Tag: Castalia House

É dia de Português

O planeta independente Rhysalan oferece Asilo para 1.462 governos
exilados. É responsabilidade do departamento de Xenocriminologia e
Relações Alienígenas da Divisão Militar de Investigação de Crimes manter
a rédea curta com as centenas de milhares de xenos residindo no
planeta. Assassinatos, revoluções, guerras civis e tentativas de
genocídios planetários fazem parte da rotina de trabalho do Subtenente
Comandante Graven Tower, da DMIC-XRA.

Em acréscimo a um aerovar armado com mísseis, à sua confiável Sphinx
CPB-18 e às políticas extremamente liberais da DMIC com relação a danos
colaterais e vítimas civis, o Comandante Tower é estimulado por sua
extrema xenofobia, assim como por uma inteligência de máquina com
aumento de realidade de categoria militar que acredita que encontrou
Deus. No meio deste cenário, quando os restos desintegrados do herdeiro
legítimo de uma casa real alienígena são descobertos nas ruas de Trans
Paradis, a questão não é tanto se no final os assassinos serão
encontrados, mas se são os criminosos ou os investigadores criminais que
vão contribuir mais para a soma total de mortos.

QUANTUM MORTIS é a série de mistério de Ficção Científica Militar
repleta de ação de Vox Day – indicado para o prêmio Hugo e autor da
série de fantasias épicas As Artes da Escuridão e da Luz – e Steve
Rzasa.

Thanks to Israel and Daniel, Castalia House has released its second and third books in Portuguese today. Two QUANTUM MORTIS books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal, have joined Uma Magia Perdida in our Portuguese language catalog. This should be useful for those, like The Perfect Aryan Male, who are brushing up on their Brazilian Portuguese. Please note that both Gravidade Mortal and Uma Magia Perdida will be free downloads tomorrow and Thursday.

And in other Castalia House news, we’re pleased to announce the first of our new bloggers. Jeff Johnson of the Space Gaming Blog will be posting on Mondays. Yesterday he got off on exactly the right foot with a review of the first of the new Traveller novels from Marc Miller, Fate of the Kinunir. The Castalia House blog is rapidly becoming a destination in its own right, with four new bloggers joining Daniel, Mascaro, and Anson in posting essays, book reviews and interviews of independent and established authors alike. So, if you’re interested in following the Blue SF revolution as it proceeds, you’ll want to check it out on a regular basis.

“Opera” on Amazon

Tor is giving away its various Hugo nominees for free on Amazon today, so I thought it might be a good idea to follow suit. The Hugo-nominated “Opera Vita Aeterna” is now available on Amazon for 99 cents, and it will be given away as a free download as soon as Kindle Select permits. If you’ve read it, I encourage you to post a review there; if nothing else the contrast between the pinkshirts’ reviews and everyone else’s should make for some entertaining reading.

In other Castalia House news, we will be introducing a number of new bloggers in the next two weeks as part of our long term plan to become the leading SF/F destination site. The release of John C. Wright’s latest masterpiece, a real mind-bender, will be taking place this month, and just in time for the World Cup, both QM:AMD and QM:GK will be published in Brazilian Portuguese next week.

Speaking of Amazon, the good news for readers is that they appear to be winning their showdown with the publishers to keep book prices low. From Publishers Weekly: “A spokesperson for Hachette Book Group has confirmed that they initiated a round of layoffs today.”

One more blogger wanted

We’ve filled most of the blogger slots at the Castalia House blog, all except one. I’d like to see a weekly interview there, not just of Castalia authors, but of independent authors, self-published authors, and mainstream SF/F authors alike. So, if you’re interested in interviewing your favorite authors, please speak up in the comments with your list of the first five authors you would interview if given the opportunity. I’ll choose one person on that basis, in the event more than one person steps forward, and we’ll take it from there.

And speaking of Castalia House, MK explains how to set your Kindle device to take advantage of our updates:

  1. Near the top right of the Amazon home page, choose “Manage your content and devices” from about halfway down the “Your Account” dropdown menu.
  2. You will be prompted to enter your password – even if already logged in to the site. The content page will load. At the top, choose the “Settings” tab.
  3. Scroll down to “Automatic Book Update” and set this to “On.”

Note that to retain your furthest page read, notes, annotations, etc.,when an update happens, you need to have the “Annotation Back Up” setting turned on in all of your devices and reading apps.

Updated versions will replace the existing versions on your devices seamlessly, in the background, with no interaction required. If you choose to keep Automatic Book Update turned off, you must update manually. I am not sure exactly how manual updates are handled now, but the Amazon.com Kindle Help pages indicate that if Automatic Book Update is off, an email is sent when an updated version is available. Presumably there is a link in the email.

New update policy

Because some readers have complained about typos in outdated versions of various Castalia ebooks, we’re going to be tweeting every time we update an ebook with corrections and typo fixes.

We make corrections very rapidly, usually within a day or two of receiving a list of typos. For example, the current version of A THRONE OF BONES is 009. Since we come from the game industry, and since our focus is on electronic publishing, we have decided to take an iterative approach to editing. This allows us to publish books quickly, and to also ensure that they rapidly reach a state of minimal errors.

All books from all publishers have typos. That’s the reality. When we converted the EW books to ebooks, we discovered that the professionally edited, professionally line-edited manuscripts, from a major New York publisher, one of which had been through three print runs and two layouts, contained an average of 165 typos. The core problem is that each individual editor and proofreader has a tendency to see certain problems and not see other ones. For example, the maximum amount of overlap I’ve seen from two different proofreader lists is on the order of 20 percent. Now, we could delay publication by a month and expect to catch somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the version 001 typos or we can do a run through Team OCD, publish it, and then catch 85 percent of them in the first three or four days after release with the assistance of the first readers.

And because we always publish ebooks first, this also permits us, unlike most publishers, to ensure that our hardcovers will be exceptionally clean.

Since it’s very easy to automatically receive the updated versions through Amazon, and it’s not much harder to get one directly from us, we think this approach is much preferable to the conventional one. If you have any better ideas, we’re certainly open to hearing your suggestions, but in the meantime, we will be transparent about when the updates are released. If you want to be apprised of them, please simply follow @castaliahouse on Twitter.

While I’m at it, I should mention that version 002 of John C. Wright’s excellent TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN is now the current version on Amazon.  And, having finished editing his forthcoming CITY BEYOND TIME , which is now in the hands of the proofreaders; I am hoping we will be able to release it this week.

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS

Today we are officially announcing the publication of ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, a curriculum created by Dr. Sarah Salviander, a research scientist whose areas of particular interest are quasars and supermassive black holes. She is a research scientist at the University of Texas, is one of the authors of “Evolution of the Black Hole Mass – Galaxy Bulge Relationship for Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7” and “Narrow Emission Lines as Surrogates for σ * in Low- to Moderate-z QSOs” in addition to many other scientific papers, and teaches classes as a visiting professor of physics at Southwestern University. Dr. Salviander describes the new curriculum at Castalia House:

“Look around the web for a high-quality, modern-science astronomy homeschool course and you won’t find much. There are a handful of scripture-based astronomy courses that seem to cover little more than the seasons and motions of the night sky, and one very expensive software-based curriculum. I realized there was a need for a comprehensive, modern, and affordable astronomy homeschool curriculum, and set out to develop one based on my years of teaching astronomy at the university level. A couple of years ago, I mentioned this in an offhand way to Vox Day; it turns out Vox had been contemplating offering a series of affordable, electronically-available homeschool curricula, and so we began to discuss the possibility of making astrophysics the first of many such courses.”

 So we are pleased to announce ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, the first offering in the Castalia Homeschool line. The curriculum is available only through the Castalia House store and costs less than $60.00. No further expenditures are necessary for the course as the textbook is available online, although we recently received permission to publish the primary textbook and will soon offer it accordingly at an affordable price. Our objective is to keep the price of all curricula under $100.

The curriculum is designed for students aged 13+. It has been described as “a top-notch astronomy curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn, author of Trivium Pursuit. As per suggestions from the readers of this blog, sample PDFs from all four books of the curriculum have been made available for free download on the relevant product listing of the Castalia House store. If you are, or if you know, a homeschool mother of teenagers now preparing the fall course schedule, I encourage you to take a close look at ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS and consider using it for the next school year.

Mailvox: making the choice

In response to yesterday’s column about it being time to choose your side, I heard from a reader who is interested in creating a short fiction companion site to Castalia House. While I don’t have the bandwidth to do much more than offer advice and perhaps some branding, I’m interested in finding out if there is anyone here interested in being involved in some way, shape, or form, be it editing, contributing short fiction, or helping with the site.

If so, mention it here, and if there are enough people that are interested, I’ll see about gathering the names and sending them to the individual concerned. There are a number of possibilities here I can imagine, from amping up Stupefying Stories to creating an entirely new short fiction brand. But the initial path will be determined by how many volunteers are willing to get involved.

As I told the guy, there is no money in short fiction these days. It has to be a mission and an objective to be pursued as an end in itself. I’d like to see it happen, as I can easily envision it being the NCAA to Castalia’s NFL, where writers can develop their storytelling and writing skills in the process of becoming publishable authors. But it has to be done right or there is no point in doing it at all.

The key to making things happen, of course, is simply jumping in and doing it. At Castalia, we had no plan. We had 10 ebooks, a name, a URL, and the support of the Dread Ilk. Three months later, we’ve sold or given away more than 15,000 books. So, I have no doubt that if the people here want to make it happen, we can collectively make it happen.

It would surprise me terribly if in five years, we have a fledgling Internet TV channel and production studio going. Or perhaps we will be petty warlords battling for local supremacy in various zombie-strewn post-civilization wastelands instead. But regardless, we have the advantage of knowing that even two men joined by their mutual allegiance to a certain Name can accomplish more than most people can imagine.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT free on Amazon

In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, or despite the many excellent reviews you still have not been moved to put John C. Wright at the front of your reading list, today opportunity knocks as today and tomorrow, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT is free on Amazon.

The novella was included in the Years Best Science Fiction anthology published in 2004. It makes for an marvelous introduction to the terrors of the Night Land, as well as to the dark beauty of Mr. John C. Wright’s pen.

In not entirely unrelated news, I would like to thank you all for an astonishingly successful launch of Mr. Wright’s TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN. I expected it to be of significant interest to many of you, but I can’t honestly say that I expected this:

  • #1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > History & Criticism
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Good & Evil
  •  #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory

TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN

Castalia House is deeply honored to announce the publication of what we believe is the most important book about science fiction in years, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright. The 369-page book is comprised of sixteen essays originally written by Mr. Wright for his journal, which have been edited, and in a number of cases, collated from more than one journal posting, by Mr. Wright.

The essays are brilliant and thought-provoking. They inspire, they inform, they educate, they entertain, and they will more than likely enrage a few readers. They provide fascinating insight into the mind and methods of one of science fiction’s greatest living masters. From beginning to end, Mr. Wright shows himself to be as able an essayist as he is a novelist.

Following an introduction by science fiction author Michael Flynn, Mr. Wright addresses everything from technological transhumanity to theological Gnosticism. He examines SF authors from H.G. Wells to Ted Chiang, and explains why it is A.E. van Vogt, and not Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury, who is the third of the Big Three of science fiction. And he explains why science fiction is fundamentally more important to humanity than what presently passes itself off as mainstream literature.

In “Science Fiction: What is it Good For?” Wright writes:  

“Stories serve several quotidian purposes. I listed them above: they are fables to instruct the young and epics to preserve the memory of the great, and ghost stories to tell about campfires to give us all a sense of proportion and remind us (like the charioteers of Caesars during their triumphs and ovations) that all men are mortal. But there is something more that they serve, a purpose which is utterly unworldly, and utterly inexplicable to the Morlocks, who have no imagination, and need none.
 
“We sons of Adam are exiles here on this world. It does not suit us. We are not comfortable here, and those who say they are comfortable in this world of injustice and disease and death are not more sane and more well adapted to the environment than we who dream; they are merely inert in their souls, too dull to hear the horns of Elfland softly blowing.”

To read TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN is to not only hear the horns of Elfland blowing, but to understand why they must be blown.

In the company with TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN, we are also announcing the publication of a second ebook by Mr. Wright. AWAKE IN THE NIGHT is the first novella that is contained in the anthology-novel AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. We are publishing it separately in order to be able to periodically give it away via Kindle Select and thereby introduce unsuspecting individuals to the epic horrors and forlorn hopes of the Night Land. It is also an attempt to address the surprising price elasticity of ebooks, as we have noticed that more than a few people prefer to take a chance on a $2.99 ebook that they will not take on a much longer $4.99 ebook. Since we are but humble servants of the market, we are happy to accommodate those economic preferences.

If you don’t mind

We are going to be announcing a pair of John C. Wright books this week, although only one of them is going to be of interest to the many of you who have already had the good fortune to read his previous release. As you may have noticed on the sidebar, Castalia is releasing AWAKE IN THE NIGHT as a stand-alone novella for the purpose of raising awareness of the excellent AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND via the KDP Select program.

However, since it is a different listing with a different ASIN, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT presently lacks reviews. So, I’d like to ask those of you who reviewed the complete collection to copy the relevant aspects of your review to the listing for the single novella as well, if you don’t mind. The sooner the better, if you happen to have the time.

Transhumanity draws near

We’re very close to releasing TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright. You can, if you are so inclined, have an early look at the cover along with the Introduction by Michael Flynn at Mr. Wright’s site. It is a selection of the very best of Mr. Wright’s reliably brilliant essays.