Tag: books

Bishop Thomas Cranberry finds himself at a loss when he is confronted by a thief and realizes some disturbing truths about himself. The experience sends him in search of the men who are increasingly absent from the Church, who find themselves at a loss in a world that has gone increasingly feral, and who feel that they have nowhere to go and no one to whom they can turn for support. In listening to them and attempting to understand their plight, he finds an unexpected mission.

THE HERETICS OF ST. POSSENTI is for readers who want the backstory of the story and for those who want to know how one inspired man can make a difference in a fallen world. It is a novel for those who need inspiration to get them though the day and those who look for unusual ways to accomplish the mission. It is for people who understand and respect the old ways but know that sometimes a seed cannot grow without splitting the pavement.

Rolf Nelson is the author of BACK FROM THE DEAD, the first book in The Stars Came Back series. This is how Rolf described the connection between the two books.

The first book written in this series of related stories was The Stars Came Back. It had a small but important part played by a somewhat mysterious order of monks, the Order of St. Possenti. It was also said they had a small but significant role in the past as they helped save, metaphorically and physically, the fully self-aware AI aboard the warship Armadillo. It was an unusual order of monks, and it raised more than a few reader questions. It also piqued my own interest: how could such an order of rifle-toting Christian monks come into existence? A fascinating plot device to use as a fully developed entity, but… How?

So I set about exploring the idea. I learned much in the process about Christianity, Catholicism, popes, monks, schisms, and more. I hope you enjoy the results of that labor.

What’s extremely exciting, at least to me, is that someone I very much respect recently informed me that he has picked up both books and intends to read them. I don’t know what he’ll make of them, but I do hope he’ll at least find some of the information in them to be useful.

From the reviews of SJWs Always Double Down:

• An improvement over the groundbreaking first. Where the examples in SJW’s Always Lie were a little inside-baseball, these are literally ripped from today’s headlines. Anyone who does not live in a cave who reads this book will instantly recognize the goings on. I have several people in organizations I’ll be buying this book for instantly.
• A worthy follow up to the first volume. After reading SJWs Always Lie I started noticing the patterns from the book in the news. I would not have noticed them without reading the book. Forewarned is forearmed. I recommend this book to individuals who may be attacked by SJWs and for executives who may be apolitical but who do not want to see their businesses ruined.
• The insight into the SJW psychological breakdown is probably the most important part, something SJWs Always Lie did not cover. Once you know your enemy, you can better predict them.

“What is Social Justice? Social Justice is the equal distribution of resources and opportunities, in which outside factors that categorize people are irrelevant.”
—Pachamama Alliance

At last, your long ordeal at the hands of the corporate inquisition is finally over. After six months of being interrogated by suspicious HR managers, defending yourself against false accusations, clarifying all the intentional misunderstandings and mischaracterizations, explaining away the ridiculous exaggerations, and enduring the cold shoulder from half the employees in your office, your boss has assured you that everything is good and you are in the clear. You’re grateful, of course, since he’s been staunchly in your corner since the first time HR descended on you like a thunderbolt for your alleged sins against diversity and inclusion. In the end, it turned out that it was all the consequence of a Dilbert cartoon taped on the inside of your door, to which one of the women in the office took offense; at least, that was the only tangible offense that remained after the six-month investigation failed to turn up any evidence of all the other crimes of which you were accused.

“I really appreciate the way you went to bat for me,” you tell your boss. And you’re truly grateful to him. When everyone else looked the other way, happy that the wolves weren’t out to devour them, your boss didn’t hesitate to tell his superiors that all the rumors were ridiculous, even going so far as to provide a vice-president with your travel itinerary and proving that you were in Canada visiting customers on the day you supposedly lingered at the entrance of your nameless accuser’s cubicle too long and made her feel uncomfortable. You’re pretty sure that if it wasn’t for him, you’d be out in the street looking for a new job already.

“Hey, you’re a valuable member of the team,” he assures you. “I’d hate to lose you, especially over some crazy nonsense like this. All you have to do is attend a one-day diversity class, and you can put this whole thing behind you.”

Diversity class? But you didn’t do anything! Didn’t they just confirm that you didn’t do anything?

“Why do I have to take the class now since they know I didn’t do any of that stuff?”

He spreads his hands and shrugs. “You know how it is. Sure, everyone knows you’re in the clear, but this lets the CEO assure everyone that we take racism and sexism and homophobia and all that very seriously, and keeps the directors off his back. I mean, the official story is that it’s all just a big misunderstanding, right, so they’re having you take this class to make sure there aren’t any more misunderstandings in the future.”

“But there wasn’t any misunderstanding. It was all just a pack of outright lies!”

He winces. “Hey, I know that, and you know that. Hell, everyone in the executive suite knows that. But they can’t come right out and say it either, can they?”

“Why not?”

“Because if they did, they’d have to fire the woman who brought the accusations against you, and nobody wants that kind of trouble. Look, we all know there is something seriously wrong with that woman. But if they fire her, we’re talking a wrongful dismissal lawsuit at the very least, and probably other employees getting upset and threatening to quit, other whackjobs manufacturing sob stories about how they were harassed or offended or whatever, and HR going nuclear. And if word got out to the media that we fired a black woman, forget about it! By the time it was all over, we’d have to rehire her and promote her to department head, set up a scholarship fund for disadvantaged youth, and sponsor at least three Women in Tech conferences.”

You stare at him, aghast. You can’t believe that after putting you through six months of Hell for nothing, your accuser isn’t going to get so much as a slap on the wrist.

“So that’s it? I get eight hours of detention for doing nothing while she gets nothing for lying about me? Isn’t there something in the employee handbook about not bearing false witness?”

“HR just thinks that’s the Bible. It’s not actually the real thing, you know.” He laughs bitterly. “Blessed are the freaks, for they shall inherit the corner office.”

So, with no little bitterness in your own heart, you heed his jaded advice and agree to do your time in diversity indoctrination camp. It’s not so bad, really. It’s essentially a day off, except instead of getting work done around the house, you’re spending it being lectured by an angry Asian woman in power lesbian attire, a very fat white woman with blue hair who breaks down in tears every time she talks, and an effeminate, overweight black man in a dress whose posterior rivals that of a force-fed hippopotamus. It rather reminds you of college, actually, only the catered food is better and there isn’t any beer.

Your fellow classmates are all white, all male, and most of them look bewildered and scared. They are programmers and IT guys for the most part, bearded and overweight and absolutely terrified of losing their jobs.

From Chapter 1 of SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police.

If you ever wonder why the rate of hit pieces on the Right is increasing of late, this should help explain why.

Thanks to all of you who made this happen. I hope you will not only enjoy the new book, but find it to be of practical use in your organizations. From the reviews:

• There is no slacking off the pace or letdown here. “SJWs Always Double Down” took the dial “SJWs Always Lie” at set at 9, and turned it up to at least 12. Vox Day continues from the individual approach in “SJWs Always Lie,” extending into defense for organizations. This is a key reference for dealing with SJWs and their fellow travelers. It provides many of the basic and advanced techniques for saving yourself and your organizations, and provides reference for further thought and application.
• Best guide for our crazy times. Vox Day did it again – after SJWs Always Lie, he penned another timely piece on how to survive our culture wars.
• Understanding the SJW infiltration and convergence sequence is vital for anyone in any kind of leadership role; those chapters are every bit as important as the SJW Attack Survival Guide from the first installment. For that information alone, this book a must-read for anyone within any kind of organization.

Whether you realize it or not, if you live in the West, you are currently engulfed in a civilization-wide cultural war that is taking place all around you. Maybe you’re aware of it, or maybe you’re not. It doesn’t matter. The cultural war is real and it is vicious. And unlike a traditional shooting war between different nations, in a cultural war there are no civilians. There are no neutral parties, since no fence-sitting is permitted, and there is no common ground to be found. No one is permitted to sit it out or refuse to take sides; sooner or later, you are going to be forced to declare yourself by either publicly submitting to the SJW Narrative or openly rejecting it.

No matter what you do, no matter who you are, and no matter who you know, the SJWs will come after you once they believe you pose a threat to their Narrative, or to their objectives for the organization they are attempting to converge.

The book is named after the Second Law of SJW: SJWs always double down. SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN is a much-needed guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks from the perspective of a man who has not only survived, but thrived, after experiencing multiple attempts by Social Justice Warriors to disqualify, discredit, and disemploy him in the same manner they have successfully attacked Nobel Laureates, technology CEOs, broadcasters, sports commentators, school principals, open source programmers, and policemen.

Written by Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil and bestselling political philosopher, and featuring a foreword by Ivan Throne, SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN is a vital weapon in the cultural war against the thought police.

The main difference between this and its predecessor, SJWS ALWAYS LIE, is that the second book in The Laws of Social Justice series is more focused on attacks aimed at the organization than on the individual, and this time, seeks to better understand what causes SJW behavior in the first place. I doubt that most of the concepts it contains will be new to the longtime readers of this blog, but seeing them brought together in a reasonably coherent manner may prove illuminating, and perhaps even useful, to the average reader.

The book will be available in both audiobook and paperback editions before Christmas. Those who received preorders may want to update the Kindle edition when Amazon permits, as we did two rounds of proofreading after Amazon locked the preorder and fixed a fair number of typos. I should also mention that this time, the cartoons are in color.

This is an excerpt from Moth & Cobweb Book 6, Tithe to Tartarus, now the #1 New Release in Children’s Supernatural Books. The entire Moth & Cobweb series, beginning with Swan Knight’s Son, is now available via Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

Yumiko was unwilling to step onto the catwalk because she could not see why a winged man would use one to reach a door four stories in the air. Instead, she swung gracefully in and used her glider wings to break her speed just enough that she could drive two knives, one in each hand, into the plywood boards covering the windows. Weighing less than a pound, she could hang from one hand or flip herself up and balance on her boot toes on the knife hilts. The dizzying drop to the empty factory floor was below her. The railing was next to her, as was the odd, archaic door.

She had seen such a door in the magic shop where Winged Vengeance left his tuxedo. It was similar in shape, but it was not the same wood, the same size, or clasped with the same ornate hinges. The knob was sapphire, not ruby. But it was clearly a brother to that other door.

She looked down. The brown mat had letters on it. They spelled out GO AWAY.

Yumiko put on boot on the catwalk handrail and reached out with her hand.

The glass doorknob turned. The door was unlocked.

A thrill of suspicion trickled up her spine to her neck. What sort of vigilante left the secret door to his hidden sanctum unlocked?

Warily, Yumiko drove another knife into the plywood further away and perched on it. With her back to the plywood, she expanded her bowstaff, extended to twice its normal length, and used the far tip to prod the door open.

She waited warily for an explosion or an attack by poisonous asps. Neither came.

Closer she crept again, clinging weightlessly to the plywood, and peered around the doorjamb.
At that moment, the flare was exhausted. The light fluttered and failed.

Darkness closed in. Yumiko drew her flashlight. In its beam she saw the eight-sided chamber beyond the strange door, paneled in dark wood, dark beneath a high, octagonal dome.

Weightlessly, she swooped into the chamber, landing in a crouch with no more noise than a falling cherry blossom petal. Here on a table in the middle of the carpet was the same phone on the same table she had seen before.

She waited, wondering whether it would ring.

The phone remained silent. She sent the flashlight beam left and right to inspect the eight walls.

Last time, the arched door had opened, not onto a catwalk inside a deserted factory uptown, but onto a brick wall. Last time, the arched door had been opposite three windows in three walls looking out on the churchyard of a deserted church downtown. The three walls were there, but now two of them were pierced by narrow doors. The wall between them was a niche holding a photographic portrait draped in black. To either side of the photograph were flowers in vases and twigs of incense in holders.

Yumiko shined her beam on the picture. Her sob caught in the throat, heavy with emotion, before her brain consciously recognized the clear features, green eyes, raven-black hair. It was her mother. Stepping nearer, she saw that these smaller doors both sported brass handles, but neither knob nor lock. Behind each was a blank brick wall.

Next, she looked at one of the cabinets. It was also unlocked, but, as before, it also opened up on a blank wall. She pushed back the top of the rolltop desk. Empty.

She walked a circle, slowly inspecting the eight walls. Then, she turned her flashlight up. A wooden dome made of eight curving panels was above. As when last she stood here, the chamber was like a stage setting, not a real room. What was she overlooking?

She directed her beam downward, seeing how obvious were the trail of triangular prints her boot toes made in the thick dust and the tiny, sharp imprints of her heel. Her brow creased. Did Winged Vengeance never sweep the carpet? Perhaps that had been her job. But where were his boot prints?

Kneeling, Yumiko ran a finger along the fibers. She inspected the dust on her fingertip. It was a white powder. The alert light in the corner of her vision flashed. Toxic environment.

Yumiko shivered, remembered that her supersuit had clamped shut, airtight, the last time she had entered this chamber. At that time, she had not known how to turn on the warning messages from the suit’s hidden instruments. Despite this, the suit, or whatever thoughtful paranoiac had designed it, had saved her life.

But she also remembered taking off her mask during her last visit. Why had the toxin coating the carpet not acted on her then? She tried to remember the exact order of events. Yumiko stood, stepped over to the pole lamp, and switched it on.

In the bright light, the dust stain on her fingertip looked dull gray. The warning light in her lenses winked out. The air registered as safe to breathe. She turned the pole lamp off again. The dust turned from gray to white. The warning flashed. Toxic environment.

What kind of material could change its properties when struck by light and turn from lethal to harmless instantly? Whether it was elfin alchemy or human super-science, it was astounding.

And astoundingly stupid to use. How did Winged Vengeance make sure, when he left the room and stepped into a dark place, a closet, unlit corridor, or out into a moonless night, he had no small gray stain overlooked on his elbow, or boot sole, or clinging to the hem of his cape which would instantly suddenly turn white and lethal again? In fact, how had she left this room of death safely?

She could not remember. But surely she had twisted the ring to render herself weightless before exiting since there was no other exit but the window. Could the mist of the elfs disperse the dusty poison?

Yumiko twisted the ring twice widdershins.

The mist thickened about her, rendering her unseen to human eyes. Immediately, her hands began to tremble. Her fingers were cold. She bit on the switch inside her mask to increase the oxygen flow, but she still seemed unable to breathe. Yumiko turned the flashlight left and right, wildly, looked for the source of the threat. No one was here.

Then, she switched the flashlight off. There was a man hanging by his neck from a rope descending from the shadows of the eight-sided dome. An arrow pinned a note, written in blood, to his chest, and protruded from his back. His eyes were terrible pits of emptiness opening into a universe larger and darker than the universe of stars the Earth’s tiny globe spun through. A second man, eyeless, bound, and hanged, was next to the first, also impaled by an arrow. A third man, hanging by the neck, arrow-stabbed, had his wrists tied behind him by his bootlaces. A fourth hung head downward.

She looked over her shoulder. There were more behind her and more to either side, like grisly fruit hanging from a rich tree. One looked as if he had been run over by a truck before being hanged and impaled. Another, as if he had been burned. Yet another had huge bites torn out of his bound arms and legs, as if he had been lowered into a pit of savage animals before dying.

With a creak of ropes, the corpses now all rotated so that their bloated, blackened, torn, and desiccated faces all faced her.

Yumiko screamed in shock and terror. She had let go of the flashlight and covered her mask with her gloves. Gritting her teeth, she forced her cold fingers to move. She grabbed and twisted the ring. Once, twice, thrice, and once more again.

Her longbow and short sword snapped out to their full length, and her cape unfolded into glider wings, knocking the phone off the table. Bolo and boomerang and dozens of knives, barbed and throwing stars jumped out of their belt pouches and fell to the carpet.

The metallic clamor of the dropped weapons rang in her ears. The echo hung in her ears a moment, and silence came.

Fear vanished.

The ghosts of the slain were gone.

A light as clear and subtle as starlight was streaming from the ring in all directions, glinting like Procyon on a clear winter night.

Yumiko stared at the ring in awe, but this time, it was the awe of wonder, not of terror. The woman’s face in the intaglio of the ring had changed again, and now her features were those of a stern and bright-eyed angel crowned with rays.

Inflicted with amnesia, Yumiko Ume Moth has managed to discover the identity of the lost love she cannot remember. She has also learned the bitter truth of her mother’s murder. And the party responsible for the absence of the one and the death of the other is the same: the Supreme Council of Anarchists.

Now Yumiko hopes to rescue the brilliant young man who may or may not be her fiance while seeking vengeance for the Grail Queen, her mother. But her only allies are a scatter-brained fairy and the Last Crusade, which despite its grand name consists of a young knight and his dog. Nevertheless, the Foxmaiden will not turn from her path, though all the dark forces of Tartarus stand in her way.

TITHE TO TARTARUS: The Dark Avenger’s Sidekick book three is the 6th volume of Moth & Cobweb.

John C. Wright is one of the living grandmasters of science fiction and the author of THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, and IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY, to name just three of his exceptional books. He has been nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and his novel SOMEWHITHER won the 2016 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel at Dragoncon. The first book in the Moth & Cobweb series, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON, was a finalist for the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult Novel.

Those of you who have Amazon Prime may be interested to know that all six books of the Moth & Cobweb series are now available on Kindle Unlimited.