The convention was well run, the panels were good, and I found a few rare books for my collection. Within hours, commenters demanded that I be kept out of every convention in the country, and the pile-on moved to Bluesky, where the language got worse. All of this over a convention review that said the con went well.
Science fiction and fantasy has a hate problem. In my experience, it does not come from the right and never has. Most of what you see on the right is just want to be included and be aloowed to exist peacefully. It comes from a left-wing establishment that spent years pushing out anyone who disagreed with it on any topic, then grew so used to total control that it forgot the people it targeted were people.
The genre’s gatekeepers say “diversity” and “inclusion” constantly. Look at who is in the room. You will find one set of opinions, repeated by everyone, and a standing threat for anyone who voices another. A community with no room for a dissenting view is a monoculture with branding that makes them feel good about themselves. What you’ll find is complete intolerance coming from them.
I get death threats and hate on a regular basis, along with people flinging so much hate my way it would break most people and cause them health problems, which is the intention of the mob to do. They want to hurt or kill those they hate from the power of their own keyboards. I have been hesitant to attend conventions because of it. The people who pile on are the same ones who tell us, correctly, that harassment and threats of violence can destroy a person. They say we should stand against it. They often point to my criticism of different cultural pieces as justification for it, which should not be the case. Criticism is a time-honored tradition in our culture and helps hone things to be better. Their personal attacks are just about destruction.
The mob is angry because it lost a little power this weekend. World Fantasy Con did not ban me. File 770 reported on the convention and let me do the reporting. The people who wanted me gone found they could not do anything substantive about it. Both organizations put their love of the genre first, and I am grateful to them. Mike Glyer deserves love for what he’s got, and it’s my understanding the hate and pressure he received was so overwhelming he’s taking a couple of days off the internet. One has to remember he’s an older gentleman; this level of abuse is something he’s probably not used to and can cause real harm, something the mob does not consider. I read File 770 regularly for genre reports, and he finds a great number of things that are interesting, and does some good work. That site does not get advertising nor subscribers; he does it completely for free.
I, for one, don’t care one way or another. I’ve never been part of fandom, I wasn’t published by a genre publisher, and except for being able to talk with John M. Ford for about an hour, I didn’t enjoy the one convention I attended. But I do think that the SJWs who drove out everyone to the right of Barack Obama out of professional science fiction and fantasy are beginning to realize the permanent damage they have done to the various institutions of the genre as well as to the genre itself.
The world is changing. Kindle Unlimited is far bigger than any SF/F publisher has ever been. I believe that within three years, Castalia Unlimited will be bigger than any other SF/F publisher, not just in terms of annual titles published, but in terms of total revenue and pages read too. We’re at 63 titles already, 23 of which have never been seen in English before. We expect to be at 150 by time of launch, 275 by the end of the year, and 1,000 English titles alone by the end of next year.
So it doesn’t matter if they want to freeze us out or not. They have Hugo Award winners. We have the guy writing the #1 movies at the box office and the guy for whom the Japanese literature awards are literally named. They have their artisanal wokeslop, we have groundbreaking science, philosophy, and high-quality history. There isn’t a single book that has been published in the genre in the last five years that can begin to compare with The Book of the Black Death or The Midnight Mayor. And the Unlimited library is growing daily in no less than six different languages.
I think it’s great that men like Mike Glyer and JDA are reaching across the philosophical divide. It was a stupid and harmful construction from the start, and now it has been extended into a technological divide as well. But for me, any “science fiction” that stands against artificial intelligence is not worthy of being called science fiction at all.
“If paperwork can make an American, paperwork can unmake an American.”
Everyone needs to keep this in mind. If your great-grandparents came in through Ellis Island, then you can leave through Ellis Island. There is no amount of paperwork that will ever modify your blood or your DNA. Your body is a literal record of your alien nature.
And now every government can easily test it.
Just something to keep in mind when the civic nationalists are bleating that they are just as American as the sons and daughters of the American Revolution, if not more so.
That’s not true, it has never been true, and we can scientifically prove it.
It doesn’t necessarily need to come to that, but it should not be forgotten that it absolutely can, if necessary.
so um i have questions and maybe the biggest one is. you’re the better option because you’re not doing the woman thing? i mean, okay, whatever. at least the radiology geek i chatted with at today’s book fair who’s inventing a new form of analog reading didn’t get stuck on the fact that i’m a girl.
I would say we’re the better option for anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to read exclusively MY GAY BILLIONAIRE VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND, ANOTHER IMMIGRANT STORY ABOUT RACISM, and EVERYTHING THAT MAKES ME SAD which is all that women in the publishing industry have wanted to publish for the last 20 years.
We have no shortage of female readers who prefer classic literature, classic fantasy, classic Westerns, and classic science fiction. We’re not among the publishers who have ignored the excellent novels of Zenaide Fleuriot for more than a century or allowed Tanith Lee to languish mostly ignored while lionizing a male mediocrity who mercilessly ripped her off.
If you want to sign up for the mailing list pre-launch, this is the time to do so. And in the meantime, I am pleased to be able to say that in addition to the translated works, and my own works, and the classics, and the Junior Classics, a certain Legend has agreed to make his novels available on Unlimited.
Sources on the ground confirm the collapse and desperation of criminal gangs in the face of the arrival of El Salvador’s special forces in Croix-des-Bouquets.
COLLAPSE OF KEY FACTION: After a wave of tactical attacks with drones and heavy fire, the operational base of “Chen Mechan” (a crucial ally in the criminal structure of the plain) was completely destroyed. His faction no longer exists in the area.
MASSIVE CASUALTIES IN THE LANMÒ GANG: The Lanmò San Jou organization suffered massive losses of soldiers in the recent clashes. The volume of casualties is so high that their makeshift medical shelters have completely collapsed.
ATTEMPTED KIDNAPPING OF MEDICAL PERSONNEL: In desperation over the number of seriously wounded, armed commandos attempted to kidnap medical staff at the Centro Hospitalario de Santo 22 and Sainte Camille Hospital to force them to treat their men under threat of death.
The situation is one of extreme volatility, with hand-to-hand battles on the ground.
