Tag: Selenoth

Another “review”

A review of Cuckservative from someone named Pink Gandhi:

1.0 out of 5 stars This book sets up a false binary from the start …
By PinkGandhi on December 9, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
This book sets up a false binary from the start and then goes to prove its case on these terms. It is for the simple minded.

How fortunate that there are so many simple-minded people who troubled to read it.

I also have some other book-related news. As you know, the 500-page early edition of A SEA OF SKULLS will be out soon, most likely next week. There will be two ways to acquire it:

  1. Buy it for $7.99 at the Castalia store. We will send out the 900-page final edition when it is completed in the late spring, which is when the paperback and hardcover editions will also be released. There will be no print editions of the early edition.
  2. Buy it for $5.99 at Amazon, then update in the spring.

We expect most people to prefer Amazon and we will absolutely be willing to send out updates to everyone who buys from Amazon and send us a copy of a purchase invoice dated December 2016, but we are aware that there are people who are liable to fall through the cracks that way.

Take this with a grain of salt, of course, given that an author finishing a novel is among the least trustworthy of judges, but the initial internal reviews of ASOS have been positive. I was determined to avoid both the sophomore slump and middle-book syndrome, as well as GRRM’s patented perspective-character metastasization, and it would appear that I have been successful in doing so. ASOS is a harsher book than ATOB, but then, that is because it provides a glimpse into some harsher cultures than that of Amorr.

A THRONE OF BONES is back

In Selenoth, the race of Man is on the ascendant. The ancient dragons sleep. The ghastly Witchkings are no more; their evil power destroyed by the courage of Men and the fearsome magic of the Elves. The Dwarves have retreated to the kingdoms of the Underdeep, the trolls hide in their mountains, and even the savage orc tribes have learned to dread the iron discipline of Amorr’s mighty legions. But after four hundred years of mutual suspicion, the rivalry between two of the Houses Martial that rule the Amorran Senate threatens to turn violent, and unrest sparks rebellion throughout the imperial provinces.


In the north, the barbarian reavers who have long plagued the coasts of the White Sea unexpectedly plead for the royal protection of the King of Savondir, as they flee a vicious race of wolf-demons who have invaded their islands. And in the distant east, the war drums echo throughout the mountains as orcs and goblins gather in vast numbers, summoned by their bestial gods.


Epic fantasy at its deepest and most gripping. Military fiction at its most fantastic. A THRONE OF BONES is Book I in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series. Available in both paperback and case-bound hardcover.

Thanks to Matt, Robert, Markku, and Kirk, who somehow managed to find the time to get this out before next week’s release of the early edition of Book II, and in between all of the other new releases to boot. Although the text is the same, it has had another round of deep proofreading and is a completely revamped print edition. Despite being Royal Octavo and larger than the Marcher Lord hardcover, it clocks in at 922 pages.

Mailvox: Sociosexuality and Selenoth

Cogitans Iuvenis was the first of several to ask:

So how would you classify each character in Throne of Bones.

My own work tends to illustrate the intrinsic challenge of writing outside one’s rank. Let’s look at the perspective characters first:

Marcus Valerius: too soon to tell. Either Alpha or Sigma.
Valerius Corvus: Alpha, but less Alpha than his brother Magnus
Valerius Fortex: Alpha
Severus Aulan: Beta
Theuderic: Sigma
Lodi: Beta
Meerfin: Delta

Non-perspective characters:

Valerius Magnus: Alpha
Severus Patronus: Alpha
Charles-Philippe de Mirid: Alpha
Skuli Skullbreaker: Alpha

Now, considering that it is a book that concerns a considerable quantity of kings, aristocrats, and generals, it is entirely appropriate that the characters should be weighted towards the Alpha rank. But I think the book would be better, and more interesting, if a broader range of characters were portrayed, so long as they were portrayed accurately according to their socio-sexual profile.

The challenge is that it is no easier for an Alpha to convincingly write a Gamma than vice-versa. Or for the Delta to write a Sigma, etc. Just as the Gamma writes paper Alphas, the Alpha is likely to write excessively sniveling Gammas that don’t do justice to either the observable exterior or the rich, self-centered interior.

Concept art

I’ll go into more detail on this at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say that the FIRST SWORD concept is expanding. Instead of being a simple combat management game, it’s going to be a cross-platform, cross-media game, and will be playable in various forms from tabletop to mobile. I’ve always been somewhat of a holistic designer, but this is the first time I’ve had the ability to do something I’ve wanted to do for seven years now, something completely new and different.

We’ve got a pair of good sculptors and a sketch artist, but we’re looking for some high-quality concept art for the various fantasy gladiators. It’s set in Selenoth, so we’re looking for Amorran, Savondese, and Dalarn humans, orcs, goblins, dwarves, elves, and trolls.

If you’re a serious sketch artist and you want to show us what you can do, send me a fantasy gladiator sketch. If we buy it from you, we’ll also send you one of the miniatures based on it.

Free Wardog

In honor of the publication of UMA MAGIA PERDIDA, the  Portuguese translation of A Magic Broken, Castalia House is giving away free copies of The Wardog’s Coin on Amazon today. Thanks to Daniel Wilhelm Mayer, the translator, as well as to proofreader N, and to JartStar, who has become increasingly adept at figuring out how to adapt different title lengths to the same space. On Thursday and Friday of this week, UMA MAGIA PERDIDA will also be a free download. If you happen to be a Portuguese speaker, particularly a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and you would like to receive a review copy, please let us know.

The description is as follows: “Passando-se no mundo épico de A Throne of Bones, Uma Magia Perdida é
uma história fantástica de crueldade, coragem e astúcia. O conto retrata
a estória de Nicolas du Mere, um exilado em fuga após a morte de seu
suserano rebelde, e Lodi, filho de Dunmorin, um bravo anão em busca de
resgatar outros anões da escravidão. Seus caminhos se cruzam, mas de uma
maneira totalmente imprevisível.”

I know this sort of thing will rapidly get boring, especially since we just added two new translation languages yesterday, so with the exception of a few upcoming new releases I am not intending to continue posting Castalia House news here. If you’re interested in SF/F and supporting the Blue SF revolution, I would encourage you to either bookmark the Castalia House blog or follow @castaliahouse on Twitter.

A THRONE OF BONES is back

I am extremely pleased to see that the first volume in Arts of Dark and Light, A THRONE OF BONES, is available again on Amazon. Seeing as I am elbows’ deep in the guts of the sequel, (and a very convoluted, but action-filled Book Two it is too), I found it more than a little irritating that all of the secondary works were back up online again, but the central one was not.

If you haven’t read A Throne of Bones yet, it is my answer to the modern epic fantasy. Interestingly enough, Amazon appears to have categorized it in the category Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Myths & Legends > Greek & Roman. I take this as the same sort of compliment that a Black Gate reviewer once paid to Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy when he commented on the arguments by Thomas Aquinas it contained. I don’t claim that A Throne of Bones rises to the level of Greco-Roman myth, much less that my argument for elven ensoulment is as logically sound as the arguments in the Summa proper, but the mere fact that my works can be mistaken for such things, however briefly, is interesting in its own right.

As for the present lack of reviews, I am confident that all 134 reviews, including the spurious ones, will soon be attached to the new Castalia House listing. The price remains the same as before, and at $4.99 for 854 pages, A Throne of Bones has to be one of the better bargains Amazon is presently offering. As for the book itself, this three-star review might provide an informative perspective:

“Vox is adept at balancing out a very complex story. This is only the first book, but Vox wastes no time establishing what are, I assume, the majority of the key forces at play on the chess board so to speak. And that’s one of the biggest draws of the book, because I don’t know how you could read it and not at least be a little curious who’s going to come out on top considering not just the volume of opposing forces, but the variety as well, between demons, different humanoid races, and monsters. Vox has created a house of cards that should be entertaining to watch come crashing down.

“Making this conflict an even more exciting prospect is the way he handles the battles. The battles are some of the best I’ve read in a fantasy novel. Whereas Tolkien didn’t care about strategy, or going into the specifics of the personal impact of the conflict, and seemed to only put the action into his books because he thought that’s what the readers wanted, Vox relishes in strategy, and the up close and personal consequences of the violence. The battles are great, and they don’t feel forced in just to add conflict. The final battle in the book was the end result of a chain of dominoes first tipped over right at the start of the book. Kudos on that, because it definitely has more impact when the battle literally couldn’t exist without the prior 600+ pages setting it up.

“I’d like to give this book a four star review, because I enjoyed reading it despite its flaws, but it’s a three star book. With just a couple of (easier said than done) improvements, this could be an easy four stars if not five. Vox has laid a solid foundation, and I’m still looking forward to seeing who dies next, who betrays who, and how the alliances change.

“Also, just sayin’, I’d much rather read this than Martin’s Game of Thrones.”

I don’t know if I will succeed in making the series continuously improve or not; presumably no author wants to see his books on a downward-trending arc. But I have paid attention to all of the substantive criticism that has been offered. Some of it is admittedly beyond me: it is clear at this point that I’m not going to magically become a more talented weaver of prose. Some of it is simply misguided: “a shrieking, struggling dwarf-sized body” is not necessarily a dwarf and if you can’t figure that out, well, that’s perfectly understandable, but in that case you are not my ideal reader. Some of it is simply subjective and therefore irrelevant. But some of it is very useful indeed, and I very much appreciate those who have criticized the book with the objective of making the subsequent ones better.

I am presently on track for Book Two to be published in ebook in December. Kirk and I were discussing the cover just yesterday, and there will be a hardcover versions of both Book One and Book Two available, although I can’t guarantee that the hardcover release will coincide with the electronic one.

The revolution continues

I know some of you have been wondering when I was going to get my books back online. I think I’ve received between 35 and 50 emails informing me that the Amazon links were broken over the last month, which is always an intriguing lesson on the inefficient nature of transmitting information via blog posts. The process of changing over from Marcher Lord took a little longer than I’d hoped, but we are at last finally getting somewhere. And since it is based in Finland, it seems fitting that the new publisher, Castalia House, should launch with  Särjetty taika, the Finnish translation of A Magic Broken.

Särjetty taika on fantastinen tarina häikäilemättömyydestä, urheudesta
ja petollisuudesta. Novelli kertoo kapteeni Nicolas du Meren tarinan.
Hän on maanpaossa hänen kapinaan nousseen lordinsa kuoleman vuoksi. Se
kertoo myös Lodista, Dunmorin pojasta; rohkeasta kääpiöstä joka yrittää
pelastaa kääpiötoverinsa orjuudesta. Heidän vaaralliset polkunsa
kohtaavat, mutta tavalla joka on kaikkea muuta kuin ennalta-arvattava.

We’d like to get a few Finnish reviews on Amazon, so if you speak Finnish and would like a review copy, please let me know. However, since the SF/F world doesn’t revolve around Helsinki, we have also published a number of the books in English today, including QUANTUM MORTIS: Gravity Kills, The Wardog’s Coin, and The Last Witchking. The first four books are already live and the other books are in the works; most of them have already been uploaded to Amazon. I’m not sure why QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted is not yet live, as it was the second book uploaded, but it appears there might be some technical conflict with the books that were published in print by Marcher Lord. But that should be resolved reasonably soon as Amazon has already acknowledged Marcher Lord’s unpublishing requests.

With a bit of luck and a tailwind, all the books should be live by the weekend with the possible exception of Summa Elvetica and Other Stories which hasn’t been created yet. Unfortunately, the process of transferring publishers appears to have caused the various reviews to disappeared. So, if you previously reviewed the books, or if you’ve read them but haven’t had the chance to get around to writing a review, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider taking the time to post a review again. I was told they would transfer over automatically, but that does not appear to be the case.

If you have any questions about Castalia House, please feel free to ask them here. My long-term expectation is that it will become a new model publisher and a key element in the Blue SF revolution. The publisher does intend to eventually publish other authors besides me, but please don’t send any inquiries in yet since we still have our hands full getting all of my books into print as well as publishing the various translated versions. Unfortunately, Amazon does not support Bahasa Indonesian or we would be publishing Mantra yang Rusak today as well.

But, if you’re interested in getting involved, as a slush reader, a translator, a blogger, or in some other way we haven’t anticipated, don’t hesitate to let me know. We haven’t even begun to put the web site together yet, as our first priority was to get the books online again. We have a long way to go to tear down the walls and towers of Pink SF, but we fully intend on having a good time in the process. After all, what is the point of sacking and pillaging if you’re not going to enjoy it?

Puhutko suomea?

Thanks to the two translators and JartStar, the first two translated ebooks are now finished and will be released once the process of republishing my Selenoth and Quantum Mortis books is complete. The Finnish and Bahasa Indonesian versions of A Magic Broken will be released then, and I’m told there is a chance that the French version may be ready by then as well, depending upon how long it the process actually takes. Some of the books should enjoy broader distribution than they did as Hinterlands books, as we will be putting them into the Apple Store and other distribution outlets that hitherto went unaddressed.

Those who speak English and have no interest in the translations may, however, be interested to know that there will be a new English ebook released as well. (No, it isn’t TAODAL 2. That will be December with some luck and a strong tailwind.) I won’t say anything more about the new book for the time being, but if everything goes as planned, we should have the previous QM and Selenoth books, as well as the four new additions, all out and available by the end of the month. The seven other translations in the works will be published as they are completed; I am myself particularly fired up about the Wallisertiitsch translation of Quantum Mortis:Gravity Kills.

In the meantime, if you happen to speak either Finnish or Indonesian and you are willing to proofread the relevant ebook, please shoot me an email and let me know. I’m still looking for more translators too, so if your mother tongue is something other than English and you have been considering a new challenge in the new year, this might be an interesting one to tackle. It has certainly been fascinating for me to learn which  English idioms don’t translate well, and frankly, I am just a little shocked to have been informed of some of the Finnish quasi-equivalents. They are a naughty people.

UPDATE: Okay, I didn’t anticipate any problem finding a Finnish proofreader. But I was a little surprised to learn that there is more than one regular reader who is a native speaker of Bahasa Indonesia.

The new Marcher Lord Press

This should suffice to explain my rather cryptic post the other day. Marcher Lord Press has been sold:

Steve Laube has officially purchased Marcher Lord Press from Jeff Gerke. There will be a question and answer post on Monday, January 6th on Steve’s own site that we will link when the post is up.The official press is as follows:

STEVE LAUBE BUYS MARCHER LORD PRESS

(Phoenix, AZ) Steve Laube, president of The Steve Laube Agency, has agreed to purchase Marcher Lord Press, the premier publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy for the Christian market. The sale was finalized on January 1, 2014. Laube has long been a champion of the genre, going back to his days as an acquisition editor at Bethany House Publishers. Jeff Gerke, the founder of Marcher Lord Press, said “I could not have found a better person to buy the company I started in 2008.”

Marcher Lord Press has a backlist of about 40 titles with many of them nominated or winning both Christy and Carol awards for being the best in their genre.

I certainly wish Mr. Laube great success with Marcher Lord. That being said, I will not be a part of it. I have reacquired all the publishing rights to the Selenoth and Quantum Mortis books and will be re-releasing them through the publishing arm of Alpenwolf.

Alpenwolf will continue to release hardcovers as well as ebooks and the books will continue to feature covers from the two artists who provided the six existing covers, JartStar and Kirk DuPounce.

Unpublished

For reasons that will become clear in a few weeks, and which I am not presently able to disclose, I am no longer publishing my books with Marcher Lord Hinterlands as of today. There haven’t been any problems or a falling out, and indeed, even our most recent collaboration has been successful, with 1,100 copies of QM being sold in its first month of release. I have merely arranged to reacquire the full publishing rights to my books.

What this means in the short-term is that neither the Selenoth books nor the Quantum Mortis books will be available from Amazon or anywhere else for that matter. I expect the books to again be available on Amazon, the Apple Store, and elsewhere, by the end of January.

I very much appreciate what Jeff has done with Marcher Lord. Were it not for his contacting me a few years ago and asking me if I had anything that my other publishers weren’t likely to publish, I would never have written Summa Elvetica. And were it not for Summa Elvetica, I very much doubt that I would have proceeded to write A Throne of Bones or to write the nine shorter works that presently make up the land of Selenoth.

Rest assured I am still hard at work on both QM2 and TAODAL 2. I’m hoping for September and December releases there.

Due to some vagaries with regards to the Kindle Select program, please note that it is possible that AMB, TWC, TLW, and QM:GK will continue to be available on Amazon in some capacities until the end of February. If that is the case, it is not necessary to inform me that they are still being loaned or sold.