Tag: books

Summa Elvetica in print

Utrum Aelvi habeant anima naturaliter sibi unita. 

Do elves have souls? In a fantasy world in which the realm of Man is dominated by a rich and powerful Church, the Sanctified Father Charity IV has decided the time is ripe to make a conclusive inquiry into the matter. If, in his infallible wisdom, he determines that elves do have immortal souls, then the Church will be obliged to bring the Sacred Word of the Immaculate to them. But if he decides they do not, there will be holy war. Powerful factions line up on both sides of the debate. War-hungry magnates cast greedy eyes at the ancient wealth of the elven kingdoms and pray for a declaration that elves are little more than animals. And there are men who are willing to do more than merely pray.

The delegation sent to the High King of the Elves is led by two great theologians, brilliant philosophers who champion opposite sides of the great debate. And in the Sanctiff’s own stead, he sends the young nobleman, Marcus Valerius. Marcus Valerius is a rising scholar in the Church, talented, fearless, and devout. But he is inexperienced in the ways of the world and nothing in his life has prepared him for the beauty of the elves–or the monumental betrayal into which he rides.


SUMMA ELVETICA: A CASUISTRY OF THE ELVISH CONTROVERSY is the prelude to the massive epic high fantasy saga ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT. In addition to the novel, it contains eight additional tales of Selenoth, including the Hugo Award finalist, Opera Vita Aeterna. 520 pages. $27.99 hardcover, $19.99 paperback.

If you’re collecting the series for your library, you’ll definitely want this one to go with the other doorstopper. And speaking of series, isn’t it fortuitous that WorldCon is experimenting with a Best Series Hugo this year?

An eligible work for this special award  is a multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, which has appeared in at least three volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2016, at least one volume of which was published in 2016. 


All right, let’s see here:

  • Multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story. Fantasy. Check.
  • Unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation. Check.
  • Has appeared in at least three volumes. Three volumes. Check.
  • A total of at least 240,000 words. 634,590. Check.
  • At least one volume published in 2016. A SEA OF SKULLS. Check.

It looks like the Rabid Puppies have a strong candidate for Best Series here. Isn’t that nice? And as the reviewers have noted, as the series have continued, AODAL is stacking up increasingly well against ASOIAF.

Meanwhile, over at Castalia House, Dragon Award-winner Nick Cole has made his debut with a bang, with a post entitled You are Fake Sci-Fi:

Fake Sci-Fi is ruining actual Sci-Fi and here’s who’s to blame: Fake Science Fiction Writers. But first… a little background.

Science fiction has always been a rather fragile affair. At times it has not had the significance it enjoys now. In fact, there were times when it was, for all practical purposes, dead. Just a few grandmasters held the torch during those times, breathing life into the guttering flame during those dark unsexy years of the seventies and eighties when it was just us true believers. But now it’s enjoying a cultural renaissance.

Or is it?

If you’ve heard me talk before, you know that I have a point I occasionally rail on. And it’s this: SciFi is a weak medium that’s been high jacked by radical leftist thinkers recently, to advance cultural change through imaginative storytelling both visual and written in order to download their weird thinking into the collective hardrive.

Read the whole thing there.

Thinking the Forbidden Thoughts

From the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance:

Jason Rennie, editor at Superversive Press, has just announced the publication of Forbidden Thoughts, an anthology of short fiction stories and non-fiction articles. The book features an introduction by the great Milo Yiannopoulos and stories and articles by an impressive roster of heavy hitters in the right-minded sci fi world. Featured authors include John C. Wright, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Nick Cole, Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, Brian Niemeier, Sarah Hoyt, and Vox Day.

Nick Cole gives a hint of what to expect:


A bunch of us malcontents got together and wrote some stories that are fairly reactionary to the PC agenda driven oatmeal currently drowning the SciFi market like a psychotic butler holding a wicked child under the water in the scum laden fountain of the creepy haunted mansion of the deranged old aunt with some weird ideas about “right” and “wrong.”


We had A LOT of fun.


Yes.  I took a few shots at some luminaries. Writers have been doing that forever.  It’s okay.  They can take it.  They’re in the “in crowd.”


My contribution is from the QUANTUM MORTIS universe. It’s a short story called “Amazon Gambit”, and while it doesn’t involve MCID or Graven Tower, I expect fans of the late Joel Rosenberg will recognize it for the tribute that it is meant to be.

Given the lineup, it should be interesting to discover whose stories are the favorites. The idea, as I understood it, was to come up with an idea that would be ruled out-of-bounds by the SF-SJWs and mainstream gatekeepers. I am quietly confident that mine will be considered one of the more appalling contributions to the collection.

The state of publishing 2017

Larry Correia fisks a minor author who appears to be hell-bent on convincing herself that mainstream publishing is the only way to go despite having sold fewer books than every single Castalia House author:

I realized that Laurie wasn’t providing writing advice for people who actually want to make a decent living as writers. She is providing advice to people who want to be aloof artistes at dinner parties, before they go back to their day job at Starbucks.

As for what Laurie says about gatekeepers, it is all horse shit. She has no flipping idea what she’s talking about.

Publishers are the “gatekeepers”. If they like you, you’re in, and if they don’t like you, you’re out. Problem is, at best they only have so many publishing slots to fill every year, so they cater to some markets, and leave others to languish. And at worst, they are biased human beings, who often have their heads inserted into their own rectums.

Agents represent the author. Their job is to find stuff they think they can sell to a publisher, and then they keep 15%. So “good” is secondary to “Can I sell this to the gatekeepers?” And then we’re back to slots and rectums.

Editors try to make the author’s stuff better. Period. They aren’t gate keepers, because it is their job to make the stuff that got through the gate suck less (seriously, the HuffPo should hire one).  Only self-published authors can hire editors too. Andy Weir hired Bryan Thomas Schmidt to edit the original self-published The Martian. Last I heard that book did okay.

“National and international reviewers” are on the wrong side of the gate, and I’m baffled why she included them. Reviewers come along after the fact, some are useful, but most aren’t. Even though I was ignored or despised by most of the big review places for most of my career, they haven’t made a lick of difference to my sales.

These gatekeepers are assessing whether or not your work is any good.

The problem is that “good” is subjective. What you personally think is “good” is irrelevant when there are a million consumers who disagree. I wouldn’t buy a copy of Twilight, but the author lives in a house made out of solid gold bars. “Good” is arbitrary. The real question is whether your product is sellable. (and yes, it is just a product, get over yourself)


Readers expect books to have passed through all the gates, to be vetted by professionals. This system doesn’t always work out perfectly, but it’s the best system we have.

It was the only system we had before technology came along and upset their apple cart.

When only the gatekeepers could vet what was “good”, sometimes they were right, but since often the “professionals” were 20 something lit majors just out of college, or some clueless weasel who had spent his whole existence in the echo chamber of Manhattan publishing, often the system fed its own tastes and ignored vast swaths of the market.

And when you neglect a market, it will spend its entertainment dollars elsewhere. So in this case, competition is good. Because the real competition isn’t between traditional and indy publishing, it is between reading and movies and video games and streaming. Ultimately the market decides who wins, not some self-appointed gatekeeper.

As Larry correctly observes, her atttitude is that of an author who is more interested in personal validation than professional status. The viability of independent publishing doesn’t mean there isn’t some advantage to publishing with the Big Five, especially if your name happens to begin with MILO. But, as in so many other things, what works for Milo is very unlikely to work for you. He’s a genuine star. Regardless, even very successful independent writers who sell millions of copies don’t hit #1 on Amazon months before release.

Nor is print anywhere close to dead. It’s not really fair to compare our print sales to our digital sales, since less than one-third of our books are in print yet and we have even fewer audio books out, but the breakdown of Castalia’s 2016 book sales is as follows:

  • 67.8% ebook
  • 20.5% print edition
  • 07.5% Kindle Unlimited
  • 04.2% audiobook

That’s unexpected, since we originally assumed Castalia would be an ebook-only publisher. But the real game changer, where the mainstream publishers are concerned, is KU. They don’t play there and they can’t afford to play there. And since publishing is a negative sum game, every $12 million paid out per month by Amazon probably represents at least another $48 million in revenue lost to the major publishers plus around $10 million lost to the authors published by them. It’s my suspicion that Amazon tries to set the KU compensation so that an author will make roughly the same amount from a KU sale-equivalent that he’ll make from conventional publishing sale, rather than the same amount he’ll make from an ebook sale.

KU isn’t great for independent publishers even though some of our big books pay out more per book equivalent than we make per sale. For reference, the average KU payout per page was $0.004848 in 2016. But at least we can afford to be there.

It’s Milo’s world

We’re all just living in it. This is hugely amusing, because I was informed that some SF-SJWs were doing their usual narrative-spinning about how Milo’s $250k book contract really wasn’t that big, and tended to indicate that he wasn’t really all that famous or important.

Then I noticed that SJWAL sales were spiking and I wondered why. This is why.

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Threshold Editions (March 14, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1501173081
ISBN-13: 978-1501173080


Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Censorship
#1 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Political
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Commentary & Opinion

So, congratulations, Milo, for hitting #1 on Amazon. And, well, thanks! Apparently it’s not at all a bad thing to have the best-selling author in the world write the Foreword to your own little book.

Love the title. It quite suits him. He is dangerous, Ice…man.

An introduction to Selenoth

In case you’re wondering what all the discussion of the various Selenoth-related books is about, or if some of the superlatives being cast about could be even remotely justified, you can now dip your toe into the epic fantasy waters at neither risk nor cost to yourself, as A MAGIC BROKEN is free on Kindle today.

The ebook is a novella in which is related the brief intersection of two perspective characters from A THRONE OF BONES and A SEA OF SKULLS prior to the events of either book. I think those who are fans of the Arts of Dark and Light series would agree that it is a reasonably fair warning of what the reader can expect from immersion into what is now, according to Amazon’s most recent Kindle Normalized Page Count, a cumulative 3,053 pages of epic high fantasy.

Anyhow, if you haven’t read it yet, I’d encourage you to download it and check it out. Even if fantasy isn’t really your thing, it’s more than a bit of a spy thriller as well.

A late SF giant and Pink SF

From a short, but substantive interview with the late Poul Anderson in 1975:

TANGENT: What do you think of the cycles and trends in science fiction, if they exist at all?

ANDERSON: Well, I think Algis Budrys put it very well once—a passing remark in a review or something: ‘Trends are for second-raters.’ There seems to be an occasional bandwagon, but what really happens is somebody has come along and broken new ground, done something original, and it’s worth exploring, you know, so naturally we all get interested—a lot of us try ourselves out in it too. But as far as making that an all-time direction or something, that is only what people incapable of originality would do. The originators, the ground breakers, they’ve gone on to something else.

I think, basically, that Jim Baen is right in his new direction. Not that there should be any declared moratorium on down-beat stories, but it does look as if that theme has been pretty well worked out, for the time being at least. What new disasters can you think of that haven’t already been done? (Laughs) You get these cycles, you know, about ten years or so ago, there was such a rash of stories, about psionics especially, and we all got sick of ‘psi’, and about ten years before that there’d been such a rash of anti-utopian things, especially bad imitations of The Space Merchants. I at least got the feeling that if I read one more of those I’d have to go and throw up.

In other words, this relentless push for multiculturalism, female authors, and diversity on the part of the SF publishers, too, shall pass.

In not entirely unrelated news, the third volume in Brian Niemeier’s Soul Cycle series, THE SECRET KINGS, has been released.

Reader poll

Just out of curiosity, which do you want to read first?

  • A Sea of Skulls, the final edition
  • SJWs Always Double Down
  • Alt-Right Revolution
  • The Collapsing Empire

Don’t get too excited about any one particular option. You know me. I could end up doing something else entirely.

On a completely unrelated note, the daily average pageviews at Infogalactic have nearly doubled since October and are now rivaling this blog. I’m looking forward to it leaving VP in the very distant dust in the near future. For all that the SJWs would like it to be, Infogalactic has never been about me or my politics. I just want a better dynamic knowledge core for everyone.

Christmas 1+1 sale

The Black Friday 1+1 sale was so successful that we’ve decided to do it again, only this time there is no limit on the number of ebooks you can get. If you buy 20 Castalia print editions, we’ll send you the 20 different ebooks you want. The only caveats are:

  1. The print sales have to be from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Both hardcovers and paperbacks are eligible.
  2. A SEA OF SKULLS is not an eligible ebook selection UNLESS you buy a print edition of A THRONE OF BONES. The extended edition of ASOS will not be provided to those acquiring ASOS as a bonus copy.
  3. The bonus copy version of THE NINE LAWS will not include the chapter-heading images.
  4. All ebooks sent out will be DRM-free epub. If you prefer Kindle or some other format, just download Calibre and convert it. It takes five seconds.
  5. Kindle Select ebooks are not eligible due to Amazon’s restrictions on non-Amazon distribution. A list of the eligible non-KDP Select ebooks is below.

It’s pretty simple. Order one or more print books from Amazon or B&N today, December 14th. Email a copy of the invoice dated 12/14/2016 with 1+1 in the subject. Specify the non-Kindle Select ebooks you want. Give the print books as gifts and keep the ebooks for yourself.

THE LIST OF PRINT EDITIONS

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Military Science Fiction<

Literary Satire

Western

Non-Fiction

THE LIST OF ELIGIBLE EBOOKS

  • 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, William S. Lind and Greg Thiele
  • A History of Strategy, Martin van Creveld
  • A Sea of Skulls, Vox Day
  • Alien Game, Rod Walker
  • An Equation of Infinite Complexity, J. Mulrooney
  • Awake in the Night Land, John C. Wright
  • Between Light and Shadow
  • City Beyond Time, John C. Wright
  • Clio & Me, Martin van Creveld
  • Do We Need God To Be Good, C.R. Hallpike
  • Equality: The Impossible Quest, Martin van Creveld
  • God, Robot, Anthony Marchetta
  • Grow or Die, David the Good
  • Hyperspace Demons, Jonathan Moeller
  • Iron Chamber of Memory, John C. Wright
  • MAGA Mindset, Mike Cernovich
  • On The Existence of Gods, Vox Day and Dominic Saltarelli
  • On the Question of Free Trade, Vox Day and James Miller
  • QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted, Vox Day and Steve Rzasa
  • QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed, Vox Day and Jeff Sutton
  • Swan Knight’s Son, John C. Wright
  • Feast of the Elfs, John C. Wright
  • Swan Knight’s Sword, John C. Wright
  • The Altar of Hate, Vox Day
  • The Book of Feasts & Seasons, John C. Wright
  • The End of the World as We Knew It, Nick Cole
  • The Four Generations of Modern War, William S. Lind
  • The Last Witchking, Vox Day
  • The Missionaries, Owen Stanley
  • The Nine Laws, Ivan Throne
  • The Wardog’s Coin, Vox Day
  • There Will Be War Volume V, Jerry Pournelle
  • There Will Be War Volume VI, Jerry Pournelle
  • There Will Be War Volume IX, Jerry Pournelle
  • There Will Be War Volume X, Jerry Pournelle
  • Transhuman and Subhuman, John C. Wright
  • Victoria, Thomas Hobbes

A SEA OF SKULLS by Vox Day

In Selenoth, the war drums are beating throughout the land. The savage orcs of Hagahorn and Zoth Ommog are on the move, imperiling Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike. The Houses Martial of Amorr have gone to war with each other, pitting legion against legion, and family against family as civil war wracks the disintegrating Empire. In the north, inhuman wolf-demons besiege the last redoubt of Man in the White Sea, while in Savondir, the royal house of de Mirid desperately prepares to defend the kingdom against an invading army that is larger than any it has ever faced before. And in the underground realm of the King of Iron Mountain, a strange new enemy has begun attacking dwarf villages throughout the Underdeep.


Beneath the widespread violence that has seized all Selenoth in its grasp, a select few are beginning to recognize the appearance of a historic pattern of almost unimaginable proportions. Are all these conflicts involving Orc, Elf, Man, and Dwarf the natural result of inevitable rivalries, or are they little more than battlegrounds in an ancient war that began long before the dawn of time?


Epic fantasy at its deepest and most intense. A SEA OF SKULLS is Book II in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series that began with A THRONE OF BONES.


A SEA OF SKULLS is 449 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $5.99 on Amazon and at Castalia House. This is the early edition of the book; those who purchase it now will receive a free copy of the 850-page final edition in ebook format if they a) buy the book on Amazon and send a copy of the Kindle receipt to voxday-at-gmail-dot-com right away or b) buy the book from the Castalia House store.

UPDATE: just to be perfectly clear, New Release subscribers are free to download the bonus book from John Van Stry regardless of where they purchase A Sea of Skulls.

Every author faces a few decisions when he writes a book, particularly when writing a sequel. Be driven by the market or be driven by the vision. Write more of the same that has proven popular or go where the story takes you. These are not binary decisions, but a series of gradients, and while the consequences of those decisions vary, there are no right or wrong decisions per se, only more effective and less effective decisions which depend entirely upon the perspective.

I made two choices in writing the second book of Arts of Dark and Light, and I have no idea if my decisions will prove to be popular or not. The first decision was that it had to be better from my perspective and more true to my original vision than its predecessor was. That’s why it has taken longer to write. Before, I was only dealing in existing human cultures. Now, I had to work in 3+ inhuman cultures as well, which proved considerably more difficult. The second decision was to increase the contrast. A moral dilemma where there is neither potential loss to the character nor moral consequence is no true dilemma. A choice that is obvious to everyone but an idiot is no true choice. Good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, but the character of a man is seldom defined by a single act. And, I decided, even the most minor character deserves to be taken seriously, presented fairly, and speak with his own voice. Or her own voice. As an example of what I mean by that, here is a sample of the text at Castalia House.

In other words, this is a “damn the torpedoes” book. It should be interesting to learn who likes it better than A THRONE OF BONES and who likes it less. But I hope you will enjoy it, and I hope those of you who read it will be as diligent about posting serious and substantive reviews as you were with its predecessor.

As a side note, I find it incredible to observe that, according to Amazon’s page count, there is now more Selenoth, with 1837 pages of Summa Elvetica + A Throne of Bones + A Sea of Skulls, than there is Middle Earth proper, with 1531 for Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit. It’s not as good, of course – how could it possibly be – but it is worthy of the title “epic”. I should mention that there will be print editions in April-May and they will be the final edition.

Thanks very much to Matthew, Robert, and Kirk for all their hard work in getting this out before the end of the year.

Book Bloggers of the Year

Castalia House Blog Editor Jeffro Johnson hails the top 15 book bloggers of 2016:

When I was completing my Appendix N series back at the tail end of 2015, let me tell you… it felt like I was just about the only one. Not that I was the first, by any stretch. Ron Edwards and James Maliszewski had trod the same path before me. But the thing is… I couldn’t square how obvious my observations were next to the fact that nobody in the book scene seemed be saying anything remotely in the same vein. It was baffling, really. Sometimes it seemed like there was really only one or two people that even “got” what I was trying to do.

It’s ironic given how I much I’ve written about mass media’s conquest of the imagination, but really… I couldn’t imagine that changing. I should have known better. Working out the actual history of science fiction and fantasy was like putting a puzzle together with no box lid, no edge pieces, and several pieces on the table from entirely different pieces. It took a while. And when it finally started to come together, something happened. There was (and I’m not exaggerating) a kind of sea change in the book discussion scene.

All of it’s documented right here on the Castalia House blog in my Sensor Sweep link roundups. What’s going on exactly…? Well, if you are into classic Dungeons & Dragons you might recognize it as being similar to the Old School Revival that swept over the role-playing game bloggers several years ago. (Cirsova is an obvious counterpart to, say, Fight On! and Knockspell, for instance.) Beyond that, it’s becoming increasingly clear that people that are exposed to the science fiction and fantasy canon don’t just want to talk about it. They want to create!

What does this mean for readers…? It means that awesome things are on the way! If you want a preview, then check out the fifteen book bloggers that I’ve singled out as the best of 2016.

15. Hooc Ott — Ah, the number of times that I’ve been told that Appendix N was just a list of books that Gygax liked. No it wasn’t. Zelazny’s Amber stories thoroughly infuse an iconic adventure module for the classic expert set. And Edgar Rice Burroughs was not just a primary influence on the formation of D&D. He was an essential inspiration to Conan in particular and thus swords and sorcery in general. The only people are still in denial about just exactly Appendix N is at this point are the ones that have blocked Hooc Ott on Twitter.

14. James Cambias of Just the Caffeine Talking — If you don’t know who James Cambias is, well… I’ll hazard a guess that you were never into space themed role-playing games. He wrote or co-wrote a lot of the big ones. He also writes a blog that has more than its fair share of references to classic games and old school science fiction and fantasy. His Nostalgie Du Geek is a must-read series in my book, as are his posts on Game Mechanics. (If you don’t have strong opinions about that last one, then you aren’t a gamer.) He dips into movies on occasion as well, but the post of his this year that got the biggest reaction from me was The Worst Science Fiction Writer Ever which completely destroyed one of my favorite characters of all time.

13. John C. Wright — Jon Mollison nailed it when he tweeted the other day: “I’m starting to think John C. Wright is the spider at the center of an all-encompassing web.” I thought that was hyperbole until I went back through his posts for the year. If you look past the rants on the usual geek culture meltdowns, the political posts, and the analysis of “Morlock” thinking… you really can see Wright was endorsing key players in the scene well before any of this became a “thing.”.

Read the whole list at Castalia House. And if you’re looking to sport the Revolution in Science Fiction, you can see the latest CryptoFashion there.