Tag: Castalia House

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.

A whiff of Hultgreen-Curie

At Alpha Game, it is observed that appears women in the military are closing the all-important suicide gap between male and female soldiers.

Meanwhile, at Castalia House, Anson contemplates the difference between “fluff” and “poorly done” in a review of John Ringo:

If a novel is poorly done, it doesn’t much matter what it attempts to do: it is a failure. (Although the topic of what makes a book either a success or a failure is a complicated one; that’s a topic I hope to dig into over time as these reviews continue).

Today, though, I want to speak about serious vs fluff. Lord of the Rings is serious. The Sword of Shana is fluff (it is also poorly done , but that’s not relevant). What makes LOTR serious while SOS (and, yes, someone please send help ASAP) is fluff? Intent, complexity, characterization, congruence between aim of the novel, tone of the language, originality of the world, nuance of the characters, depth of the moral code, etc.

And Daniel cites Philip K. Dick’s preferred method of future-scrying:

[B]ecause the mystical experience of writing to anticipate the future will most certainly be inaccurate, one is more likely to anticipate the future by looking to the past…and scrambling it.

Castalia House Store

Ladies and gentlemen, Dread Ilk, casual fans, rubberneckers, anklebiters, and fellow Hugo Award nominees, I am very pleased indeed to announce to you that the Castalia House online store is now open for business.

Our selection is somewhat scanty at present, as the participation of certain books in Amazon’s Kindle Select program precludes them from being offered at the Castalia store for now. You will look in vain for Lt. Col Tom Kratman. You will offer no sacrifices on any Altars of Hate. Der Verstand werden Sie nicht finden. E li, i ragazzi piangono mai.

What you will find in the Fantasy section is four fine works of fiction, including AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright. All of them are also DRM-free, in EPUB format. What you will find in the Science Fiction section are two tales of the future, both involving Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower, MCID-XAR. And, most importantly, what you will find in the Homeschool section are the four books that make up the ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS curriculum by Dr. Sarah Salviander. They are also DRM-free, but are in PDF format for easy printing.

While we have not yet officially announced the curriculum, as we are in the process of having the curriculum reviewed by a number of homeschool sites, I wanted to make it available to VP readers as soon as possible, as I know that there are many homeschoolers here who are presently preparing their coursework for the autumn. It has been declared to be “a top-notch astronomy
curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn of Trivium Pursuit fame, and is literally serving as the model for other Castalia House curricula, including Physics, Economics, and Military History.

And don’t forget that the Castalia House blog is active too. Today Mascaro reviews Fearless, the second book in the Lost Fleet series.

Castalia House Goes Live!

One of our long-term goals for Castalia House is to make it the premier intellectual driving force in SF/F. That means more than simply publishing intelligent entertaining books by the likes of John C. Wright, Tom Kratman, and Rolf Nelson, and more than the publication of various educational curricula on subjects ranging from Astrophysics to Military History, but also reviewing the current state of the literary sub-genres.

So, we’re pleased to announce that the Castalia House blog has gone live with its first three daily bloggers. We’ll be adding a few more presently, but these three alone will ensure that the Castalia blog becomes a daily destination for everyone interested in science fiction and fantasy.  From Anson, a book review:

REVIEW: The Martian by Andy Weir

The last few decades have seen a decline in the genre, as the good
material has surrendered its space in the bookstores, and foot by foot,
rack by rack, has been replaced by bi-curious tattooed lyncanthrope bike
chicks, Victorian ladies in steampunk goggles (Victorian only in
breeding and couture, sadly), endless Star Trek novelizations, and other
varieties of crap.

(The last 30 years have not been entirely dark – we’ve been blessed
with some of the best space opera ever from the pen of Ian Banks,
stunning Weird Fantasy from China Mieville, amazing stuff in multiple
genres from Neal Stephenson, and more…but bright spots aside, the hot
white hot center, the default worldview of science fiction has dimmed
and become less magical, more mundane, and – yes – simultaneously more
tacky, more banal, and more despair inducing.)

I was thrilled to come across a new novel recently that broke from
this downward trend. It’s not the perfect novel (but then again, what
is?)

And from Daniel Eness, The Secret to Science Fiction:

H. Beam Piper — a man so versed in science he could sketch out, on a napkin, an engineering model of Sputnik the day it was announced, and explain it to a table of science enthusiasts — quit near-future science fiction. He did it because the scientific advances of the 1950s were coming so quickly that much of the knowledge he used for his stories felt obsolete to him by the time the magazines went to print. He was fed up with his guesses going bad so quickly like so much produce. That was 60 years ago. Has the world slowed down since then?

Jeff Sutton’s Apollo at Go suffered the opposite fate: because the NASA missions were so heavily engineered, and Sutton an engineer doing work for NASA…his 1965 “science fiction” book about the first moon landing that would happen in real life four years later now reads more like alternate history, and only a slight alternate at that.

Also, in case you haven’t read it yet, THE LAST WITCHKING, which contains the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna”, is a free download today from Amazon.

And finally, due to the inability to sell pre-formatted PDF files through either Amazon or Smashwords, (yes, we know Smashwords sells PDFs, but they have to be submitted in Word format), we found it necessary to create our own online store. So, if you would like to support us by purchasing epubs directly, you can now do so at the Castalia House Store. Not everything is available there now, due to the limitations of the Kindle Select program, but you can expect the selections there to grow over time.

Opera Vita Aeterna

I’ve been informed that it is customary to make Hugo-nominated works freely available to the public during the voting stage, so here is “OPERA VITA AETERNA”, a nominee for the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Click on the title link or on the cover image to download the free epub. If you prefer Kindle format, there is also a mobi version available for download.

There has been a fair amount of discussion of the novelette online, almost entirely by people who not only have not read it, but know absolutely nothing about it. I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in excellence in SF/F literature simply read the work and judge it on its merits. And for those who are more interested in thought-policing the genre, they can simply do as some have suggested, “rank a nominated work below “No Award””, and thereby provide us with an accurate measure of the degree to which SF/F fandom is influenced by the politically correct Left.

From the Amazon reviews of THE LAST WITCHKING:

  • The masterpiece of the trio, though, is Opera Vita Aeterna. At its core
    is the dialogue between an aging monk and a long-lived elven sorcerer in
    unwitting search of his own salvation. Day again employs both allegory
    and tremendous subtlety as the more experienced and intelligent elf is
    perplexed and impressed by the power of eternal truth. Aeterna is both
    clever and touching and might be the best story Day has produced to
    date. 
  • Opera Vita Aeterna: This is a brilliant, five-star story, and the
    best in the book, in my opinion. For me to rate a story as brilliant,
    it must be beautifully written, have complex characters, and leave me
    with a note of lingering intangibility. The elf Bessarias is on a quest
    for God, whom he doesn’t necessarily find. Through his searching,
    though, he leaves an important legacy behind him. There lies the
    intangibility–no personal, cathartic moment, but, instead, a glimpse of
    something far greater.
  • Opera Vita Aeterna is a deeply catholic work of the height of beauty,
    the power of events long after the events are forgotten, and the
    complexity and density of the Christian model of hope. Its most elegant
    turn is its ability to transform a deft and intriguing story about a
    strange sorcerer’s encounter with a rural cloister into a meditation on
    the nature of eternity. It is rare to describe a story as both
    restrained and florid, but its details are so rich and believable and
    its voice is so even. Read it, then read it again after reading Summa
    Elvetica.
  • All too brief, it balances the darkness of this book’s title story with a
    reminder that though darkness may engulf the world and seem to triumph,
    within the light there is a power that endures, which darkness cannot
    comprehend. All together, The Last Witchking is a significant offering by Vox, one I am still digesting and will read again.

Beyond good and bad

The Bloggerblaster reviews AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Moments ago I finished Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright.

As I sit to give you my thoughts on it…  the first thing that comes to
mind is a question.   How does one review… or critique…  something
like this?  I am unfit.

One does not critique the great works of literature.  One appreciates
them.  You define good and bad by them.  Good and bad do not apply to
them….

I would offer some advice to the reader.  Read with patience.  Each
story builds upon the last.  You will have questions and frustrations as
you go.  Keep going. The struggle of the climb improves the view from
the top. 

One theme that keeps reoccurring in reviews is how the book forces them think about it afterwards. To me, that is one of the hallmarks of greatness in literature; one of Maupassant’s haunting stories, his best, in my opinion, once left me staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour.

It may strike you that this isn’t how we usually talk about one of my books, or one of Tom’s books, or one of Larry’s books. It’s not how we talk about the books we publish. It’s not how we talk about the award-winning stuff, be the awards merited or unmerited. This is one of those rare occasions when one discovers, much to one’s surprise, that one has stumbled upon genuine and timeless greatness concerning the observation of the human condition.

The book’s one four-star reviewer declared he only gives out five stars to Shakespeare… then thought about it and gave the book five stars anyway. If you’ve read my book reviews, you know I tend to grade on the severe side, I rarely give out anything above an 8/10, and yet, I don’t hesitate to tell you that this book rates 10/10. If you believe me, then read it. And if you don’t believe me, then read it and afterwards tell us precisely where and how you believe it somehow falls short.

On the cover

Jartstar shares his thoughts about how he went about creating the cover for AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Awake in the Night Land is one of the finest stories I have ever read, and when I was given the opportunity to design a cover for it I was elated. After presenting a series of thumbnails to Mr. Wright with series of different styles and ideas, he chose a straight forward image with the focal point being The Last Redoubt.

The challenge was representing a towering, ancient, rusting structure surrounded by a dead and sunless sky encircled by ruins and a wasteland. If the lighting was accurate to the real world and the story it would consist of a silhouetted triangular shape with a dim red glowing horizon and a few bright spots of magma here and there. This would make for a thoroughly uninteresting image which certainly would not work for a book cover. Using some artistic license I brightened up the concept and made a dramatic, disconcerting red sky with the light of the Redoubt fighting against the creeping black around it. 

I certainly hope my version of the Redoubt has done justice to it as described in the story, but more importantly, it should reflect the power of Wright’s superb work. This question of my success can only be answered by the wayfarers who are willing to enter into the dark of the Night Lands and find their way out again.

On John C. Wright’s Journal, Pinlighter asked about the shape of the pyramid:

It’s certainly an effective cover, – I’ll go beyond that, a beautiful
cover – but the Redoubt is clearly described in THE NIGHT LAND as being a
Pyramid without terraces or steps like that, but looking more like the
traditional (Egyptian) pyramid, smoothly tapering to a point. I am
curious as to your motives for not showing it like that. 

VD replies: The change to a more Mayan-style pyramid was my call. As you can see in the thumbs, the original plan was to go by the book. But the simple geometric shape just looked too plain and boring, especially for a central element that was featured so prominently on the cover. So, chalk it down to artistic liberty, in much the same way that the Watcher’s heads are fully exposed rather than on their sides with their faces half-buried as in the text. It’s certainly desirable to get the details right, but not at the expense of making a cover visually tedious. I think Jartstar did a very good job of conveying the ominous spirit of the Night Lands while also expressing its core message of human hope in a visually arresting image; to see it in more detail, just click on the cover.

Larry Corriea drops the bomb

On behalf of Mr. John C. Wright and encourages his vast horde of heavily armed readers to divert a little of their ammo money towards a copy of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Many of you already know John for being an awesome sci-fi writer. Personally, I found him because of his blog. Like me, John is an out of the closet conservative. Only where I am
blunt and sometimes crude, John is eloquent and intellectual. I’m a
tetsubo. John is a rapier. I’ve got a lot of respect for his writing,
and I don’t say this lightly but I really do believe he is our modern
C.S. Lewis….

Right now it is sitting at: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,504 Paid in Kindle Store

I want to bump that up higher because I think
John is a great writer and a voice of reason in the wilderness. So
please tell your friends, repost this on your FB or Twitter or whatever
you are in to.

Read the rest at Monster Hunter Nation.