Dr. Hallpike spent his first ten years as an anthropologist living with mountain tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea and writing up his research for publication. He learned that primitive societies are very different from our modern industrialised societies and that it takes a considerable amount study to understand how they work.
But since all Man’s ancestors used to live in a similar manner, understanding these societies is essential to understanding the human race itself, especially when speculating about our prehistoric ancestors in East Africa. Unfortunately a wide variety of journalists and science writers, historians, linguists, biologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists erroneously believe they are qualified to write about primitive societies without knowing much about them.
The result is that many of their superficial speculations have about as much scientific credibility as The Flintstones. The various critical studies contained in Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society examine some of the most popular of these speculations and evaluate their scientific merit.
Among the learned fools whose works are critiqued are:
Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You
René Girard’s theory of learned behavior
William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth
Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar
No one systematically and structurally demolishes the pseudoscientific work of charlatans more comprehensively than Dr. Hallpike. Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Societyis a must-read for any educated individual who regularly finds himself coming into contact with intellectual poseurs who make a habit of quoting learned fools.
And if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Hallpike’s Do We Need God to Be Good: An Anthropologist Considers the Evidence, which is the only takedown of evolutionary psychology you will ever need. If you thought TIA did a reasonable job dissecting the arguments of the New Atheists, then you will truly appreciate both of Hallpike’s books.
Castalia House is pleased to announce Richard Cain’s latest book, VESSEL OF VENUS, the second in the Diary of an Ex-Angel series.
Mark is a down-and-out IT professional with a secret. When he discovers a sorcery app that gives him incredible powers, he sets out to win his ex-girlfriend’s love and start a new life – until Venusians show up, sharing the story of how their civilization was destroyed by global warming and giving Mark the chance to fight climate change. All he has to do is offers them a sacrifice once in a while. Will he get the girl? Will everyone finally realize that he’s the most amazing person ever? And will that damn talking locust ever shut up and leave him alone?
Read this to find out the real story behind: The clean up after the the deluge to eliminate evidence of the prior civilization, such as air conditioning and the Nephilim. Pixies. Haunted houses. Crop circles. Aliens.
The demon’s name is Malach. He doesn’t consider himself evil. Sure, he was part of the rebellion, but he was there because of some really cool music the “Choir Director” was playing. He tries not to be too evil, although he keeps getting roped in. But he wants to get back into Heaven, so he keeps looking for ways to get their attention by doing good. But, he keeps messing things up.
Please, God, let them come up with some different cover art.
It’s a zippy tale, told in a lively style that gets the reader leaning into the narrative. It’s a quirky faux memoir like something we might read if C.S. Lewis’s Wormwood had corresponded with Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. A few sections made me honestly laugh aloud, something I never expected to happen when cracking a book about a fallen angel. It’s as if Frank Peretti actually had a sense of humor…as if Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins actually knew how to jettison the proselytizing, cut the brake lines, and just let the story run.
Nick Cole fans and book collectors will be pleased to know that we have figured out how to provide a SIGNED AUTHOR EDITION of the Soda Pop Soldier paperback.
To obtain one, simply place an order at the Castalia House store. Once placed, we will send you an email to confirm a) the mailing address at which you want the book to go, and b) the inscription, if any, that you would like Nick Cole to write. We’ve already arranged for him to have the books on hand. You can also elect to sign up for the Castalia Book Club to receive notifications of future Signed Author Editions from Nick and other Castalia House authors if you’re not already a subscriber.
We will send the relevant information to Nick, who will sign the book accordingly and send it to you by post. The price of the Signed Author Edition includes the shipping price to you; we anticipate that the book will arrive via US post in about one week. Signed Author Editions are only available in the USA right now, and Soda Pop Soldier by Nick Cole is the first book for which we are offering a Signed Author Edition.
If you’re interested in us providing Signed Author Editions for other authors, please let us know which authors and works are of particular interest to you. However, please don’t even bother asking about my books, since this process is not viable in Europe, although we MIGHT be able to do it for Owen Stanley fans in the UK.
Call of Duty meets Diablo in this fast-paced, action-packed LitRPG novel from the author of GALAXY’S EDGE. Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online combat sport arena where mega-corporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out. But times are tough and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough, there’s always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens, a gothic dungeon fantasy world. And all too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a mad man intent on hacking the global economy for himself.
Soda Pop Soldier is available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. A Castalia House paperback will be available from Castalia Books Direct later today.
From the reviews:
I half-expected a light-hearted romp through modern video games. What I got was something completely different. Something telling about how many of us live our lives online and the anonymity that we expect…. Throughout it all, we see the real world, but in many ways Cole presents this as almost more fantastic and ridiculous than the online worlds that PerfectQuestion plays in. There are scientific advancements that take humans to other planets and planes that seemingly traverse around the world without stopping, but most of that is unavailable to the average person. The more the book explores those areas – the areas inhabited by the rich and powerful – the more the reader finds themselves in foreign territory. In many ways PerfectQuestion is more at home in the war and fantasy of his online games than in the real world.
This is a seriously well-crafted book, full of twists, loads of pop culture references, and a remarkable treatise on integrity, conviction, good versus evil, hero versus villain and several other themes. He picks up on everything that was (and is) fun about gaming, problem-solving and the creativity and story-telling that great games AND books have in common, and lectures in a good way about the joy of reading. This is a great story. If you played Pong and other games up to the current genre of first-person shooters, and enjoy a good story, with characters that you can identify with, buy this book. Read it. Share it. If you aren’t a gamer, but rather a well read bookworm, buy this book. Lose yourself in it, and enjoy something that is exceptional.
This book blew me away. I went into it expecting little, because it’s from an indie publisher. Big mistake. It feels like a blend between Catcher In The Rye, Blade Runner, and Warhammer 40K. It started off a bit slow and I wasn’t sure where it was going, but it morphs into a compelling story that I could not get enough of. I’d think about this book while I was working, waiting to get home. I went out and bought three more of his books just so I’d have some ready when I finished this one.
I love Cole’s work and SPS is probably my favorite one to date.
It’s in my top ten favorite novels of all time, and it’s just wonderfully good.
This book is an absolute must-read for any gamer. People not unreasonably tend to think of Nick Cole as a pulp author due to the success of Galaxy’s Edge, but he is actually one of the better science fiction authors around, and there is no one currently writing who is more adept at playing on the emotions of the reader.
LitRPG has been around since Joel Rosenberg created it in Guardians of the Flame; my abortive first attempt at a novel was a Guardians imitation that very cleverly utilized Traveller instead of D&D. But the invention of the MMO and subsequent blurring of reality and game reality in the real world has transformed and popularized the genre, and Soda Pop Soldier represents the very best of it. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy and do so.
Castalia House will also be publishing the next two books in the Soda Pop Soldier series.
In case you’re interested, we’ve got THREE new print editions out this week that may be of interest.
First is CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON #1: THE STREET RULES, which is available in a gold logo edition for $2.99. We very nearly got it out as fast as the digital version thanks to our new production process, which cuts 4-5 days off the previous pre-print routine. This means that all of our new print editions will only be available on Castalia Books Direct for a week or two, before they eventually show up on Amazon.
Second is the brilliant SUPERLUMINARYtrilogy by John C. Wright. It contains The Lords of Creation, The Space Vampires, and The World Armada and is a 482-page paperback. Although it retails for $27.99, we’re able to offer it at $19.99.
And third is Vol. II of my Collected Columns. Crisis & Conceit 2006-2009 is a 756-page hardcover that is available for 34.99.
Castalia House is extremely pleased to announce thatSUPERLUMINARY: THE WORLD ARMADA by John C. Wright is now available for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
Although the Lords of Creation survived the awesome onslaught of the world-killing space vampires, there is nowhere in the lifeless galaxy that they can hope to hide their planets and people forever. How can they hope to destroy what is already dead? The vampiric necroforms are a massive empire of anti-life, terrible beyond all imagining, ruling a vast network of dead stars and planets they have drained of all life. Aeneas, the Emperor of Man, realizes that if the human race is going to survive, he is going to have to find a way to re-seed the entire galaxy with life while burning down the interstellar undead empire with the precious light it cannot bear. And not only does Aeneas have to do the impossible, he is going to have to do it while keeping a wary eye out for the ruthless betrayer at his back. SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most brilliant creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. THE WORLD ARMADA is the third and final book in the trilogy. Rather like Awake in the Night Land, you cannot appreciate the full brilliance of Superluminary until you have read the whole thing and see how John C. Wright manages to pull the whole thing together on multiple levels. In my opinion, with Superluminary, John C. Wright firmly establishes himself as the greatest science fiction writer of his generation and one of the all-time greats. It’s the combination of brilliance, originality, and consistency that serves to elevate him beyond the likes of Neal Stephenson and China Mieville, both of whom are indubitably great SF writers, but unlike Mr. Wright, they simply do not manage to scale the literary heights again and again with such magnificent reliability.
I initially thought Superluminary was over-the-top fun, John C. Wright amusing himself by seeing if he could go the notorious Worldkiller one better. Then, when I reached the part about why faster-than-light travel is a very bad idea and why there has been such a mysterious lack of alien contact with the solar system, I realized that it was something deeper and darker than that. But not until finishing THE WORLD ARMADA did I grasp just how uniquely astounding is the work as a whole. And it is not a coincidence that every single one of the 41 reviews for the first two books in the series rate them both 5 stars.
From the earlier reviews:
Grand design space opera turned up to 11! For everyone who liked The Golden Age but thought it might have been just a bit too talky, this has the same over the top world building but starts off with the main character’s assassination…and then things start to get really wild.
What an amazing mind to think up this story (with all its intricate and entangled details) and then make it understandable!
Seriously, WAR DYSONS? I didn’t think he could do it. I didn’t think Mr Wright could take the already delightfully extravagant story begun in The Lords of Creation and make it bigger and wilder…. Oh ye of little faith, how wrong I was.
Spectacular classic space opera. If you know your classical SciFi and loved the family politics of Nine Princes in Amber, the weird super science of The World of Null-A, the immense galactic war of the Lensmen series, then you need to buy and read this book right away.
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 listeners 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. Narrated by Wade Schoenemann The Heretics of St. Possenti is 12 hours and 2 minutes long.
This may very well be the greatest audiobook ever produced. I’m not kidding. It’s right up there with Douglas Adams reading his own The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Owen Stanley’s satirical novel is brilliant, of course, alternating between darkly and ridiculously funny, but Gabrielle Miller’s narration, in her unique Australian accent, takes it to a new level of hilarity. I guarantee the way she does Roger Fletcher’s sneering laugh will crack you up, and her effortless switching between the roughneck and posh accents is spot-on.
And if you think you recognize the voice, let’s just say that you do and leave it at that.
THE MISSIONARIES is six hours and 41 minutes. You will not want to miss it. It’s that good.
Castalia House is very pleased to announce the publication of Superluminary: The Space Vampires by science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright. The Lords of Creation have learned that although they rule the solar system with their god-like scientific knowledge, there are even more powerful forces to be feared lurking out in the dark depths of space.
The vampiric necroforms are a massive empire of anti-life, terrible beyond all imagining, ruling a vast network of dead stars and planets they have drained of all life. And at last they have come to the Nine Worlds, seeking to destroy the last refuge of living things to be found in all the dying universe. But how can the Lords of Creation even hope to stop the nightmarish undead monstrosities when they are bitterly divided by pride, jealousy, and mutual suspicion?
SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most outrageous creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. THE SPACE VAMPIRES is the second book in the series.
SUPERLUMINARY is arguably John C. Wright’s darkest, most mind-boggling work to date. It’s spectacular space opera on the very grandest scale, so grand that no description can possibly do it justice. It simply has to be read in order to be believed. No one writing in science fiction today thinks bigger or does it better.
Space opera on a Grandmaster scale. This is an easily read story, with grand science concepts and speculation, and a great deal of human nature on display. I recommend it for any young man over the age of nine, who wants to discover just what’s larger and more powerful than a Death Star (hint: think big, no, … BIG).
No living writer has captured the spirit of E. E. Doc Smith like J. C. Wright. I’ve heard it said that Wright is the greatest living Science Fiction author. Perhaps he is. But J. C. Wright is far and away the greatest pulp author publishing today.
Another masterpiece by Wright. John C. Wright’s books expand the imagination like no other author in the field. Just when you think you know where his story is going he takes a hard turn, and then again. This book does so every chapter, and never lets up the gas. A ton of fun.
I’ve been waiting for years for John C. Wright to write a new space epic better than his Golden Age trilogy and I think this is it! If you like Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, get this. In science fiction, Wright is peerless.
JCW ramps the pace up to eleven. The Lords of Creation is an explosive tale of space travel, family intrigue, assasination, nanobot resurrection, life force, death force, and forbidden knowledge of the power to create and destroy. Highly recommend.
You have no idea how many ways to kill you are lurking in the little laboratory of mass destruction known as your neighbor’s garden. Gardening is just a hobby for most – but for some, it’s a matter of life and death. Who keeps killing soil scientists and agriculture industry executives around the world? If you dare to ask, you may end up as the next corpse left to serve as garden compost. When gardener Jack Broccoli and his boss are targeted by a radical farming cult, Jack’s entire life is turned upside-down as he’s forced into a terrifying world of international agro-industrial intrigue. TURNED EARTH is a frighteningly funny novel by master gardener David The Good and the first in the Jack Broccoli series of gardening thrillers.
This is one of those books you have to read to believe that it’s real. Yes, it’s a gardening thriller, and somehow, inexplicably, the concept actually works. Also, it appears that gardeners have considerably more ways to kill you than ninjas, hit men, and the U.S. Marine Corps combined. I am now officially terrified of all those little blue-haired women who spend their days laboring painstakingly over their well-tended laboratories of mass destruction.
This might the world’s first garden thriller ever to be published. Imagine Mel Bartholomew meets Liam Neeson as written by a graft of Douglas Adams and Dave Barry, and lyrics by David Byrne, if it had lyrics. You aren’t going to read the secrets of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but you will be asking yourself “How did I get here?” and “That’s not my house” which is more of a statement than question.
