Tag: books

Book of the Week

I am very pleased to announce that Equality: The Impossible Quest, by Martin van Creveld, is now available in case bound hardcover for $24.99 on Amazon. Along with his friend William S. Lind, Martin is Castalia’s most important non-fiction author and he is one of the foremost military minds living today. Jerry Pournelle himself has observed that van Creveld is a necessary addendum to Clausewitz; one simply cannot hope to begin understanding modern war without becoming familiar with his distinction between trinitarian and nontrinitarian warfare.

Equality is Martin’s attempt to examine and understand the ill-defined and nebulous idea that has somehow become the ruling political metric of our times. From the reviews:

  • A work of amazing breadth, Martin van Creveld also explores the depth of the history of equality, while striking a healthy tone between conversational and scholarly. Reading through the book ends up being rather easy, as the writing is engaging, yet a plethora of footnotes intersperse the text for those who wish to either fact-check or read further. 
  • I’ve not read van Creveld’s work
    before, though I am familiar with his reputation and his theories in a
    secondhand way, but this book has definitely sold me on reading the rest
    of his work.
  • A must-have for every student of Western philosophy. 
  • If there was more justice in the
    world, this would be assigned to young students as a primer — or
    rather, as an inoculation against — this seductive political idea which
    has become so debased over the last 200 years. 

This is a hardcover for which I have personally been eagerly awaiting. Castalia will be releasing more print books, in paperback and hardcover, in the near future. The next three will be 4GW Handbook (paperback), Cuckservative, (paperback), and Brings the Lightning, (hardcover, paperback).

And speaking of Martin van Creveld, if you haven’t been periodically checking out his blog, you really should. He doesn’t post often, nor does he usually post original work, but he always selects very interesting and informative guest articles. (I have myself once had the honor of having one of my posts selected for a guest article, a distinction I would not trade for a dozen Hugos.) The latest, “Sarejevo on the Baltic?” by Karsten Riise, merits a read simply on the off-chance that it might correctly read the possibility that Russia’s unexpectedly successful Syrian adventure was a practice run for Ukraine and the Baltics.

Baltic Membership in NATO is Destabilizing

When both sides have good reason to feel insecure, the relationship between them becomes unstable and something dramatic may well happen. This is currently the case in the Baltic where Russia may feel an understandable need to take action to remove the future military threat from the three Baltic countries before proceeding to liquidate its unfinished business in the Ukraine.

Any Russian operation in the Baltic will have to take place before NATO’s growing presence there makes it too dangerous. By NATO Treaty, such an operation will be considered an attack on all NATO countries, the US included. But honestly: In such a case, will the US and Europe risk a nuclear war? Probably not. Thus Russia may bet on a limited conventional war; one which would lead to the end of NATO.

On 17 May 2016 one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Berlingske Tidende, published an article by a retired NATO brigadier general. The article was written with some typical NATO rhetoric. But under the rhetoric the Danish brigadier general seemed to be genuinely scared. He fears that something violent may take place in connection with NATO’s maneuver, BALTOPS 2016, schedules to take place in the Baltic Sea from 3- to 19 June, as Russia’s window for action in that region may become smaller in the future. As I just explained, his worries are in line with own my analysis.

Russian Interest in (Temporary) Stabilization in Syria

The Russian operations in Syria bear strong similarities to those of the German “Legion Condor” during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. They enabled the Kremlin to test and train its most advanced weapons—and watch them working perfectly well. The lesson to NATO? Beware!

For a conflict in the Baltic, Russia will prefer to have all of its air force back after its success in Syria. Land operations in the Ukraine are better undertaken in the summer time, and a Baltic operation will have to take place before NATO builds up too many forces in the Baltic. Therefore Russia has an interest in reaching a settlement (at least temporary) with the West on Syria; one that may allow it to bring the rest of its military aircraft home. As NATO’s build up in the Baltic accelerates, Russia may only have short time left to act

Brings the Lightning by Peter Grant

Castalia House is very pleased to announce the publication of a new Western novel, Book 1 in The Ames Archives, Brings the Lightning, by Peter Grant.

When the Civil War ends, where can a former Confederate soldier go to escape the long memories of neighbors who supported the winning side? Where can Johnny Reb go when he can’t go home?

He can go out West, where the land is hard, where there is danger on every side, and where no one cares for whom you fought – only how well you can do it.

Walt Ames, a former cavalryman with the First Virginia, is headed West with little more than a rifle, a revolver, and a pocket full of looted Yankee gold. But in his way stand bushwhackers, bluecoats, con men, and the ever-restless Indians. And perhaps most dangerous of all, even more dangerous than the cruel and unforgiving land, is the temptation of the woman whose face he can’t forget.

When you can’t go home again – go West!

Earlier this year, Peter Grant, the author of The Maxwell Saga and The Laredo Trilogy, happened to mention that he was interested in reviving the classic Western, and was, in fact, engaged in writing one. While the thought of publishing a Western was appealing, my initial impression was that Castalia House had more than enough on its plate attempting to revive classic science fiction and fantasy, and besides, I’ve always been more of a Louis L’Amour fan than a particular fan of the genre.

But then it occurred to me that for many Western civilizationists who love liberty, the Western is central to our conception of ourselves, and moreover, that there was very likely a connection between the SJW infestation in SF/F and the loss of interest in the Western genre by the mainstream publishers. As we’ve seen everywhere from computer games to comics and RPGs, it is all one big cultural war.

And then there is the fact that Fair Blows the Wind is one of my favorite novels in any genre.

So, I got in touch with Peter, told him that Castalia would love to get on board with the Western revival, and offered to publish what I learned was not merely the novel that turned out to be Brings the Lightning, but was the first book in a series about a man named Walter Ames, a Confederate who finds that he can’t return home to the farm in Tennessee after the Civil War. Peter is a man of a vast and varied experience, and it shows in his writing; moreover, he is a stickler for historical research, especially where firearms are concerned.

If you have a soft spot for Westerns, or you are, like me, a L’Amour fan, I am confident you will enjoy the adventures of Mr. Walt Ames. Brings the Lightning is 229 pages, retails for $4.99, and is available only on Amazon. New Release subscribers should check their emails for the customary free bonus book offer.

From the early reviews:

  • Brings the Lightning is an
    excellent revival of the western genre popularized by the likes of Louis
    L’Amour and Zane Gray in years past. 
  • The gun nuts among his fans will be delighted at the myriad details about firearms he includes, deftly weaving them into the tale as his main character comes to depend on them for his livelihood and defense on the dangerous trip West. 
  • I found the novel to be on a par
    with the early L’Amour works such as Killoe, Fallon, Radigan, Hondo and
    Kilkenny    . Very much worth reading.
  • The storyline is L’Amouresque, but the writing style is much better. L’Amour told great stories, but let’s face it, some of his prose really clunked in places, whereas Grant’s is very smooth. 

UPDATE: Peter Grant’s own announcement of his first Western is here. It’s interesting to learn that the genre was so popular with the South African military.

    Book Bomb: Nethereal

    Larry Correia has announced his latest Book Bomb in support of 2016 Campbell Nominee Brian Niemeir. Brian is a friend of the blog, and of Castalia House, and so I’m quite happy to support Larry in his efforts.

    Nethereal is the first book in the Soul Cycle series. It’s $3.99 and is currently at #43,662 in Kindle. Larry describes it as “Space Pirates Go To Hell.”

    An announcement from Dr. Pournelle

    From Chaos Manor: Announcing Hardbound Edition: There Will Be War, Volumes I & II. The first two volumes of the 1980’s anthologies bound together in a hardbound edition. Obviously these are available as eBooks for considerably less, but if you want them as a book, this is your opportunity.

    There Will Be War Volumes I & II is 702 pages, casebound hardcover, and retails for $34.99 at Amazon. It may show up at other brick-and-mortar bookstores, but when that will be we do not know. It contains the complete contents of the first two volumes of Dr. Pournelle’s classic military science fiction series and marks the first time There Will Be War has ever been available in hardcover.

    The omnibus edition of Volumes I & II contain 42 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions,” an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.

    We do not plan to release There Will Be War in paperback. The next hardcover edition will be Volumes IX & X. We designed these editions for serious fans of the series who intend to collect them; as you can see, the Vol. II cover is featured on the front while the Vol. I cover is on the back.

    The decline of the Big Five

    Author Earnings isn’t the only outlet to notice the ongoing decline of the Big Five publishers:

    Unit sales of e-books published by traditional publishers fell 13% in 2015 compared to 2014, said Kempton Mooney of Nielsen during a Thursday panel aimed at examining different publishing markets.

    Units fell to 204 million from 234 million in 2014. The high point of e-book sales was 2013 when units totaled 242 million units. While e-book sales fell in the year, print units rose 2.8%, to 653 million. As a result, e-books’s market share of units dipped to 24% in 2015, down from 27% in 2014. Mooney observed that some of the gain in print sales was due to the extraordinary popularity of adult coloring books last year. The e-book sales figures came from about 400 traditional publishers, Mooney said.

    In another look at e-book sales, Mooney reported that the Big 5 publishers’ share of e-book sales fell to 34% in 2015, down from 38% in 2014. In 2012, the Big 5 held a 46% of e-book unit sales. The loss of share of the Big 5 was made up by self-publishers and small publishers. Self-publishers’ share of the e-book market rose to 12% last year from 8% in 2014, while small presses accounted for 30% of e-book unit sales in 2015, up from 26% in 2014.

    Sticking to the children’s category, Mooney pointed to a recent survey that found 51% of children under age 9 are non-white. He said publishers that aren’t publishing books that can appeal to children from diverse backgrounds are losing “huge chunks of sales.”

    I devoutly hope the Big Five follow Mooney’s advice and devote increasing resources to pursuing readers from diverse backgrounds. One thing that we have learned from our various translations is that “diverse” readers simply don’t read as much, so the more they pursue the rainbow unicorn market, the easier it will be for independent publishers to continue to outcompete them for genuine markets that actually exist.

    SJW convergence is no foundation for effective business strategy.

    An actual conversation

    Other Guy: I don’t really know anything about this Rabid Puppies thing. What’s up with that?

    Vox Day: Oh, it’s just related to this science fiction award. Last year we took a bunch of nominations, so they made a big deal about it and vowed it would never happen again. Then this year, we took a few more.

    OG: So that’s why they’re pissed.

    VD: Yeah, pretty much. But also because we got things like “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” nominated.

    OG: What?

    VD: There’s this guy, Chuck Tingle, he’s a complete lunatic and he writes these crazy gay dinosaur erotica stories.

    OG: Doesn’t he have a book about boyfriend who is a plane or something too?

    VD: There’s one called “My Gay Billionaire Plane Boyfriend”, something like that, anyway.

    OG: Yeah, I read it! It was pretty good.

    VD: I’m a little alarmed to hear you’ve actually read that.

    OG: Yeah, well, you’re the one who knows the guy’s name.

    VD: Touche’.

    Why they’re terrified

    It’s hard for those outside the science fiction publishing world to understand why so many of the people inside it are a such a collection of mentally unstable freakshows. Part of it is the genre; many of these people are simply not fit to function in the real world. You have only to look at a picture from any science fiction convention to understand this; you will not see a group of more heavily medicated people outside of a hospital or a hard-core rave.

    But part of it is the human reaction to stress. And the publishing world has become increasingly stressful over the last 20 years, because it is in pretty severe contraction. The dumbing down of the West thanks to the diversity they love so much combined with the growth of video games and other visual entertainment options means there are fewer readers than before. The decline of the midlist, the advent of Amazon, and the explosion of independent publishing means that far fewer people can make a living in the traditional publishing market.

    Hugh Howey and Author Earnings have been doing a great job tracking the decline of traditional publishing. And in their most recent report, they show that the Big Five are rapidly approaching one-half the size of the independent publishing market.

    The most important graph for authors shows the rapidly diverging rate of
    ebook author income by publishing path. The Big 5 publishers are now
    providing less than a quarter of the dollars earned by creatives for
    their ebook sales. Indies are taking close to half. As detailed in
    previous reports, higher prices and other missteps are a likely
    contributor to this accelerating trend, but the reality may be that
    major publishers simply are finding it difficult to compete with indie
    authors on diversity, price, quality, and frequency of publication, as
    this divergence has been increasing for the last two years — well before
    the Big Five’s return to no-discount agency pricing. But as we can see,
    the transfer of market share in author earnings from Big Five to indies
    did steepen significantly after the Big Five’s 2015 reinstatement of
    agency ebook pricing.

    That chart is spectacular. That purple line marks a cataclysmic decline. At this rate, traditionally published authors would realize ZERO income from ebooks by January 2019. Now, that’s not going to happen, I don’t think, unless traditional publishers either a) all go out of business, b) stop selling ebooks, or c) give all their ebooks away for free.

    This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that Kindle Unlimited is going to kill the mainstream publishers. They can’t compete with it, and since there is a finite and shrinking supply of readers, every Kindle Unlimited sale is a strike against them.

    But it’s worse than that. I just got a royalty statement from one of my traditional publishers. Not only is it a very good reminder of why working with Castalia House is a MUCH better deal than working with a traditional publishing house – I’d have made nearly 3X more on a Castalia deal than I did on this one – but it demonstrates that their business model simply cannot compete with ours.

    Here is the simple fact. In eight years, the non-fiction book I published with them, has sold exactly two-thirds as many copies as SJWAL has sold in eight months. And ironically, the older book, which has sold thousands fewer copies, is the one that anyone would have expected to sell more. So, even though it’s not precisely apples-to-apples, the point is that an ebook-focused micropublisher can already provably sell as many books as a traditional independent publisher.

    In other words, they are bringing literally nothing to the table for me any longer. The Big Five theoretically still have advantages, but what is the use of having a formidable retail distribution infrastructure when there are no bookstores to carry your product? What is the use of being able to sell into Barnes & Noble when the retailer has cut down the size of the genre section to one-tenth of what it used to be?

    Sure, there will be a few blockbusters, but for literally everyone else, the traditional model offers them nothing. That is why the traditional publishers, and the traditionally published, are panicking. That’s why they are scratching and clawing for every award and every distinction that might help keep their heads above water.

    That is why they are drowning. They call us a “tiny” publishing house, and in infrastructure and overhead terms, they are absolutely right. But we are growing nearly 100 percent year-on-year, we are growing at their expense.

    And more importantly, we know that’s not because of us, that’s because of you. We understand, as they do not, that we can’t force anything on you. We can’t, and won’t, try to tell you that space romance is science fiction, that left-wing diversity lectures are entertaining, and we don’t believe you owe us anything.

    For the first time in decades, they are being forced to compete for their readers with genuinely different competitors, and it should come as small surprise that they neither enjoy the experience nor are they any good at it.

    On the Question of Free Trade

    For more than 200 years, the question of free trade has been considered
    settled by economists. However, advancements in technology have
    considerably changed the world since David Ricardo popularized the
    concept of Comparative Advantage in the early 19th century, and the rise
    of economic populism around the world is increasingly calling long-held
    assumptions into question.

    On the Question of Free Trade is a public debate between Dr. James
    D. Miller, Associate Professor of Economics at Smith College, and Vox
    Day, the author of The Return of the Great Depression, in which they
    address the vital question of whether free trade is intrinsically
    beneficial or detrimental to a national economy. Both participants are
    well-versed in economic history and economic theory, which permits them
    to bypass the political side issues that so often cloud such debates and
    focus on the core issues involved. The post-debate Q&A session is
    also included.

    On the Question of Free Trade is 46 pages, DRM-free, and $2.99. It is available only on Amazon. Brainstorm members should have already received their free copy via email. If you are a Brainstorm member who needs to convert the .epub file to Kindle-friendly .mobi format, please download Calibre.

    SJWAL Spanish edition

    Thanks to Emilio and Toni, two longtime readers who also speak Spanish, Los Guerreros de la Justicia Social Siempre Mienten: Derrotando a la Policía del Pensamiento is now available for the Spanish-speaking world. I am told there is a real need for it, as SJWs have been pulling their usual tricks in Spain, Mexico, and in the USA as well.

    There is also a Spanish version of the SJW Attack Survival Guide which is available now on the right sidebar. A Portuguese version is available too, and a Portuguese translation of the entire book is in the works.

    This blog is now an international community, and it’s good to see that nationalists from around the world can work together in thwarting the globalists and multiculturalists who would erase our differences, and even our nations, under the banner of la justicia social.

    If you’re a Spanish speaker, I’d encourage you to review the Spanish edition, particularly on Amazon.es.

    Book of the weekend

    This week, I’m a little late on the book of the week, which essentially makes it a book of the weekend, but for those who are interested in the subject of the Singularity, Dr. Miller, my past and future debate opponent, has made the audio introduction to his book on the technofuture, Singularity Rising, available for listening. How will the Singularity affect our daily lives—our jobs, our families, and our wealth?

    Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
    focuses on the implications of a future society faced with an abundance
    of human and artificial intelligence. James D. Miller, an economics
    professor and popular speaker on the Singularity, reveals how natural
    selection has been increasing human intelligence over the past few
    thousand years and speculates on how intelligence enhancements will
    shape civilization over the next forty years.

    Miller considers several possible scenarios in this coming singularity:

    • A merger of man and machine making society fantastically wealthy and nearly immortal
    • Competition with billions of cheap AIs drive human wages to almost nothing while making investors rich
    • Businesses rethink investment decisions to take into account an expected future period of intense creative destruction
    • Inequality drops worldwide as technologies mitigate the cognitive cost of living in impoverished environments
    • Drugs designed to fight Alzheimer’s disease and keep soldiers alert on
      battlefields have the fortunate side effect of increasing all of their
      users’ IQs, which, in turn, adds a percentage points to worldwide
      economic growth

    Singularity Rising offers predictions
    about the economic implications for a future of widely expanding
    intelligence and practical career and investment advice on flourishing
    on the way to the Singularity. Sadly, no word on okapis.