I’ll admit that I really don’t think about my early novels at all. Which is the main reason Castalia hasn’t bothered to get them back into print for years, even though they’re fairly decent as your average fantasy novel goes. I think The Wrath of Angels, in particular, holds up rather well over time, although the first two definitely show my inexperience as a novelist.
Anyhow, when Castalia Unlimited launches in November, they will be exclusively available there, as are dozens of never-before translated books such as The Okehazama Campaign, a military history of the battles that established Oda Nobunaga as the unquestioned power in Japan and somehow, despite its very small scale, somehow set the stage for the military unification of the new shogunate, as well as juvenile science fiction novels like The Undersea City from the father of Japanese science fiction, Unno Juza.
You can sign up for the pre-launch mailing list now at Castalia Unlimited. There are already 120 titles loaded and we expect to have 175 available at launch and 250 by the end of the year. While we won’t have the estimated 7 million titles available on the newly renamed Kindle+, we arguably have more good books available for you to choose from, and not only that, but you get to keep them.
There’s a whole world of ideas out there that you’re not supposed to explore. Forgotten history. Unconventional science. Unfashionable philosophy. Suppressed perspectives. Questions that respectable people aren’t supposed to ask.
For one week only, from Wednesday, October 28, through Tuesday, November 3, discover books that challenge conventional wisdom, recover forgotten knowledge, and encourage you to think for yourself.
Castalia House and I are participating in the 2026 Nonfiction Based Book sale with two books:
I would also very highly recommend John C. Wright’s excellent collection of essays, Transhuman and Subhuman, which is among the best and most thought-provoking nonfiction works I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
JDA attends Worldcon, writes a convention report, and filed it on File 770. This did not go over well with those who style themselves the Haters of Hate.
On Saturday, I published a report on World Fantasy Con for File 770. The convention was well run, the panels were good, and I found a few rare books for my collection. Within hours, commenters demanded that I be kept out of every convention in the country, and the pile-on moved to Bluesky, where the language got worse. All of this over a convention review that said the con went well.
Science fiction and fantasy has a hate problem. In my experience, it does not come from the right and never has. Most of what you see on the right is just want to be included and be aloowed to exist peacefully. It comes from a left-wing establishment that spent years pushing out anyone who disagreed with it on any topic, then grew so used to total control that it forgot the people it targeted were people.
The genre’s gatekeepers say “diversity” and “inclusion” constantly. Look at who is in the room. You will find one set of opinions, repeated by everyone, and a standing threat for anyone who voices another. A community with no room for a dissenting view is a monoculture with branding that makes them feel good about themselves. What you’ll find is complete intolerance coming from them.
I get death threats and hate on a regular basis, along with people flinging so much hate my way it would break most people and cause them health problems, which is the intention of the mob to do. They want to hurt or kill those they hate from the power of their own keyboards. I have been hesitant to attend conventions because of it. The people who pile on are the same ones who tell us, correctly, that harassment and threats of violence can destroy a person. They say we should stand against it. They often point to my criticism of different cultural pieces as justification for it, which should not be the case. Criticism is a time-honored tradition in our culture and helps hone things to be better. Their personal attacks are just about destruction.
The mob is angry because it lost a little power this weekend. World Fantasy Con did not ban me. File 770 reported on the convention and let me do the reporting. The people who wanted me gone found they could not do anything substantive about it. Both organizations put their love of the genre first, and I am grateful to them. Mike Glyer deserves love for what he’s got, and it’s my understanding the hate and pressure he received was so overwhelming he’s taking a couple of days off the internet. One has to remember he’s an older gentleman; this level of abuse is something he’s probably not used to and can cause real harm, something the mob does not consider. I read File 770 regularly for genre reports, and he finds a great number of things that are interesting, and does some good work. That site does not get advertising nor subscribers; he does it completely for free.
I, for one, don’t care one way or another. I’ve never been part of fandom, I wasn’t published by a genre publisher, and except for being able to talk with John M. Ford for about an hour, I didn’t enjoy the one convention I attended. But I do think that the SJWs who drove out everyone to the right of Barack Obama out of professional science fiction and fantasy are beginning to realize the permanent damage they have done to the various institutions of the genre as well as to the genre itself.
The world is changing. Kindle Unlimited is far bigger than any SF/F publisher has ever been. I believe that within three years, Castalia Unlimited will be bigger than any other SF/F publisher, not just in terms of annual titles published, but in terms of total revenue and pages read too. We’re at 63 titles already, 23 of which have never been seen in English before. We expect to be at 150 by time of launch, 275 by the end of the year, and 1,000 English titles alone by the end of next year.
So it doesn’t matter if they want to freeze us out or not. They have Hugo Award winners. We have the guy writing the #1 movies at the box office and the guy for whom the Japanese literature awards are literally named. They have their artisanal wokeslop, we have groundbreaking science, philosophy, and high-quality history. There isn’t a single book that has been published in the genre in the last five years that can begin to compare with The Book of the Black Death or The Midnight Mayor. And the Unlimited library is growing daily in no less than six different languages.
I think it’s great that men like Mike Glyer and JDA are reaching across the philosophical divide. It was a stupid and harmful construction from the start, and now it has been extended into a technological divide as well. But for me, any “science fiction” that stands against artificial intelligence is not worthy of being called science fiction at all.
so um i have questions and maybe the biggest one is. you’re the better option because you’re not doing the woman thing? i mean, okay, whatever. at least the radiology geek i chatted with at today’s book fair who’s inventing a new form of analog reading didn’t get stuck on the fact that i’m a girl.
I would say we’re the better option for anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to read exclusively MY GAY BILLIONAIRE VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND, ANOTHER IMMIGRANT STORY ABOUT RACISM, and EVERYTHING THAT MAKES ME SAD which is all that women in the publishing industry have wanted to publish for the last 20 years.
We have no shortage of female readers who prefer classic literature, classic fantasy, classic Westerns, and classic science fiction. We’re not among the publishers who have ignored the excellent novels of Zenaide Fleuriot for more than a century or allowed Tanith Lee to languish mostly ignored while lionizing a male mediocrity who mercilessly ripped her off.
If you want to sign up for the mailing list pre-launch, this is the time to do so. And in the meantime, I am pleased to be able to say that in addition to the translated works, and my own works, and the classics, and the Junior Classics, a certain Legend has agreed to make his novels available on Unlimited.
Castalia Unlimited started with the first-ever translation of Naruto Hicho, Eiji Yoshikawa’s landmark The Secret Scrolls of Naruto. The six ebooks have been very well-received, and Castalia House is now very pleased to be able to offer the entire six-scroll series in a set of two volumes.
I know a number of readers here really enjoyed The Little Duchess, Castalia’s first translation of a Zénaïde Fleuriot novel. Mlle Fleuriot was more or less the French Christian Louisa May Alcott, but her very popular and bestselling work was never translated into English. So I expect that people will be pleased to know that our intrepid French translator, Summer Charrette, just published the sequel to The Little Duchess, which is simply titled Alberte.
Alberte de la Rochefaucon is twenty now: beautiful, high-spirited, and the ward of an old ducal name. The wild child of The Little Duchess has become one of the most admired young women in the capital, and the fashionable world has decided her future for her. Her sister Madeleine. the marchioness de Valroux, is determined to see her make a brilliant match, and a dazzling candidate has appeared: David Louzéma, a fabulously rich friend from her Cannes childhood, who sweeps back into her life amid charity bazaars, skating parties, and masked balls, resplendent one evening in the pearls and emeralds of a rajah’s costume.
But Alberte measures men by a different standard. She will give her heart only to someone in whom she can find “a God, a country, and a heart” which draws her not to the glittering foreigner but to Roger de Châteaugrand, a plain young officer of dragoons with little to offer her but faith, honor, and steadiness. Against her stands a formidable alliance: her scheming sister, a severe great-aunt, and a false friend of doubtful reputation, all determined to steer her toward fortune and away from love.
Ladies and gentlemen, Castalia House is fairly bursting with pride to announce an original complete and unabridged English translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi, the epic Japanese novel of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the publication of Volume 10: Wuzhang Plains.
A falling star appears over the plains of Wuzhang, and the man who saw it understands the omen.
Zhuge Liang has given his all. Six northern campaigns, each one successful, but insufficient to win the war. The kingdom of Shu is too small, its resources too thin, and its emperor too weak to hold what his father built without the man who has borne the burden of responsibility upon his shoulders. Kongming knows the future. He has always known it. He came down from his secluded mountain against his better judgment, and he has been at war with destiny ever since.
Volume Ten of Yoshikawa Eiji’s saga is the final act. Kongming and Sima Yi face each other for the last time across the plains, and the duel between them is no longer just a contest of strategies, but a war against time itself. Kongming’s body is failing. He neither eats nor sleeps, and the men who follow him can see what is happening and know what is coming. When the end comes, it is stranger and more haunting than anything that came before.
After the Dragon falls, the story does not end. Instead, it transforms. The age of heroes gives way to the age of heirs, and the passage from Wei to Jin completes the long arc that began in a peach garden with three men and an oath. The Three Kingdoms are gone. What they represented endures to this day.
Over the last seven weeks, Castalia House has translated approximately 10 million words from over 100 foreign language works into English. Most of these works have never before been translated into English, including the complete ouvres of major authors like Benito Perez Galdos, Eiji Yoshikawa, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Naoki Sanjugo, and Nomoro Kido. They also include never-before-seen military analyses of historic Japanese battles like Sekigahara, Nagashino, and the Korean Campaign published by the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army, to say nothing of never-before-translated biographies of historic Japanese figures and long-lost Spanish Church histories.
At some point in the next two weeks, Castalia House will launch Castalia Unlimited, which is designed to be a significant improvement on Kindle Unlimited. It is not a store. We will not offer single books for sale there and we are not attempting to compete with Amazon. What we will offer is a steady and relentless supply of high-quality literature from the public domain of every major literary language on Earth, including English, although the widespread availability from free sites like Project Gutenberg is why we will not focus on English originals. And while we had no intention of making it exclusive, due to the new Amazon KDP publishing limits, we anticipate a growing number of books that will be exclusively available at CU.
You can now sign up and register for an account at Castalia Unlimited. All you need to do is provide a username, and email address, and a password, and we’ll send you back an email to confirm your email address. When the site goes live, you’ll be the first to be notified. And while I’m not going to say anything more about it at the moment, I will say to be sure to sign up if you’re a subscriber to Library, History, Libraria, Cathedra, or Chateau… you are not likely to regret it.
Also, be sure to check your spam and your junk folders if the confirmation email hasn’t arrived within five minutes or so. And finally, not only are print editions coming, they are already here.
Never before translated, coming soon to bookstores near you.
We’re expanding the translation and publication program to speeds that the conventional distribution simply cannot handle. We’re also taking a poll on how many books we have to have on the shelf to interest people in access to the rapidly growing library. If you are a reader, please visit Castalia Library and answer the one-question survey there. There is no correct answer; if you’re not interested, then please let us know. If you’re an inveterate KU subscriber who needs at least one million books before you’ll bother, let us know that too.
And thanks to all the existing subscribers for your support. This week’s book has already gone out to you.
Since we remain limited to publishing ten books per week on Amazon, the complete, unabridged set of Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms will not be available until next Friday. But it was a very productive week nevertheless, since six of the ten books released have never been available in English before; I particularly recommend The Mystery Planet Gan for anyone who enjoys classic science fiction of the Heinlein juvenile variety.
While the focus on published books was heavy on the Japanese this week, don’t be misled into thinking that the released books represent the fullness of our translation efforts, as we’re now increasing the translation rate to up to 30 books per week in preparation for the launch of Castalia Unlimited, our subscription-only, DRM-free epub store that we expect to launch in October with more than 500 titles available by the end of 2026. Please note that everyone who is a paid subscriber to the Castalia Library will have access to it from the start in case you want to avail yourselves of the weekly ebook release in the interlude.
We also will be announcing three print editions of Natsume Soseki novels, Kokoro, Botchan, and Sanshiro in the coming week, and we’re now working on the print edition of a two-volume set of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto by Eiji Yoshikawa, so rest assured that traditional readers will not be left out.
