Jason Rennie has released the January 2015 issue of the Sci Phi Journal and it is now available at Castalia House in EPUB and Kindle formats. SCI PHI JOURNAL Issue #3 contains eight short stories and four non-fiction articles, including Issue number three contains eight short stories, including “Philosophical Reflections on The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special” by David Kyle Johnson, “A Deeper Rabbit Hole: Reconsidering the Philosophy of the Matrix Trilogy” by Joseph Moore, and “Khan as Nietzschean Übermensch and as Moral Actor” by Patrick S. Baker. It also contains the next two chapters in the serial novel that began in the December issue.
The third issue is, like its two predecessors, only $3.99. The content of the previous issues has been pretty solid; I’m not at all interested in Star Trek and yet I found the comprehensive takedown of a critic concerning a particular Q episode to be as interesting as it was convincing. The stories have been good too. I don’t mind confessing that we’ve mined the journal for two authors, one of whom is currently writing what I expect will be a very intriguing futuristic detective novel; the other will be contributing to the second volume of Riding the Red Horse, which is already shaping up to be a serious murderer’s row.
Specifically, The Book of Feasts & Seasons. You’ll want to read the whole thing:
This week I’m reviewing a title that’s seasonal in nature, although the seasons it deals with occur across an entire year rather than a small part of the year. I’ve not read much of Mr. Wright’s work, but what I have has been better written and more original than much of what’s currently being published.
The same is true here. These stories have a great deal of depth, both in the characters they’re about and the concepts with which they deal….Wright is an author who isn’t afraid to delve into deep topics. Some of the themes here dealt with the nature of God, forgiveness, kindness, racism, sacrifice, and second chances. A number of authors these days try to deal with serious themes and issues in their fiction. Few are as accomplished or as entertaining as Mr. Wright.
The Book of Feasts & Seasons is one of the best and most thought provoking books I’ve read in the past year. I highly recommend it.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Mr. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasonshas a 4.9/5 rating. But I find it a little surprising that of the six stories the reviewer deemed worthy of mention, none of them were the one I consider to be the best, namely, “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”.
“Jerry had a small stroke. He is recovering well at a local hospital. Prognosis is good, though they’re running more tests and he’s expected to stay at least another day or two.
“He felt well enough to call Mom [Mrs. Pournelle] from the hospital.
“Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. More updates when we have them.”
They are permitting well-wishers to post comments, in case you would like to do so.
I can’t say I know Dr. Pournelle well, but after working with him over the last two weeks to get “His Truth Goes Marching On” and “Simulating the Art of War” into RIDING THE RED HORSE, I found myself marveling at how sharp he is despite being 81 years old. Of course, it probably helps when you’re starting with a mind that is around +4SD.
We did talk a little about the SFWA purge in passing; he was curious about my perspective on it. He was mildly appalled to hear what really happened, as you might expect, and thought the Board’s action was both ridiculous and short-sighted. But he also saw the humor in the incident, and laughed out loud when I explained the actual nature of the technical violation.
It’s such a pleasure to discover that a giant of one’s youth is also a genuinely good man. Here is to his speedy recovery.
If having your assumptions challenged and your mind blown could upset your delicate little psyche, you’re gonna want to click away right now.
If harrowing scenes of speculative, futuristic combat or stories about the men and women who fight for something greater than themselves fill you with dread, flee from here.
If center-right positions, hard science, or frank discussions of our past mistakes and future concerns make you want to hide behind your momma’s petticoats, you’d best stick to your internet safe-zone with all countervailing opinions neatly blocked away.
If the phrase “Trigger Warning” is something you watch out for and is itself a potential trigger for bad-thought . . . yeah, I got a book you’re gonna want to avoid.
However, if you can handle it and are a fan of kick-ass science fiction, of near-prescient analysis on what our future holds, or of some of the best writing you’ll see all year by great authors both new and old, well, for you I have your new favorite book….
Read the rest of it there. What do I mean by “new Castalia House Associate”? What that means is that Thomas May’s very good first contact novelis now available in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI for Kindle format from the Castalia House store for $3.99. And by “first contact”, I should probably point out that I mean “violent space combat” with one of the most unusual alien races yet encountered in science fiction. If you enjoyed “Within This Horizon”, then you’re going to want to read A Sword Into Darkness.
The reaction to the new anthology has been almost uniformly positive, which is encouraging, but I have to say that I was probably most amused by these two comments at Instapundit’s.
Tom Kraman and Vox Day…lemme guess, more of that namby-baby, Dem/Lib/SJW kumbaya fluff… said no one ever.
Kratman AND Vox Day? Is the publisher TRYING to make SJW heads into IEDs?
The collection is Blue SF, to be sure, but it is moderately less Deep Navy Blue SF than you might expect, mostly because unlike the gatekeepers of Pink SF, Tom and I don’t believe in ruthlessly enforcing our ideological perspective on every contributor. As Larry Correia has gone to considerable pains to point out in the past, it is the story is the point, not the moral or the ideological object lesson. And the general conclusion appears to be that these are very good stories indeed.
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.
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.
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:
Pournelle 108
Day 45
Torgersen 28
Nelson 17
Raymond 14
Kennedy 4
Nuttall 7
Rzasa 5
Mays 3
Filotto 3
Cheah 1
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.
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.
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.
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.
