#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Kukuruyo@kukuruyo
Ok i bought a dance mat for ps2 and only conector it has is this. Someone know dafuq is that? how do i play on ps2?
Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
It’s a ProctoPad. You stick it up your ass and dance, Jack.
I have to confess, I never dreamed that one day, I’d be able to whip out THAT particular quote IN CONTEXT. It’s a glorious moment that was more than two decades in the making.
This moment in literature was brought to you by the Original Cyberpunk.
We are very pleased and proud to announce the beginning of a brand new YA fantasy series from John C. Wright that we anticipate may one day be worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as classic fantasy series such as The Dark is Rising and The Chronicles of Prydain. The book is the first in a new duodecilogy called Moth & Cobweb, and the first book in the series is THE GREEN KNIGHT’S SQUIRE: SWAN KNIGHT’S SON.
Gilberic Parzival Moth is a strange and lonely boy who has grown up without a father, raised by a single mother who moves from town to town in fear of something she will not name. His only friends are animals, with whom he has always been able to speak. But when he awakens one night at the Thirteenth Hour, and sees for the first time the dark reality of the secret rule of Elf over Man, he begins to learn about his true heritage, the heritage of Twilight.
And when his mother finally tells him the terrible truth of her past, he must choose whether to continue running with her in fear, or learning how to fight against ancient powers that are ageless, soulless, and ultimately damned. SWAN KNIGHT’S SON is the first book of THE GREEN KNIGHT’S SQUIRE, the first volume of MOTH & COBWEB, an astonishing new duodecilogy about the magical worlds of Day, Night, and Twilight by John C. Wright.
If you enjoyed Mr. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, then you will almost certainly enjoy the Moth & Cobweb series. The series has been some time in the works; after the success of One Bright Star, I encouraged John to write about the childhood adventures to which the adults refer throughout the novella, but he did not wish to retread ground he had previously covered, even in reference. Instead, he came up with the idea of the Day World, the Twilight World, and the Night World, and soulless elfs that are fey and cruel because they know that despite their beauty and power, they are ultimately doomed.
SWAN KNIGHT’S SON is 167 pages, DRM-free, and sells for $4.99 exclusively on Amazon. New Release subscribers, check your emails to see the bonus book offer. From the early reviews:
The Campbell- and Dragon Award-nominated author Brian Niemeier has made the second book in his Soul Cycle series, Souldancer, free this week. That means you can pick up both books in the series, which is described as “Space Pirates in Hell”, for less than $4, as the first book, Nethereal, is only $3.99.
I should probably also mention that Brian is a Castalia-author-to-be, as we will be introducing a new science fiction series with him in 2017. And by new, I mean “mind-blowing”.
Publishers Weekly provides a list:
1. A Wild Sheep Chase – The original title of this novel is “An adventure concerning sheep,” and it lives up to that title. In it, the Murakami hero takes on a political-business-industry syndicate with apparently limitless money and power, and he does it on his own terms. Some of the most interesting parts of the novel take place in the rural wilds of Hokkaido, which has been interpreted alternately as the hero’s inner mind, or as a mythological land of the dead. At its heart, like many Murakami novels, this is a tale of conflict between the will of the individual and the demands of an impersonal State. Oh, and there is a really cool, all-empowering sheep, too.
2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – This is another novel that features an “other world,” this time taking the form of a labyrinthine hotel, in which the hero’s wife, Kumiko, is held prisoner by her evil brother, Wataya Noboru. The hero, a mild-manner, unemployed house-husband named Okada Tōru, must find his way into this metaphysical labyrinth, confront Noboru, and rescue Kumiko. Meanwhile, he must also deal with those awkward moments when the coiled springs of time run down, and different historical epochs slam into one another. The work is a study of sex, violence, and collective memories lost and regained.
3. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – If Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and H.G. Wells has gotten together to write a novel, it might have looked like this. Its dual narratives portray, alternately, the mean streets of a slightly futuristic Tokyo embroiled in an information war with real casualties, and a bucolic fantasy world in the form of a Town, surrounded by a massive, perfect wall, populated by people without shadows, a fearsome Gatekeeper, and unicorns. The hero, finally, must choose between the two worlds for his permanent home.
4. 1Q84 – This is the first novel in which Murakami takes up the risky topic of fringe religious groups—a sore spot in Japan since the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attack of 1995. As the work’s fictitious cult, Sakigake, attempts to re-establish its connection with earth spirits known as the Little People, the novel pursues a central plot of bringing together its two soul-mate heroes: a fitness instructor who moonlights as an assassin of abusive men, and a math genius who moonlights as a copywriter. As with other Murakami novels, this one looks hard at the tension between political and religious ideology and the inner soul of the individual.
5. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Tsukuru Tazaki spends much of this story trying to understand why his circle of friends in high school expelled him from their group shortly after he left Nagoya to attend college in Tokyo. His quest for understanding takes him al the way to Finland, where he confronts some hard truths about his own inner self. It is a novel of betrayal and forgiveness, but above all, it is about growing up.
While they get the #1 book right, that’s not how I see it. This is my top 10 Murakami list, keeping in mind that they specified “books”, not “novels”, which thereby permits the inclusion of both non-fiction and collections of short stories.
Haruki Murakami is, without question, one of the greatest living writers, if not the greatest one now that Umberto Eco is dead. While he lacks any sense of spirituality, particularly in the Christian sense, and his grasp of human socio-sexuality is marginal, he more than makes up for these flaws by his observational skills, his intellectual curiosity, and his penetrating insights into human behavior.
Kafka on the Shore is this week’s book of the week.
The third or fourth book on my list of books to write is a literary novel written in a style that is chiefly influenced by a) Murakami and b) Banks. I’ve already started it, and I’m hoping to be able to get back to it in the second half of next year.
Congratulations to Fenris Wulf, whose Loki’s Child is now, thanks to you all, the #1 bestseller in the Dark Humor category and is rapidly closing in on Kurt Vonnegut in Satire.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,488 Paid in Kindle Store
#1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > Dark Humor
#2 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire
Read the reviews. If you liked Owen Stanley’s brilliant The Missionaries, the chances are pretty good you’ll like this one too. The main difference is that where The Missionaries was a stiletto silently slipped in to the strains of Vivaldi, Loki’s Child is a sledgehammer, and the sound of skulls being smashed is drowned out by Metallica.
Loki’s Child is a tale of music, revolution, and revenge. A pagan dystopian paean to chaos, a libertarian manifesto, and an insider’s scathing critique of the music industry, this is a book that Robert Anton Wilson might have written if he had known how to play electric guitar. This is a book so metal that even the consonants require umlauts. This is a book that will make you first question the author’s sanity, and then the sanity of the society in which you live.
Jasmine, Mitzi, and Sandy are Fatal Lipstick, a three-piece girl-metal band with a million-dollar record contract and less musical talent than the average gangster rapper. They dedicate songs such as “Whoredumb”, “Greed is Bad”, and “Guts Ripped Out” to the Devil and declare their greatest ambition is to inspire their fans to kill themselves. Their own sound engineer thinks they should be dragged out into the street and shot for their crimes against music. And it falls to Ezron Blenderman, a record producer who puts on his pants one leg at a time and makes hit records, to somehow transform their horrendous incompetence into something that will sell millions of records to unsuspecting teenagers around the world.
But one day, Blenderman catches Jasmine playing the guitar by herself… and begins to discover that the daughter of the Norse God of Chaos has no intention of becoming a manufactured one-hit wonder. Loki’s Child is angry, and she intends to set the whole world on fire.
Loki’s Child is 380 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $4.99 on Amazon. This is the same book that some New Release subscribers received as a bonus book last year, but it has been considerably edited since. However, please note that the book contains a number of elements that some Castalia House readers may find objectionable, including vulgarities, a pagan perspective, drug use, violence, the music industry, and a revolutionary libertarian theme.
If you are, like me, a fan of either Robert Anton Wilson or Philip K. Dick during his VALIS phase, (which is to say his most reality-challenged phase) you will not like this book, you will love it. Loki’s Child is a satire even more biting than The Missionaries; while it is often funny, the humor is considerably darker and there is an angry edge to it that is more than a little appropriate to the political situation in which we find ourselves today.
Like its recent predecessor, Loki’s Child is a novel that would never have gotten past the gatekeepers at any other publishing house. And the fact that the book is about the music industry, takes place in part in Tokyo, refers to kawai metal, has a libertarian theme, and is written by someone named Fenris Wulf might lead some to believe it was written by a three-time Billboard-charting recording artist who studied in Japan, recently attended a Babymetal concert, has been named one of the 25 leading internet libertarians, and founded a game development house named Fenris Wolf.
However, I assure you, these things are mere coincidences.
From the reviews:
VFM, can you get me the contact information for Simon Nicholas Hawke? Preferably telephone, but I’ll settle for email. I can find his street address, but telephone numbers are restricted to IP addresses outside the USA. I cannot believe this guy’s books are not all in print. I loved the Time Wars books when I was younger; the first one, The Ivanhoe Gambit, is this week’s Book of the Week.
Given the number of new readers who may not be familiar with it, I thought its recent Dragon Award nomination for Best Science Fiction novel justified posting this recent Amazon review of John C. Wright’s Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm. Congratulations, John, on your Dragon Award finalist!
Just finished rereading Somewhither, a grand tour through John C. Wright’s daunting and vivid imagination, wherein dwell creatures eldritch, fell and fantastic beyond anything any one, or even any small number taken together, of earth’s many mythologies ever dreamed. Plus all the worlds and trained warriors and assassins and spies and superheroes from a dozen cultures, comics and RPGs kicked up a notch or two by Wright’s deft muse, and all tossed into one epic blender of an adventure, of which this is only Part I.
Which is why I needed to read it twice. At least.
Illya Muromets is a odd teenage boy living in rural Oregon with his even odder family. Illya has grown very large and very ugly – heavy brow ridge, huge teeth. He looks nothing like his 2 brothers or his parents. His homeschooling includes rigorous physical and combat training, as well as Latin and Hebrew. He doesn’t see this as particularly weird, just sort of odd like everything about his life. His best friend is Foster Hidden, fellow Boy Scout and champion archer.
Dad takes ‘business trips’ that involve getting armed and armored to the teeth, which arms and armor include any number of holy relics and silver bullets, and and hiking up the hill to the ruins of an old monastery and disappearing for days on end. His mother went on one such trip, and never came back.
Illya gets a job doing grunt work at a nearby ‘museum’ for the mad and colorful Professor Dreadful, who has an inexplicably beautiful and brave daughter Penelope. Penny Dreadful tries to become the youngest person to sale around the world alone, but her yacht goes down and troubles beset her. She doesn’t get the record, but she survives and returns in time for Illya’s raging hormones to inflict the world’s worst crush on him.
Professor Dreadful gets locked up in the local nuthouse, to the surprise of few. He had been working to decipher a set of what might be cuneiform letters that appeared mysteriously on a wall at CERN after a fatal accident.
Illya gets a desperate message: Professor Dreadful has deciphered the cuneiform, which contained instruction on how to build a gateway between worlds in Ursprache, the one language spoken before the fall of the Tower of Babel.
He has constructed the gateway. He left it running in the museum basement….
Here’s how I see it. Your mileage may well vary. It’s a pretty good list, although I was surprised not to see Seveneves on it. It’s definitely light on the Pink SF, which is good to see. I’m a little disappointed that for all our military-related publications this year, we didn’t publish a single novel in the Mil-SF category this year.
Still, it’s great to see two Castalia novels up for awards in the inaugural year.
1. Best Science Fiction Novel
Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm by John C. Wright
I liked Marc’s Traveller book, but I have to go with Mr. Wright here.
2. Best Fantasy Novel
Son of the Black Sword by Larry Correia
Not even close this year. Larry was always a fun and popular author, but he stepped it up with this and MH:Nemesis.
3. Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel
Changeling’s Island by Dave Freer
4. Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel
Hell’s Foundations Quiver by David Weber
I think Scalzi did the right thing by declining his nomination; his work doesn’t really belong in this category and this clearly isn’t his crowd. This is a bit of a career Oscar for Weber, but he deserves it.
5. Best Alternate History Novel
League of Dragons by Naomi Novik
Novik is an SJW-lite, but her Napoleonic dragons are an original and interesting alternate history take. Turtledove is all right. The Baen gang might like Eric Flint, but I’ve never enjoyed his books and the man isn’t just intellectually ossified, he’s also a dick.
6. Best Apocalyptic Novel
Ctrl Alt Revolt! by Nick Cole
Again, not even close. This is the best book on the whole list.
7. Best Horror Novel
Souldancer by Brian Niemeier
Sorry Declan, you are screwed.
8. Best Comic Book
Don’t know. Don’t care.
9. Best Graphic Novel
The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman
10. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series
Game of Thrones – HBO
I’ll vote for quality work even if the creator is an obnoxious, creepy, rape-obsessed troll. Going into the final stretch, this is still the best TV series running, despite the inept battlefield consultants. Still bitter that they killed off Myranda, though.
11. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie
Deadpool
Pretty good selection. This is the only one I would watch again.
12. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC / Console Game
Metal Gear Solid V by Konami Digital Entertainment
What else?
13. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game
Fallout Shelter by Bethesda Softworks
14. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game
Talon by GMT Games
15. Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures / Collectible Card / Role-Playing Game
Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game (7th Edition) by Chaosium Inc.
Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It, by Martin van Creveld, is the Book of the Week. Martin is always a must-read for anyone interested in military history or strategy, whether he is published by Castalia or, as in this case, not.
We’ll have a pair of new books out from him in the near future, but in the meantime, this book about the decline of Western military power should tide van Creveld fans over nicely.
The “West,” a term which from this point on will refer to the countries of Western Europe and North America while excluding Russia and Japan, reached the peak of its power just before 1914. Later, owing partly to the casualties sustained in World War I and partly to a loss of self-confidence, it found that its rule over subject peoples became harder and harder to sustain. During the interwar period several colonial countries in the Middle East, including Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, gained at least nominal independence. Translating that into real independence took longer; but by the second half of the 1950s that, too, had been achieved.
Here we are concerned with the strategic aspect of the matter, not the moral one. Still staying in the interwar period, struggles such as the one against the Rif of Morocco, when some 250,000 well-equipped, highly-trained, French and Spanish troops took several years to defeat a loose coalition of mostly barefoot, mostly illiterate, Moroccan tribesmen, pointed to the direction in which things were moving. By 1939 many colonial peoples around the world were preparing to challenge their masters. Although, in the event, it took World War II, in which those masters tore each other to pieces, to set the stage for the conflagrations that followed.
Since then almost the only time Western countries gained a clear military victory over their non-Western opponents was during the First Gulf War. In 1991 NATO, as the most powerful military alliance in history, had just emerged triumphant from the forty-five year struggle known as the Cold War. But its members had not yet begun to dismantle their armed forces as the European ones in particular were to do later on. As a result, they were free as never before or since to send those forces to any spot they wanted to wage any war they wanted against any opponent they wanted. Though few people realized it at the time, in retrospect to challenge NATO, reinforced by several other countries, with a conventional army, as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did, represented the height of folly. Even so the US and its allies did not complete the job. With good reason, as it later turned out.
This episode apart, practically every time the West, or some country that was part of it, fought the rest it was defeated. Conversely the wars in question, and the people who waged them and fought in them, succeeded in liberating—whatever that might mean—entire continents with populations numbering in the hundreds of millions.