Tag: Castalia House

The Green Thumb of Evil

You didn’t see this one coming. WE certainly didn’t see it coming. Apparently Castalia House isn’t merely disrupting the entire book distribution system, we’re throwing out pretty much all the rules for how a reasonable publishing house is supposed to operate. Which is the only rational way to explain our latest book, COMPOST EVERYTHING: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting by David the Good.

You know I will not lie to you. I do not know a single damn thing about gardening, composting, or pretty much any activity that involves getting my hands dirty with anything other than human blood or gunpowder. Nor do I have any interest in growing fruit, vegetables, or anything beyond green grass in the yard. That being said, COMPOST EVERYTHING is actually a surprisingly entertaining read, mostly due to the fact that the author, David the Good, is quite clearly insane. I mean, this man not only knows more about gardening than I do about games, he experiments with his garden in ways that would cause any reasonable wife to not only leave, but file a restraining order and move to the barren land of Mordor where nothing green ever grows.

After reading the book, one thing was very clear: this man’s wife deserves a medal and an on-call therapist for life. The only reason I gave it the subtitle “The Good Guide to Extreme Composting” was because “The Good Guide to Certifiably Insane and Quite Possibly Prohibited in All 50 States Composting” didn’t fit. Extreme doesn’t even begin to describe it.

That being said, the man definitely knows his business, and any book that can actually hold my attention about freaking gardening is one that is well worth publishing. I have absolutely no idea if there is even a single reader here who is interested in growing orange trees in asphalt parking lots in the Arctic, but I am convinced that if you follow the directions given in this book, you can probably do it.

COMPOST EVERYTHING: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting by David the Good is 113 pages and is available for $2.99 on Amazon.

Sci Phi Journal #5

SCI PHI Journal #5 is out. This issue is particularly strong on the non-fiction, even the book reviews are fascinating. I particularly enjoyed THE PHILOSOPHY OF SERENITY by Anthony Marchetta, an excerpt from which is posted below.

SCI PHI Journal #5 is available at Castalia House in EPUB or MOBI formats for $3.99. It is also available on Amazon. SCI PHIL Journals 1-4 are also available.

From THE PHILOSOPHY OF SERENITY

“Joss Whedon is a famously virulent and ultra-feminist atheist. He is also, of course, an excellent writer, and, in my experience, good writers will tend to echo known truths about human nature even when they don’t necessarily want to face it themselves. You can see a lot of this in atheist Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide books are really about a man staring into the void and seeing nothing back. The only way to keep from crying in the face of such nothingness is to laugh. Adams recognized this, and it’s this philosophical underpinning that makes the series so brilliant.

“And so it is with Joss Whedon’s Serenity. The real theme of the movie is man’s underlying need for faith. Shepherd Book says it the most clearly when he tells Mal, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it”  Of course, there’s something deeper going on with that line that Whedon probably never intended. He is literally saying that it’s better to believe in a lie than to look into the void and find nothing; it’s better just to make up a substitute to fool yourself.

“This isn’t only an atheist idea. C.S. Lewis explores this concept in the climactic scene of the fourth Chronicles of Narnia book, The Silver Chair. The character of Puddlegum is talking to the Lady of the Green Kirtle. The children and he are being enchanted to believe that the real world is only make-believe and the dark underworld they’re in is the only world that is:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

“This seems to us like a radical line of thought. It’s practically blasphemous by modern standards. Lewis is literally saying that it’s better to believe in a lie than believe in nothing at all. But does Whedon really say anything different?

“Shepherd Book is supposedly a Christian. This entails belief in things like the Resurrection of Christ and the importance of evangelization and repentance. Mal is supposedly an atheist. Book’s number one priority, then, should be to convert Mal to Christianity. But that’s not what he does! For Book, being a Christian is of secondary importance to Mal leaving behind the black hole of unbelief he has fallen into. Book doesn’t care what Mal believes in. Like Lewis, Book recognizes that even believing in a lie is better than believing in nothing. Whedon, an excellent writer, senses this even if he doesn’t state the idea outright. Atheism as a worldview is ultimately dead; the only way to survive it is to avoid its implications.

“And so Serenity is really Mal’s story about finding a meaning and a purpose to his life in the absence of a God to guide him.”

Smells like success

This review of “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it:

I’m going to start with short stories, because they’re, well, short, and with the last story on the ballot and then work my way up.  So the first story is “Turncoat,” by Steve Rzasa. A sentient warship and some post-humans are battling against another group, people who have decided not to make the jump to post-humanity.  The warship goes from being annoyed at the messy, pesky humans to championing them (though I’m not sure where in the story this switch occurs) and defects at the end, bringing along with it (him? her?) its superior hardware and some useful intel about the other side.

I’m going to take a slight detour here, though I promise I’ll get back to the review soon.  When I was in high school I did or said something that got me sent to detention, a closet-sized room where, oddly, someone had left a stack of Analogs.  I had just started reading science fiction, and of course my first  thought was, Is this supposed to be punishment?

But I ended up not really liking most of the stories.  They emphasized hardware, and not even interesting hardware.  The characters were cardboard, the stories predictable (partly because they all ended with humanity triumphing), the style ranged from serviceable to really pretty bad.

This was late-period John Campbell I’m talking about.  (Yes, I’m old.)  I will stipulate that the guy did some good things for sf in his prime, but something had happened along the way, some hardening of attitudes and an inability to tell when a story had gone bad.  Humanity had to be shown to triumph in every story, for example, to be superior to anything thrown against it, which pretty much let the air out of any balloon of tension.

So, as I hope I’ve made clear, when I say “Turncoat” is a perfectly adequate late-period Campbellian story I don’t mean it as a compliment.  You can’t even say the characters are cardboard, since there are no characters, just a warship that, for the most part, proceeds along strict logical lines.  There’s no one to like, or even hate, no one to identify with or root for, nothing at stake for the reader.

But think about everything that’s happened since Campbell.  The New Wave (does anyone remember the New Wave?  Yes, I’m old), feminism, cyberpunk, counter-cyberpunk, a fresh infusion of writers who are not white or straight or able-bodied.  This would have been an average story in the late sixties, but now, nearly fifty years later, it’s stale and dated.

Rzasa hasn’t even caught up with the second of these new categories.  “Our founders were the men who…”  “Posthuman Man…” “Not content with setting Man on his new evolutionary path…”  After Ancillary Justice — hell, after The Left Hand of Darkness — this reads very oddly.

 Now consider Castalia House’s mission statement:

“The books that we publish honor the traditions and intellectual
authenticity exemplified by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis,
Robert E. Howard, G.K. Chesterton, and Hermann Hesse. We are consciously
providing an alternative to readers who increasingly feel alienated
from the nihilistic, dogmatic science fiction and fantasy being
published today. We seek nothing less than a Campbellian revolution in
genre literature.”

That review is supposed to be a negative one, but it sure sounds to me as if we’re on the right track. Now consider these three reviews, the first two from SJWs, the second from a neutral party.

Daveon on May 4, 2015 at 11:46 am said:

I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.

I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate “Turncoat” as well? Another SJW posted a similar review:

In the story, an artificial intelligence serves the post-humans in a far-future war against ordinary humans. As the title suggests, it chooses to switch sides in the end. That’s it.

I think this is a quite awfully-written story with a heavy-handed delivery of plot points and a lot of infodumping. You can see the “surprise” conclusion of the story coming from miles away (or by reading the title, actually). A very boring read, overall.

The one thing that could have made the story at least slightly interesting if done well was the characterization of the AI and the post-humans. Sadly, that was crappy and formulaic as well. The protagonist doesn’t really feel like he belongs to the far-future, or the future at all, for that matter. The black-and-white pontificating (a term lifted from Secritcrush) has a definite vibe of the past in it.

A black-and-white approach to any war of conflict just feels silly and makes the whole world of the story unrealistic for me. Now that I was doing some googling, I noticed that Hugo-nominated Puppy-fanwriter Jeffro Johnson is praising this story because it offers a “concise description of real Christian religious experience”. That’s an interesting thought and maybe some people do enjoy over-simplified morality dramas in 2015, but I certainly don’t.

This is certainly going below no award.

Addendum

The vibe of the past I was writing about arises from the protagonist’s
moralistic attitudes which bring to mind the papery characters of old
fiction who don’t really resemble real people (or real consciousnesses
in this case). Also, I think there was no futuristic sensawunda in the
far-future fight scenes when compared with, say, Greg Bear’s Hardfought
(that’s a far future war story I think is very good, even though
military SF is not really my cup of cat crackers)…. On a second thought, let’s also try to give the Hugo finalists an
unscientific numeral score on the range of 1-10 in order to make
comparing them easier (if unscientific). “Turncoat” gets 2.

On the other hand, Steve Moss reached a very different conclusion:

I loved Turncoat. Beware- SPOILERS:

SPOILERS

To correct something, there are two types of machine intelligence in Turncoat. The Uploaded, which is as you described, humans who have placed their consciousness into machines. The other is true artificial machine intelligence.

The antagonist is Alpha 7 Alpha. He is one of the Uploaded. He also appears to have carried over many of the negative human emotions such as hate, etc.

The protagonist is X 45 Delta. He is a 42nd generation true artificial intelligence. He’s never had a human body.

What I loved about the story is that the Uploaded have lost their humanity (become inhuman) while the true machine intelligence becomes more humane. X 45 Delta committed his betrayal because, in his words, he “wants to decide the sort of man I will become.”

You are right that he expresses annoyance with his human crew. They are inefficient and filled with inane chatter. He also expresses pride and protective instincts in them, and misses them when they are removed from his ship. All of these things are very human feelings.

Alpha 7 Alpha removes the crew from X 45 Delta to make him more efficient in battle. Which is true, but also a lie, as X 45 Delta notes (he’s learned to lie from the Uploaded, mostly by omission). He deduces that they will be either terminated or uploaded against their will. This is when his metamorphosis from loyal warrior to turncoat begins.

All in all, Turncoat was an excellent story and well worthy of a Hugo nomination. I haven’t read everything (yet), but it may well be my number one pick.

At the end of the day, there isn’t much room for compromise. They hate the actual science fiction we love. We have no interest in or regard for their SJW, non-SF, “science fiction”. We appreciate a genuine sense of wonder. They refer in snarky contempt to “sensawunda”. We believe in the human soul, we believe in God, we believe in higher things,  they believe in “science” and the infinite evil of humanity, to the extent they believe in anything at all.

THERE WILL BE WAR: The ten best stories

This is just my personal list of favorites from Volume I and Volume II. I’m only considering the fiction here, not the essays, articles, or poems.

  1. “Cincinnatus”, Joel Rosenberg, Volume II. This story about a retired, possibly traitorous general brought back for one last command is probably my favorite-ever mil-sf story. As excellent in conception as execution, it has had a distinct influence on the world of Quantum Mortis.
  2. “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen”, William F. Wu, Volume II. The series features several stories from this world where wars are settled by professional gamers. It reads like a prophecy of Sega’s Total War series, but has a haunting edge to it that gives it a timeless feel.
  3. “Superiority”, Arthur C. Clarke, Volume II. A clever and amusing exercise in explaining how technological superiority can be a weakness. Particularly interesting if you’ve read van Creveld’s Technology and War. It’s more relevant than the average general would like to think.
  4. “Ender’s Game”, Orson Scott Card, Volume I. “Ender’s Game”. The original novella. Enough said.
  5. “In the Name of the Father”, Edward P. Hughes, Volume II. This is possibly the most light-hearted post-apocalyptic tale ever told. I like the stories of Barley’s Crossing.
  6. “Time Lag”, Poul Anderson, Volume II. A tribute to the significance of female steadfastness in times of war, as well as an illustration of how time and distance factor into the martial equation.
  7. “His Truth Goes Marching On”, Jerry Pournelle, Volume I. As Tom Kratman once called it, “the Spanish civil war in space”. Philosophically deeper than you might think at first.
  8.  “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, Volume II. A little longer than it needs to be, not quite as artfully written as the others, but an inspirational and optimistic war story.
  9. “Ranks of Bronze” by David Drake, Volume I. Drake does Roman legions playing mercenary for aliens. A little short, but it’s a good battle scene.
  10. “Call Him Lord” by Gorden R. Dickson, Volume I. Less about war than the price of leadership. A bit artificial, but it comes to an emotionally powerful close.

As far as the non-fiction goes, while the articles on High Frontier are fascinating for their historical significance, my favorite is “Proud Legions” by T.R. Fehrenbach, which appears in Volume II. In fact, I have to confess that of the nine volumes of THERE WILL BE WAR, Volume II is my favorite. That is the very high bar that Volume X will attempt to clear.

EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST reviewed

Ann Sterzinger reviews Martin van Creveld’s EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST in a fairly detailed article entitled: “Your Stupid Questions Have No Answers: Martin van Creveld vs. the Chimera of Equality”:

Van Creveld’s Equality is one of Castalia’s most absorbing
releases, if you’re interested in history anyway—past history, not the
historical destiny of your marching-drum ideology—the sort of history
that’s not only full of holes where the victors and the monks wrote over
chunks of the evidence, but the sort of history that, as far as we can tell, indeed has been repeating itself rather drearily.

As van Creveld says in his preface, the histories of our other two
unattainable ideals, liberty and justice, have been written before—or,
rather, attempted; there’s too much to read on all three of these
subjects for one guy to do it at a go. But van Creveld does his best to
describe all our tragic, failed attempts at equality. When we’ve bothered to make an attempt, that is.

Van Creveld also dwells on one of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers:
the tragic failure of the classical fifth-century democracy at Athens.
This was history’s most famous attempt at “one man, one vote on every
issue,” and the resulting polis served as the cradle of the
greatest explosion of civilized thought and art in our history. The
glory lasted all of about a generation and a half, during which time the
Athenian mob destroyed themselves by repeatedly voting to attack their
neighbors at Sparta.

The Spartan attempt at equality, by the way, is more thoroughly given
its due by van Creveld than I’ve seen in any other historical text. He
also includes fresh perspectives on the interesting mishmash that was
feudalism (a derogatory name invented by snooty post-feudalists); Locke
vs. Rousseau vs. Montesquieu; the fitful, failed, and often bloody
attempts of Hellenic city-states to achieve equality after Alexander;
the ironically “vicious inequalities” of communism; the ever-miserable
war of the sexes; and the medieval revolt of the French jacquerie. The book is as rich in historical detail and perspective as it is thick with bitter disappointment.

Over and over again, van Creveld is forced toward the same conclusion: there are hardly ever two individuals who
are equal, much less entire social classes. And as lovely as it may be
to enjoy citizenship (if you can get it) in a relatively egalitarian
city-state, it’s only a matter of time before your polis gets
swallowed up by the greater driving power—a power which may actually be
the result of greater inequality and therefore organization—of a nearby
empire. Take, for instance, the way the squabbling Greek city-states
were swallowed by the burgeoning Macedonians’ power-lust. Alexander the
Great actually managed to co-opt the Greek cultural prestige while
stripping the Greeks of their political sovereignty and moving on to
bulldoze the Middle East.

Oh, and capitalism never helped much. It may have used the traders
and urban islands—which, clinging to the margins of feudalism, added a
dash of meritocracy to the stupid-son mix—to get its momentum going. But
then, says van Creveld, “The shift towards capitalism and absolutism
did not mean that inequality grew less pronounced. On the contrary, the
growing power of the modern state, which in many ways was based on a
firm partnership between the kings and their nobilities, caused it to be
accentuated even more.”

Read the whole thing there. As for the book itself, EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST is available at Amazon and at Castalia House. And speaking of Castalia House, you won’t want to miss Jeffro’s interview with Thomas Mays, US Navy Commander and author of A SWORD INTO DARKNESS:

Jeffro: I have to hand it to you… I was utterly riveted by the scene from your A Sword Into Darkness when they used those fancy missiles of yours on an asteroid for target practice. It’s never crossed my mind that such a thing could be a problem in the first place, much less that a real spaceship would have all manner of ancillary problems to deal with in the process. How did you come up with all of that?

Thomas Mays: You mean in terms of “It’s not like Star Wars, where the target blows up and that’s it?” Well, It’s a question of weapon effects. If you’re going to vaporize something, you have to have a mechanism that can contain the target long enough to apply sufficient energy to break down every molecular bond it has. That’s . . . a LOT of energy and actually very difficult to do. Even with antimatter, the target and the antimatter would tend to blow one another away from contact after only a few micrograms exploded. Aside from my engine (which is a handwavium 1g reaction drive with no reaction mass requirement, used so the story stays exciting (it moves at the speed of plot!)), most of the tech is within the realm of reason.

For the most bang for my buck, I wanted nukes. But nukes don’t work the same way exo-atmospheric. They burn and vaporize up close, and only produce a real blast effect if they blow up inside something. And if you do that, you’re going to have a lot of debris. How do you handle that? Use a different weapon that can reach out and touch someone. So I thought, LASER! But no. Lasers don’t zap things. They burn and vaporize, and they take time and focus. So that means I need big mirrors or lenses, and still the focal length will be relatively small. Lasers weapons are shorter range devices. Kind of like CIWS.

So, I went to my old standby: electromagnetic railguns, which I worked on for my Master’s Degree in Applied Physics. Figure out the proper shell velocity, then figure out your ammo for various effects. Everything in that scene derives from first principles. But I did have a lot of help and reference material from the Atomic Rockets website by Winchell Chung. That helped with a lot of the book’s technical details.

The return of THERE WILL BE WAR

From The Year’s Best Science Fiction to Thieves World, I have always been a fan of anthologies. I find it interesting to read the work of various authors as they address similar topics; in some ways, appearances in anthologies allows the reader to better distinguish the true masters from the journeymen, the stunt writers, the formulaists, and the one-trick ponies. It’s also intriguing to see the difference between authors who are adept with the short form and novelists who really need more textual space within which to work. And of all the anthologies I ever read in my youth, my absolute favorite was THERE WILL BE WAR, created by none other than the science fiction great Dr. Jerry Pournelle himself.

To me, Jerry Pournelle was a near-mythic name that appeared on the shelves of B. Dalton’s like an omnipresent demigod. I enjoyed his non-fiction essays even more than most of the fiction for which he was most famous, and looking back, he probably had as significant an impact on my intellectual development as Milton Friedman, Joseph Schumpeter, or Camille Paglia, not only as a writer, but as an editor. When I first read the first volume of THERE WILL BE WAR, with the unforgettable cover of a white-helmeted spotter calling in orbital artillery, I was deeply impressed by the way in which the essays informed the short stories as well as how the short stories tended to bring the essay subjects to life and make them more relevant to the reader.

And the names! Gordon R. Dickson. Philip K. Dick. Arthur C. Clarke. Poul Anderson. Joel Rosenberg. Robert Silverberg. Joe Haldeman. Niven and Pournelle. What was most impressive, however, was the way in which even the stories by the biggest names were occasionally trumped by then-unfamiliar names like Orson Scott Card, Edward P. Hughes, and above all, William F. Wu. THERE WILL BE WAR ran from 1982 to 1990, and finally came to an end around the same time as the Soviet Union, which had often served as a primary topic in the nine-volume series. It seemed apropos, after all. The Berlin Wall had fallen, an end to history had been reached, the long-warring nations of Europe were heading for monetary union, and, everyone assumed, peaceful political union as well, and many presumed that an end to war as we knew it was in sight as well. There would be no more war.

Being, as readers here know, somewhat of a pessimist when it comes to such utopian claims, reviving THERE WILL BE WAR was one of my first ideas when Castalia House was founded. I contacted Dr. Pournelle about it, but although he generally favored the idea, we never really got around to discussing it very seriously. I went with Plan B and created RIDING THE RED HORSE with LTC Tom Kratman instead. But I still wanted Dr. Pournelle to be involved, as I considered RED HORSE to be the spiritual successor of THERE WILL BE WAR. Upon being asked for a contribution, Dr. Pournelle graciously permitted me to include two of his pieces, a well-known short story set in the CoDominium universe called “His Truth Goes Marching On” and an article on wargame design that I found to be particularly interesting. Tom also obtained a contribution from John Carr, the associate editor on several volumes of THERE WILL BE WAR, including the first one. RIDING THE RED HORSE was published last December and it has been very
well received. Five months after its release, it is still one of the top ten bestsellers in Military Strategy and more than one reviewer has even referred to it as a virtual “tenth volume” of THERE WILL BE WAR.

But the most significant response came from Dr. Pournelle, as after looking over the new anthology, he asked me if Castalia House might be interested in republishing his own out-of-print anthology series. I allowed that, yes, perhaps Castalia might have some modest interest in considering a discussion of the possibility, immediately put it on top of our priority list, and after a few months of hard work from the ad hoc THERE WILL BE WAR team, I am very, very, very pleased to be able to announce not only the republishing of THERE WILL BE WAR Volumes I and II, but also the revival of the THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series with an actual Volume X, edited by Jerry Pournelle, as well. Volume I and Volume II of THERE WILL BE WAR are now available in ebook at Amazon and Castalia House for $4.99 each, and as the following reviewer of Volume I noted, despite being 33 years old, they have a lot to offer the younger generations who never had a chance to read them before. It was very rewarding to read the first review of Volume I from a reader too young to have encountered the original paperbacks.

This book is astonishing. A
collection of short military science-fiction and essays put together in
the early 80s by Jerry Pournelle, the book is older than I am and yet
somehow manages to avoid seeming dated at all. The book was extremely
well-regarded when it came out, and spawned a nine volume series, but
for years has languished in semi-obscurity. How good is it? It’s got
the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, and that’s not
even the best story in the book!

If you’re a younger reader, odds are
you’ve never even heard of half of these writers. And they’re all
good. The stories are diverse, with everything from post-apocalyptic
shootouts to huge sci-fi space battles. Sometimes the heroes win, and
sometimes they don’t. But every time I found myself rooting for them.

But
the real prize of the book is the non-fiction essays, which give a
window into how scary the world was back when the Soviet Union was still
a threat. One of the essays, ‘The Soviet Strategic Threat From Space”,
discusses the end of the world in a cold, scientific manner that’s more
chilling than any fiction could ever be.
 
“There Will Be War”
introduced me to a ton of great new authors, and entire series that I
had no clue even existed. For someone who’s just getting into science
fiction, it’s a wonderful starting point. For veterans, it’s a way to
revisit some of the old greats.

I will post later today at Castalia House about some of my favorites from these first two volumes, but I can assure you that if you enjoyed RIDING THE RED HORSE in any way, shape, or form, you will be find Volume I and Volume II of THERE WILL BE WAR to be very well worth reading. I very highly recommend both volumes.

Amazon (Kindle format)

Castalia House (EPUB and Kindle formats)

FAQ

  •  Will these be released in print versions as well? Yes, in two-volume case laminated omnibus hardcovers. The first will probably appear in the July-August timeframe.
  • When will the next volumes be released? We expect to release Volumes III and IV in company with the VI+VII hardcover.
  • Does this mean the end of RIDING THE RED HORSE? No. RIDING THE RED HORSE Vol. 2 will focus on entirely new fiction. THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. X will consist primarily of Dr. Pournelle’s selections from the best and most significant military fiction published between 1990 and 2015.
  • Who did the covers? Jartstar and Chris came up with the title layout and a new artist, Lars, did the updated 3D images that are homages to the original painted covers. He’ll be doing the entire series. 
  • Can we review the books on Amazon if we bought them from Castalia or read them previously? By all means, please do.

If you want paper

We’ll give you paper. We are but the humble servants of the marketplace.

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War is now available in trade paperback. 592 pages.

Awake in the Night Land is available in hardcover. 342 pages.

The next books to appear in print format will all be in hardcover, and in the following order:

The History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld.

Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld

There Will Be War Volumes I and II by Jerry Pournelle. This will be a single omnibus edition.

There will be THERE WILL BE WAR

File 770 has the scoop:

Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War series is returning to print. All nine volumes will be reissued by Castalia House in ebook and two-volume omnibus hardcovers.

I’m glad to see that Dr. Pournelle, who I have now known over 40 years, will have his iconic titles back on the market.

Jerry commented on the project’s history for File 770:

I am very pleased that we were able to revive, in both hardbound and eBook, the There Will Be War anthology series.  The series was conceived during the Cold War, but most of the stories take place in other eras.  I am not astonished that they hold up well long after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended that conflict. We will be releasing the original 9 volumes over the next year and revive the series after that.  However much international politics may change, it remains likely that There Will Be War.

There is more, so read the rest there. As you can imagine, I am a tremendous fan of the anthology series, and indeed, Riding the Red Horse was created in conscious imitation of its ground-breaking blend of fact and fiction. Volume I is already ready to go and we are just putting the final touches on Volume II, after which we will release both of them. If you’re not subscribing to the Castalia House New Release mailing list yet, you’re probably going to want to do so soon because we will be announcing a very good new release offer in the next newsletter. There Will Be War was a tremendous influence on my own intellectual development, and not only are the books not conceptually outdated, they often feel remarkably prescient despite the end of the Cold War and the passing of the events upon which they are nominally focused. The reality is that the forces leading to war run much deeper than any of the national or societal differences that are usually blamed for it, which is why Dr. Pournelle is correct to observe that history has not ended, the secular utopia has not arrived, and there will indeed be war. I have highly recommended the books for decades, which is why getting them back into print was one of my top priorities for Castalia House.
We will publish the Volume I and II ebooks before the end of this month. Later this year, we will publish Volumes III and IV in ebook, and Volumes I and II together in an omnibus hardcover edition. We expect to publish all nine volumes, as well as the new tenth volume, before the end of 2016.

John C. Wright: The Hugo-nominated works

John C. Wright burst onto the science fiction scene in 2002 with his astonishing The Golden Age.
Published by Tor Books, Amazon.com declared it to be “the most
ambitious and impressive science fiction novel since China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. Amazingly, it is John C. Wright’s debut novel.”
Publishers Weekly wrote: “It’s already clear, however, that Wright may be this fledgling century’s most important new SF talent.”
In 2014, Castalia House began publishing collections
of Mr. Wright’s short fiction, much of which was hitherto unpublished,
including Awake in the Night Land, City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, The Book of Feasts & Seasons, One Bright Star to Guide Them, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth.
A record-setting five of those works were nominated
for the 2015 Hugo Awards in three categories. A sixth work was also
nominated for Best Novelette, but was subsequently ruled ineligible by
Sasquan. All four of the Hugo-nominated short fiction works, as well
as an essay from Transhuman, are included in this special release, which is available for free from Castalia House in both Epub and Mobi (Kindle) formats and will also be available in the Hugo packet.

A doctorate in comparative gaming

2015 Hugo nominee Jeffro Johnson is better suited to make the following introduction than I am, so I will simply quote him in introducing the latest Castalia House blog star, Douglas Cole, the author of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling and a number of other combat-related RPG publications.

Game designer Douglas Cole will be joining Ken Burnside and myself at Castalia House with his new blog series called “Violent Resolution.” As you can see from his first post, this is going to be a doozy. From what I’ve seen, this will do for rpgs what Nick Schuessler did for wargames in his Space Gamer column. If you’re the type of person that’s always wanted a doctorate in comparative gaming, you will faint!

As for Violent Resolution itself, Cole himself explains what the weekly column is going to entail:

The column will focus on combat in games, mostly to the exclusion of other things. It will of course include fighting, but also how fights start and end. It will spend a great deal of time looking at game mechanics along the way, and will probably spend a lot of word count looking at what kind of storytelling environment is created by those mechanics.

Through the Lens

As the blog progresses, I’ll frequently be looking at combat with examples from different games. There will be others from time-to-time – notably when I have an anecdote from games I’ve played (or stopped playing) in the past. But by and large, I’ll explore this topic by looking at how certain games handle things.

Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition

I’m going to refer to D&D5 here
frequently, because you can’t talk about RPGs – especially combat in
RPGs – without talking about the moose in the room. D&D-based games
dominate the market of tabletop RPGs that all other games combined are
pretty much an afterthought.

I’ll use D&D5 as a proxy for the kind
of resolution system that is found as variations on a theme in
Pathfinder, the D&D-derived Old School Renaissance (or Old School
Revival? Maybe both!), and other games that are recognizably the same
basic mechanic. All are recognizable as essentially the same game that I
learned to play when I was 10 years old, roleplaying for the first time
in 1981 – the Basic/Expert D&D boxed sets, followed by AD&D.
Stepping into Swords and Wizardry, Pathfinder, or D&D is usually a
matter of fine-tuning. You may need to understand the proper use of a
Feat hierarchy, or what will kill your character as opposed to knocking
him out, or get the feel for various special mechanics, such as the
Advantaged/Disadvantaged mechanic newly introduced in D&D5 . . . but by and large if you’ve ever played D&D you’ll understand what’s going on pretty fast.

As the future leading publisher of military science fiction, the martial arts from the grand strategic to the tactical is of interest to us, and while I think it is highly unlikely that we will be able to convince Dr. van Creveld, Gen. Krulak, Gen. Gray, or Mr. Lind to take up blogging  at Castalia House anytime soon, we are very pleased to have Mr. Cole intelligently addressing matters from the other end of the spectrum.