Hyperspace Demons is a novella from our newest author, and it is one you’ll want to check out if you’re a science fiction fan. From the reviews:
Mixed in with hyperspace and spaceships is the interesting concept of “hyperspace microbes” that can possess a human mind, driving the person insane. These microbes are kept out of the spaceship by a special shield, so there shouldn’t be any problems, right? That’s where the plot pulls off some unexpected twists and turns, making for a fun read. Moeller keeps up the pace all the way to the end. Amazingly, for a novella there is much more that could be said, but I fear explaining anymore will reveal too much.
The story grabs you, and you don’t want to put it down until it is over. Once the action begins, it builds and builds without letup until the very end. I can’t think of any higher praise than: When I was done, I wished it was longer, because I was enjoying it so much.
In other Castalia House news, I’m pleased to be able to announce that we will be publishing a second book by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld this year. In addition to Equality: The Impossible Quest, we will be publishing The Art of War: A History of Military Strategy.
In space, the demons can hear you scream. Space travel has always come with risks. But hyperspace travel comes with one particularly frightening hazard, namely, the non-corporeal dark energy-based macrobiotic entities that inhabit the void and are insensibly drawn to the presence of human minds. Once penetrated by a macrobe, the infected human mind rapidly devolves into raving insanity, which usually presents in a homicidal manner. Fortunately, hyperspace-capable ships are protected by a dark energy resonator that keeps the macrobes away and thereby permits safe interstellar travel.
But what happens when a ship’s resonator is sabotaged while it is traveling through hyperspace? And who would be so insane as to unleash a demonic infection of mutating madness on an entire ship’s crew?
Hyperspace Demons is a novella by Jonathan Moeller, one of the most prolific self-published authors of science fiction and fantasy today. Featuring a cover by JartStar, Hyperspace Demons is his first publication with Castalia House. And in respect of Anonymous Conservative’s newly announced free days (about which more after the jump), we’re extending the New Release newsletter offer for two more days, which means that if you buy Hyperspace Demons from Castalia House today or tomorrow, you will also receive a free copy of Jonathan’s Frostborn: The Gray Knight. If you would like to sign up for the New Release newsletter to take advantage of similar offers in the future, you can do so here.
I’m also looking for ten volunteers to review Hyperspace Demons. If you’re interested, please email me with HYPER in the subject and specify MOBI or EPUB.
Now about those free books. Anonymous Conservative writes:
For those interested, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, How to Deal with Narcissists, and The Altar of Hate by Vox Day will all be free in ebook form at Castalia House on Monday and Tuesday.The Altar of Hate is a compilation of ten great stories ranging from fantasy to military fcience fiction. As one reviewer wrote, “Each offering contained in The Altar of Hate tickles or provokes the mind with salacious ‘what ifs’ and glances behind the veil of reality. The stories move along, but one feels the uneasy eyes of the abyss staring back as you progress, as it were, through a darkened ancient forest. Only an author of the first rank could achieve this.” While I don’t have that big of a readership compared to Vox, I’m hoping those here who haven’t yet stopped by Castalia’s website and partaken of their incredible titles will maybe find a great new source for all their high quality sci-fi/fantasy/military-theory/educational/non-fiction needs, and in so doing help establish our foothold on this great new beachhead in the publishing world. If we can get Castalia to the point it is the new Simon and Schuster, we will have helped alter the very terrain on which our future battles will be fought. It is an exciting time in Conservatism. The theories beneath political science are shifting, the cultural tides in publishing are changing, and maybe the very natures of our citizens are becoming more K-selected. It feels like we are approaching a turning point rapidly, and just at the right time. Until the turning point comes, take some free books, then tell your friends about r/K, and rave to your friends about how awesome Castalia House is. We are making a difference with every person we tell.
In other words, if you buy Hyperspace Demons today, you can pick up as many as four free books for $2.99. Not a bad deal. And speaking of “how awesome Castalia House is”, if you have any interest in fantasy and science fiction and haven’t already bookmarked the Castalia House blog, you are really missing out on some excellent and intelligent content. One of our newest bloggers, Morgan, is rapidly demonstrating that he’s capable of hanging with Jeffro, Daniel, and Scooter with his detailed anthology reviews; you’ll want to read his post on The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, with an introduction by David Drake, complete with a comment by David Drake himself:
A couple of years back, if you searched for Tachyon Publications’ The Secret History of Fantasy on Google Books, this is what would come up:
“Tired of the same old fantasy? Here are nineteen much-needed antidotes to cliched tales of swords and sorcery. Fantasy is back, and it’s better than ever!”
The lure of filthy lucre must have proven to be too much as Tachyon published The Sword & Sorcery Anthology in 2012…. The 1970s entries are dependable. Karl Edward Wagner’s “Undertow” is one of the most memorable Kane stories. The Ramsey Campbell story has never been reprinted to my knowledge.
Some of the seven post 1980 stories get dodgy. There was sword and sorcery in the 1980s in Fantasy Book and Space & Time. The 1990s were lean and grim but still you had Shadow Sword and Adventures in Sword and Sorcery. The editors did no deep excavation.
I never thought of Jane Yolen as a sword and sorcery writer. I used to read her stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction decades back and liked them. Her story is good if not a bit clichéd. Does anyone find it disturbing there was an anthology entitled Warrior Princesses? That is where “Become a Warrior” originally appeared.
Two stories are from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. My view is Bradley’s anthology series quickly created a new category that can be called femizon fantasy that is distinct from sword and sorcery. The Charles Saunders story was a highlight of the original Sword and Sorceress and the highlight of the chronological later stories. Why was Rachel Pollack’s “The Red Guild” included (Sword and Sorceress #2)? You can stamp generic femizon story on this one.
Back in March, about a month after we launched Castalia, I contacted Jerry Pournelle with the idea of reviving his great military science fiction anthology series, THERE WILL BE WAR. He was entirely open to the idea, but he was busy and quite naturally had a lot of more important things to do than be pestered by an insignificant publisher who at the time published a single novella by Tom Kratman.
So, I gave up on the notion, contacted Tom, and we put together RIDING THE RED HORSE instead. That went rather well, as you know, and Dr. Pournelle became sufficiently interested in the project to graciously contribute two pieces to it, one fiction and one non-fiction. I was rather pleasantly surprised when, after he received a copy and had the chance to read a few reviews, he asked if I might be interested in having Castalia re-release the nine volumes of THERE WILL BE WAR in ebook format.
You can probably imagine that it didn’t take me long to indicate that, yes, we might be willing to contemplate the notion. I daresay we contemplated and cogitated at least a nanosecond or two. The result of all this cogitation was the suggestion that with war looming on nearly every horizon, it might be the right time to consider reviving THERE WILL BE WAR as an anthology series, since it had lain dormant since the end of the Cold War. Dr. Pournelle concurred, which made the timing of this Amazon review of RIDING THE RED HORSE more than a little ironic:
Should be called “There Will Be War Volume 10”, February 2, 2015 By Chris Gerrib “Author, Pirates of Mars”
Generally a very solid work, modeled after the old “There Will Be War” military SF anthologies. The difference is that there is a mixture of non-fiction and fiction in this work. I don’t agree with some of the ideas presented (others I do) but everything is thought-provoking and well-written.
On the full disclosure front, Jerry Pournelle’s contribution is “His Truth Goes Marching On” which is a classic but has been reprinted seemingly everywhere. Having said that, it’s probably Pournelle’s best short work. All in all, well worth the time and money.
I say ironic because on that very day, Dr. Pournelle agreed to revive the series with Castalia House, beginning with THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X. The two anthology series will remain entirely separate, as RIDING THE RED HORSE will consist of entirely new material while THERE WILL BE WAR, as before, will primarily consist of high-quality reprints. Tom Kratman and I will continue to edit RIDING THE RED HORSE, while Dr. Pournelle will edit THERE WILL BE WAR.
There have been a lot of military science fiction stories published since Volume IX appeared in 1989. We’re going to want to identify and feature the very best of them in Volume X, so if you happen to have any suggestions in this regard, or believe that you happen to have written one of them, please don’t hesitate to bring them to my attention.
As for the original nine volumes, we intend to release them in individual ebooks and as a set of three three-volume hardcover omnibuses, beginning later this year.
Here’s a brilliant idea for an anthology: collect essays about the changing face of war and war technology, then alternate them with short stories and novel excerpts from the cutting edge of military-focused sci-fi and fantasy.
Riding the Red Horse, edited by fantasy star Vox Day and Army Ranger vet Tom Kratman for Castalia House, is a tailor-made compromise for those time-pressed souls who find the consumption of unalloyed fiction to be too useless a practice in which to indulge. It’s also a treat for sci-fi readers who retain an interest in the world around them—and the two groups’ overlap is large enough to make it a very good idea indeed.
Every tale or essay is fronted by an editor’s introduction, placed conveniently before each piece rather than in some tedious index or intro; they perk up the reader’s ears for the key factual and speculative themes of the collection.
Essays are fully half the mix, with the fiction serving as not only pleasure reading but as exercises in imagining how the technological and population changes the essayists describe might play out in the future. The tone is set early on by William S. Lind’s discussion of the four generations of modern war strategy, in “Understanding 4th Generation War.”
Lind’s unsettling conclusion is that the U.S. military is stuck in the second-generation mindset used by the French in World War I, while our adversaries—particularly those who aren’t based in a state, i.e. the jihad—have moved on to an updated version of pre-nation-state warfare, where neither the battlefield nor the combatants are clearly defined. Lind writes:
We have no magic solutions to offer, only some thoughts. We recognized from the outset that the whole task might be hopeless; state militaries might not be able to come to grips with Fourth Generation enemies no matter what they do. …
“Wherever people go, conflict seems to follow, and one always prefers to be on the winning side—so we might as well be ready for the physics problems we’ll encounter if the conflicts move into outer space.”
His essay is preceded by a dramatic fictional illustration of the unpredictability of the near future of war, albeit a state-based one: Eric S. Raymond’s “Sucker Punch,” a near-future military tale in which an American attempt to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is rendered both impossible and unnecessary by the gruesome new weapons both sides have in store for each other.
The American pilots’ disorientation is so stark as to be almost darkly humorous:
“Hey. What are those flashes from the tin cans?”
Blazer: “Cool off. We’re stealthed, and radar’s clear. They’ve got nothing in the air that can hit us at angels twenty.”
Blazer’s plane disintegrated less than three seconds later.
This is what future sci-fi is going to look like, this collection predicts: as nervous as its past, with future-tech tactical guesses mixed into the drama. (Although if you prefer your sci-fi laced with humor, the winner in the anthology is longtime Navy fleet veteran Thomas Mays’ “Within This Horizon”—with Rzasa’s solo contribution, “Turncoat,” as an oddly touching runner-up.)
This focus on military realism doesn’t surprise me in a Vox Day-branded anthology. What makes A Throne of Bones, the fantasy series that gave Day his name, outstanding is the weakness of his magician characters—which makes his military generals work harder, which is more interesting to read than the standard Robert Jordan-type fantasy plot wherein Rand Al-Thor points at your army and it disappears. The authors in this anthology are reclaiming the same logic for sci-fi; instead of seeing the limitations of physics as an inconvenience to be juked around, they turn them into the driving power of their story lines.
The stories and essays talk back to each other in this manner constantly; regardless of whether their predictions will be accurate—my own military and technological knowledge is too poor to place any bets—they result in a conversation so entertaining and stimulating that the reader feels most privileged to listen in, especially for an entry fee of five dollars.
Riding the Red Horse hasn’t been what one would call extensively reviewed in the SF press, but you know, I think we can live with that. This is just an excerpt from a fairly long and detailed review, so you’ll want to read the whole thing.
UPDATE: We were just informed that one of our authors has been nominated for the 2015 Prometheus Award. Go to the Castalia House blog to find out who it is!
Riding The Red Horse has a number of stories and essays, and is worth your buying. My non fiction contribution is an essay on simulation I did for Avalon Hill in the 70’s –and it is still pretty good. They found and asked my permission, and I am told I’ve already earned a good dinner out of it… Next I think comes a revival of There Will Be War.
It’s good to see Dr. Pournelle recovering so rapidly from his stroke. As a wargamer and game designer, I very much enjoyed his game design essay in The General; I found it by pure happenstance and we added it at literally the last moment. It was fascinating to learn that he was the inventor of the “matchbox” concealment system, which uses a single unit to stand in for several, a concept that is incorporated in most wargames these days in one way or another.
As Castalia House continues to grow we need another graphic design professional to help with cover typography and pre-press needs. Ideally the candidate will have a strong background in graphic design with a love of composition, type, and an understanding of the pre-press process including ICC color profiles, color conversion from RGB to CMYK for the press, and how to read and understand provided print specs and templates. A typical project will include the typography for a cover design with both the artistic cover type over a provided illustration for an eBook cover, and then prepping select covers for printing including laying out the body copy on the cover, designing the spine and back cover based upon the font illustration, and all pre-press work to create a make-ready file for the printer based upon a template. The designer will need to have industry standard software and be able to provide an X-1a compliant pdf for print.
The work and pay is based upon the project and an online portfolio for evaluation of your work is a must. Please email books AT castaliahouse DOT com with COVERS in the subject, provide a link to your work, and include your rates for the work specified above. Not all books will require print layout. If you want to help the Blue SFF revolution and work with a talented and very dedicated team of professionals, this is your opportunity.
Castalia House is a publisher of books, but we are also a developer of games. So that is why we are pleased to be able to announce that the Castalia House bookstore will also be carrying digital versions of various games we consider to be of high quality and potential interest to our readers in the new Games section. The first games we are offering here are published by Castalia House author Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games, who contributed “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” to Riding the Red Horse. Ken is also Castalia’s newest blogger, where he’ll be focusing on various aspects of game development, from general analysis and history to in-depth design and mechanics.
Our long-term goal for Castalia House is to become a major destination site for all high-quality Blue SF/F-related activity, including books, boardgames, and electronic games. This is another small step towards that objective.
A Castalia House blogger interviews the leading Castalia House author at Castalia House:
Q: Your conversion story from atheism to Christianity is remarkable. Some critics have been surprised to discover which of your books were written as a Christian, and which were written as an atheist. You have said that in each case you simply followed the internal logic of the story to its conclusion. How much has your faith influenced your fiction, if at all?
A: This is a very difficult question, because my firm resolution when first I converted was to simply tell stories to entertain.
I am often annoyed by stories that preach, even when they preach a sermon with which I wholly agree, such as Philip Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS. I was an atheist when I read it, a full-throat anti-Christian zealous in my love of godlessness, and even I could not stand the obtrusive excrescence of the preaching in that miserable book.
Now that I am in the other camp of the endless war between light and darkness, I confess I am still nonplussed and unamused by preaching disguised as entertainment, whether it supports my side or not. The idea of ‘Christian entertainment’ is a sound one, as long as it is entertaining as well as being Christian. There is an odor of self satisfied smugness and piety which is as repellant as the musk of a skunk clinging to much Christian entries into the literary world, which one never finds in older works, such as Milton or Dante, and never in the works of masters even in so humble as genre as science fiction. I challenge anyone to find anything nakedly and blandly pious or preachy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers, but there is clearly a spiritual dimension to all their works.
So I vowed a great vow never to let my personal feelings creep into my books, but merely to tell a tale for the sake of the tale, keeping faith with my readers. I am not their teacher, nor their preacher, nor their father confessor, and I have no duty to instruct them, and no qualifications to do so, no more than the jester in a King’s court has the authority to criticize the laws and policies of the King. My customers are my kings, and my job is to do pratfalls and take pies to the face to amuse them.
In the space of a single hour my great vow was overthrown when a reader, practically in tears, so deeply and thoughtfully praised the vision of spiritual reality presented in one of my short stories, the wholesomeness of the moral atmosphere portrayed there, that the reader likened it to a man trapped on some alien world of chlorine gas and sulfurous clouds being allowed to step on the fair, green fields of Earth for a single breath of wholesome, springtime air.
The reader was talking about my Christian faith, and the strength and firmness and clarity it lent to my writing. If I can wax lyrical about Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, as I did in THE GOLDEN AGE, then surely I can wax lyrical about truth, virtue, and beauty.
The king is sad, and the jester needs to bring him comfort, for I know tales of a country where these sad things do not reign, but a king kindlier and mightier than any mortal king. As a jester, I owe it to my kings here on Earth and the King of Kings in heaven not to hide or waste my talents.
You’ll definitely want to read the whole thing. And afterwards, if you happen to find yourself still failing to be in possession of excellent books by the interviewee such as THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, and THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, I find it impossible to imagine that you will not want to swiftly rectify the situation.
It’s an excellent interview with a fascinating author. Scooter did an excellent job of formulating much deeper questions than one generally sees in the SF genre, in addition to demonstrating that he was actually very familiar with the author’s material.
It’s no slight to Daniel, Scooter, Mascaro, or me to say that Jeffro, of the Space Gaming Blog, has been the star of the Castalia House blog this year. He makes everyone up their game by starting each week off with an intriguing, in-depth post, and gives our four new bloggers a high level of excellence to aim for. And fortunately for everyone, he appears to enjoy blogging there:
I am not shy about pointing out how happy I am with how this is shaping up. I cover the full range gaming topics: vintage stuff, current releases, role-playing games, wargames, everything! I write in such a way that you can get something out of a post even if you don’t buy or play the game in question. I put things into the wider context of gaming history and touch on the literary antecedents of the games we play. And yeah, I occasionally get esoteric, but I try to stay readable and comprehensible to people that aren’t gamers. No matter what, though, I never stray from the voice of someone that actually knows how to articulate how these things work in actual play… and that just freakin’ loves to play the heck out of these things.
I have complained about how games are covered in magazine articles and so forth in the past. I am just so rarely satisfied with how “journalists” and commentators portray games and gaming in general. Voicing that sort of concern almost invariably summons a smarty pants type that sneers back, “oh, you’re just complaining; the best answer to this sort of thing is to go out show us the right way to do it.” Well listen here, bucko… I’ve done it now.
If you’ve enjoyed Jeffro’s exploration of Chapter N this year, don’t be shy about going to his blog and letting him know. What I particularly enjoy about his posts is the way he dives deeply into the game mechanical aspects as well as the experience; he represents the perfect blend of SF/F literature and gaming that is of particular interest to a game designer who occasionally dabbles in fiction.
RIDING THE RED HORSE is an anthology of military science fiction, speculating on what the wars of both the immediate and the distant future will look like. It alternates between nonfiction essays on the nature of war and short stories. None of the essays or stories were bad, but my favorites were:
-Jerry Pournelle’s HIS TRUTH GOES MARCHING ON takes place on a distant colony planet. Later some refugees are assigned to the planet, to which the original inhabitants take offense, and the situation unfolds with predictable violence from there. Basically, it’s the Spanish Civil War IN SPACE! The story follows an idealistic yet nonetheless capable young officer who gradually loses both his illusions and his innocence during the fighting.
-William S. Lind’s essay on “The Four Generations of Modern War” rather presciently pointed out some of the serious problems with the Iraq War. His thesis postulates that we are entering a period of history where technology enables non-state organizations or even individuals to wage wars effectively, much like the Middle Ages when the state did not have a monopoly on war. (A good example of that is the Hanseatic League, an organization of merchants which actually defeated Denmark in a war during the 14th century, or the various civil wars of medieval France and England where powerful noble families fought each other with no central authority able to restrain them.) While I lack the expertise to determine whether the essay is actually correct or not, I nonetheless think it helpful in trying to understand the various conflicts in the world today. Admittedly the hack around THE INTERVIEW film, which took place after I started writing this review, caused millions of dollars in economic disruption and is likely a good example of fourth-generation warfare, regardless of whether a government, a non-state group, or simply a group of disgruntled employees did the hack.
-WITHIN THIS HORIZON, by Thomas A. Mays follows a Space Navy officer in a distant future where the major powers have developed space fleets, and therefore armed conflict has moved the the asteroid belts and the comets. Ground-based forces are left to wither. The Space Navy officer in question, after sustaining serious wounds, is reassigned to the terrestrial water navy, and figures his career is over. The enemy, however, has other ideas, and the story is an excellent tale of integrity in the face of cynicism.
I think one of the chief arguments for the strength of the anthology is the way in which readers and reviewers keep citing different stories as their favorite. Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat” was my favorite, and there are more than a few who agree with me, but it’s remarkable how many other of the 14 different fiction stories have been cited by others as the anthology’s best. No doubt Mr. Roberts will appreciate Mr. Moeller’s opinion on the matter.
The essays are better than the stories, which is amazing given the stories. The book also includes a bibliography for each contributor and that is even better. This is a must-buy for anyone interested in science-fiction or military history, let alone military science-fiction.
