Tag: books

New Castalia blogger: Morgan

We’re pleased to welcome the first of FOUR new Castalia House bloggers today, as Morgan makes his debut with a post on what he describes as the Sword & Sorcery Extinction Event:

In the early 1980s, if you were new to the sword and sorcery genre, you
could go to your local chain bookstore, generally B. Dalton or Walden
Books and get the core library in short order. Robert E. Howard’s Conan,
Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock’s Elric
were all there. There was a period around 1983 that you could get Karl
Edward Wagner’s Kane books, C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, and Timescape
editions of Clark Ashton Smith. Sword and sorcery in paperback form went
back to 1966 with the Lancer editions of Conan. There was a post-Conan
sword and sorcery boom in the late 1960s where you had Brak, Thongor,
Kothar with eye catching covers painted by Frank Frazetta or Jeff Jones.
That died out around 1971.

There was a second boom in the late 1970s
fueled by Zebra Books reissues of Robert E. Howard non-Conan material
and Berkley Medallion issuing of nine collections and one novel and
another six reissues of previous Zebra paperbacks with new covers. All this created a coat tails effect with new sword and sorcery novels
and anthologies published. Many of them were bad. Some of the books were
really science fiction disguised to look like sword and sorcery. The
minor publishers such as Manor, Zebra, and Tower were looking for
anything to slap a barbarian with a sword on the cover. Those publishers
were gone in the early 80s leaving Ace, D.A.W., Bantam, Del Rey, and
the new Tor Books as the main publishers.

Morgan will be blogging on Sundays; we’ll be introducing the other new bloggers in the coming weeks.

The RED HORSE rides

I’m not sure there are the superlatives to describe how pleased I am to be able to introduce to you Castalia’s new anthology of military science fiction and military fact, RIDING THE RED HORSE. Tom and I have been working on this all year, and between us, we somehow managed to recruit a very strong roster of contributors on both the fiction and non-fiction sides. It’s now available from Amazon as well as from Castalia House.

As the editing was a collaborative effort, so too was the cover. JartStar was unhappy with his initial attempt, but he liked the concept, so he brought in Jeremiah, who did the covers for The Altar of Hate and The Book of Feasts & Seasons, and together they managed to bring it to life. Historically keen eyes will probably recognize the cover to which it is a thematic homage of sorts.  But as much as I enjoy working on covers, let’s face it, it’s really what is inside the book that matters. The contributors, and the pieces they contributed, are as follows, in the order they appear in the book. Many, if not most, of these names will be readily recognizable.

  • Eric S. Raymond: “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”
  • William S. Lind: “Understanding 4th Generation Warfare”
  • Chris Kennedy: “Thieves in the Night”
  • Vox Day: “A Reliable Source”
  • James F. Dunnigan: “Murphy’s Law” and “Red Waves in the South China Sea”
  • Jerry Pournelle: “His Truth Goes Marching On” and “Simulating the Art of War”
  • Ken Burnside: “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”
  • Christopher G. Nuttall: “A Piece of Cake”
  • Rolf Nelson: “Shakedown Cruise”
  • Steve Rzasa and Vox Day: “Tell it to the Dead”
  • Harry Kitchener: “The Limits of Intelligence”
  • Giuseppe Filotto: “Red Space”
  • John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr: “Galzar’s Hall”
  • Thomas Mays: “Within This Horizon”
  • Benjamin Chea: “War Crimes”
  • James Perry: “Make the Tigers Fight”
  • Brad Torgersen: “The General’s Guard”
  • Tedd Roberts: “They Also Serve”
  • Tom Kratman: “Learning to Ride the Red Horse: The Principles of War”
  • Steve Rzasa: Turncoat

I should probably go ahead and point out that both “Tell it to the Dead” and “Turncoat” are set in the Quantum Mortis universe. And despite being one of the editors, as a longtime fan of military science fiction and a lifelong student of the art of war, I won’t hesitate to tell you that this collection is one that you simply will not want to miss if you are even remotely interested in either. I hope you will find RIDING THE RED HORSE to be a worthy successor to the excellent anthology series that inspired it, THERE WILL BE WAR.

The initial reviews are in. Some selections:

  • RIDING THE RED HORSE features both military sci-fi short stories and nonfiction articles regarding the future or history of warfare. For those readers that don’t recognize it; the title is a reference to the second horseman of the apocalypse from the Bible’s Book of Revelation; the Horseman of War who rides a red horse. Some of the stories, “Sucker Punch”, “Thieves in the Night” and “A Reliable Source”, “Red Space”’ for example, are more Tom Clancy-ish techno-thrillers than outright military sci-fi. Others are more traditional military sci-fi, like “A Piece of Cake”, “Shakedown Cruise” and “Turncoat”, to name just three stories that feature high-tech space battles in the middle distant future. Other stories are more Earthbound, but just as high tech, or discuss war against highly modified “trans-humans, to name just two examples. The story quality is uniformly very good; two outstanding examples are “Shakedown Cruise” and “Turncoat”…. RIDING THE RED HORSE is a well done military sci-fi and military studies anthology, and frankly at $4.99 it is a helluva good value for your entertainment (and education) dollar.
  • Easy 5 stars on this one. An impressive collection of fun and
    well-written military fiction interposed with essays by military
    thinkers/historians. I was both entertained and informed throughout…. The essays are not navel-gazing; when their writers challenge
    conventional thinking on various topics, they do so with the voice of
    insight and experience. Their credentials are helpfully explained by an
    editor’s introduction at the beginning of each entry, for both the
    essays and the fiction. That was helpful both to establish the authority
    of the essay writers to speak on their subjects, and also in helping me
    to become aware of some newer authors I hadn’t heard of but whose work I
    enjoyed in this collection. The fiction entries are mostly
    military sci-fi to varying degrees of “hardness,” with a couple
    Roman/Medieval fantasy type stories thrown in as well, but all deal with
    questions of tactics, strategy, and the human element in combat…. Highly recommended.
  • This is a first-rate collection, but more for the non-fiction than the
    fiction. The non-fiction essays by practitioners of various kinds can
    range from enlightening to quite frightening. ESR and Pournelle are
    excellent technically and Kitchener on the limits of intelligence was a
    masterly summary. For the non-fiction alone, I would recommend the book
    as a buy. However little you may agree with them, they will provoke real
    thought in you. On the fiction side, the stories are consistently serviceable, and occasionally exceptional.

RIDING THE RED HORSE is 443 pages and retails for $4.99. It is available in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI for Kindle format from the Castalia Store and from Amazon.

SJWs at Amazon

This is the description of the Amazon editors’ choice for the best book of 2014:

Lydia is dead. From the first sentence of Celeste Ng’s stunning debut, we know that the oldest daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family has died. What follows is a novel that explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family….

Do you even need to read Everything I Never Told You: A Novel to know how the book is likely to proceed? Notice how the battle we observe in Pink SF/F vs Blue SF/F is playing out in mainstream literature too. This is not merely the best novel of the year, it is supposedly the VERY BEST BOOK of 2014, yet at 4.2, it has a lower average rating than most of my books, let alone John C. Wright’s.

Why? One guess. Style and SJW politics over story, of course. Compare the two most helpful reviews, one complimentary from a guy who got the book free, and one critical from a woman who actually paid money for it. Exhibit A:

How is it possible that this is a first novel? It is so exquisite, so marvelously perfect, so regally quiet and elegant that surely, it must come from the hands of a old soul author. But no. This is Celeste Ng’s first novel, and in it, she has painted such a deeply felt, original story. This book shall remain with me for the rest of my days.

Everything I Never Told You is a story of secrets, of love, of longing, of lies, of race, of identity, and knowledge. The story begins with the death of Lydia, daughter of Marilyn and James, which is told in the first sentence and slowly revealed through the book. Why she did it drives the narrative, and yet, this story is bigger, grander than this central mystery. Marilyn wanted to defy society’s narrow vision of her life and become a doctor, while James is trying to overcome humble beginnings and a society judging him based on his race. Together, they conventions, marry and create a family. Nathan, oldest son on his way to Harvard, Lydia, the middle sister and favorite one, and Hannah, truly growing up invisible. Together, Ng has created a complex, complicated family that rings so true on every page. There isn’t a false note in the story.

Classic. Pretentious language. Overpraise for a debut – you know there is a non-zero chance we’ll never hear about this writer again – defying society, ringing true, overwrought claims about how the book will live on in his heart forever and ever after, and to top it all off, the literary SJWs favorite praise: “There isn’t a false note in the story.”

Translation: this book is utter SJW bullshit and is full of false notes from start to finish, without ceasing. Remember, SJWs always lie.

And now, exhibit B:

Celeste Ng seems like a talented writer. Her style of writing is fluid and lyrical. For that reason, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t, primarily because nearly all the characters are so overwhelmingly awful.

I know characters don’t need to be good or even likeable to be compelling, but there has to be something to draw you in and make you care about them. That wasn’t the case here for me at all. In fact, the adult protagonists are so awful I almost wanted to stop reading at times. The main couple comprises the most self-absorbed, selfish, emotionally abusive parents I’ve ever encountered. Before the death of beloved Lydia, they turn her into a proxy of themselves and basically ignore their other children. Post-mortem, they become even more entrenched in themselves and their needs and issues and continue their neglect of their children or even take their anger out on them. Toward the end, which hints at happier times for the parents, I didn’t even care anymore. They didn’t deserve anything better.

My other issue with this novel was its treatment of race. I understand that Ng wanted this to be a treatise on racial differences and the impact prejudice can have on people, but the way she chose to do this was not effective. She was both heavy-handed and uninspiring. She made it seem as if every single person this family encountered had never seen a Chinese person and was prejudiced against them. I find this hard to believe even back in the 1970’s.

As I said, lies from start to finish. Not merely lies, but blatant and unconvincing lies. SJWs not only swim in shit, they want you to swim in it too, which is why they incessantly try to convince you that it’s the purest, cleanest water you’ll ever taste.

To conclude my case against buying into the ludicrous propaganda of Amazon’s SJWs, note that two of the other 100 best books of the year are: Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” by the Dunham Horror and Cosby: His Life and Times by Mark Whitaker, who somehow managed to avoid discovering anything about Mr. Cosby’s reported pasttime of drugging and raping women in the process of writing his biography.

The results

Apparently everyone expects Jerry Pournelle to produce the best story in the forthcoming RIDING THE RED HORSE. The results of both polls were as follows:

  1. Pournelle 108
  2. Day 45
  3. Torgersen 28
  4. Nelson 17
  5. Raymond 14
  6. Kennedy 4
  7. Nuttall 7
  8. Rzasa 5
  9. Mays 3
  10. Filotto 3
  11. Cheah 1
  12. Carr 1

As much as I hate to disappoint my most hard-core fans, I regret to inform you that neither my story nor the story I contributed in collaboration with Steve is likely to be regarded as the best, or even the second-best story. It’s not that the stories are bad, in fact, they are among the best I have ever written. It’s just that the quality of the stories, even from the lesser-known names and newcomers, is remarkably high.

I changed my mind about doing a poll on the non-fiction, because, with the possible exception of Mr. Lind, it’s too hard to guess what the author could possibly be writing about.

In any event, if you’re a New Release subscriber, you can now decide for yourself.

A question of anticipation

UPDATE: I changed the poll software because the other one was screwing with the blog. You don’t need to vote again since I saved the previous results, which had Jerry Pournelle in the lead with 31 votes, followed by Brad Torgersen with 13.

One of my favorite things about anthologies is seeing how the unknowns fare in comparison with the more established figures. And, of course, it’s always wonderful to discover new writers, new or established, who one hasn’t previously read. Given that many of the contributors to RIDING THE RED HORSE have their own fan bases, I think it will be interesting to see which stories are most anticipated, and which end up being perceived as the stronger ones once the anthology comes out.

In case you’re wondering where familiar names such as William S. Lind and Tom Kratman are, I’ll run another poll tomorrow addressing the non-fiction pieces.

The pain of the rejected

In which we endeavor to soldier on:

A while back, during THE WEREWOLF ERA of our blog (seems like a thousand centuries ago), someone suggested some books by Vox Day and Larry Correia.  I dismissed them because I wasn’t interested in them, seemed too tongue in cheek or wacky or silly for me.  Apparently someone told Vox Day about it, which I think is sad that anyone should make it his business that there’s someone on the internet that doesn’t want to read his books, but whatever.

Anyway just wanted to mention that I think Larry Correia does deserve some respect, especially for having THE UNMITIGATED GALL of having opinions that most artists don’t approve of.

Actually, I understand from people who frequent GoodReads that not reading Vox Day’s books is not only rather common, but qualifies as something of a badge of honor to which all good and decent people should aspire. Based on comments I have seen here and there, there even appears to be something of a competition with regards to the vehemence with which one vows never to pollute one’s eyes with words whose order I have arranged. In comparison with this, I fear Mr. Webcomics’s benign indifference is hardly likely to impress anyone.

Especially since he has committed the unthinkable crime of saying something positive about the International Lord of Hate, the Nemesis of the SJWs, Mr. Larry Correia.

I’ve never quite grasped the idea about being upset that people don’t read your books. When even Umberto Eco’s own children express what he describes as “Olympian indifference” towards HIS work, the miracle is that anyone has any interest in it at all.

The best books of 2014

For some reason, I’m on the GoodReads mailing list even though I don’t use it at all, so when I saw that the 2014 Readers’ Choice winners had been announced, I clicked on it to see if Larry Correia had won. And I literally laughed out loud when I saw the covers of the winners… now, do you notice anything that seven of these eight books have in common? Which one of these books is not like the others, which one of these books just doesn’t belong? Of course, as we know from the Hugo and Nebula Awards, it’s only a matter of a year or three before that last anomaly is viciously stamped out too. No wonder book sales are continuing to decline. Seriously, even the gamma males of science fiction aren’t going to read any of that equine ejectus.

And we are supposed to believe they’re honestly and truly going to make good, nay, even better, computer games. Really? To quote the Sports Guy: “The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”

Here is the primary difference between men and women. In the past, women would look at a male-dominated list of book awards and be struck by feelbad because she felt excluded. A man looks at that list, laughs, and thinks, do they really read that shit? THIS STAR WON’T GO OUT? Are you freaking kidding me?

Robert Heinlein was wrong. These are not the Crazy Years. They are the #GIRLBOSS Years.

SF/F before the coup

Daniel wrote an interesting post about the pre-pinkshirt state of science fiction at Castalia:

By 1995 or so, it had become fairly evident that the science fiction market had begun to experience a significant shift, one that I have been struggling to put my finger on for quite some time now.

The genre, of course, has always been one for whom change at a certain level should be something of a constant. The Romance genre (not the chivalric or ancient. I mean the “girl picks one of two boys” sort.) has remained the same since 1921’s The Black Moth, but Science Fiction (not the current “girl picks one of two boys” sort, but the traditional “having something to do with phenomena”) necessarily must adapt to any new knowledge….

In October of 1991, SF editor and reviewer, and senior editor at Omni, Robert J. Kilheffer did the world a favor by attempting a fairly comprehensive “State of the Genre” report in Publisher’s Weekly, titled Science Fiction: Expanding, Experimenting.

It’s interesting to see some of the comments from familiar names that we now know to have been responsible, in part, for the ongoing decline into necrobestiality and wereseal romance. I didn’t consciously notice the change until the award of the 2002 Nebula to Catharine Asaro’s ridiculous The Quantum Rose made me notice it, but looking back at the old Nebula winners, there is a definite point in 1988, when a nobody with a nothing novel that no one remembers beat Greg Bear, Gene Wolfe, David Brin, Avram Davidson, and George Alec Effinger, followed by Lois McMaster Bujold beating Gibson, Card, and Wolfe in 1989 (a less ludicrous result, but unjustifiable nevertheless), shows that the rot had set in.

Just for amusement’s sake, here is the description of the 1988 Nebula Award winner for Best Novel.

Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist, and the author of several popular books that challenge her colleagues’ ideas about Mayan civilization. Elizabeth has a strange gift, connected to a suicide attempt as a young woman, which allows her to see the spirits of ancient people while she walks at dusk and dawn. The story opens with Elizabeth in the middle of an eight-week field study at Dzibilchaltún. Her team hopes to find dramatic artifacts that will spark interest and increased funding for future field studies at the site.

In the middle of the field study, Elizabeth’s estranged adult daughter Diane arrives unannounced. After the death of her father, Elizabeth’s ex-husband, Diane suddenly abandoned her life in the United States, and flew to Mexico to see her mother. It’s revealed that Diane has seen Elizabeth for only a few brief visits since Elizabeth left her as a young child to be raised by her father. Neither is sure what Diane wants from Elizabeth.

As the two struggle to connect, Elizabeth has a new experience: one of her spirit visions, a Mayan priestess named Zuhuy-kak, can see and speak with Elizabeth. Zuhuy-kak provides unprecedented knowledge about the Mayans’ departure from Dzibilchaltún, and leads Elizabeth to the major archaeological find her team needs, but demands a sacrifice to the goddess Ix Chebel Yax. As the dig progresses, haunted by bad luck and tragedy, Zuhuy-kak makes it clear that Elizabeth must sacrifice her daughter.

Of course, were this novel written today, Elizabeth would sacrifice her daughter without thinking twice about it and the plot would instead revolve around which of her two lesbian lovers Elizabeth would choose to marry in a civil ceremony in Mexico City, Zuhuy-kak or Ix Chebel Yax. It is perhaps worth observing that this “fantasy masterwork”, published in 1986,  presently has 28 reviews averaging 4.0, is out of print, and is ranked 1,640,443 on Amazon.

Interestingly enough, one reviewer observed back in 2005: “This Novel is NOT Science Fiction and is a mundane novel as well. This novel should NOT have won the award for what was called the best science fiction novel. 1987, the year of this novel, is thus the start of the Feminist takeover of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), now called the Science fiction and FANTASY Writers of America.”

Kissinger on the EU and Islam

I’ve been reading Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, and it is a very informative book about grand strategic world history as seen through the eyes of one of the global elite’s better-known servitors. It’s interesting how regardless of whether one looks at the world through the 4GW lens or through the NWO lens, the same diagnosis appears: the modern Westphalian state is endangered:

German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding itself together?

The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system. The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either.

He also, in passing, explains something that I mentioned yesterday, which is how the West planted the seeds for the third great wave of Islamic expansion that we now know as ISIS and the global jihad.

In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life….

The West, al-Banna asserted, “which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations, intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and eventually “Islamic unity” would result.

How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. 

Through its attempts to impose a Westphalian order on the dar al-Islam and its development of the concept of world revolution, the secular West inadvertently created a rival it cannot possibly defeat on its own. The secular West’s advantages – science and technology – are readily utilized by the jihad, while its weaknesses of demoralization, apathy, multiculturalism, and demographic decline are both readily exploited and easily avoided.

To paraphrase the immortal words of LTC Tom Kratman, if you’re going to wage a religious war, you damn well better bring a religion. And as one reader noted: “In 100 years, either Norway will be an Islamic republic or there will be statues of Anders Breivik in every Norwegian town.”

Our first hardcover

A number of people have been asking when we’re going to be offering print edition of our books, and believe it or not, we’ve actually been doing so for two months. However, there was a glitch at Amazon that prevented the cover image from being displayed on the listing, and we didn’t want to send people there until the issue had been resolved. It was finally resolved yesterday, and so we’re pleased to be able to say that the hardcover edition of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is now available from Amazon for the retail price of $24.99. It’s discounted somewhat from that, of course, but I only see the converted US pricing, so I don’t know exactly what price Amazon is offering it for in the USA. We switched from the red of the Kindle version to the blue of the Kindle novella cover because the author preferred it, and I have to say, I think it was the right choice. It is 342 pages and it will make a handsome addition to the library of any discerning reader.

Now that we’ve got the process worked out and LL is helping with the layouts, we will gradually be adding more print editions to our catalog. VICTORIA: A Novel of 4th Generation War will be next in trade paperback, since we have an obligation to publish it in that format, and after that, well, it would be helpful to hear suggestions from the people who are seriously interested in buying hardcovers. AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND comes with a dust jacket, but we’re subsequently going to be switching to casebound since people expressed a fairly strong preference for that and the books will last longer.