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.
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 LANDcomes 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.
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 becauseVictoria 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.
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.
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.
Castalia House has two very important books coming out early next year. One is the 4GW Handbook by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele. The other is by an intellectual heavy-hitter who cannot yet be named since some of the details are still being worked out concerning the project. Castalia is paying its usual revenue share on both books, 25 percent, although keep in mind that some languages such as Baha Indonesia have sold very, very few copies as Amazon doesn’t even sell books in that language.
We absolutely require native speakers, (mere fluency is not enough) and prefer those with previous writing or translating experience. Previous Castalia translators will be given precedence, as we already know the quality of their work. Some, though not all, of these translations may appear in hardcover as well as in ebook format. Neither book is particularly long, the 4GW Handbook is around 50k words and the other one is 100k words.
If you are interested and able to commit to doing either or both of these translations, please send me an email with your native language in all caps in the subject.
The Hugo-nominated author Larry Correia is now up for another award, this one being the Horror category of the GoodReads Choice Awards. The book nominated is Monster Hunter Nemesis and you can vote for it here.
And to think he didn’t even campaign for it! How is that even possible?
In other book news, there were two interesting development on the Castalia front this week. First, we’ve been under a relentless hacker attack for the last 134 hours, which appears to be related to our public endorsement of #GamerGate. After some initial success tracking down our login URL due to our carelessness, we tightened up the security and have been letting the hacker fruitlessly bang his head against the locked door in an attempt to gather more information about him. He’s changed his tactics three times now, but we have traced his activity through several servers in the USA and we may even have found his genuine IP address. So, the hunter has become the hunted.
The second thing was that as a result of working with a new author who will be announced shortly, his agent brought a second author to our attention, whose work actually promises to be very interesting. So, that’s another small step forward for the Blue SF/F revolution.
Quite a few New Release subscribers opted for SCI PHI JOURNAL #1 as their free book, so I expect more than few people might be pleased to know that the publisher is permitting Castalia House customers to purchase SCI PHI JOURNAL #2 a few days prior to its official release on November 1st. The second issue of SCI PHI JOURNAL features short stories, book reviews, and some interesting articles such as “On the Ethics of Supersoldiers” by Patrick S. Baker and “The Making of the Fellowship” by the excellent fantasy essayist Tom Simon. it also contains the first part of a serial, Beyond the Mist by Ben Zwycky, and a history that never-was by Castalia House standout John C. Wright, entitled “Prophetic & Apotropaic Science Fiction”.
From the reviews of the premier issue:
It’s a bit tragic that you’d need a somewhat specialized magazine to read stuff that treats Sci Fi, philosophy and Christianity seriously and with respect – but here it is.
This was an enjoyable read, well worth the price. As with anything in this format, the individual entries are of varying quality, but none were all bad. “Domo” was my personal favorite.
Enjoyed it enormously. The stories are well written. The magazine is thought provoking.
