An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity


Today, Castalia House is pleased to announce a debut novel by J. Mulrooney, AN EQUATION OF ALMOST INFINITE COMPLEXITY.

When the devil moves in next door to Cooper Smith Cooper’s house, Cooper doesn’t know what to make of him at first. But when the unexpectedly neighborly Scratch helps the unemployed actuary find a job at a local insurance company with the help of some inside information into the activities of Death, Cooper decides the old devil might not be so bad after all. 


 The only problem, Cooper thinks, is how to conceal from his fellow actuaries his newfound ability to perfectly predict the time and place of people’s deaths. And then, there is also the small matter of the screams of his recently deceased neighbor coming from Scratch’s basement furnace to consider. 


 AN EQUATION OF ALMOST INFINITE COMPLEXITY is a sardonically funny debut novel from J. Mulrooney.

This was one of the first novels I signed to Castalia House, and it has been nearly two years in the making. The genre is a little hard to describe, as it has fantasy elements, satirical elements, and literary elements. I would put it somewhere between The Missionaries and Loki’s Child; it’s not quite as funny as the former, not anywhere nearly as pedal-to-the-metal insane as the latter. It is intelligent, witty, and has a peculiar sensibility all its own; there is, perhaps, just a little John Irving maple syrup flavor to it.

Our production editor loved this one and says it is his favorite of all the novels we’ve published to date. Regardless, it certainly has one of the best first lines since Larry Correia’s first Monster Hunter novel.

When the devil moved in next door, Cooper Smith Cooper had the same question everyone else did: how would it affect the property values?


SJWs Always lie in audiobook

It took a few false starts, but the third time proved to be the charm and we finally managed to get it done. I’m happy to be able to announce that SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police is now available in audiobook format.

The audiobook is narrated by Bob Allen, who did his customary bang-up job, and is 6 hours and 49 minutes long. You can listen to a sample there. If you’ve only read the Kindle version, you might be interested in picking up the paperback version, which is available too.

SJWAL has been Castalia’s bestseller for most of the last year, but that appears likely to change, as MAGA Mindset, by Mike Cernovich, is doing very well. Mike recently reported that the paperback contained an error, but just to be clear, that was only in the CreateSpace version that was out briefly before we managed to get our version into distribution. The kindle version, the paperbacks from us, and the new hardcover which is still in the process of being listed by Amazon, all contain the fixed version of the text.

Regardless, Mike is tearing it up again. He’d probably have #1, #2, and #3 in the category if the audiobook was available from Audible yet. Note that the Kindle price shown below is misleading; it is actually $7.99.


Recommended

Speaking of promoting Mike Cernovich, the Indy King, Vaughn Heppner, who with BV Larson and soon-to-be Castalia author David VanDyke is one of the three big dogs of military science fiction, recommends Mike Cernovich’s GORILLA MINDSET as one of his three picks for Amazon’s Powered by INDIE:

GORILLA MINDSET is an awesome read for those who want to learn how to control their thoughts and thereby their actions. Mike Cernovich is a straight shooter who tells it like it is. In today’s world, that is a welcome relief.”

If you liked GORILLA MINDSET, I can guarantee that you’re going to like MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again. Now in paperback from Castalia House.

Also, I recommend Vaughn Heppner’s books, particularly if you happen to be inclined towards men with large quantities of futuristic weaponry at their disposal completely failing to abide by Gene Roddenberry’s ideal of non-violent interaction and achieving one’s objectives through diplomacy, communication, and mutual understanding.


Here be Dragon-winners

It has taken us rather longer than we would have liked to get our print process running smoothly, but Castalia House is pleased to announce that two books published earlier this year by our two Dragon Award-winning authors, Mr. John C. Wright and Mr. Nick Cole, are now available in hardcover.


IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY is a deeply complicated tale of romance, mystery, and myth that has proven extremely popular with our readers, as its average 4.8-star rating tends to demonstrate.

The top review, from Richard Green, calls it “a wonderfully creepy, profound, sad and yet uplifting story.”

Wright’s latest is another fantastic and inventive piece from an author whose imaginative faculties boggle the mind. This book is a bit different from his universe-spanning COUNT TO A TRILLION series, and less baroque than SOMEWHITHER. I would compare it more to AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and even A PARLIAMENT OF BEASTS & BIRDS; it is more intimate, following only three characters over a somewhat limited span of time, but it manages to encompass past, present, and future regardless.


IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY retails for $24.99 and is available from Amazon or can be ordered through your local bookstore.

The new hardcover from Nick Cole, our other Dragon Award-winning novelist, THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT, is a war story, a post-apocalyptic zombie tale, and a deeply romantic tale of true love conquering all. It features an ending that is so flawless that, in my opinion, only John C. Wright and Jeff Sutton have ever done it better.

From the top review by J.R. Weaver:


Nearly every page is a gut-punch, whether it’s from the descriptions of a brutal war against the undead that makes World War Z look like a Sunday picnic, or the unvarnished look into the heart of a guy who’s lost everything. The characters are raw and brutal and real. The story is dark and uplifting at the same time. Mr. Cole is a romantic and wears it on his sleeve unashamedly.


THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT retails for $24.99 and is available from Amazon or can be ordered through your local bookstore.

Both books will also be available in trade paperback later this week. But most serious fans of Castalia’s two Dragons will want to own these case-bound hardcovers. Also, please note that we are aware that the cover images have not yet percolated through Amazon’s system yet, which can take up to 48 hours. And yes, the vagaries of Amazon’s algos have, for reasons completely unbeknownst to us, bestowed a PhD on Mr. Wright. Or, perhaps we should say, Dr. Wright.


MAGA Mindset reviews

First, thanks to everyone who made MAGA Mindset Castalia’s second-most-successful book launch after Cuckservative. That was great; Mike noted that it was even more successful than his Gorilla Mindset launch. And more than a day after its launch, it is still in the Amazon top 250.

A couple of people have posted reviews I thought worth highlighting here, first of all, Caleb Q. Washington:

If I had to describe the book in just a sentence, it is SJWs Always Lie meets Gorilla Mindset condensed to their core, with a unifying theme of Donald Trump.

The book is divided into three sections on culture, media and mindset. The first lays out, in brutal terms, the cultural landscape of modern America and how it paved the way for Trump’s rise. Cernovich does it in such a way that he won’t sound like a conspiracy theorist to uninitiated readers, which is really hard to do given the gulf between reality and the media created dreamworld most of America lives in. The first section is as good of a redpill as any I’ve seen. It will convert people to Alt-Right….

For people like me, who read Cernovich & Vox Day blogs and books, who know the state of cultural rot in America, who already see the media as adversarial to the American nation, this book is going to feel like it’s preaching to the choir and telling you things you already agree with. This book was written to create more allies for us. You should read it, enjoy a well done work pushing your worldview and pass it on to people who it will impact greatly.

He’s right. MAGA Mindset is a great starting point for young men and women who sense that there is something wrong with America, but would be overwhelmed by the likes of SJWAL and Cuckservative. It’s short, it’s succinct, and it’s straight to the point.

The notorious Charles C. Johnson took a break from his various nefarious plans to wreak havoc throughout the world to write a review as well:

You may ask: are you really telling me Donald Trump fought the world and won just thanks to his mindset?

Yes. And Mike Cernovich makes that compelling case in MAGA Mindset, using Donald Trump’s boyhood pastor, who was also a best-selling author of “positive thinking” books, as evidence.

And it looks like he’s right. Trump never backs down, never stops fighting, and always wins in the end.

But it all begins in his head.

I am genuinely alarmed. Chuck Johnson is a serious dark lord, and the idea of him applying even some of the lessons taught in MAGA Mindset is not only frightening, it is almost beyond imagining. He is the Dr. Evil of the Alt-Right. In other news, Mike Glyer of File 770 was amused by the press release Castalia’s PR team sent out to the media concerning Mike’s latest book:

Mike Cernovich’s new book, MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again, is the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s Politics & Social Sciences>Leadership category. That’s not surprising, as his prevous book, Gorilla Mindset, self-published in 2015, was also a bestseller

What is surprising, however, is that languishing behind the Donald Trump-supporting author’s latest bestseller is Stronger Together, a book published only last month, written by Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine. The Clinton-Kaine book, signed by Simon & Schuster to $14 million advance, currently sits at 5th place in the category…..

The new Cernovich bestseller, signed to an advance that was, according to Day, “pretty close to $14 million less than Clinton and Kaine got,”….

As always, the perspicacious commenters at File 770 didn’t hesitate to demonstrate their astuteness and keen powers of observation in all matters even tangentially related to the Supreme Dark Lord.

“Teddy doesn’t mention it’s number one in that tiny subcategory because it was FREE, and listed prominently on ebook freebie sites. I follow a couple so I don’t remember which.”


One almost has to admire their determination to stick to the Narrative no matter what the actual, readily confirmable facts are. As it happens:

  • The book is $7.99 for ebook, $9.99 for paperback.
  • The book ranked #226 on all of Amazon and #22 in Nonfiction.
  • The #2 book in the Media Studies category has 831 reviews and is ranked #3,425 on Amazon.
  • The #2 book in the Leadership category has 971 reviews and is ranked #803 on Amazon.

MAGA MINDSET by Mike Cernovich

Castalia House and Mike Cernovich are happy to announce their first collaborative effort, MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again.


MAGA MINDSET: How to Make YOU and America Great Again is not a traditional political analysis of Donald Trump or the success of his political campaign, which would be boring and useless to the reader. MAGA Mindset is an overview of the cultural forces that have propelled Trump forward while using the example of his candidacy as a case study for the reader’s own life.


MAGA MINDSET will give you a deeper understanding of America, the challenges it is facing, and how those challenges created the conditions for Donald Trump’s inevitable rise. You will understand how Mike Cernovich was able to successfully predict Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee when all the professional political pundits considered his campaign to be a joke, and why, win or lose, the Trump revolution will continue beyond the 2016 election.


In MAGA MINDSET you will learn:


* The cultural forces behind Trump’s rise
* How Trump and other masters of social media are able to drive the news cycle
* The mindset techniques and strategies YOU need to succeed at life, even when it seems hopeless


Mike Cernovich is the bestselling author of Gorilla Mindset. He is a lawyer, a journalist who has broken several news stories of international interest, and the producer of the film documentary Silenced.


MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again retails for $7.99 and is available exclusively at Amazon. It is 101 pages and DRM-free.

Now, you may well wonder what is the point of releasing a book about Donald Trump only a few weeks before an election that the media, and almost everyone else, assume that he is going to lose, and lose badly. You may also wonder how it is possible that a book of barely 100 pages could possibly be worth the asking price.

But, as Mike points out in the Introduction, this isn’t a book about who will or won’t be the next President. This isn’t a book about how to run for office, much less a history of an American political campaign. This is a book about the challenges faced by both America and you in the years ahead. Whether Donald Trump wins or loses on November 8th, neither he nor the cultural forces that caused his rise are going to disappear. If anything, they are going to grow stronger and make the lessons contained in this book that much more important for the reader.

And those lessons are important. Because, in a society riven by cultural war, one of the most vital is the ability to affect the culture. Mike Cernovich not only explains how Donald Trump has been able to do that, he explains how you can learn from his example and achieve your own vision. This isn’t think-and-grow-rich snake oil or the Prosperity Gospel, it is a practical analysis from an author who has been practicing exactly what he is preaching that picks up where Gorilla Mindset left off.

From Amazon:
#1 in Books > Social Sciences > Communication & Media Studies
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Leadership

What is particularly amusing about the latter category? Twelve spots behind, at #13, is Stronger Together: A Blueprint for America’s Future, by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Author), Tim Kaine (Author)


SJW entry point: HR

Dr. Helen reviews a new book about Human Resources and how SJWS use it to converge corporations:

Silicon Valley and the tech industries are the next targets. If you’re a manager at a tech company, we’ll suggest some ways to protect your people from HR and its emphasis on credentials and affirmative action (AA) over the best fit for a position. Corporate leaders need to be sure their HR departments are managed to prevent infiltration by staff more interested in correct politics than winning products. And we’ll show why appeasement of diversity activists is a dangerous strategy that may make your organization a target for further extortionate demands.

The next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring–which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring–supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ–are coming soon.

Of course, no one who has read SJWs Always Lie will be even remotely surprised by any of this. The good news is that all of this corporate convergence is creating a whole range of new opportunities as the converged corporations begin to pursue social justice objectives rather than serving their customers. It’s not a question of whether SJWs can ruin a company they converge.

Once they’ve entered, it’s only a question of when. And as long as we’re on the subject of SJWs, this probably as good a time as any to mention the latest from Dark Lord Designs.


CLIO & ME: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Martin van Creveld ranks high among military historians, and given the changes in technology since Napoleonic Times, his work is a necessary supplement to Clausewitz.” 
– Jerry Pournelle

Dr. Martin van Creveld is a significant contributor to the literature of war. A Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Dr. van Creveld is one of the world’s leading writers on military history and strategy, with a special interest in the future of war. He is fluent in Hebrew, German, Dutch, and English, and has authored more than twenty books, including the influential Technology and War: 2000 BC to the Present (1988), The Transformation of War (1991), and The Culture of War (2010). He is known for his development of the concept of “nontrinitarian” warfare as well as contributing two books to the 4GW canon, and he is deeply respected by military officers and professional strategists around the world.

CLIO & ME: An Intellectual Biography is Dr. van Creveld’s most personal book, an honest, heartfelt account of his lifelong love affair with the Muse of History. It is an autobiography, not of the life, but of the mind, and as such, will be of great interest to historians and students of history alike. This “intellectual autobiography” reveals one of the great historical minds of the 21st Century to be eternally curious, endlessly inquisitive, and, unexpectedly, possessed of more than a little charm. CLIO & ME: An Intellectual Biography is 288 pages, DRM-Free, and retails for $4.99 on Amazon.

I have to say that has been a real pleasure for me to work with Martin, who is very warm and friendly in person, in stark contrast to the vast and coldly calculating mind that one occasionally glimpses in his work. He is certainly the only Castalia author with whom I am on hugging terms. But it is not at all surprising to learn that some of his professors later confessed themselves to have been intimidated by him in his youth. This is a rare opportunity to see inside the head of a genuine genius, with the historian’s lens reversed and turned on himself for a change.

Anyone who admires the military historian must read this work, of course, but it will also be of interest to those who enjoy reading biographies.


THE NINE LAWS by Ivan Throne

Castalia House is proud to announce its first mindset book, THE NINE LAWS, by Ivan Throne. Ivan, also known as Dark Triad Man on Gab and Twitter, is an impressive man who has overcome many difficulties and life-challenges through accepting the callous disregard of the world and ruthlessly imposing his own will upon it.

Do you dare to discover what you’re truly capable of? 


THE NINE LAWS is your living manual of power, distilled for you by the man who was forced to build it to survive. The author forged this system over decades of cruel experience. It began with profound trauma in early childhood, shaped itself during long training in the eastern warrior arts, and was polished amidst financial industry competition and family crisis. Master this content, and deliver yourself to a place that few men ever reach: joyous mastery of your own fate. 


This book is not for the uncertain or the timid. THE NINE LAWS is designed for men who are acutely aware that one lifetime is all they have to pursue and achieve their sacred purpose. Far more than a mere self-help book, or a simple collection of advice and ideas, THE NINE LAWS is a gravely serious operating system for success in a dark world.


Read it. Train it. Live it. Survive the dark world with momentous ferocity, and triumph.


THE NINE LAWS is 371 pages, DRM-Free, and retails for $9.99 on Amazon.


PREFACE: THE DYING CHILD

The man sat across the sterile room and watched his child dying.


He had stood calmly under the hostile machine guns of the Soviets within the charred and shattered rubble of Berlin in service to his Crown and country. He had then crossed the world to America where he built and lived, loved and raised his family.


Now this former reporter could do nothing but watch, and wait, and take notes in a sad and tired hand on a yellow legal pad, recording details with the practiced habit of a journalist as fever migraines prodded his youngest son into crying, wakeful pain. The boy would writhe, then subside into exhausted silence on the bed once more.


Bruises covered him where intravenous lines had been run for weeks into his hands and arms, his feet and ankles. With each passing day there were fewer places to insert fresh ones, fewer issuances of hope from doctors and nurses who were reduced to mere attendants of pain and no longer able to act as healers.


Days and nights were a blur, for sleep and waking were run not by play and rest, by meals and repose, but by the fits and starts of fever and the incomprehension of the innocent who woke in the dark hours before dawn and cried and cried with pain at the soft light that glowed from the nurse’s station.


As the weeks went by the man documented the progression of meningitis that writhed in the skull of his child, burning the boy’s mind away and murdering his senses.


“His hearing is going,” the man wrote.


“Even in the pain, he can tell something is happening to him, and complains that he cannot hear.”


The love and helplessness inscribed into those pages shone from the written words.


The documentation stopped near the end, when against all odds the fevers broke and the doctor took the man aside and said to him, “It’s happened. We saved him.”


The grave illness had lost. The pain was gone, and the gift of calm and sleep had replaced the tossing and turning of agony and pressure within the golden head of the young child.


Soon enough the boy went home to his family, and entered into a world where nothing made sense any longer. The world had been turned upside down, and everything had been severed.


He was deaf. Birds, laughter, music, human connection through voices had all been stolen by the disease and the fevers and the drugs pumped into him with desperate hope and quantity.


The boy could no longer walk, for the nerves that connected his inner ears to his brain had been burned away. There was no longer an up or down to perceive, and even a simple attempt to stand on his own made the world tumble and turn and the floor would leap up and slam into him without sympathy.


The voice of his mother, which used to sing to him and lull him to sleep as one of the sweetest sounds of the universe, was now silent. There was only the great effort of slowly mouthing words, beginning the long and exhausting process of teaching the boy to lip read as if his life depended on it… and it did.


The living feeling of connection with friends and family was severed forever. No longer could the boy simply listen and be an integral and accepted partner of humor and discussion, of sharing and whispers. He was now a permanent outsider, cut off and reduced to an observer rather than an equal participant.


Gone were the dreams of a little boy to be an astronaut, a firefighter, a policeman, a soldier. Never again would a future be possible that relied upon the ability to hear, to listen, and act.


And so the boy was dependent, and hurting, and terrified, and did not understand. And finally the day came when the family sat down to dinner, and he laid on the floor and cried for help, because he could not walk. And not one person came, and he laid there alone in miserable despondency.


Until he started to scream in rage.


Then his older sister came down, and stood over him. And when she spoke, she made certain he could read her lips and understand.


“Get up and walk,” she said. “Quit wailing.” Her face was harsh and neutral. “The world isn’t going to help you.”


And she turned away, and went back up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen and the family.


The boy laid there for a moment, stunned, and rebelliously enraged at reality.


Then something contracted inside him, and he sat up. He looked at the stairs, then silently wiped his face.


He crawled to those stairs and dragged himself upwards, furious, finally reaching the chair next to his father. Then he gasped and clambered until he had pulled himself onto it. Not one person at the table glanced at him or offered assistance. When he was seated, his father looked over and calmly offered him a serving of dinner. But in that Englishman’s eyes was the glint of the most powerful approbation that an officer of the Royal Horse Guards can give another man.


It was respect, and the boy never forgot that look.


I was four years old.


Kim Kardashian robbed in Paris!

Yeah, right.

To return to matters of actual interest to me, it’s interesting to see how, despite authoring two volumes of a significant new book, Francis Fukuyama’s public relations efforts appears to have been sidelined into an ongoing defense of the indefensible, which are his collective attempts to defend and retroactively redefine his increasingly ludicrous End of History thesis:

In the summer of 1989, the American magazine the National Interest published an essay with the strikingly bold title “The End of History?”. Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed right on the money. Fukuyama became an unlikely star of political science, dubbed the “court philosopher of global capitalism” by John Gray. When his book The End of History and the Last Man appeared three years later, the qualifying question mark was gone.

The “end of history” thesis has been repeated enough to acquire the ring of truth – though it has also, of course, been challenged. Some critics have cited 9/11 as a major counterexample. Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.

But Fukuyama was careful to stress that he was not saying that nothing significant would happen any more, or that there would be no countries left in the world that did not conform to the liberal democratic model. “At the end of history,” he wrote, “it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

Fukuyama was talking about ideas rather than events. He believed that western liberal democracy, with its elegant balance of liberty and equality, could not be bettered; that its attainment would lead to a general calming in world affairs; and that in the long run it would be the only credible game in town. “What we are witnessing,” he wrote, “is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama drew on the philosophy of Hegel, who defined history as a linear procession of epochs. Technological progress and the cumulative resolution of conflict allowed humans to advance from tribal to feudal to industrial society. For Marx, the journey ended with communism; Fukuyama was announcing a new destination.

For a long time his argument proved oddly resilient to challenges from the left. Neoliberalism has been pretty hegemonic. Over the last three years, however, in a belated reaction to the 2008 bank bailouts, cracks have started to appear. Global Occupy protests and demonstrations against austerity have led many commentators on the left – including the French philosopher Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History and Seumas Milne in his collection of essays The Revenge of History – to wonder whether history is on the march once again. “What is going on?” asks Badiou. “The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world?” He tentatively regards the uprisings of 2011 as game-changing, with the potential to usher in a new political order. For Milne, likewise, developments such as the failure of the US to “democratise” Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crash and the flowering of socialism in Latin America demonstrate the “passing of the unipolar moment”.

What remains an open question is whether these developments – dramatic as they are – will actually result in anything.

Frankly, the whole thing is somewhat of a disappointment to me. To discover that Jesus Jones’s conception of “watching the world wake up from History” is both more sophisticated and accurate than Fukuyama’s is devastating to anyone who would fancy himself an intellectual.

Fukuyama’s mistake was to apply History’s end to liberal democracy rather than to Marxism, where it belonged.

Anyhow, both Fukuyama and Marx were wrong. They went full-Hegel. Never go full-Hegel. And you can’t bring back ideology in multicultural societies where identity politics are destined to rule until they are homogenous again.