THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It featured some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II, and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Hide and Seek” in Volume III . Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova.
THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VI is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 25 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battleground” by Gregory and James Benford, “The Eyes of Argos” by Harry Turtledove, “The Highest Treason” by Randall Garrett, “Crown of Thorns” by Edward P. Hughes, and “See Now, a Pilgrim” by Gordon Dickson. My personal favorite in this volume is “Nonlethal” by DC Poyer.
New Release subscribers, be sure to check your emails, as the bonus book is an especially good one this time around. Also, I’d like to encourage fans of the series to leave reviews for the benefit of those who are not familiar with it; some of the previous volumes are pretty scanty in this regard.
When I lived in Uganda there was an old joke that would routinely do the rounds:
“In Africa, what’s the difference between a tourist and a racist?”
Answer: “Two weeks.”
Occasionally I would recount this joke to a particularly inane group of Swedes who were about to depart for a gorilla trekking excursion into the remote Bwindi forest. They would get all self-righteous and mutter at my blatant prejudice and soon after they would depart. It was not uncommon to bump into them again after they had returned from their excursion.
“Ya, now your joke, we understands.”
Like all good jokes its premise is founded in truth and also of shared experience.
“The Missionaries,” by Owen Stanley, depicts a fictitious land known as Elephant Island, located somewhere in the confines of the Bismarck Sea, its people closely resembling the ways and mannerisms of Papua New Guinea. As colonialism no longer allows the natives to practice their favorite pastime of headhunting, the burden of keeping law and order falls to a small group of misfit expats, who despite their individual shortcomings, keenly understand the idiosyncrasies of the local population….
I have not enjoyed a novel as much as this in a very long time. In fact, this novel could not have been published by the regular publishing industry as it skewers the type of people who haunt that industry as much as NGOs in misbegotten locales in the far corners of the globe. It is a credit to Castalia House that the author has sought them out and I sense that this will be a breakthrough work not just for Stanley but for this small publishing house as well.
It appears his instincts are correct. Not only have we recently signed a number of new authors about whom we are extremely enthusiastic, but some of the existing authors have stepped up their game as well. Just as Mutiny in Space will not be our only SF juvenile and Brings the Lightning will not be our only Western, The Missionaries will not be our only literary satire.
When academic theories collide with practical reality, fun is had by all and sundry. The Missionaries is a hilarious book that will have you turning the page to see how badly a UN bureaucrat’s quest to modernize a distant tribe can go — and believe me, it goes really wrong. It shows the limits of the academic way of thinking while making you laugh all the way.
In the book, Dr. Prout is on a mission from the UN to develop the tribes of Elephant Island. As he does this, he finds himself going up against Roger Fletcher, a local administrator who prefers to let the tribes live as they always have, with him smoothing over any disputes. Despite Fletcher’s crude behavior and jokes about the natives’ culture, he clearly understands and respects them on a fundamental level. Dr. Prout, on the other hand, strides in like a know-it-all, spouting a mix of UN propaganda and left-wing orthodoxy while making no effort to understand the people in front of him. Most of the book’s humor comes from the collision of Fletcher’s practicality and Prout’s theoretical thinking…. I would proudly say that I loved the book. Highly recommended.
This book is absolutely hilarious and a must buy. 6 stars out of 5.
I cannot praise the craftsmanship that went into the plot too highly; the entire novel is as tight-knit as a Chekov short story.
The way the bureaucrat reinterprets everything to fit his academic theories will leave you rolling on the floor.
HitchHikers Guide meets social justice warriors in a United Nations 3rd world development project.
I think it should now be clear that we have not exaggerated, in the least, how good this book is. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, you really, truly, should. When readers are openly comparing it to Voltaire, Chekov, and Douglas Adams, you know it is a classic-in-the-making.
As numerous people have been asking me the same question, let me be perfectly clear: ALL CASTALIA HOUSE BOOKS WILL APPEAR IN PRINT, SOONER OR LATER. As various facts on the ground have changed, we have modified our original ebook-mostly strategy accordingly and will now be publishing print editions of all our books.
To be specific, most books will appear in both hardcover and paperback in our standard size, 8.5 x 5.5. They will generally run from 12.99 to 16.99 for paperbacks and 19.99 to 24.99 for hardcovers, depending upon the pagecount. We will NOT be doing the Amazon matchbook thing because our ebooks come out first. Nor will we provide any information about when any given print edition will come out because there are too many factors to make any prediction meaningful.
Larger books, such as the There Will Be War omnibuses and the Selenoth books, will appear in both hardcover and paperback in our large size, 9.2 x 6.1. All hardcovers in both sizes will be casebound. Smaller books, like Mutiny in Space, will be paperback only, but will be collected in three-volume 8.5 x 5.5 hardcover omnibuses.
We are ramping up our print production capabilities thanks to our indefatigable Production Editor and a number of volunteers. As noted in the title, Brings the Lightning is now available in paperback for $12.99.The next books to appear in print editions will be:
Iron Chamber of Memory, John C. Wright (HC,PB) Mutiny in Space, Rod Walker (PB) CTRL ALT REVOLT!, Nick Cole (HC,PB) The End of the World as We Knew It, Nick Cole (HC,PB)
All four of these books are expected to be available in July. At our current rate of production, we anticipate releasing two ebooks and four print books for a total of ten editions every month.
This is a book that touched me more then I thought it would. For most of my career in the Marine Corps, I was fighting nasty little low level insurgencies. Honestly most of these had been going on before we showed up and continued after we left. They were just run of the mill tribal conflicts that flared up and died down again of their accord when the world wasn’t looking.
But when the world was looking it was time to send in the Marines “Hoo-Rah!” I didn’t mind overmuch. It was a life of adventure and I was young enough and dumb enough to enjoy it. It was why I joined the Corps in the first place. And I am reasonably certain we did more good than harm. The people we were dealing with understood, respected and even honored a warrior ethic. We were comprehensible to them, even if the motives for our arrival looked pretty hazy to them
We made some effort to get to the know locals and listen to their problems and grievances. Occasionally we would dig wells for them, which was usually appreciated. Although they always wondered what it would cost them in the end.
Sadly what it would usually cost them was becoming a UN protectorate.
The UN assessment teams that would follow on our heels…after we had settled things down naturally…were an inexplicable plague, the likes of which the poor bastards had never known.
The best of the UN Poo-bahs had but one purpose and that was to make sure the UN got the credit for what we were doing. The average ones would try to put us in UN Baby Blues, constantly lecture us on how to do our jobs and saddle us with insane Rules of Engagement, (bottom line don’t do anything gross like shoot back). The worst of them would have had the colonial government of Leopold II reeling in horror.
The infuriating thing was sitting helplessly by and watching the UN get away with doing these things. I have no idea why the United Nations still enjoys the kind of prestige that it does at that point. It ranks as equal members first world democracies and third world kleptocrats. It’s Human Rights Council is a by word for farce. It’s a dumping ground for diplomats that couldn’t make it in their own countries diplomatic corps. This is an oligarchy of bureaucrats with no one to answer to and yet, it pretends it’s the best that humanity has to offer.
As you may have guessed a book about United Nations high commissioners getting what they deserve is little short of porn to me…. I highly recommend it.
This is a particularly interesting review, because both the reviewer and the author definitely know very well whereof they write. And while it may strike those who have not yet read The Missionaries that I am perhaps overreacting to it or praising it too highly, all I can say is that you will simply have to read the book before reaching any such conclusion.
To put it plainly, no one writes books like this anymore. They don’t because they simply can’t; virtually none of today’s authors possess the necessary inside experience of the NGO world combined with an intrinsically skeptical outsider’s perspective on it. This is a unique snapshot of a specific point in time; just as Catch-22 could not have been written without Joseph Heller’s experience of war and all the madness of the military bureaucracy that goes with it, there is no one, besides Owen Stanley, who could have written this satirical take on the UN’s quixotic attempt to bring the modern world to the natives of Elephant Island.
UPDATE: Thank you all again, for making The Missionaries #1 in Satire. Not bad, considering that we are reliably informed that the editor doesn’t even know what it is. It is also #1 in Humor, and, I suspect those who have read it will agree, deservedly so.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509 Paid in Kindle Store #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Satire #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Satire
The Missionaries is a story of the collision of three cultures. A brilliant tale of ineptitude, self-righteousness, and human folly, it combines the mordant wit of W. Somerset Maugham with a sense of humor reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse.
When Dr. Sydney Prout is named the head of the United Nations mission to Elephant Island, he believes he is more than ready to meet the challenge of guiding its primitive inhabitants into the post-Colonial era, and eventually, full independence. But neither his many academic credentials nor the Journal of Race Relations have prepared Dr. Prout to reckon with the unrepentant bloody-mindedness of the natives, or anticipate the inventive ways their tribal philosophers will incorporate the most unlikely aspects of modern civilization into their religious lore and traditional way of life.
Author Owen Stanley is an Australian explorer, a philosopher, and a poet who speaks seven languages. He is at much at home in the remote jungles of the South Pacific as flying his Staudacher aerobatic plane, deep-sea diving, or translating the complete works of Charles Darwin into Tok Pisin.
We release a book or two every month, up to five or six if you include print editions and audiobooks. And while I always put up posts here to let you know about them, I seldom play favorites or make a hard pitch for a particular book.
But if you read just one Castalia House book, The Missionaries is the one you really ought to read. It is, in the collective opinion of everyone at Castalia involved in the production, one of the two best books we have published to date, the other one being John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, if not the best.
The Missionaries is not science fiction. It is not military strategy. It is neither history nor political philosophy, and while it does contain a single reference to gardening, it definitely isn’t anything an expert gardener such as David the Good would recommend. We didn’t even have an internal category in which to list the book except “fiction”. It’s the first purely literary novel we’ve published, and yet, it is exactly the sort of book Castalia House was created to publish in the first place, the kind of book that no other publisher would ever dare to touch. The Missionaries is a satirical novel in the vein of Evelyn Waugh or Joseph Heller and it is not an exaggeration to say it is capable of one day being considered a classic.
Owen Stanley’s debut novel is intelligent, it is erudite, it is educated, it is almost astonishingly offensive to delicate modern political sensibilities, and above all, it is funny. One would have to either be perfectly politically correct or totally devoid of any sense of humor to read this book without occasionally finding oneself laughing aloud, usually in disbelief. If you are a reader, then you must read this book. Seriously, it’s that good.
But you need not take my word for it. From the early reviews ofThe Missionaries:
The author, Owen Stanley, writes in a rich, flamboyant style that I associate with the best early to mid-20th century writers, but without overdoing it and spoiling the story with grandiose verbiage.
The work at hand is strongly recommended as thought-provoking, crafted with tremendous skill and control, brilliant in its choice of targets, and uproariously absurd.
The Missionaries is both a rollicking, rip-roaring, old-fashioned great white hunter adventure as well as a hilariously stinging modern satire.
It’ll probably be the funniest book you read all year.
This one is Castalia’s best yet.
UPDATE: Thank you! The Missionaries is now the #1 bestseller in Literary Satire.
We’re looking for 2-3 layout artists who have Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat and are good with tight detail work to help us get caught up on our print editions. Mac or PC is okay, but it has to be Photoshop and Acrobat proper, not any of the various alternatives. Illustrator can be replaced with a similar vector-based alternative. We’ll pay up to $100 per PB/HC pair; no design is required as we’ll provide the covers and the basic spine designs. The PB/HC will always be the same size.
We have a number of important announcements coming over the next few weeks, which means we want to increase our production capabilities. If you think you’re able and you’re interested, email me with LAYOUT in the title.
I’m looking for volunteers to review our next novel, which is of a rather more literary strain than most. Think W. Somerset Maugham meets an even more anti-PC Douglas Adams. It is a special novel, for more reasons than one, and that’s why I’m being particular about what sort of reviewers we are seeking. We want the book to be judged on its merits by those most competent to do so.
Please only volunteer if you’ve read at least two Maugham novels or collections of his short stories, you can hop right on it, you have an Amazon account, and you are willing and able to post a review. Please don’t volunteer if you primarily read SF/F, if you are one of those readers who has your own personal rating system and only give five stars to Shakespeare or deducts stars because you don’t like the cover or whatever. That’s fine and all, but it’s simply not relevant to Amazon reviews.
Thank you. I’ll delete this post when we have enough.
UPDATE:
In addition to Maugham, those who have read and appreciate Nabokov and Waugh (or other similar authors) should also feel free to volunteer.
The 4GW Handbook is now available in audiobook. Narrated by the quintessential voice professional, Bob Allen, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of war. 3 hours and 54 minutes.
For those of you who prefer your books in print, I’m pleased to be able to let you know that Peter Grant’s new and very well-regarded Western novel, Brings the Lightning, is now available in hardcover. Book One of The Ames Archives is 272 pages and retails for $19.99.
The production team is working hard at bringing all of our 40+ full-length ebooks into print; our current goal is to publish two ebooks and four print books per month. The next books to go into print will be John C. Wright’s Iron Chamber of Memory and the omnibus hardcover of There Will Be War Vols IX and X. We also intend to re-release A Throne of Bones in a new, royal octavo editions in July, case-bound hardcover and paperback.
From the reviews:
Lean and taut. A tale told well. Grant has written an old fashioned western, and the subject fits his writing style well. His prose is spare and straightforward, without any extraneous elements, flowery descriptions, or narrative asides. The plot is straightforward, yet interesting. And, best of all, he’s easy to read.
I’m primarily a science fiction, fantasy, and self help reader, but found this book very enjoyable. It was thoughtful and steady, some twists, with good solid characters and believable action. Usually westerns just don’t ring true like this one does. I’ve recently read The Heart of Everything That Is and Empire of the Summer Moon, both non-fiction, and both fully supportive background for the story in Brings the Lightning. I’m hoping that there is another one in the works.
Wonderful! I am thrilled that a real western has been written once more. This book rings true to me having grown up amongst the last remnants of the world Grant writes about.
Zane Grey has a peer! Mr. Grant, author of several other novels, brings his expertise to bear on this authentic Western. The characters are genuine, and the writing is true to life, with historically accurate details. You’ll like the characters, you’ll like the writing, and you’ll like the story. I can’t help but compare Brings the Lightning to Zane Grey’s novels, because that’s the only other author whose writings are comparable. HIGHLY recommended!
Author Peter Grant has done his homework, and it shows. Before the main journey even begins Ames has to deal with bushwhackers, Union occupation, and the aftermath of the Missouri guerrila war and Bleeding Kansas. The collection of colorful characters are entertaining too, including cheating gamblers, corrupt army officer, and the lecherous husband of a schoolmarm. Grant’s descriptions really add a “you are there” feel to the book. As someone who grew up on the plains, his descriptions of the terrain and dangers were spot-on. Grant also provides great how-to details, such as moving and defending a wagon train on open ground. Gun buffs will love the trip to the Nashville gunsmith early in the book.
Volume VI is now out! Seven down, two to go.
