Tag: Castalia House

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.

John C. Wright explains the gatekeepers

It probably didn’t surprise you to see that the SJWs at Amazon claimed the best books of 2014 included an incestuous child molester’s chronicle of a nonexistent rape and a biography of a celebrity that contained no reference to the biggest scandal of the celebrity’s life, or that their list was topped by a derivative, paint-by-numbers, race-based lamentation of life in America by a female minority. (The irony involved in calling a member of the most populous race and nationality on the planet a “minority” does not escape me, but this is the parlous state to which our language has been reduced in 2014.)

John C. Wright explains this bizarre inverting of literary quality, where excellent books are ignored and the literary equivalent of finger-painting with one’s urine, excrement, and menstrual blood is praised as being not only exceptional, but the very best on offer:

Democracy also has a drawback: our liberty allows for such license, that no accomplishment is needed ere one is called accomplished. Eve our elitism is democratic: Anyone can be a snob!

All you have to do to achieve the paramount of the modern Decalogue is dishonor your father and mother; to be the modern version Horatio, all you need do is betray the ashes of your fathers and the altars of your gods. Hegelian evolution says that whatever comes later is better, right? Well, you come after your forefathers, and you are younger than your teachers, so you must know more.

To be a snob in the Old World you had to be born to a high family, or in the New, to earn a high place. But all you have to do to be a snob in the world of no-fault modern snobbery is look down on the giants who founded and fought for this nation.

The only way to look down on a giant is to turn your soul upside down, can call evil a type of good (tolerance, diversity, choice) and good a type of evil (intolerance, divisiveness, bigotry). And all you need to do to switch the labels on things, change the definitions so that the north arrow of the moral compass reads south, is to be a damned liar.

Yes, I do mean damned. So picture the modern Progressive as a dwarfish figure, head firmly wedged into a chamber pot, who looks down (what we call up) sees the clouds and stars underfoot, and sun and moon, and proudly imagines he is trampling heaven. And when he seeks to soar to higher places, overhead is a blank and cold earth, merely a roof of matter, impenetrable to his wit; and when he dreams of spiritual things his thoughts ascend to hell. The harder he tries to live up to what he thinks are higher ideals, the lower toward the central fire he sinks.

The short answer is that the elite of our culture are not a high elite at all, but the low dregs.

They do not sneer at us as their inferiors despite their embarrassing retardation in experiential, intellectual, philosophical and theological matters, not to mention their bad manners and sexual perversions: they sneer at us as their inferiors BECAUSE of their retardation.

Instead of the books recommended by Amazon, let me recommend a very good and seasonal book you may wish to consider in their stead, indeed, one by the very critic cited. But don’t take my word for it, consider what some of the readers of Mr. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasons have had to say about it.

  •  There is really no way to rate this book with Amazon stars; Amazon does
    not have a way to indicate books which point to eternal truths and
    transcendent beauty. Speaking solely in terms of composition, the book
    has its flaws; shifting from more or less pure sci-fi with wit and much
    satire at the beginning to a conclusion full of sacred and solemn joy – while leaving in the sci-fi elements – and successfully carrying off
    each step without occasionally having your normally divergent themes try
    to separate like oil and water might be impossible anyway. That Mr.
    Wright on the whole pulls off this balancing act is a testament to his
    skill as a writer. I am giving it 5 stars because most of the stories within deserve 5
    stars, because several of them are the closest thing I have ever read to
    a 21st century G.K.Chesterton, and also because that is the most
    emphatic way I can recommend this volume to your attention.
  •  I have read many of Mr. Wright’s other works and in many of them, he hides his Christianity in parable. A parable is a tale that tells of Truth, but is veiled in a way that only those who know the author’s intent can discern its deeper meaning. In THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, Mr. Wright alternately dons and throws off the disguising cloak of parable and allegory, writing as plainly as an honest man is able and with an elegance that only a master of prose can manage.
  • This is a marvelous collection of John C. Wright’s seasonal short
    fiction. Especially notable stories are “Pale Realms of Shade,” a ghost
    story with a noir sensibility and a very satisfying twist (for Easter),
    “The Ideal Machine” for the Ascension, “Eve of All Saints’ Day”
    for–well, you know what holiday that one is for! Finally, the two
    Christmas-themed stories, “Nativity” and “Yes, Virginia, There Is a
    Santa Claus,” are also especially good. At their best, these stories
    remind me of G. K. Chesterton.
  • A brilliant collection of mind-bending short stories. I liked all of
    them, loved three of them, and one of the three I loved stands as one of
    the best short stories I think the esteemed Mr. Wright has written
    (That’s “Pale Realms of Shade”, by the way). “The Meaning of Life” was
    hysterical. “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” was an extremely clever
    parable story, something I very rarely see

I feel, on the other hand, that “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” is the best short story that Mr. Wright has yet written, although there is one story that will be published in a collection next year that may surpass it. For me, it is a remarkable tale that combines the very best of Tanith Lee with CS Lewis in his Narnia mode. 

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.

Riding this way

Still keeping fingers crossed concerning one more potential contributor, but this is what looks like the final list of contributors to the first volume of Castalia’s new annual mil-SF anthology. We are expecting to make it available to newsletter subscribers next weekend assuming everything comes together as it should. The cover is, well, you’re just going to have to see it. If it’s not quite a murderer’s row of contributors, it is a strong one from start to finish and a variety of national militaries and service branches are represented.

And if you’re a military historian or an established writer of mil-SF and are interested in contributing to volume two, get in touch. We’ve already got two excellent new contributors lined up for volume two.

The Book of Feasts & Seasons

It being December 1st, we are now properly in the Christmas season and so this seems a propitious time to announce the newest John C. Wright book from Castalia House, a collection of 10 holiday-inspired science fiction stories collectively known as THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS. This is not your average cup of Christmas tea, as a look at the story titles alone will tell you. Over the course of the year, from January to December, the science fiction grandmaster takes
his inspiration from ten different holidays and explores their meanings
in a series of stories of marvelous imagination. The book begins with
New Year’s Day and “The Meaning of Life as Told Me by an Inebriated
Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey.” The Feast of the Annunciation of
the Blessed Virgin is represented by “A Random World of Delta Capricorni
Aa, Called Scheddi”, while “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” represents the Feast of Pentecost. The calendar, and the anthology,
culminate on Christmas Eve with “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”.

My personal favorite is “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”, which rather reminds me of one of Tanith Lee’s best works, “The Tale of the Cat”, and is, in my opinion, a serious contender for the best thing that Mr. Wright has ever written.

The animals gathered, one by one, outside the final city of Man, furtive, curious, and afraid.

All was dark. In the west was a blood-red sunset, and in the east a blood-red moonrise of a waning moon. No lamps shined in the towers and minarets, and all the widows of the palaces, mansions, and fanes were empty as the eyes of skulls.

All about the walls of the city were the fields and houses that were empty and still, and all the gates and doors lay open.

Above the fortresses and barracks, black pillars upheld statues of golden eagles, beaks open, unmoving and still. Above the coliseum and circus, where athletes strove and acrobats danced and slaves fought and criminals were fed alive to wild beasts for the diversion of the crowds, and the noise of screams and cries rose up like incense toward heaven, statues of heroes and demigods stood on white pillars, glaring blindly down.

Within other walls were gardens whose trees were naked in the wind, and the silence was broken only by the rustle of the carpet of fallen leaves wallowing along the marble paths and pleasances.

Above the boulevards and paved squares where merchants once bought and sold ivory and incense and purple and gold, or costly fabrics of silks from the east, or ambergris from the seas beyond the Fortunate Isles, and auction houses adorned and painted stood where singing birds and dancing girls were sold to the highest bidder or given to the haughtiest peer. And here were gambling houses where princes and nobles once used gems as counters for cities and walled towns, and the fate of nations might depend upon the turn of a card. And there were pleasure houses where harlots plied their trade, and houses of healing where physicians explained which venereal disease had no cures and arranged for painless suicides, and houses of morticians where disease-raddled bodies were burnt in private, without any ceremony that might attract attention and be bad for business.

And higher on the high hill in the center of the city were the libraries of the learned and the palaces of the emperors adored as gods. But no history was read in the halls of learning and no laws were debated in the halls of power.

Not far outside the city was a mountain that had been cut in two, crown to root, by some great supernatural force. On the slopes of the dark mountain, in a dell overgrown and wild, two dark creatures met, peering cautiously toward the empty city.

A black wolf addressed a black raven sitting in a thorn-bush. “What is the news, eater of carrion? Did you fly over the city and spy out where the corpses are?”

As you will have noticed from the text sample, THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS is not the traditional light-hearted seasonal fare, but is as deep and as dark, as full of grief and joy, as the true story of St. Nicholas, Wonderworker, Defender of Orthodoxy, Holy Hierarch, and Bishop of Myra, himself. It is available from Castalia House as well as on Amazon.

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.

Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

We are pleased to be officially releasing two new Castalia House books today. The first is the novel Victoria, which is, as the subtitle suggests, “A Novel of 4th Generation War”. It is very different than our other novels, in fact, its publication might even be considered a little ironic, in light of Scooter’s recent blog post on Pink SF Propaganda vs Blue SF Storytelling. This is because Victoria can quite reasonably be described as the very sort of propaganda we detest in modern SF/F, except it happens to be against politically correctness rather than supportive of it. As one proofreader rather amusingly commented, “That was certainly an interesting work.  On a superficial level, I’ll
say it’s the most politically incorrect thing I’ve ever read in my
life.  I thought of myself as politically incorrect, and even I blanched
at a lot of it.”

I have to admit, there were moments when I found myself thinking: “he can’t possibly be going… well, I guess he is.” The difference is that Victoria is an openly and avowedly political novel, unlike Pink SF, which is politically correct propaganda marketed deceptively as science fiction and fantasy. And the secondary difference is that Victoria is more than mere traditionalist propaganda. It is also, much like Atlas Shrugged and 1984, a didactic novel. It amounts to a dramatic instruction course on how the principles of 4GW are utilized, set in a near-future fictional version of America that is unfortunately not nearly as far away from reality as one might wish. If I were to describe Victoria in a single sentence, it is as the Christian lovechild of Ayn Rand and Tom Clancy.

The same proofreader later noted, “Less than 24 hours after finishing Victoria and thinking, “Man, this isn’t very realistic,” I woke up to see that an entity named The Islamic State is moving to establish a gold-backed currency. In the same week the West landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time in human history, but the big story today is that one of the scientists wore a shirt with girls on it and was forced to make a tearful apology to the entire world. This latter event goes far beyond anything in the book.”

Perhaps we’re the ones living in someone else’s parody. Anyhow, those who have been reading Victoria in serial at Traditional Right should be informed that the published version includes the final one-third of the book that will not be posted online. Victoria is available for $9.99 in EPUB and Kindle format from the Castalia House store and in Kindle format from Amazon.

On a thematically related note, after receiving several requests we have made the transcription of the lecture at Quantico by William S. Lind that first introduced the concept of 4th Generation War to the U.S. military available as a separate ebook in addition to the previously announced bundle with the recording of the lecture itself. The ebook/audiobook combination is still available in both EPUB and Kindle formats for $3.99 from the Castalia House store, while the ebook alone is $2.99 in Kindle format from Amazon. The lecture is only 51 minutes, so the ebook is only 24 pages, but it packs a remarkable amount of information in it and will be of considerable information to anyone who wishes to better understand 4GW in either its military or strategic applications.

And thanks very much to all the New Release subscribers who have already purchased Victoria. We hope you will enjoy it, but more importantly, we hope you will learn something from it.

A note about the new release

We just sent out a second New Release newsletter to our subscribers, and I expect that some of you may be a little surprised at the fact that this particular new release is a somewhat more expensive than our usual pricing model would indicate. Please note that this does NOT indicate a new pricing policy on our part, it is merely the consequence of a contractual obligation on our part that stems from the book’s rather complicated origins.

The book is still considerably less expensive than new ebook releases from the mainstream publishers, at 475 pages it is a good value, and there are two new selections included in the five from which the New Release subscribers can choose their free book: The Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind and The Altar of Hate by Vox Day.

In other, not entirely unrelated news, people are beginning to wrap up their long march through William S. Lind’s ON WAR and post reviews on Amazon. Here are three that might inspire you to take a closer look if you haven’t already: 


You can’t say you weren’t warned.
A long but great work. This book should be required reading at West Point. 

Highly recommended
Highly recommended, even for those not directly interested in military strategy. Mr. Lind’s framework has wide ranging applications for politics, economics, and the future of our nation. Consider it in the same league as Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile” (and indeed, there are many overlaps). 

I urgently and gravely, recommend this book for any officer of the United States Armed Forces 
In March of 2003, I was in a unique position to watch the anatomy of a folly…. I was a career Marine at the time and I knew we were making several mistakes. I knew we didn’t have enough boots on the ground for a successful occupation, in truth we didn’t have enough boots in the entire military. In 1945 we has better than 11% of the population in uniform and under arms and we were trying to get the Germans and The Japanese to self organize. In 2003, less than one half of one percent of our population was in uniform, we had huge global commitments and we were trying to get Arabs to self organize. The occupation plans seemed to be little more than a few platitudes from a Washington DC that was playing at war.

It felt as if we were trapped by a fever dream. That we could bring democracy to an extremely low trust culture on the points of our bayonets. Overthrow thousands of years of tribal tradition with little more than a few speeches. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why were trying to do it.

William S. Lind had a very good idea as to why were doing it.

This book contains collected columns of William S. Lind through that six year trip to hell known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Much of this this reads like the works of a modern Nostradamus. Resented by many senior officers at the time as an ardent defeatist, Lind’s predictions were beyond prescient. From the rise of AQI, to the collapse of the Iraqi government’s control over it’s own territory. Linds 20/20 foresight makes him a modern Cassandra.

There is a reason Cassandra wasn’t popular

The new book’s official release date will be on Monday, when it will also be made available on Amazon.

A soldier’s review of ON WAR

Derek Thornton, a 20-year veteran of the Mississippi National Guard, reviews William S. Lind’s ON WAR:

Having
been deployed to Iraq twice, I naturally retain much interest in
events in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Before my first
deployment, I was a true believer in “nation building”, the
ascendancy of democracy and the superiority of the U.S. military.
Such is no longer the case. By my second deployment, the first two
were at the back of any priority list and I concentrated on training
my fellow soldiers so that we could all just come back alive. I still
thought the U.S. military was the best, but had niggling doubts due
to our inability to truly defeat our foe. With recent events and ISIS
rolling over the sham of a nation we left behind in Iraq and the
constant destabilization of states in the region by our own
governments backing, I was coming to a lot of conclusions. This book
showed me that those conclusions had already been reached long before
they started crystallizing in my mind….

 I
cannot stress [enough] the importance of reading this book. We continue to
repeat the mistakes of the past again and again. We need a new way
forward to meet the coming challenges.

I think it is very important to observe that while the politicians and the military-industrial complex may be dubious about the 4GW framework (about which more later today), the soldiers and Marines who have been deployed and possess actual combat experience tend to intuitively grasp its relevance. For those who are particularly interested in gaining a more complete understanding of 4GW and its implication for the 21st century, you may wish to obtain a copy of the lecture that started it all in 1988, prior to the famous article that was simultaneously published in the Marine Corps Gazette and Military Review.

Fortunately, then-Major Greg Thiele, USMC, had the foresight to video a subsequent repeat of that first lecture, called The Four Generations of Modern War, given extemporaneously at Quantico to a group of USMC officers, which he graciously sent me a few weeks ago. I transcribed the lecture, edited it to correct a minor historical infelicity or two – it was indeed General Weygand, and not Gamelin, with whom Churchill was meeting in June 1940 – and we are now making the combined audio/ebook available exclusively from the Castalia House store for $3.99. This, and other forthcoming audiobooks will not be available on Audible for the time being because we intend to keep our audiobook prices considerably lower than Audible insists on charging.

However, please keep in mind two things. First, the audio quality is not what you’d get in a studio. Thanks to Vidad cleaning it up, you will have no problem understanding any of it, but it is a live speech and not a studio-recorded narration. Second, if you are a newsletter subscriber, you will have the opportunity to obtain it free in the future as part of our New Release program, so you may want to keep that in mind.