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sAs a longtime reader of Vox Popoli, I half expected Vox Day’s fantasy world of Selenoth to be populated with ankle-biting trolls, fat frogs, and lizard queens, the landscape charred from the 4G war between the flaming sword-wielding libertarian knights and the glock-toting social justice warriors. Instead of the archetypal dark fantasy fortress we would find a […]
A Ghost Story for Halloween: Pronouncing the Mackay-Bennett
Friday , 31, October 2014 Fiction, Uncategorized 2 CommentsWell, it is midnight somewhere in the world tonight, so happy Hallows Eve to you. Please enjoy a chilling little tale – on the House. (NOTE: If you want to jump through a few hoops to download the file for your reader instead of reading it here, do so at Smashwords and enter the […]
The Semiotic Rifle: 4th Generation War, Language and Science Fiction
Tuesday , 28, October 2014 Uncategorized 14 CommentsEverywhere he found boiling resentment, a fierce willingness to fight against the tyranny, but it was undirected, uncoordinated, and, in any modern sense, unarmed. Sporadic rebellion was as futile as the scurrying of ants whose hill has been violated. PanAsians could be killed, yes, and there were men willing to shoot on sight, even in […]
RETROSPECTIVE: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs
Monday , 27, October 2014 Appendix N 8 CommentsUrsala K. Le Guinn called this book “authentic fantasy.” Lin Carter said it was “absolutely first class.” Quite simply, though, this book is just downright fun. The dialog of the two main magicians featured in the story is loaded with anachronisms. Every scene practically boils over with vivid details. And the action is varied and […]
“Awake in the Night Land” is my favorite book I’ve read this year, my favorite of Mr. Wright’s, and easily the best-adapted parallel work that I can think of — a lollapalooza of fan fiction. Its Promethean characters are rousing, its Lovecraftian monsters are horrifying, and its Tolkien-esque prose help make it stand as one of […]
As a publishing house founded to counteract the baleful influence of the cultural Marxists who successfully invaded and took over the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Castalia House has followed the developments of #GamerGate with more than a little interest. It is clear to us, as it […]
A 1959 essay by Isaac Asimov, on creativity, is rediscovered and published at Technology Review: The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that […]
Forefather of the Singularity: The Omega Point
Tuesday , 21, October 2014 Uncategorized 111 CommentsThe Science Fiction myth of The Singularity (as best described by Vernor Vinge) has its non-mathematical intellectual origins in the older, pre-AI concept of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin known as The Omega Point. The Omega Point concept portrays a universe that is simultaneously Progressive and doomed because of it: that mankind (and all matter, really) […]
This offbeat novel first published in 1973 begins with the dread Emperor of the East enjoying the slow impalement of one of his people. He then meets with his various chiefs and magicians to discuss the threat posed to their empire by Ardneh, some strange being that seemed in league with the West. The novel […]
I’m not sure what I expected from Tom Kratman’s fiction, but it certainly wasn’t this. Big Boys Don’t Cry is a military sci-fi novel of tragic beauty and grim joy, telling a story that simultaneously celebrates traditional martial virtues even as it scorns the way the powers-that-be glorify them in order to manipulate men into […]
This novella was published last Friday, October 10, 2014. I had preordered it a few days before after reading the description at Amazon’s page. That description is very misleading. And so is the title. This is not a story about “burned-out veterans, techs who’ve been warned off-planet, medics who weren’t much good on the ground” […]
H. Beam Piper’s snappy little novel Murder in the Gunroom was his last venture into the traditional detective story, before he started writing science fiction full time. The book – a forefather of modern gun porn – tells the story of a prominent businessman and gun collector found dead by his own hand in a […]