Tag: books

On the Existence of Gods

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is the response to a public challenge posed by Dr. PZ Myers, a militant atheist who claimed to have never encountered any good arguments for the existence of gods. It is a competitive discourse between a Christian and an atheist, each of whom argue for their position on the subject, after which the arguments are adjudicated by a team of three judges, a Christian, an agnostic, and an atheist, before additional arguments are presented.

The format is compelling and the results are at times surprising, as the discussion takes unexpected twists and turns, while the judges exhibit ruthless impartiality as they criticize the arguments of both sides without mercy or favor. Vox Day, the author of The Irrational Atheist, presents the Christian perspective, while Dominic Saltarelli argues for the atheist position. The debate is wide-ranging and intelligent, but remains civil throughout, even as the momentum swings in favor of one side, and then the other. It also includes an appendix that addresses the argument for a science-based morality presented by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is a compelling test of how open the reader’s mind is to the various possibilities of reality, and is a worthy addition to the long history of Man’s contemplation of his own existence in the face of the divine.

From the reviewers:

  • This is the first thing that I’ve read in a very long time that actually had new, novel, and interesting arguments – and both authors achieved this, on both sides of the debate. I find myself giving this book five stars purely for the astonishing
    achievement of presenting novel arguments. After two thousand years of
    debating the topic, that’s a remarkable achievement.
  • Watching a relentlessly logical mind like Vox Day at work is a sight to behold.
  • I enjoyed it very much, not least for the subtlety of the arguments.
    This is a really enjoyable intellectual battle between a believer and an atheist which has the very unusual distinction, in such battles, of being courteous, humorous, and on a high intellectual level.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is 105 pages, $4.99, and DRM-free.

Open Brainstorm tomorrow night

As I mentioned yesterday, tomorrow night I’m hosting an Open Brainstorm event featuring C.R. Hallpike, the anthropologist and the author of DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD, which, thanks to the readers here, is presently the #1 bestseller in Ethics. This is a good thing, as clearly, in light of the earlier announcement today, some of you are in desperate need of some beyond “if it moves, kill it”… or so I am told.

Anyhow, it’s an excellent book and I’m very much looking forward to interviewing Dr. Hallpike. Of course, you’ll have the chance to ask him questions too, so if you’ve already picked up the book, I’d encourage you to at least read the chapter on secular humanism before tomorrow night’s event.

The Brainstorm is Mar 22, 2016 8:00 PM Eastern and is open to everyone. Seats are limited to 500, so if you want to attend, be sure to register now. I’ll also have a little announcement at the event about the upcoming release of Mr. Dominic Saltarelli’s new book, to which I had the honor of contributing, On the Existence of Gods.

Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright

The small island of Sark in the English Channel is the last feudal government in Europe. By law, no motor vehicles run on the road, and no lights burn at night. Only the lord of the island may keep hounds.Into the strange, high house of Wrongerwood wanders Hal Landfall, penniless graduate student at Magdalen College, looking for his missing friend Manfred Hathaway, who has just inherited the lordship, the house, and the island. What he finds instead is the lovely, green-eyed Laurel, a beautiful girl from Cornwall who is Manfred’s wife-to-be. 

There is said to be a haunted chamber in the house, erected by Merlin in ancient days, where a man who enters remembers his true and forgotten self. When Hal and Laurel step in, they remember, with fear and wonder, a terrible truth they must forget again when they step outside.

From the reviews:

  • “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.”
  • “There are few authors who can maintain extremely high 5-star quality in
    every single piece of work they produce. JCW is one of the very few
    grand-masters who manages to pull this off consistently.”
  • “It was a roller coaster ride, and I mean that in a great way. Few works have affected me like this novel.  I quit reading it twice in order to think about things.”

Iron Chamber of Memory, John C. Wright’s latest novel, is now available exclusively on Amazon. It is 242 pages, retails for $4.99, and is DRM-free.

Reading List 2015

Of the 63 books I read in 2015, the one I enjoyed most was Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. Brilliant, mind-bending, and quintessentially Japanese. The
worst book I read this year was, again, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, although The Spider’s Web, a cheap rip-off written by Charles Osborne that uses an Agatha Christie play as an outline, gave it a run for its vile money. The
most disappointing book was Charles Stross’s The Annihilation Score. I like his Laundry Files but Stross can’t write women to save his life; the story would have been more credible, and more entertaining, if the protagonist had been Bob in a dress rather than his nominal wife.

On the non-fiction side, two Martin van Creveld books were excellent. Castalia published A History of Military Strategy, and van Creveld’s Technology and War is a must-read for anyone interested in history. On
the downside, J.B. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought was little more than a historical prelude to the tawdry philosophical works of the New Atheists and its perspective has been rendered irrelevant by subsequent events. The book was particularly disappointing because I am a big fan of Bury’s great editorial work, The Cambridge Medieval History Series.

Keep in mind these ratings are not necessarily statements about a book’s
significance or its literary quality, they are merely casual observations of my personal tastes and how much I
happened to enjoy reading the book at the time. A five-star book is one that I recommend without any reservations, while three-star or above is likely going to be worth your while. As always, I have read more books than are on this list, but I only rate books that I have read cover to cover.

FIVE STARS

A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
Demian, Hermann Hesse
The Book of the Damned, Tanith Lee
65 Short Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
If Symptoms Still Persist, Theodore Dalrymple
A History of Military Strategy, Martin van Creveld
Technology and War, Martin van Creveld

FOUR STARS

Against a Dark Background, Iain M. Banks
Gorilla Mindset, Mike Cernovich
Danger & Play: Essays on Embracing Masculinity, Mike Cernovich
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
The Book of the Beast, Tanith Lee
The Book of the Dead, Tanith Lee
The Complete Stories, Evelyn Waugh
After the Quake: Stories, Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami
The Changing Face of War, Martin van Creveld
Armageddon, Max Hastings
Japan 1941, Eri Hotta
Carthage Must Be Destroyed, Richard Miles

THREE STARS

Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Somewhither, John C. Wright
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy Sayers
There Will Be War, Vol. III, Jerry Pournelle
There Will Be War, Vol. IV, Jerry Pournelle
There Will Be War, Vol. V, Jerry Pournelle
There Will Be War, Vol. VIII, Jerry Pournelle
Imperial Stars, Vol. I, Jerry Pournelle
Imperial Stars, Vol. II, Jerry Pournelle
Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee
Saint Fire, Tanith Lee
A Bed of Earth, Tanith Lee
Venus Preserved, Tanith Lee
Pirates of the Levant, Arturo Perez Reverte
Purity of Blood, Arturo Perez Reverte
The Sun Over Breda, Arturo Perez Reverte
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez Reverte
Back From the Dead, Rolf Nelson
The Sorcerer’s House, Gene Wolfe
Churchill, Paul Johnson
The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke
History of the First World War, Basil Liddell Hart
The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett
Railsea, China Mieville
How to Deal with Narcissists, Michael Trust
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

TWO STARS

The Annihiliation Score, Charles Stross
Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg 
Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie
Murder is Easy, Agatha Christie
Three Act Tragedy, Agatha Christie
Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein
Farnham’s Freehold, Robert Heinlein

The Peril at End House, Agatha Christie
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
Year’s Best SF 18, David Hartwell

ONE STAR

Spider’s Web, Agatha Christie (Charles Osborne)
The Wasp Factory, Iain M. Banks
Hero in the Shadows, David Gemmell
A History of Freedom of Thought, J.B. Bury
Grumbles from the Grave, Robert Heinlein

The least of the three

I was rating books on Goodreads today, when it occurred to me why I have never liked The Return of the King as much as either of the two books that preceded it. It is a very good work of fantasy, and it is a satisfactory ending to the trilogy – which was written as a single book – but as one of the three volumes, it is the weakest link.

I read The Lord of the Rings in a somewhat unusual manner. I was at an overnight church lock-in, and I read about thirty pages of a book that someone else had brought. It was fascinated and really leaped right into the action, with someone named Boromir bravely battling some orcs as he defended two little guys with weird names.

Sadly, I couldn’t convince my friend to let me take the book with me the next day, but I begged my mother to take me to the library first thing after school. She went one better and picked up the books from there while I was at school, and after I sorted out my confusion concerning which book actually came first, I devoured The Fellowship of the Ring that afternoon and evening, and the rest of the trilogy, followed by The Hobbit, that week.

It was already December, and that Christmas I received a gold boxed set of white paperbacks that I read and re-read until they fell apart. I now have a beautiful red leather set with a matching green leather Hobbit that Big Chilly and the White Buffalo gave me for my birthday one year.

But as much as I loved the books, I noticed that when I re-read them, I seldom read The Return of the King cover-to-cover. I usually skipped ahead once Frodo and Sam reached the swamps. And what I realized today is that in addition to the drudgery of trudging through Mordor as a reader, I’ve never felt that the Scouring of the Shire ever made any sense, at least not in the form it appeared.

The idea that Saruman and Wormtongue had time to not only travel to the Shire, but take it over and institute a repressive, very anti-Hobbit regime simply overstretched the bounds of my credulity. It simply didn’t make any sense to me, then or now. The various endings were otherwise very satisfactory, which makes me think that this was perhaps a very early example of message fiction – in this case, Tolkien’s rural anti-industrialism – leading an author astray.

It’s a minor flaw, but it is a flaw nevertheless. For all that Peter Jackson has been rightly criticized for permitting the tomfoolery of his fellow writers in The Lord of the Rings, and for the ridiculous metastasized cancer of the second trilogy he produced afterwards, he did well in excising that particular ending from the story.

2015 Book of the Year

Fourmilab selected SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police as the Book of the Year for 2015:

Nonfiction:
    Winner:
        SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day

    Runners up:
        Concrete Planet by Robert Courland
        What If? by Randall Munroe
        GPS Declassified by Richard D. Easton and Eric F. Frazier
        Rocket Ranch by Jonathan H. Ward

It has been very gratifying to see how well SJWAL has been received across the political spectrum. SJWs are not merely dangerous to those of us on the Alt-Right, they are a very real problem for conservatives and liberals and those who are entirely apolitical as well.

In other news, Castalia House’s new Audio Editor is on a roll.  The audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible for $19.95. I believe it is also available to Audible members for free in some capacity, although I’m not familiar with the system.

Written by: Vox Day, John Red Eagle
Narrated by: Thomas Landon
Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins

The audiobook for A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld is also complete and will be available soon.

John Scalzi, Baen author

It’s probably a good thing John Scalzi is looking to find some new publishing outlets, because Tor Books obviously isn’t of the opinion that they got their money’s worth with his most recent submission:

So, here’s the Very Important News about my 2016 novel release:

Currently, there isn’t one. Not a new one, anyway.

Which isn’t to say I’m not writing a novel in 2016. In fact, I’m writing two(!). Merely that Tor has decided to wait until 2017 to release the next new one.

Why the wait? Among other things, because Tor just dropped a ton of money on me so we want to make sure we debut this next novel, the first in the new contract, just right. I’m on board with this plan — note the “we” in that last sentence — since (again, among other things) I actually want to try to earn out the silly large chunks of money Tor has dropped on me. I also don’t mind the extra time it gives me to write/tweak the novels I’m currently working on.

I’ll admit it. I laughed. I fully expected Scalzi to crack under the pressure, but not this quickly. It’s one thing to talk about writing a really good book that will sell 100k+ copies, but it’s another thing to deliver on it the big talk.

Now, those who don’t know much about the business of publishing may not understand how serious this little delay is. You see, each quarter, a mainstream publisher has certain books upon which it is relying in order to make its numbers. This is particularly important now, in a market that is characterized by declining sales; all the Big Five have seen their sales shrink as a result of bookstores closing and competition from independent publishers and self-published authors on Amazon.

Now, Tor had never previously depended on Scalzi; as recently as 2012 its bestsellers were Orson Scott Card and Karen Traviss’s HALO novels. But they lost HALO and Robert Jordan isn’t writing any more books, which is why they badly need Scalzi to step up to the next level. Hence the big contract and the aggressive book tours, which are essentially PNH throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to save his job.

The recent announcement means that Scalzi hasn’t been able to do it and his new novel didn’t meet requirements. He turned it in, and after reading it, the editors at Tor know that it won’t sell enough to meet their needs. So, they’ve pushed it back one year in the hopes that Scalzi can tweak it enough to turn it into something that will justify their investment in him.

But it’s not going to work any better than signing a WR3 to be a WR1 does. More time won’t change the core problem, which is that Scalzi is a stunt writer. He relies heavily on flash to disguise the fact that he’s not a good storyteller, he has no original ideas, and he’s merely a competent wordsmith. There is nothing wrong with that, and he could have had a perfectly satisfying career as the midlist writer that he is – as an editor, I concluded some time ago that writing snarky dialogue for short TV episodes was probably his ideal medium – but he is not the sort of bestselling writer on whom you would ever want to bet the company.

(For what it’s worth, I’m not either. Very, very few writers are. There is no shame in not being a King, a Heinlein, or a Rowling, and even those writers can seldom deliver on that scale for more than a decade.)

But, as we know, SJWs always double down. Tom Doherty or the Macmillan executives should have fired PNH when he gave them the chance last year, because he is going to cost them heavily due to his decision to ride or die with his pyrite boy. It’s far too soon to say this is definitely the case, but the smart money would bet on PNH’s Hail Mary pass falling incomplete. Sooner or later, one has to stop spinning and massaging the Narrative and actually deliver real-world results.

In the meantime, boycott Tor Books!

Volume X favorite story

It should be interesting to see what the favorite story in There Will Be War Vol. X is around these parts; as with Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat” in Riding the Red Horse Vol. I, I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about a contribution by one of the junior authors.

And if you haven’t gotten There Will Be War Vol. X, what on Earth are you waiting for? It’s every bit as good as the reviews are saying.

  • I own all of the original There Will Be War series from when I
    bought them new. They were all excellent. This follow-on, after a long
    series hiatus, is every bit as good. New names, old names, great
    stories, and thought-provoking essays. 
  • Volume 10, the latest There Will Be War, is worthy to stand with the best of that series. Mil-sf doesn’t get better than this.
  • This volume represents a long
    overdue return to the series, and is as timely and pertinent today as
    the originals were in the 80’s.
  • Since Military SF’s value is to provide a means to understand future threats and solutions, this volume is a treasure.

 I
personally don’t think any of the fiction quite rises to the level of
“Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg or “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen”
by William F. Wu, both of which appear in There Will Be War Vol. II, but  I would argue that the non-fiction is actually better. Still, even if Volume X is only the second-best in the series, that is a remarkable accomplishment after a 25-year hiatus.

The results here.

GRRM is next on the menu

SJWs are intent on devouring George RR Martin next, although that will certainly take some doing. Because he’s fat. It’s funny because he’s fat.

Season six of Game of Thrones will change its approach to depictions of sexual violence, according to director Jeremy Podeswa.

The show has become infamous for its harrowing depictions of rape, but complaints over the violent scenes in the fantasy series has led creators David Benioff and DB Weiss to reconsider how the subject is portrayed.

Podeswa, who has directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and is expected to helm more in season six, was speaking at an event in Fox Studios Australia. He said the creators “were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result.

Imagine if they actually read the books… they’d throw him off a building, then stone him.