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.
Tag: Castalia House
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.
A review of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND
As part of Night Land Day, I asked Andy Robertson, who founded The Night Land site and first published the novellas there, to share his thoughts on the new book. He went one better and explained both how the site developed as well as his initial reaction to John C. Wright’s forays into the Night Lands, now collected in AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:
The dark, looming, images of the Land had made
such an impact on me. When I started to
write stories set in that world, it was as if I
remembered a life I had lived in that society,
with its prim manners overlaying iron values and
its dauntless courage. I didn’t need
to make anything up. I just watched it happen.
Brett Davidson sent me a story from New
Zealand with a background that
complemented and extended my own, and I
found the person who would be my principle
creative partner. For years we’ve
batted ideas back and forth by email late at
night. Other writers joined us and
mostly took their lead from Brett and
I. We were building a shared world
but one so rich and vivid felt as if we were
were discovering something that already
existed. I don’t think I’ve ever had such
fun ((while vertical)) in my life.
And then I got a new submission, from John C
Wright, which was quite apart from all the other
Night Land tales.
I’d written a fusion of Hodgson’s vision
with cutting-edge science, and tried to evoke a
credible Redoubt culture, a culture that might
really last ten million years.
Therefore my Redoubt was a society of strict
moral codes, an actual functional and enforced
marriage contract, strong kinship bonds, and
sharply differentiated complementary behavior of
men and women. ((It strikes me only now that
this is mistaken by some readers for archaism.
But of course it isn’t. It’s
futurism. Or just realism. No society
without these values or something like them can
survive more than a couple of
generations.)) And I’d written of a
society rich in technical and scientific
knowledge, including as unremarked givens such
familiar SF tropes as nanotechnology,
cyborgisation, and Artificial
Intelligence. I had some fun
integrating these into Hodgson’s “scientific”
formulation of reincarnation and psychic
predation.
I had done my best to reinterpret the Night Land as science fiction, and other writers
had followed me. But John’s
story followed his own dreams.
His character names were derived from classical
Greek, not generic IndoEuropean sememes. The
manners of the society were likewise closely
modeled on the ancient pagans. Dozois has called
this an air of distanced antiquity, and it works
well, but I repeat it’s distinctly different
from my own, which is not antique at all. His
was not a technically sophisticated society and
seemed not to have a scientific attitude to the
alien Land that surrounded it. It ran off rote
technology and was ignorant of the workings of
much of the machinery it depended on. It was
doomed and dwindling and dark and candle-lit, a
tumbledown place with a hint of Ghormenghast to
it. (I know John will hate that comparison, and
I apologize). The story was one of childhood
friendship, rivalry, disaster and rescue. The
writing style was, incidentally, brilliant.
I bought it and published it in our first
hardcopy anthology, ENDLESS LOVE. It got into
Dozois’ BEST SF and several other yearly
anthlogies and created a minor sensation. There
are still places where the first taste of
Hodgson’s work a casual reader will get is the
translation of “Awake in the Night” in that
year’s Dozois, and the story is an entry drug
not only for THE NIGHT LAND but for Hodgson
himself and all his work. This was a story which
Hodgson might have written if he had been a more
gifted weaver of words. John remarked to me at
one point that he was surprised at the story’s
popularity. I think we both understood that
despite its author’s talent, the real power
resided in the way it had stayed faithful to
Hodgson’s own visions, without elaborating them
too much. The whole world could now see and
share Hodgson’s original Night Land. They were
seeing it through John’s eyes, not mine, but
that didn’t matter to me. This was
what I had set the NightLand website up for.
*****
I expected a whole series of tales from John
set in his version of The Night Land, but his
next story was a radical departure from anything
that he or any of the rest of us had ever done.
It surpassed not only Hodgson’s talents but,
damn it, Lovecraft’s.
When I read “Awake in the
Night” I felt some envy, but when the ms for
“The Last of All Suns” crossed my inbox I felt
something like awe. It’s almost impossible to describe this
story without employing spoilers, because there
is nothing else like it to compare it to or to
hint that it is like.
Read the whole thing at The Night Land.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND
As you can imagine, we are proud, pleased, delighted, and deeply honored to announce Castalia House’s publication of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright. It is, quite simply, one of the best books I have ever had the privilege of reading. If you peruse the Reading Lists on the right sidebar, you can see that I have read a considerable number of SF/F works considered to be of high quality in the last five years alone. So, you can be confident that I know whereof I speak, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest, when I tell you that AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND will be one of the best books you read this year if you have the courage to enter one of the most daunting realms in literature.
It is not an easy book to categorize. Part anthology, part novel, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND consists of four novellas that are tied together in one vast story spanning five million years. It is a masterful combination of three literary subgenres, SF, Fantasy, and Horror. It is set in the world first created in an obscure novel published in 1912 and yet it is far more original than the vast majority of SF/F published in the last fifty years. It is remorselessly grim story set in a more inhumanly horrific environment than anything you are likely to imagine, and yet it is an uplifting tribute to the unquenchable human spirit.
It is monstrous and glorious and ghastly and magnificent.
Consider the reactions of the early reviewers:
- “The Last of All Suns” may be the best SF novella I have ever read. I am not kidding.
- Every now and then someone comes along who not only can say things
nicely, but can say _important_ things nicely. That somebody, in the
modern age, is John C. Wright. - He projects an atmosphere of hope amid the vast emptiness of a dead world.
- Set millions of years in the future the story and
setting can really only be compared to the worst nightmares of
Lovecraft. I cannot stress enough, read this book! If you like
Lovecraft, the darkest visions of Stephen King, or the visions of H.R.
Giger you will love this book. If you like science fiction especially
the ‘Dying Earth’ genre of Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Michael Moorcock,
you will love this book. If you’ve never heard of those authors or those books, read this book.
I have written a number of books. Never once have I said to you, my readers, “you must read this book”. That is because I have never written a book like this one. There are a very small number of books of which I would say “you must read this book”: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Watership Down by Richard Adams.
There were also others that came close, books that I enjoyed very much indeed, but did not quite justify the assertion. Embassytown by China Mieville. Cryptonomicon and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A Game of Thrones by George Martin. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Dune by Frank Herbert.
I will tell you now that if you appreciate excellent books, then you must read this one. I cannot imagine you will regret it.
As a child, I was much struck by the quote of the reviewer for The Times in his review of Watership Down: “I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story.” But I am not so much trembling with pleasure as shaking my head in awe as I announce the appearance of a story that may sit on the shelves in the mighty company of the aforementioned books without feeling shame.
In addition to the Amazon links provided above, Awake in the Night Land is also available in epub format at Smashwords.