Tag: Castalia House

On the Existence of Gods

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is the response to a public challenge posed by Dr. PZ Myers, a militant atheist who claimed to have never encountered any good arguments for the existence of gods. It is a competitive discourse between a Christian and an atheist, each of whom argue for their position on the subject, after which the arguments are adjudicated by a team of three judges, a Christian, an agnostic, and an atheist, before additional arguments are presented.

The format is compelling and the results are at times surprising, as the discussion takes unexpected twists and turns, while the judges exhibit ruthless impartiality as they criticize the arguments of both sides without mercy or favor. Vox Day, the author of The Irrational Atheist, presents the Christian perspective, while Dominic Saltarelli argues for the atheist position. The debate is wide-ranging and intelligent, but remains civil throughout, even as the momentum swings in favor of one side, and then the other. It also includes an appendix that addresses the argument for a science-based morality presented by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is a compelling test of how open the reader’s mind is to the various possibilities of reality, and is a worthy addition to the long history of Man’s contemplation of his own existence in the face of the divine.

From the reviewers:

  • This is the first thing that I’ve read in a very long time that actually had new, novel, and interesting arguments – and both authors achieved this, on both sides of the debate. I find myself giving this book five stars purely for the astonishing
    achievement of presenting novel arguments. After two thousand years of
    debating the topic, that’s a remarkable achievement.
  • Watching a relentlessly logical mind like Vox Day at work is a sight to behold.
  • I enjoyed it very much, not least for the subtlety of the arguments.
    This is a really enjoyable intellectual battle between a believer and an atheist which has the very unusual distinction, in such battles, of being courteous, humorous, and on a high intellectual level.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS is 105 pages, $4.99, and DRM-free.

Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright

The small island of Sark in the English Channel is the last feudal government in Europe. By law, no motor vehicles run on the road, and no lights burn at night. Only the lord of the island may keep hounds.Into the strange, high house of Wrongerwood wanders Hal Landfall, penniless graduate student at Magdalen College, looking for his missing friend Manfred Hathaway, who has just inherited the lordship, the house, and the island. What he finds instead is the lovely, green-eyed Laurel, a beautiful girl from Cornwall who is Manfred’s wife-to-be. 

There is said to be a haunted chamber in the house, erected by Merlin in ancient days, where a man who enters remembers his true and forgotten self. When Hal and Laurel step in, they remember, with fear and wonder, a terrible truth they must forget again when they step outside.

From the reviews:

  • “A wonderfully creepy, profound, sad and yet uplifting story. Wright’s latest is another fantastic and inventive piece from an author whose imaginative faculties boggle the mind.”
  • “There are few authors who can maintain extremely high 5-star quality in
    every single piece of work they produce. JCW is one of the very few
    grand-masters who manages to pull this off consistently.”
  • “It was a roller coaster ride, and I mean that in a great way. Few works have affected me like this novel.  I quit reading it twice in order to think about things.”

Iron Chamber of Memory, John C. Wright’s latest novel, is now available exclusively on Amazon. It is 242 pages, retails for $4.99, and is DRM-free.

A few things

If you’re looking for a job and you’re interested in this one, email me with NC in the subject:

Senior Linux Administrator – RHEL preferred by not required. Central NC. On-site only; no remote option.

Okay, so we’re good on Iron Chamber and Existence reviewers, thank you. However, we still need another PHP volunteer or two for a few weeks on Project Big Fork.

Future and current attractions

For all that we haven’t had any new releases, Castalia House has been extremely busy. We have a number of new projects underway, a number of new authors, and the blog has continued to grow steadily under the leadership of Jeffro.

It has taken longer than expected, but we have finally finished what is certain to be regarded as a tour de force, which is to say, John C. Wright’s latest novel. It’s a standalone, and once you read it, you’ll understand what he meant when he said that it came to him in a dream. It’s not a big book like Somewhither, but it is one that you’ll almost certainly want to read more than once. Iron Chamber of Memory will be coming out this month; if you’re a New Release subscriber, keep an eye on your emails next week. And if you’re not, well, then you should probably consider subscribing.

It won’t be out quite as soon, but also en route is the debate between Dominic Saltarelli and I concerning the existence of gods. We’ve always planned to pick up the debate again one day, but after reading the intriguing debate between Umberto Eco and Cardinal Martini, I realized that a) our debate was already longer, b) it was more conclusive, and c) it was arguably even more interesting, if perhaps not quite so erudite. So, On the Existence of Gods will be released later this month, complete with the commentary from all of the judges who didn’t go off the reservation and declare themselves the winner.

Speaking of which, if the agnostic judge doesn’t send me his additional notes soon, the book will have go to out without them. And, simply because the question is bound to arise, no, I am not even close to being done with A Sea of Skulls yet. You may now proceed with the inevitable George RR Martin comparisons….

And finally, I am very pleased to be able to announce that the Compost Everything audiobook, written and narrated by David the Good, is now available on Amazon and Audible. It is three hours of gardening genius that contains everything you need to get rid of your enemies forever.

Compost Everything: the movie

The 2016 Home Grown Food Summit is coming up in just a few days. It features a bunch of presentations by expert gardeners, farmers, herbalists and homesteaders, including Castalia author David the Good, who decided to use the opportunity as a chance to directly demonstrate some of the crazy composting methods in Compost Everything by creating Compost Everything: The Movie.

No word on whether he actually demonstrates the use of human corpses to feed his zucchini or not. But if you want to find out, sign up and see the all the presentations for free.

There Will Be War Volume IX

In many ways, the first nine volumes of There Will Be War were a chronicle of the Cold War; reading those earlier volumes published in the 1980s is a literal education in both the events and the psychologies of that time. Volume IX, which was originally subtitled After Armageddon, was published just as the Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing, a process that was much more dangerous than most of us were aware at the time, or realize today.

As with the previous eight volumes, Jerry Pournelle assembled a formidable list of contributors for There Will Be War Volume IX, including John Brunner, Edward P. Hughes, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Norman Spinrad, among others. A necessary word of warning to those with younger readers: the Spinrad story “Journals of the Plague Years”, while an excellent reminder of the AIDS fears of the late 1980s, is exceedingly dark, violent, and most definitely R-rated.

There Will Be War Volume IX is 433 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $4.99 on Amazon.

Note to New Release subscribers: if you don’t have an email in your inbox concerning Volume IX by noon EST and you’ve been having trouble receiving the emails despite being sure that you’re a subscriber, get in touch and I’ll send you the link to the bonus book. It is a pre-release version of what I believe is a new Jerry Pournelle book.

Expanding the audio front

A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind Audible – Unabridged. Martin van Creveld (Author), Jon Mollison (Narrator).

There are few better suited to write the history of strategy and
military thought than Dr. Martin van Creveld, who has been a significant
contributor to the literature of war. A professor emeritus at the
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Dr. van Creveld is one of the world’s
leading writers on military history and strategy, with a special
interest in the future of war. He is fluent in Hebrew, German, Dutch,
and English and has authored more than 20 books, including the
influential Technology and War: 2000 BC to the Present (1988), The Transformation of War (1991), and The Culture of War
(2010). He is known for his development of the concept of
“nontrinitarian” warfare as well as contributing two books to the 4GW
canon.


Featuring a foreword by Dr. Jerrry Pournelle, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind
begins with the Chinese military literature, then reviews the Greek,
Roman, and Byzantine works before proceeding to the Middle Ages. From
Machiavelli and Montecuccoli to Guibert and Frederick the Great, van
Creveld chronicles the gradual transition from medieval to Napoleonic
warfare and onward into the nuclear age and the rise of ISIS.

We’re very pleased to announce our second audio book, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind, and to be able to let you know that many more are on the way, including Awake in the Night Land, SJWs Always Lie, and There Will Be War Vol. X. And if you haven’t heard it yet, you’ll likely want to check out the audio sample of Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America as well.

Our goal is to have all Castalia House books available in audio by the end of 2016. I know most of the readers of this text-heavy blog prefer ebooks to audio, but if you’ve got friends who prefer the latter, do us a favor and let them know about our audiobook line.

The new sheriff

In order to better focus my activities in the coming year, I have relinquished my responsibilities as the manager of the Castalia House blog. If you’d like to see who is going to do a much better job of running it than I did, visit the CH blog to see who has been named the new Blog Editor at Castalia House.

Mark my words. In two years, the Castalia House blog is going to be the best and most popular SF/F and gaming blog. There are few pleasures as satisfying as handing off responsibility to someone who is more capable than you are.

Traffic report 2015

The growth in site traffic this year was more than expected, as a surprising number of people initially stopped by to see what was going on with the Hugo Awards in August and then stuck around for the remainder of the year. Last year we saw a single 1.5-million pageview month; this year we had 10 in a row. All of the growth was at VP, as AG was pretty flat due to my sporadic posting there. But as was the case last year, 2015 finished very strong; December was not only up 30 percent over last December, but was the second-most-highly-trafficked month of the year.

In 2015, Vox Popoli had 16,211,875 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,565,094 for a total of 20,776,969 Google pageviews. The blogs are now running at a average rate of 56,923 daily pageviews. And yes, I do find it amusing that the blogs are now seeing considerably more genuine traffic than the “extraordinary amount” a certain SF blogger once lied about having. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622
2015: 20,776,969

Thank you all for the part you have played in making that happen. However, there are some more important numbers that merit mention. 2015 ended with 465 Vile Faceless Minions pledging their mindless obedience to the Supreme Dark Lord and preparing for battle in 2016. Expect heavier use this year, VFM, as the SJWs react to our media offensive in a variety of means both fair and foul.

On Twitter, I ended the year with 6,230 followers and 14.628 million impressions for 2015. Not bad, but I can clearly put in a little more effort on that front.

Castalia House grew from 21 books published to 37, including 5 in print and 1 in audiobook. Book sales increased 145 percent and no less than six category bestsellers were published. We also added three editors, an Editor-at-Large, an Audio Editor, and a Blog Editor; see the Castalia blog later today for more details there. Speaking of the Audio Editor, the audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible and Amazon, and is already one of the top 50 Philosophy audiobooks. We expect even faster growth for Castalia in 2016 with the release of upcoming books such as Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright, Clio and Me by Martin van Creveld, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep by Josh Young, and There Will Be War Vol. XI by Jerry Pournelle, among others.

And yes, one of those others will be A Sea of Skulls.

Thank you for your interest, even if it is no more than morbid
curiosity, thank you for your support, and while 2015 was certainly intriguing, I believe 2016 is going to be absolutely extraordinary.